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If the French Revolution is indeed the more Enlightened of the two, then why should we presume that individual rights are, in fact, a core element of the Enlightenment's legacy?
From the post above:
How do we actually go about answering a question like that? It seems to me that we can start with four types of evidence, in ascending order of reliability:
If I claimed that deep Christian faith was a core element of Enlightenment ideology, you would laugh. If I pointed to Kant's profound faith in Christianity, you would continue to laugh, and you would be right to do so. Kant's Christian faith may have been the core of his personal philosophy, but it did manifestly failed to propagate into the ideology as a whole. What did propagate are the ideas we see in the French Revolution: absolute, unshakable confidence in the primacy and sufficiency of human reason and rationality, militant hostility to traditional religion, enthusiastic secularism and atheism, and honestly not a whole lot else. Individual liberties get a lot of lip-service, but their actual record is a whole lot worse than the ancein regime's, from what I've seen.
I wrote this post to highlight what I see as the fundamental dishonesty of the consensus discourse regarding the Enlightenment. When people talk about the Enlightenment's results, they talk about outcomes in America or Britain, the two distant outliers of the entire Enlightenment project. When they talk about Enlightenment values, they go straight to Revolutionary France. They ignore the fact that the best results came from the societies that maintained strong Christian social integration and placed absolutely minimal trust in the products of human reason, and the worst came from the countries that embraced Enlightenment principles whole and without restraint.
Several of the most prominent among them were indeed probably not too far in beliefs from Robespierre. And yet, the sum of their peers and society was such that they kept their opinions mostly to themselves, and often spoke even to each other of Divine Providence in contradiction to their own avowed beliefs. Meanwhile, in France...
The point of this comparison is not to argue that Christianity is awesome. It's to point out that Christianity is very clearly not part of the Enlightenment, and so the revolution that embraces the Christian faith of its populace is not a very Enlightened revolution.
Your point eludes me. The revolutionaries themselves, and their subsequent progeny, seemed to find both despotism and religious persecution both innovative and eminently desirable. Here's Mark Twain offering apologia for mass slaughter a century or so later:
The mendacity of that passage galls. Leave aside the absurdity of the cited numbers; grant them for the sake of argument. He minimizes the crimes of his favored ideology by comparing them to all harms and misfortunes, natural or manmade, for a thousand years previously. In doing so, he demonstrates both the founding principle of the Enlightenment, as well as its first corollary:
You can't claim that the pathological hubris and maniacal bloodlust were tangential to the spirit of the movement, when the movements' own champions consistently affirm that that they were necessary and justified.
And what sort of societies gave birth to such principles? Was it France, with its radical egalitarianism and staunch secularism and obsession with "scientific" progress? Or Britain and America, deeply Christian, cautious, skeptical of revolutionary change?
One would.
I don't think the Enlightenment has any claim to creating our prosperity at all. It did not end the religious wars; the religions and secular authorities did that jointly before its birth, and once it got rolling it caused some of the worst wars we've ever seen. It did not establish universal literacy; the Protestants did that, with the able assistance of Guttenburg. It arrived after science was already organizing itself, and so cannot claim credit for establishing it. It cannot claim credit for the subsequent industrial and scientific revolutions, because its focus was always social science and the theories it promoted were uniformly garbage, and because the nations that drove those revolutions the hardest were not very Enlightened. It cannot claim credit for individual rights and liberties, because it systematically trampled those rights and liberties wherever its ideology was allowed free action. What it did do, quite reliably, was produce vast, pitch-black concentrations of human misery, the historical record of which our current consensus steadfastly refuses to seriously grapple with.
Bro, you can't invent your own definition of the enlightenment, then say that everybody else's definition is wrong because it doesn't fit your own. You say that your assessment comes from reading the words of theorists and revolutionaries, by which I have to assume you mean literally the French revolutionaries themselves. This is a good way to learn about the French Revolution, but not about the ocean spanning movement of the Enlightenment, on which exists a massive corpus of work by theorists arguing for the importance of individual rights.
Imagine if I wrote a piece about how the point of communism was for capitalists to own the means of production, and that therefore Lenin's New Economic Policy was an example for why communism worked well. For evidence I show statements from contemporary communist apartchiks praising Lenin's plan as a glorious expression of the communist revolution. People push back and say that generations of philosophers, activists, and social movements have actually made it really clear that communism is supposed to take the means of production away from capitalists.
I respond: "If the New Economic Policy is the more communist of the regimes, then why should we presume that taking the means of production away from the capitalists is, in fact, a core element of Communism's legacy?"
I haven't argued this - I haven't even engaged with the corpus of thinkers or movements who define the enlightenment, I'm just creating my own circular definition based on a cherry picked situation and assuming everyone else is wrong if they don't match it.
Downthread I've seen @To_Mandalay make the same point and you seemed confused there too, and I'm not really sure how it can be made a lot clearer. If you want to argue that the enlightenment brought tyranny, centralization, and religious persecution, you need to grapple with the fact that all those things were happening before the enlightenment and that the broad European history of the enlightenment is less absolutism and greater religious tolerance. You can't just pick one country you don't like, ignore all the others, and act like their own history started in 1789.
Beyond this, your insistence that the success of the incredibly enlightenment oriented, rationalist-ruled, post revolutionary democracies of Britain and America add proof that the enlightenment is bad is just baffling. As @fuckduck9000 says, this is all part of the enlightenment box. These were most certainly not countries that were "cautious, skeptical of revolutionary change" - they literally had real revolutions. I generally respect and appreciate your posts a lot but this argument just doesn't make sense.
The past 200 years are far away the most prosperous in all of human history. It is insufficient to say "science existed before" (unless you think alchemy is equivalent to the combustion engine), you have to grapple with this graph.
I'm not saying that your definition of the Enlightenment is wrong because it contradicts mine. I'm asking you what your definition is based on, how it is derived. I'm pointing to a pair of purported Enlightenment revolutions, and observing that the features people generally ascribe to the Enlightenment don't actually cluster the way the standard narrative claims. One revolution is much more secularized and rationalist than the other, two values usually taken to be core elements of the Enlightenment.
If your definition holds that individual liberties are a core, definitional element of the Enlightenment, my argument isn't that you're wrong, it's that you should then conclude that the French Revolution isn't a central example of the Enlightenment, and neither are the succeeding generations who took the French Revolution as a positive example of how to make a better world. The problem then becomes that absolutely everyone else appears to be certain that the French Revolution is a central example of the Enlightenment, and we can both notice we are confused together.
My claim is that different types of evidence should carry different weight, and the order roughly goes: writings of theorists < theory as understood by revolutionaries < actions taken by revolutionaries/political actors < action as interpreted by the next generation of theorists/revolutionaries/political actors. Ideologies have a core, an identifiable set of central beliefs that define them. I'm arguing that the best way to identify that core is to look at which ideas make it into practice and then get propagated down through the generations and into subsequent revolutions and government reforms, versus those that do not. How could it be otherwise?
I do not think I am engaging in circular thinking. If the French Revolution is a central example of an Enlightenment project, than the values it trampled can't be definitional elements of the Enlightenment. If the values it trampled are definitional to the Enlightenment, then the French Revolution can't be a central example of an Enlightenment project. ...Otherwise, it seems to me that the definition of the Enlightenment is simply incoherent.
The French Revolution brought some of the worst tyranny, centralization of unaccountable power and religious persecution Europe had ever seen, and led to a military dictatorship that plunged Europe into one of the worst sequences of warfare it had suffered to date. Direct ideological descendants, Marx in particular, did significantly worse. They were worse than the status quo, and not by a small margin. I get that the American/British-style eventually spread and a lot of the European nations eventually settled down into peace and normalcy, and now they DO care a lot about individual liberties and other Enlightenment principles, and don't guillotine each other randomly. What I'm trying to do is to track the specifics of how that actually happened, compared to the recieved story of how it happened.
You and Mandalay seem to be arguing that the French Revolution's murderous nature was par for the course. It was not. France wasn't a slaughterhouse under the ancien regime. America pulled off a revolution with absolutely minimal bloodletting. People have argued that tyranny and massacres were the norm for French politics, but the whole point of a revolution is that you stop doing things the way they've been done, and start doing them exactly the way you think they should be done. And again, there'd be no point in arguing about it if everyone recognized that the FR was a monstrous mistake. They don't! It's been lauded as a victory for freedom and social progress for two hundred years!
I'm picking the first two (three, counting Britain) countries in the chain, and trying to make sense of the divide between them. The next step is to follow the branches of that split forward through the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. I'm not sure what to do with the argument that I can't act like the history starts in 1789, because 1789 is when this set of people secure absolute power and begin to use it. We can look at what came before them, or what opposed them, but neither seems to me to be of much help to the central problem; they won, they got to reshape their political world as they saw fit, and what they produced is what we have to judge them by. What am I missing?
Britian and America diverged very sharply from France. If they're the central examples of the Enlightenment, fine, the French Revolution and its descendent ideologies are non-central, and then we need to ask why no one else seems to understand this. If France is the central example, then the extreme political divergence means America and Britian are the non-central examples, and their excellent results can't be attributed to Enlightenment ideology. If all three are central examples, then we need to admit that "The Enlightenment" can mean pretty much anything, and is thus an incoherent term.
Further, the French did what they did for specific reasons, and those reasons clearly derive from elements of Enlightenment philosophy, specifically the axiomatic confidence in human reason. I believe it is easy to demonstrate how those ideas contributed directly to the disastrous consequences in France, and how they continued to propagate through the subsequent generations of thinkers and actors.
Science existed before the Enlightenment. The Scientific and Industrial revolutions are absolutely, obviously the reason for the graph you posted. The question is whether the Enlightenment is responsible for those revolutions, a question we can't answer without nailing down an understanding of what the ideology itself actually is and is not. I note that both revolutions were heavily driven by Britain and America, so the split mentioned above seems like it's pretty relevant.
The point isn't that science is fake, it's that the Enlightenment wasn't ever science, and especially not when it explicitly claimed to be. The educational revolution underpinning the birth of Science started with Gutenburg and Protestantism. The Enlightenment took shape because science already existed and was demonstrating its value. The Enlightenment itself was not a scientific movement, but a philosophical and political one. It frequently deployed fake science for political ends, using social hacks to bypass skepticism and verification because the lie was "too good to check"; Marxism and Freudianism being two of the more consequential examples, but the social sciences generally are rife with examples. Its ideological nature frequently undermined actual science, occasionally to disastrous effect.
Science and Industry, meanwhile, were obviously useful and experienced little to no ideological opposition from any quarter. No one who mattered was arguing that science sucked and should be stopped. What people were arguing against, and occasionally fighting, were Enlightenment social innovations. A fundamental part of the Ideology's strategy has always been to frame opposition to its schemes as opposition to Science. That's part of what makes it so pernicious.
Or at least, that's the reality as I understand it. If you think the Enlightenment was actually critical to the Scientific and Industrial revolutions, though, it'd be good to lay out exactly why, what, and when it did the things to get the ball rolling. I'm skeptical, but open to being proven wrong.
I apologize if my tone upthread has been rude and I'm trying to be more polite here, I just think I'm very confused by your argument because it seems to hinge on two things that I don’t think anyone really considers up for debate:
Individual rights are not relevant in the enlightenment, such that when we see less individual rights we should consider a country more enlightened.
The American and British revolutions are not manifestations of enlightenment political philosophy.
We have three countries that had revolutions led by rationalist, secularized Christians who lionized reason and rejected divine revelation, conducted in the name of replacing the monarchs with more democratic rule and establishing individual rights.
Two of these revolutions that most fulfilled these goals you seem to think did a pretty good job, maybe even contributed towards the industrial revolution. But you look at the third and conclude that the enlightenment:
This is a... downright strange argument. These are all the enlightenment. Not just France. If you think post-revolutionary Britain and America did a good job then you too are a supporter of the enlightenment.
Who systematically trampled on individual liberties more, Tudor England with its strict restrictions on publishing and the importation of books, or post revolutionary England with its freedom of press? Who systematically trampled on individual liberties more in the 1848 revolutions, the monarchies with their restrictions on freedom of press and speech and democratic participation, or the protestors who demanded more of these rights? Are we to conclude that the kings and queens or yore were more authentically enlightened than the liberal movements that fought their repression? Few would find this line of thinking convincing.
You've mentioned several times that you think France is the most central / most enlightened of the revolutions (based on their ultimate rejection of core enlightenment principles?) I understood that this is your position but until your last comment I never realized that you thought everyone else believed this too. To be clear, I have never heard anyone say that, not ever. It's completely natural to say that the revolution that retained the most of the old world's absolutism and intolerance was the least successful in implementing enlightenment norms. It would be like arguing that the Young Turks were the most enlightened revolution.
The reason you see a bunch of users referencing pre-revolutionary France is that you’re making some really strong claims about how the enlightenment brought novel things like tyranny and religious persecution without acknowledging that these things got better most places other than France, and in France in the longer run, and that they were extremely commonplace and generally worse before the enlightenment.
When you say the enlightenment "systematically trampled" individual rights you have to grapple with the fact that in most places these rights were only invented and enshrined in the enlightenment era; nearly all of Europe previously were monarchies with serious restrictions on speech, press, religion, and association.
When you say that the enlightenment brought absolutism and state repression you have to grapple with the fact that pre-revolutionary regimes did things like kill everybody in an entire village or city for defying them (France, Russia, England).
When you say that the enlightenment brought religious persecution you have to grapple with the fact that literally dozens of these countries ethnically cleansed their Jewish populations without a second thought.
When you say that the enlightenment brought unprecedented war you have to grapple with the fact that wars of the Middle Ages were staggeringly violent, with the French Wars of Religion killing some two to four million people, the Thirty Years War killing up to 50% of Germany, and Renaissance Italy having an average life expectancy of 18.
When you say that the enlightenment made all these things worse you have to confront the fact that in most of the West absolutism declined and religious tolerance increased with the advent of liberalism.
You’ve already said you think the post-revolutionary enlightenment nations of America and Britain contributed significantly to the industrial revolution so there isn’t much to argue that you don’t seem to already agree with.
But first, on an economics level, abolishing aristocratic monopoly privileges allows for competition, which lowers prices and encourages innovation and the adoption of technology to keep your competitive edge; abolishing feudalism allows people to own their own land and property which raises the self interest that drives work; abolishing guilds (the vastly more restrictive versions of unions of the day) and allowing free movement between jobs and regions allows people to shift into the most productive versions of the work they can do. You already seem to agree we see this in enlightened America and Britain, I’ll point out you even see this France as well - in Acemoglu’s “The Consequences of Radical Reform: Post Revolutionary France,” he and his co-authors measured that the areas occupied and reformed by Napoleon demonstrated significantly higher long run growth when compared with the areas that did not.
The cultural argument is that, beyond replacing faith and relevation with the more scientifically productive norm of reason, previously in western societies the ideal life (in yes, heavily protestant-work ethic Christian societies) was considered to be a gentleman who received passive income, whereas merchants were seen as base and materialist. Over time people came to value knowledge, innovation, and progress for its own sake and the ideal life was seen as one that contributed to society. If you want the long form argument the go-to is Joel Mokyr's “A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy” or “The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850,” that “the root of modernity is in ‘the emergence of a belief in the usefulness of progress’, and that ‘it was a turning point when intellectuals started to conceive of knowledge as cumulative’
This is also well argued by Diedre McCloskey’s six-part Bourgeois Era series. To quote myself from the first OP:
I find these arguments pretty convincing, most especially on the economic level. To the extent that I’m not convinced, the remaining plausible argument for the industrial revolution does come down to interventionist government - most of the countries that industrialized first did so during high tariffs and industrial policy.
Of course, the burden of proof hangs more on the skeptics. If our extremely novel social system coincides with unprecedented success then it’s kind of on you to present a serious alternative theory.
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