had forecast progress in morality and society just as much as in science, technology and industry
progress was inevitable
the conviction that “the Idea or the Dialectic or Natural Law, functioning through the conscious purposes or the unconscious activities of men, could be counted on to safeguard mankind against future hazards
From this it doesn’t seem surprising that smart people would have initially seen something like communism as the next step in the inevitable moral and social progress of humanity, powered by reason. Combine this high prior that communism would be good with lack of strong evidence of communism’s problems (it probably looked pretty good from the outside, and any unfavorable info that did leak out, you couldn’t be sure wasn’t anti-communist propaganda)… and you almost don’t need to invoke human irrationality to explain them being enamored with communism.
Maybe a more distal cause is that the Enlightenment was too successful, in that the values it settled upon through “reason”, like freedom and democracy, turned out to work pretty well (relative to the old norms), which made people trust reason and progress too much, when in retrospect, the Enlightenment philosophers seem to have just gotten lucky. (Or maybe there are some deeper explanations than “luck” for why they were right, but it sure doesn’t seem to have much to do with their explicit reasoning.)
Maybe they looked at a set of values (present) and decided that others might serve better. Having picked out a better set* might not have been super hard.
Jason Crawford’s recent post on 19th-century philosophy of progress seems relevant. Some quotes from it:
deep belief in the power of human reason
had forecast progress in morality and society just as much as in science, technology and industry
progress was inevitable
the conviction that “the Idea or the Dialectic or Natural Law, functioning through the conscious purposes or the unconscious activities of men, could be counted on to safeguard mankind against future hazards
From this it doesn’t seem surprising that smart people would have initially seen something like communism as the next step in the inevitable moral and social progress of humanity, powered by reason. Combine this high prior that communism would be good with lack of strong evidence of communism’s problems (it probably looked pretty good from the outside, and any unfavorable info that did leak out, you couldn’t be sure wasn’t anti-communist propaganda)… and you almost don’t need to invoke human irrationality to explain them being enamored with communism.
Maybe a more distal cause is that the Enlightenment was too successful, in that the values it settled upon through “reason”, like freedom and democracy, turned out to work pretty well (relative to the old norms), which made people trust reason and progress too much, when in retrospect, the Enlightenment philosophers seem to have just gotten lucky. (Or maybe there are some deeper explanations than “luck” for why they were right, but it sure doesn’t seem to have much to do with their explicit reasoning.)
That last point (“more distal cause”) is a very interesting idea. Thanks!
Maybe they looked at a set of values (present) and decided that others might serve better. Having picked out a better set* might not have been super hard.
*in their context