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It's my club as much as it's yours, at this point, three exiles down the line. What we insist on is that distinctions seem relevant.
I disagree, but I suppose it comes down to how you define "Rationalism" and "the Enlightenment". My guess, speaking reductively, is that you'd assert that Rationalism is, essentially, the drive to be less wrong, and the Enlightenment is something like the pursuit of truth through human reason. I disagree on both counts, and my evidence would be what the people involved say and do. Rationalism fails to appreciate the hard limits imposed on rationality by human nature and human frailty, and so traps many of its own adherents in moral mazes of their own design. The Enlightenment, from the start, used scientific and technological advancements as a skin-suit for an ideology that had nothing to do with either. It generated a vast midden-heap of false knowledge, and hundreds of millions of people died or were immiserated as a result. Einstein and Von Neumann were not the poster-children of the Enlightenment, but Freud, Skinner, Dewey and the rest of their ilk. The point was never dispassionate science, but passionate ideology, then and now.
As for rebellion, I argue that death and pain are morally neutral. I think that's a pretty solid starter against either. In any case, nothing precludes Rationalism and the Enlightenment from being failures by their own values as well as by mine, and pointing this out seems fair play to me.
I'm not sure that's true. Progs generally seem to feel the bite pretty keenly, given how they generally react to criticism of their goals and achievements. What's different here is that we're supposed to make an actual argument, rather than simply deploying mean girl shit to crush all opposition.
It seems to me that Rationalists still believe that Studies Show. They look at the replication crisis, and they look at the long, long string of technocratic policy failures over the last fifty to a hundred years, and they look at the obvious, numerous, glaring errors and perverse incentives in Academia, and they still insist that it's rational to reason on the basis of that system's generated "knowledge". They look at a corpse liquid with decay, imagine it's their high-school sweetheart, and pucker up for a kiss.
They try to think better, which in practice seems to amount to finding reasonably persuasive memes, and then engaging significant social pressure against anyone who dissents from the Correct Answer. "Shut up and multiply", naïve utilitarianism, and the whole idea of Coherent Extrapolated Volition fall into this bucket, along with quite a bit of the rest of the AI and EA classics. They imagine that they've Found Answers, and then they try to use those answers, sometimes they hurt people, and sometimes they burn value. (And sometimes they actually do some good, at least temporarily. I greatly admire their work on bed nets. Their obsession with animal suffering, much, much less so.)
So where's the baseline to compare that to? Unsurprisingly, I'll compare it to my church. The fact that we're Christians is probably game, set and match for you; what could possibly be less rational? And yet, I find the results preferable. The people in my church helped pull me out of a mental tailspin once upon a time. They gave me love and community. I found a wife there. I have a family now. When the breakdown of our society left me with a burning ocean of rage and hate inside me, the tools I'd picked up second-hand from a steady diet of Rationalist thought did nothing but stoke that fire ever hotter. Amusingly enough, it was my church, and a simple conversation with @HlynkaCG here, that extinguished that fury, to my inestimable benefit. That's why I argue alongside him in these threads: because I've experienced, viscerally, how deeply correct and necessary his particular perspective can be.
Conformity has positives and negatives. It seems to me that Rationalists manage to engineer away most of the positives, while leaving the worst negatives in place. Presuming it were so, that seems like a reasonable thing to criticize. Whether it is so or not is of course a different argument.
...I think what you're trying to express here is the idea that, before the Enlightenment, people simply did what they were told without thinking, with obedience to kings and to the Ten Commandments being two examples of this purportedly sheeplike behavior. The problem is that this line of reasoning is absolutely fucked. There have been no shortage of rebellions and revolutions against kings throughout history, for a whole variety of reasons, and there have been no shortage of loyal populations for a wide variety of reasons beyond sheeplike obedience. Likewise, it is not obvious to me why one would need sophisticated arguments for obeying the Ten Commandments; they're relatively straightforward, and point to obviously beneficial ways of life in any social context.
In my experience, no, they really aren't. They require certain concessions and leaps of faith that are not, strictly speaking, rational, by any measure but the results. Rationality could not help me with my rage and hate, because my rage and hate were, strictly speaking, rational, evidence-based, logically sound. It took an explicit abandonment of the Rationalist obsession with the pursuit of power and control to halt that spiral. Other examples would be the evergreen meme of rationalist-founded religions, rationalist approaches to dating and relationships, the rationalist attitudes toward risk and value and much else besides.
Yeah, that's... not really how it works, or ever has, or ever will. I'm not a Neo-reactionary, worshipping hierarchy, and Rationalism does not have a monopoly on rationality, on logic. Amusingly enough, I'm not even sure that you and I disagree all that strongly on the object-level, and this isn't all a dispute about definitions. But if you believe that Rationalism or the Enlightenment invented critical thinking, I'm not sure what to tell you, other perhaps than you should think hard about where such a foolish idea came from. Do you honestly believe that all people before, say, the 1600s were incapable of reason? Do you think that the overall level of superstition and magical thinking has actually gone down over time? On what basis would you suppose such a thing? On what evidence?
They were certainly capable of reason, it’s just that the opponents of the enlightenment would tell them to shut up, often by force of arms. Our friend’s object of admiration, Thomas Hobbes, was censored and nearly labeled a heretic by the english monarchy, the law went "the committee should be empowered to receive information touching such books as tend to atheism, blasphemy and profaneness... in particular... the book of Mr. Hobbes called the Leviathan.", forcing him to publish in amsterdam for the rest of his life.
What you defend has a name : obscurantism. And your intellectual forebearers wouldn’t even give the peasants a translation of the bible, so they literally believed what I said about the priests leading the blind. Do you disagree that the enlightenment meant education for the masses, and the discussion of ideas and justifications for the stuff they used to have to believe on faith (and stick)? Mistakes were made, sure, but for once they were their mistakes, and not those of their corrupt, self-appointed shepherds. Bite the bullet like moldbug already, burn the heretics and keep the peasants in their rightful place.
How do you explain the massive correlation between the ‘age of reason’ and technological advancement (and life expectancy, etc) if one has nothing to do with the other? How can you look at the post-enlightenment world and think ‘immiseration’? I don't think the numbers back you up on that.
Please, give me the names of “common-sense” contemporary critics of the enlightenment you apparently identify with. I predict there aren’t any, because they were all obscurantist censors who didn’t know anything and wanted to know even less. That’s why you and Hlynka can never quite explain from what intellectual tradition you hail from. There’s nothing there, just obscurantism and reason. That’s the mystery at the heart of the ‘Inferential distance’, not some earthy wisdom.
So no, I don’t think we would be having this conversation without the enlightenment. I probably wouldn’t know how to read, and at best I’d be burning my writings like Hobbes did to avoid the Inquisitor General’s attention.
I’m glad religion helped you like homeopathy helps some people, but I don’t choose ‘my truth’ by its therapeutic effects.
Censorship is a universal component of all human societies. Enlightenment societies are no different.
I point out that all societies censor. You claim I am defending obscurantism. To the extent that all societies are obscurantist for relatively straightforward and unavoidable reasons, sure, I guess. I like functional society, and it appears straightforwardly true that some information can be quite harmful to society's function. Crucially, I see no evidence that you have a workable alternative, rather than an imaginary one.
What makes them my intellectual forebears? I'm not Catholic, though I note that prior to the invention of the printing press, mass literacy and mass distribution of bibles probably wasn't physically possible. There's no point in teaching people to read when there's literally nothing for them to read. As soon as printing was developed, Protestant nations leaned hard into building universal literacy and wide distribution of bibles, which made book production and general education a practical possibility. All this paved the way for the Enlightenment, note.
Yes I do, because education for the masses started first and probably made the Enlightenment possible, and because a lot of the core Enlightenment beliefs seem very obviously based on faith and sticks. The concept of social progress, of the infinite perfectibility of man, the idea of social engineering and especially the ideas of what it could accomplish, were not rationally-grounded or scientific in any meaningful sense. The Enlightenment vanguard believed they could solve human nature, straight up, and it is intellectually dishonest to allow them their after-the-fact rationalizations and walk-backs. They believed that ignorance, sickness, poverty and crime were the results of mismanagement by society's leadership, not emergent properties of human nature, and they killed a lot of people based on this entirely magical belief. They conceal these failures through relatively unsophisticated lies about the historical record, by retroactively assigning all positive aspects of history to themselves and all negative aspects to their opponents, regardless of the facts. They've been winning for so long that few people actually poke at the lies, but once one does they pop like a soap bubble.
Mass literacy was always going to produce an explosion of knowledge, and it arrived because technological development was already running up the exponential curve. The Enlightenment came after these trends were already well progressed, and throughout the era it followed or even retarded progress, rather than leading. The French Revolution sold itself as explicitly scientific and reason-based, but its social and political theories were bullshit, and it did not in fact significantly advance science relative to, say, England or America. Individual Devout Christians and devout Christian societies have frequently made significant contributions to actual science, while the Enlightenment was a wellspring of destructive pseudoscience from its inception to now. Rousseau was not a scientist, and neither was Marx, nor Freud, nor Dewey, nor Skinner. These men were driven by a single coherent, consistent ideology, by the idea that they could solve human nature. They and many others like them built the social sciences, and through them much of the world we live in, and none of them were constrained in the slightest way by truth or objective facts. It's true that many actual scientists saw themselves as contributing to the Enlightenment project, but this is to their detriment, not the Enlightenment's credit. To the extent that, say, Einstein could not recognize that Freudianism was pseudoscience, that speaks poorly of Einstein's abilities as a scientist. Freudianism, like most explicit products of the Enlightenment, never had the slightest empirical foundation. It did not make accurate predictions. It did not deliver significant results. It was a con job from the start, and why it worked as well as it did is a question that deserves careful examination.
A huge part of the point I'm trying to get across here is that claiming to FUCKING LOVE SCIENCE is not the same as an actual commitment to scientific truth. The standard Enlightenment line is that someone who believes in God and rigorously obeys the scientific method in empirical matters is less of a scientist than a proud atheist who spends their life proliferating baseless pseudoscientific bullshit until it's assumed common knowledge society-wide. This sort of ass-backwards fuckup recurs regularly throughout the history of the Enlightenment, and that historical reality is a serious problem for the consensus narrative as I understand it.
C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, and H. L. Mencken would be three to start. Are those contemporary enough?
Axioms are a choice, and they have observable results. Philosophical commitments are not homeopathy, nor are they therapeutic. Some beliefs are simply more adaptive than others, and some Rationalist beliefs are very, very maladaptive, in the same way that embracing short-time-horizon unrestrained hedonism is maladaptive. The Rationalist obsession with control is one such maladaptation.
You said yourself we don’t even disagree that much on the object level issues. That’s why it’s a shame that your anti-enlightenment theory makes it seem that we have more values difference than we really do.
One point where we disagree is censorship, you are more in favour of it than I am. The enlightenment was anti-censorship. This is a rare example of your theory managing to cleave reality at the joints and actually explaining something.
“Censorship is unavoidable” , “They didn’t have anything to read” – yeah, yeah, but the questions that matter here are : How much censorship, and should they get more to read? The enlightenment and anti-enlightenment sides took positions here, don’t evade.
The censorship issue is a good template to evaluate the rest of your theory. Do we disagree on an issue now, and is it traceable to the enlightenment/anti-enlightenment kerkuffle?
On Marx, Freud, most of the woke stuff we discuss endlessly, I don't disagree with you, despite this presumed enlightenment-borne ideological distance between us.
On total social engineering vs brutal state of nature, I don’t disagree with you and have never thought otherwise. The first time I heard about Rousseau was from this short, pudgy, adorable, and very opinionated french teacher, who told us she couldn’t stand ‘that scoundrel’ Rousseau, who despite writing the celebrated On Education, abandoned all his children to an 18th century orphanage as soon as they were born. And later in the course, on the “do as I say, …” part of his life, it was clear to me that hobbes was right and rousseau was wrong. So when you two accuse me, along with everyone else, of being inveterate rousseau-ians, I’m left scratching my head.
Sorry, I meant contemporary in the sense of ‘living or occurring at the same time.‘, not recent time. Ie, anti-enlightenment thinkers from the time of the enlightenment.
It might not be a bad idea to do the definitions thing after all: “The Enlightenment included a range of ideas centered on the value of human happiness, the pursuit of knowledge obtained by means of reason and the evidence of the senses, and ideals such as natural law, liberty, progress, toleration, fraternity, constitutional government, and separation of church and state. wikipedia “
Which of those am I supposed to repudiate? (I have my problems with natural law.) It seems to me you want to claim a large chunk of those as not-enlightenment for your strange theory, unlike a true reactionary. So what are we even talking about?
It might just be a big misunderstanding: You say you oppose the enlightenment, people hear the above definition and object, when in reality you mean rousseau, anticlericalism, plus some other shit you tacked on, and people don’t even disagree with you on rousseau.
Else, if you want to argue for absolutism and theocracy, against reason, happiness, liberty and empiricism, please say so clearly and don’t bring Freud into it.
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