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PaperclipPerfector  13d ago (text post)   33064 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 31, 2025

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How would you describe this "modern worldview"? Empiricism, materialism, skepticism, rationality, something along those lines?

"We, as individuals, are capable of discovering the physical and moral laws of the universe and in so doing creating a more perfect society."

The short version is that as Science began delivering massive, obvious benefits, people noticed that they could lie and claim to be Scientists doing Science, and as long as they engaged in a certain minimal amount of social posturing, the empiricism, materialism, skepticism and rationality could simply be bypassed, and they could reap all the social, fiscal and political benefits of Contributing to Science without actually having to contribute anything meaningful at all. The more people explicitly or implicitly locked into this paradigm, the lower the incentive to resist the bypass became. The result was a parasite class of "intellectuals" growing fat and happy, while at best actively burning value to accomplish nothing, and more often burning value to produce dangerous forms of self-replicating deceit to plague mankind generally.

While this parasitic class clearly exists today, the benefits of scientific advancement were not obvious enough in 1789 for this to be a primary motivator of anyone involved in the French Revolution. Three years later China could still imperiously dismiss the Macartney Embassy, and the idea that Britain would go from producing nothing that they needed to kicking down their doors and taking whatever they wanted by force within a single lifetime was as far from European minds as it was from Asian ones.

You should be able to recognize the hostile takeover in the architects, actions and character of the French revolution. You should definitely be able to recognize it in how subsequent generations spoke about the French Revolution; Mark Twain is one of my favorite examples of a purportedly intelligent person spouting insane, mindkilled horseshit. By the time we get to Marx and Freud, it seems to me that failure to recognize the pattern must in some sense be willful; and then there is the 20th century, where we must laugh lest we weep.

This is why I ask people to identify whether the American or French revolution was a more central example of the Enlightenment. My impression is that the consensus answer is the French revolution is the more Enlightened; yet the industrial revolution came out of Britain and then America, both of which stubbornly resisted the succession of ideologies spawned by the French Revolution far longer than their European peers, to their enormous benefit.

I don't hold that more Enlightened = better, only that some minimum threshold of Enlightenment needed to be passed for the Industrial Revolution to occur. Beyond that point, that ideological train was almost certain to crash and burn in spectacular fashion. Therefore, I will raise Mark Twain one better: modern technology and Communism were separate but inevitable consequences of the Enlightenment, and the hundred million dead at the hands of the latter were a fair trade for the former.

Likewise, the universal literacy that was an obvious precursor to the scientific and industrial revolutions was a product of Protestant Christianity

Bit of a tangent, but we do have examples of highly literate societies that did not produce a scientific revolution, namely Japan under the Tokugawa Shogunate and pre-colonial Burma.

The empiricism, materialism, skepticism and rationality were never rigorous in any population-level sense. Superstition and ignorance changed their masks, and nothing more. Now that bedazzling scientific advancements are slowing down and we have had a moment to collect ourselves, a modest amount of actual skepticism and curiosity and a memory broader than the last fifteen minutes is sufficient to tear the whole rotten edifice wide open.

No argument from me here. I think our priority should be salvaging what is valuable from Western civilization before it implodes and incorporating it into a more sustainable philosophical tradition.

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