Light in the Enlightenment?
Gamma Gamaliel
Shipmate
in Purgatory
@WhimsicalChristian has alluded to the Enlightenment in several posts, generally negatively.
The Enlightenment assumed that people are rational. They aren't.
So what, then, are we to 'assume'?
That people aren't rational or capable of making their own decisions? Therefore we need some form of absolutist pre-Enlightenment style forms of government to keep them in check?
Louis XIV anyone?
Charles I?
The Russian Tsars?
Believe me, I sometimes come across people who might go as far as that...
A suspicion of the Enlightenment is a common trope in some forms of conservative Christianity. It spawned individualism, the French and Russian Revolutions, the rise of Communism, fascism, cynical atheist regimes ... it's led to globalisation, techno-capitalism, the erosion of nation states, traditional notions of the family, of sexualiry etc etc the list goes on ...
The various 'ills' one chooses to focus on under this umbrella will very much depend on the person's ideology. Some will rail at the injustices of global capitalism, others at liberal views on the kind of subjects we address here in Epiphanies.
Some of the more Luddite proponents will do both. Let's all go off grid and live on small holdings...
My own view is, as you'd expect, something of a 'both/and' one tempered however with the view that some of the more reactionary elements can easily veer into extreme nationalism and fascism.
There was an occasion in Uraguay, I think, where 'peace-church' agrarian settlers naively supported a right-wing dictator because they thought his romantic rural-facism accorded with their own values of hard work, simplicity and localism.
The extreme right can hijack a lot of this stuff.
By the same token, I think liberalism and libertarianism can veer out of control unless they are held in check by some sense of 'community' and social cohesion.
My question is, how do we avoid the Scylla of reactionary right-wing ideologies masquerading as returns to 'traditional values' on the one hand, or the Charybdis of atomised individualism and scary AI techno-freakery on the other?
We can't all go and live on communes and grow veg like the Diggers and other communitarian groups.
We need modern medicines, vaccines and so on.
We need to retain the 'light' that was in the Enlightenment alongside, I'd suggest, older forms of wisdom. What that looks like I don't know. Can we learn from pre-industrial tribal societies?
Can we avoid a dewy-eyed romanticism for a mythical past? Or humanise emerging technologies?
Answers on a postcard to ...
The Enlightenment assumed that people are rational. They aren't.
So what, then, are we to 'assume'?
That people aren't rational or capable of making their own decisions? Therefore we need some form of absolutist pre-Enlightenment style forms of government to keep them in check?
Louis XIV anyone?
Charles I?
The Russian Tsars?
Believe me, I sometimes come across people who might go as far as that...
A suspicion of the Enlightenment is a common trope in some forms of conservative Christianity. It spawned individualism, the French and Russian Revolutions, the rise of Communism, fascism, cynical atheist regimes ... it's led to globalisation, techno-capitalism, the erosion of nation states, traditional notions of the family, of sexualiry etc etc the list goes on ...
The various 'ills' one chooses to focus on under this umbrella will very much depend on the person's ideology. Some will rail at the injustices of global capitalism, others at liberal views on the kind of subjects we address here in Epiphanies.
Some of the more Luddite proponents will do both. Let's all go off grid and live on small holdings...
My own view is, as you'd expect, something of a 'both/and' one tempered however with the view that some of the more reactionary elements can easily veer into extreme nationalism and fascism.
There was an occasion in Uraguay, I think, where 'peace-church' agrarian settlers naively supported a right-wing dictator because they thought his romantic rural-facism accorded with their own values of hard work, simplicity and localism.
The extreme right can hijack a lot of this stuff.
By the same token, I think liberalism and libertarianism can veer out of control unless they are held in check by some sense of 'community' and social cohesion.
My question is, how do we avoid the Scylla of reactionary right-wing ideologies masquerading as returns to 'traditional values' on the one hand, or the Charybdis of atomised individualism and scary AI techno-freakery on the other?
We can't all go and live on communes and grow veg like the Diggers and other communitarian groups.
We need modern medicines, vaccines and so on.
We need to retain the 'light' that was in the Enlightenment alongside, I'd suggest, older forms of wisdom. What that looks like I don't know. Can we learn from pre-industrial tribal societies?
Can we avoid a dewy-eyed romanticism for a mythical past? Or humanise emerging technologies?
Answers on a postcard to ...
Comments
I don't think it'd be 'reasonable' to expect the Founding Fathers to have acted any differently given that, like all of us, they were products of their times.
They were hardly likely to establish a 'workers' collective.'
I think it's fair to say, though, that influenced by Voltaire, the Scottish and English Enlightenments, Tom Paine and so on, they were 'against' what they'd have seen as medieval obscurantism and absolutism.
The American 'revolution', if it can be described as such, did influence the French Revolution which went a lot 'further' in terms of clamping down on religion etc. The US Founding Fathers were mostly Deists but did believe in freedom of religion. The French revolutionaries went through a phase of closing down monasteries, expelling monks and nuns and revising the calendar along 'rational' lines. The 'Goddess of Reason' was enthroned instead of the crusty old God of Catholic despotic etc ...
I've heard Russians argue that the Tsar had introduced more liberal reforms around 1905 - under pressure of course - so there was no 'need' for the Revolution of 1917 to have taken place.
The 'bourgeois' revolution of 1905 and the early stages of 1917 was then hijacked by the Bolsheviks and taken in a more murderous direction.
It's the old Marxist view of history of course, the bourgeoisie taking over from the old aristocracy then in turn being replaced by the proletariat who would lead us all to the sunny uplands of utopia.
Some would say that, like Christianity, that hasn't actually been 'tried' yet.
I was there also in the 1970s and it was apparent to me that small market capitalism was burgeoning among the youth there, in black market scarce goods. There was a thriving trade in Red Army insignia and fruits heisted out the kitchen doors of the "tourist zone" hotels in return for bubble gum, blue jeans, panty hose and lipstick.
It seems to me that the Chinese have hacked some of the biggest problems of balancing small family or private enterprise with the larger types of enterprise that deal with communal property, technology development, and infrastructure. They operate an almost pure meritocracy that has been running for five thousand years already.
It isn't perfect by a long chalk but the past thirty years have seen China leap forward in terms of infrastructure, manufacturing efficiency, technological advancement, and lifting two hundred million people out of medieval-level living conditions.
All this while we watch private equity squeeze every cent they can out of the working and middle classes leaving us with aging and rapidly deteriorating infrastructure, dumb tech bubbles, declining birth rates, and the corruption, dumbing and paralysis of our youth and leadership.
There's something to be said for the both/and model of communism and capitalism. We've tried both extremes and they have yielded similar results. Perhaps, like everything else, the harmonic resonance lies in the proper modulation of both in their proper spheres?
AFF
For the record, the monuments in downtown Ottawa celebrating the military heroes of the British side refer to the conflict in question as the "Revolutionary War". Not sure if that reflects the actual analysis of the people who erected the statue(20th Century, some time), but it was certainly the viewpoint that prevailed in the popular Loyalist historiography for much of Canadian history. William Blake and other English liberals also viewed 1776 as revolutionary(Blake wrote a poem about it), obviously with the opposite moral judgement of the Loyalists.
I used to encounter a certain type of weirdo Canadian nationalist who would would criticize contemporary American imperialism by saying "The Yanks continue spreading their revolutionary ideology around the world." Whereas I think the Mexican PRI was the last group the US supported that could be called genuinely revolutionary, even just in a 1688 sorta way. With the Cold War, American policy in the global south mostly switched to backing the old colonial-era elites they'd previously claimed to oppose.
I don't know if you have been keeping up with China's technological and educational development but there are many knowledgeable commentators who have observed the meritocracy at work.
I recall one of them saying that the recognition, evaluation and development of Chinese talent of all types from early childhood ensures that the truly gifted grow up never having to meet a stupid person in their lives. I was gobsmacked by that. The sheer numbers of their talented people can make sure that this is so.
But this is consistent with practices that have been held over for centuries during the Imperial and Warring periods. The Chinese keep impeccable records. They have never had difficulty identifying, fostering, employing and promoting their best and brightest.
Unlike some western models that keep everyone at the pace of the slowest one in the class because of "social stigma" and no child left behind.
AFF
Presumably, though, this was a lacuna that Mao was trying to redress when he launched the "Down to the Countryside Movement" during the Cultural Revolution.
Which was a bone-headed way of accomplishing his goals, to be sure. But I think there's probably a reason that series of events erupted at that point in Chinese history.
(By the way, if you're going to argue for a meritocratic system, I'd advise avoiding use of the word "stupid" to describe people at the lower end of the academic spectrum. It comes off as pretty insulting.)
I'm not arguing for it. I'm just saying that the Chinese have had five thousand years to experiment with social engineering, and the latest iteration seems to be working better than a lot of previous iterations and maybe we have something to learn from their hybrid model of communism/market capitalism. Or perhaps improve upon it, like they have done with western tech and economic models.
One of the things they have a relentless drive for is improvement on existing systems. If there's a better faster cheaper way to build something better, stronger and higher functioning, they are on it. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" is anathema to them.
I think we would do well to emulate their drive and level of funding for improving systems and things. If the point is to make life easier, not harder, then it seems like a pretty successful formula if we are to look at the past 30 years in China.
If the point is to drive every possible unit of value created by every person below a tiny handful of people into the pockets of that tiny handful of people, then I would say that late market capitalism has been a roaring success. Hooray for our race to the bottom. We win.
AFF
I'd also suggest that aspects of evangelical Protestantism as well as more liberal forms of Protestantism are the result of the Enlightenment.
One of the best biographies of John Wesley, in my view, is Henry Lack's Rational Enthusiast.
Good title.
Arguably evangelicalism itself is a child of the Enlightenment as well as Deism and so on.
I'm not saying that's good, bad or indifferent, simply that some Christian groups that rail about the Enlightenment don't appear to be aware that their own approach has been shaped by it too.
I would agree that some aspects of some types of *modern* Evangelicalism have their ancestry in the Enlightenment, but Evangelicalism as a whole pre-dates it. I actually would argue that in historical terms, the Enlightenment is more of an ending than a beginning, at least in the UK - it's the culmination of the post-Civil War period, and most of the the "new" things had their origins earlier.
It really depended on location as to how fiercely secular the Enlightenment was - Germany for instance had a very different and much less polemical experience than France. But in defence of the more virulently anti-supernatural attitudes....I can see how enduring centuries of wars of religion would push people towards that viewpoint.
Sadly, yes, but of course that doesn't make anti-supernaturalism true.
It rather depends on what you mean by "working better".
They have succeeded in getting the economy up to speed in a remarkably short space of time. It's a highly-engineered system, which is OK if you like being a cog in a system. And bearing in mind that treating everyone as cogs is made possible by operating an anti-liberal anti-democratic form of capitalism.
Everyone's position is subject to state control - one day you're an entrepreneur running a successful tech company, next day your position and lifestyle are removed by the state for acting against the interests of the state, and there's no appeal, no route back.
That aside, the big question is whether the cracks in the economy are going to continue to widen. 30 years is rather too soon to say whether engineering the economy in this way is a sustainable methodology.
Oh yes - I think that the form of capitalism that liberal democracy encourages or enables has a lot to answer for.
But I do think we're rather closer to its end point.
Ultimately, this comes down to the same thing as most of the threads in this cluster. End-stage vulture capitalism proposes to people that there are infinite personal universes, in which thought and accountability are dead, and choice is infinite and risk-free. This started in the Enlightenment, when conscience was essentially privatised. Of course, Voltaire and Diderot did not foresee anything like the apocalypse we have created for ourselves, and neither did Adam Smith, but it is based in the individualism that the Enlightenment posited as the invincible alternative to tyranny. It has become a fatal tyranny of its own. The mentality which sees a corporation as having a single subjectivity is an essential element in this evolution. Each one has an inalienable right to make independent decisions and act in its own self-interest, at least according to the prevailing post-Enlightenment ideology.
Origins, yes. But I'd argue that evangelicalism in its recognisably modern sense coincided with the Enlightenment.
The roots of it go back further and we can see embryonic hints of it within early Puritanism from around the 1590s/early 1600s.
But I would argue that evangelicalism as we know it today is a result of the 'Great Awakening' of the 1740s and the second 'Great Awakening' of the mid-1800s.
The various eschatological elements associated with some strands of evangelicalism are a feature of the 1830s onwards.
Evangelicalism in its modern form was partly a reaction to the Enlightenment and partly a product of it.
Says it all really. David Hume would have been horrified.
Schopenhauer and Hegel.
Politically, I've usually heard him described as a Tory, based largely, I think, on his historical writings. In matters of hard philosophy, though, he was pretty radical.
There is a statue of Hume in the Royal Mile, Edinburgh which depicts him dressed incongruously in a toga. Even better, people rub the toe of this great Enlightenment figure, who believed that superstition was dangerous, for luck. The statue is green with verdigris, but with a shiny bronze big toe sticking out from under the toga. There could be no depiction of Hume less in keeping with his beliefs.
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that veneration of Hume in Edinburgh has more to do with the fact that he was a hometown boy who made it big, rather than admiration for any of his specific ideas. Most people aren't looking at the statue and thinking "Ah, yes. David Hume. The man who finally disabused epistemology of the direct perception of causality."
And, yeah, I hate that sorta ahistorical boosterism. Some Canadians like to talk up Marshall McLuhan as a big deal, even though I'm pretty sure most of them don't know anything about his thought beyond a couple of slogans. But he was admired as one of the supposedly few Csnadians who made it big in international academia while staying in Canada, so that was enough(*).
(*) My hometown has converted McLuhan's birthplace into a museum, even though he was only three or four when his family moved away forever. It's claimed that as a small child, he saw a horse-drawn carriage in the distance, and assumed it was as small as it appeared, which supposedly influenced his media theories later in life. As if that was a unique experience to him.
The statue is on a plinth; were it not I have no doubt that people would be rubbing his nipple for luck. As it is, only his big toe is conveniently accessible to the superstitious masses. (And to me!)
As you describe it, the statue sounds artistically interesting, for sure. It's just a personal gripe of mine when someone gets honoured in a locale simply because he happened to be from there.
If it was a philosophy department, regardless of the city, renowned as a a great centre for Empiricism, a statue of Hume might make more sense. Though maybe that does describe Edinburgh's department?
Yep. We should assume the sun will rise tomorrow because that's the way we've always observed it to happen.
Rightio. I stand corrected.
I've not heard the Python song for many years.
On the statue thing... sounds good. There's so much poor public art around these days that anything a bit quirky should be celebrated.
His empirical enlightenment did not take into account the growth of international vulture corporate capitalism.
He emphasised the importance of moderation in politics, public spirit and regard for community. I think he would see international vulture corporate capitalism as an enemy of moderation.
Was he really a Tory? I thought he identified himself as a highly sceptical Whig? But whatever, moderation was a key theme in his political writings.
Women were still banned from universities, professions like law and medicine and normally those famous learned societies ( if you were brave enough to write a learned paper then they might let a man read it for you- they certainly weren't letting you in!)
Men who weren't substantial property owners generally couldn't vote ( there's the odd exception but this is pre Parliamentary reform and the Scottish franchise was very restricted.)
Enlightenment stadial theory (the ideas about how civilisations had stages) went on to play a major part in scientific racism, with, in this case, people who were not white being seen as the perpetual children who needed 'civilised adults' to take care of them with the results you could expect from that kind of racism.
When people start going on about Enlightenment values it's often worth checking to see it's not code for 'Enough with equality we want Great White Men!' It's sometimes used in that way. ( Not by you! Just saying it's something I've encountered)
I've read a lot of Hume (he was more famous in his day as a historian than as a philosopher) and as a historian he's an excellent writer with some fascinating observations who blew a lot of constitutional myth out the water ( that's why he wouldn't be a Tory in his day - this stuff gave them apoplexy) but that's in the context of contemporary debates, not where we are now.
Yeah, this is the thing about old style liberalism; private property being sacrosanct was in many ways primary, in practice both the commitment to equality (under the law) and liberty referred back to it.
Equally, with Conservatism, as Paul Kingsnorth observes it's gone from claiming to be all about 'conserving' what might be considered 'traditional values' - family, faith, the nation etc - to being all about conserving my wealth, my property.
I hasten to add that I'm uncomfortable with some of Kingsnorth's 'radical reactionary' stuff as I find it ... well ... reactionary ...
I'm still a woolly liberal to some extent but not always comfortably.
The old Whig thing took things so far but then pulled up the drawbridge to stop anyone else getting aboard.
Well, conservatism, even in its romanticized nobless oblige phase, is all about preserving social hierarchies. And with the ascension of liberal capitalism, those hierarchies are now based largely on private property.
Bingo.
Perhaps it should be retitled the Age of Selective Enlightenment?
This was ever thus, it was ultimately always about the preservation of 'natural' hierarchies.
Edmund Burke's anti-imperialism in regard to British policy in the 13 colonies and in India was basically a defense of the right of local elites to rule free of outside interference. He later contrasted this with the French Revolution, which he viewed as the overthrow of rightful rulers.
What was his view of Native Americans/First Nations people? I’m intrigued now…
Good question, and I'm not sure. Toryism in general tended to be favored by First Nations in the British Colonies(and successor Realm) north of the USA, as a bulwark against expansionist Yanks. But I'm not sure what Burke himself thought about their interests and claims.
Compact is apparently a start-up political site with a fairly impressive establishment pedigree. They've got an article up from a couple of years ago called The Unconservative Edmund Burke. Seems to be arguing that he was generally enlightened on indigenous vs. colonizer issues in North America.