Apparently when the adherents of an ideological movement seize political power, they put a lot of effort into rewriting the story of the nation state’s recent past which casts the previous order of affairs in a bad light compared to the allegedly improved way the new rulers say they’ll run things. That explains why, for example, American historical accounts of the Revolutionary War usually don’t explore whether the revolutionists had reasonable grievances, or whether King George III had a defensible case for maintaining and asserting his authority over the American Colonies. Americans have come to a collective decision to cut off inquiry into those questions, at least as far as indoctrinating the young goes, because certain kinds of answers throw into doubt the legitimacy of the way things actually happened.
I wonder how much of that has happened on a larger scale to Western civilization because of the political success of adherents to the Enlightenment. Since I discovered Neoreaction and it has poked at the splinter in my mind, I have engaged in crimethink about whether we have an impoverished understanding of social alternatives because the Enlightenment’s intellectuals and their heirs have worked very hard, and very successfully, at making sure that we get a heavily biased view of how things worked in the before-times which makes it look terrible compared to its replacement. Yet the splinter in our minds remains. Just ask questions about whether we really benefit from democracy, equality or feminism, and the emotional reactions from some people (David Brin, for example) show genuine anxiety on their part. These excessively emotional responses resemble how reminders of death, called “mortality salience” in Terror Management Theory, activate people’s anxiety buffers to try to suppress distressing thoughts.
Did our ancestors in the West invent the Enlightenment, with its emotionally soothing message about human nature, to manage some kind of terror we should confront directly instead of trying to hide from it?
American historical accounts of the Revolutionary War usually don’t explore whether the revolutionists had reasonable grievances
For what it’s worth, I’ve been in the UK since about age four and everything I learned about the American Revolution took the view that the Americans were basically in the right. I don’t know how typical this is, but if it is then one explanation (not the only one but maybe the most plausible) is that actually that’s the conclusion most reasonable people would come to when looking at the available evidence, and the most plausible explanation of that is that actually the Americans were (according to typical present-day values) in the right.
crimethink
I don’t think this sort of overheated language is helpful. No one is going to put you in prison (or even fine you, or even mock you gently) for thinking that current views of the Enlightenment may be misleadingly positive.
These excessively emotional responses resemble how [...]
Emotional responses are also what one would expect if a thing has (really, truly) been established only with difficulty and much opposition and turned out to be extremely beneficial, and if the person making the response is worried that it’s being attacked again.
It is usually best to determine that something is wrong before undertaking to explain the mental pathologies that produce it. (The idea described at the other end of that link is about doing this to beliefs, but I think one can say much the same about attitudes.)
Did our ancestors [...] invent the Enlightenment [...] to manage some kind of terror
This seems like one hell of a leap. There are things other than fear of death that lead people to respond emotionally to things. I already mentioned one above, but there are plenty of unflattering ones if NRx has already made it impossible for you to take seriously the possibility that admirers of “Enlightenment values” might be sincere and sane: for instance, maybe people like David Brin have so much of their personal identity invested in such values that criticism of them feels itself like a personal threat. Or maybe they don’t really believe in the Enlightenment any more than you do, but they recognize (as you do) the extent to which present-day Western society is built on it, and fear the consequences if it’s overthrown.
For what it’s worth, I’ve been in the UK since about age four and everything I learned about the American Revolution took the view that the Americans were basically in the right. I don’t know how typical this is, but if it is then one explanation (not the only one but maybe the most plausible) is that actually that’s the conclusion most reasonable people would come to when looking at the available evidence, and the most plausible explanation of that is that actually the Americans were (according to typical present-day values) in the right.
people automatically downvote anything critical of the Enlightenment
Evidence?
(It looks to me as if most of the unthinking downvoting on LW is done by neoreactionaries. But being not at all neoreactionary-minded myself, it’s likely that it looks more that way to me than it is in reality.)
Of course, even if your claim were true that wouldn’t suffice to make “crimethink” an appropriate word; the whole horror of the term in 1984 is that the Party tries (apparently quite successfully) to control not only actions, not only words, but thoughts, and did it by means a little more brutal than downvotes.
Backing up your general observation. Someone just went ahead and upvoted advancedatheist’s original comment, upvoated Michael’s comment, and then apparently downvoted every critical comment in this subthread. If they can give an explanation for why they think your responsed to advanced deserved a downvote I’d be really intrigued to hear it.
Nearly any political discussion has a few people downvoting on LW. If that’s the standard every political discussion is crimethink.
There also the idea that policies should be judged on their merits and not based on whether or not they are enlightment policies and as such a post focusing on criticism a policy based on being an enlightenment policy might be downvoted for reasons having nothing to do with “crimethink”.
The Enlightenment began with Epicurus. Perhaps even earlier, but Epicurus is the earliest source we have. Perhaps for as long as one man has said “God”, another has said “Man”.
I’ve been reading “Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Revolution”, by Matthew Stewart, since seeing a quote from it on the current quotes thread. That, and another book I read this year, “Victorian Sensation”, suggest a different history of all this.
This is just a quick outline, or I’d have to spend days writing this up. “Epicurus’ Dangerous Idea”, as Stewart calls it, was simply this: we live in and are part of a material universe. There are no gods, or if there are they don’t care about us, or they’re metaphors for our own ideals, but at any rate they’re not up there in the sky watching out for us and answering our prayers. We are all we have, and we are made of atoms that have come together for a little while, and when we die and they come apart again, we are gone.
Well, of course we are, any of us here might say, but following Yvain’s method of reading philosophy backwards, we should ask, what made this idea so offensive to people from the ancient Greeks onward? God, or the Gods, were part of people’s everyday mental furniture. The Gods taught us virtue and set our foot on the right road. Evil acts were, quite literally, offences against the Gods. God made all this: when you looked at the world, you were looking at the work of God. God moved the sun, or the sun was a god. God brought sickness, and recovery from sickness. God hardened the heart of the Pharoah and inspired the saints. God quickened the seed in the ground and in the womb, and God decreed that our years were three score and ten.
And Epicurus said “Atoms” and started an itch that never went away.
From that we eventually got to really practising the idea, universal now, that you can find out how stuff works by looking at it. And we’ve never found anything to contradict Epicurus’ original vision. People like Galileo and Newton, and all the scientists before them, put foundations under Epicurus’ speculations by making major discoveries about how the universe worked, and God was nowhere to be found. “I have no need of that hypothesis” runs the anecdote of Laplace and Napoleon, but the idea has been around since ancient times. The poet Kabir wrote in the 15th century:
There is nothing but water in the holy pools. I know, I have been swimming in them.
All the gods sculpted of wood or ivory can’t say a word. I know, I have been crying out to them.
“Victorian Sensation” is a book about another book, Robert Chambers’ “Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation”. (If you know Chambers’ English Dictionary, that was published by Robert and his brother William, who were publishers and literary figures in Scotland.) “Vestiges” was first published anonymously in 1844, and ran through many editions. It was nothing less than a summary of the scientific knowledge of the time, as it related to the structure of the universe, the geological history of the Earth, and the development of species. This was well before Darwin’s Origin. Darwin read Vestiges and considered the book an important one.
The atheistic implications of the work were evident to everyone, even though Chambers, like many writers on these things before him, was careful to attribute the marvellous clockwork to the divine hand setting it in motion. But what need of God in a universe that ran by itself?
What sustained the social order in earlier times, the social order that neoreactionaries like to praise so much, was religion. When God is not in His Heaven, overseeing all, rewarding the good and punishing the evil, whither Man? But how can that belief be sustained, in the face of the inexorable power of the single most dangerous idea of all: that you can observe a lot by looking?
John C. Wright is the only example of a Christian neoreactionary I’ve encountered. There may be others, but all the others I’ve seen here on LW or on the sites that have from time to time been linked to, say not a word of religion, beyond praising its moral character. None profess any faith themselves, although other than advancedatheist’s choice of moniker, I have not noticed them professing atheism either. They want the virtue of past times without the religion that was its foundation. They are silent about how to expel the elephant from the drawing room without letting the bull into the china shop.
To find virtue in a material world: a grand project. Who will carry it out?
And an even briefer sketch of now a neoreactionary might answer that last challenge.
The problem in former times of virtue, the neoreactionary might say, is that people did not know enough to be able to demonstrate what is virtue and what is vice. People have always known right from wrong, but they have not known how they know, any more than they knew how they see. Having God as the explanation, even though it be a false one, had the beneficial effect of protecting their knowledge from their ignorance. When people generally began to see that there was no God (including those who believed they believed, but whose God had dwindled to the shadowy ghost in the background), virtue decayed, for we are all like Chesterton’s fence-lifters, discarding a thing, however useful, when we notice that we do not see the reason for it.
But now, the neoreactionary might continue, in the last century, or perhaps just the last few decades, we have discovered the material origin of virtue. This knowledge comes primarily from evolutionary biology and neuroscience, and history reinterpreted in its light. We know how societies flourish and how they decay. We know how we know right from wrong. With this new knowledge, we shall restore virtue to the world.
To which the progressive might even more briefly respond:
Yeah, our people tried some of that in the early 20th century. The project was supposed to make society better by making better people. It applied scientific knowledge of Darwinian evolution, Mendelian genetics, and the science of psychology that gave us the ability to measure feeblemindedness and mental degeneracy.
It was called eugenics. It didn’t work.
Its failure was not that it was pseudoscience. Quite a lot of it wasn’t. Its failure was that it involved giving a political and technical elite a kind of power over other people that couldn’t not be abused — abused to control others; abused to enact ancient prejudices like antisemitism, and new ones like middle-class fear of the poor and rural; abused to allay some people’s fears of a collapsing, degenerating society at the expense of other people’s bodies and lives.
I think you overrate the influence on science on German nationalism. The idea that blood relationships matter doesn’t come out of science. It’s a much older idea.
Or are you speaking about something that doesn’t have something to do with Germany?
and new ones like middle-class fear of the poor and rural
What are you talking about? Late 20st century US thought?
I think you overrate the influence on science on German nationalism. The idea that blood relationships matter doesn’t come out of science. It’s a much older idea.
The specific ideas behind Nazi eugenics and “racial hygiene” derive — in part — from earlier eugenics and racial-hygiene movements in the US. See, for instance, the Indiana eugenics act of 1907 and, more pointedly, the Virginia Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which combined legislation against mixed-race marriages with compulsory sterilization of the “feebleminded”.
and new ones like middle-class fear of the poor and rural
What are you talking about? Late 20st century US thought?
No, early-20th-century US thought,. I should have been more clear: by “new” I meant “new at the time”, not “recent as of today”. The idea that poor rural families were inbred hives of criminality, madness, and race-mixing was one of the motivations behind American eugenics of the early 20th century.
Thing is, it’s true that many mental disorders are heritable. In that regard, the early eugenicists were not operating entirely on pseudoscience. But they went wrong in believing that if nations refused to use law and violence to control people’s reproduction (and, ultimately, to kill the “unfit”), that society (or “the race”) would degenerate.
After WWI Germans did try to copy American culture and might have copied scientifically motivated racism. On the other hand that stopped a bit with the Nazis. They didn’t care about copying the US. “Blut und Boden” (“blood and soil”) was a quite old idea.
“Racial hygiene” isn’t really the same as “scientific racism”. The latter seems to be used more to refer to the anthropological theories of racial superiority, now euphemistically called “human biodiversity” by their advocates.
But “racial hygiene” policies included the elimination of “undesirable” gene lines within the advocates’ favored race — first through forced sterilization, and later through killing.
In 1933 in some sense yes. Hermann Muckermann who was co-author of the law did study in the US.
By 1936 the Nazi however forbid him from speaking publically.
Yes, that’s the main failure mode of ethical naturalism. “You must die, because SCIENCE!”
What would the progressive atheist’s answer be to the challenge of producing virtue from matter? I’d try writing that one as well, but I think I’d end up caricaturing it.
Yes, that’s the main failure mode of ethical naturalism. “You must die, because SCIENCE!”
My libertarian shard says it’s the main failure mode of politics: “You must die, because POWER!”
What would the progressive atheist’s answer be to the challenge of producing virtue from matter?
No idea, but mine is game theory coupled with compassion — a System 2 mathematical insight and a System 1 intuitive and trained response. Ethics comes down to symmetry among agents: my good is no more or less The Good than your good. Humans can recognize this both as a matter of explicit mathematical-philosophical reasoning, and using intuitive-emotional responses (which can be trained). Virtuous humans both recognize and feel that symmetry, and vicious humans do not recognize or feel it.
The basic ethical failing that leads to atrocities is not usually the lack of System 2 ethical reasoning, but the sentiment (or System 1 trained reaction) that those people are not really people; they are some sort of mockery of people who do not deserve compassion. See Rorty, “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality”.
What we see in the history of eugenics politics is the notion that society can progress by freeing itself from having to care about certain kinds of people — so that they can be subjected to medical violation, mutilation, or extermination. But this is the same thing that we see in religious antisemitism or any number of other sources of the dehumanization meme. Dehumanization works the same evil whether it’s couched in the language of progressive science, the Lutheran language of Nazi antisemitism, or in the order to the Albigensian crusaders: “Kill them all; God will know his own.”
Rorty’s critique of ethics since Plato has a weird echo when we’re talking about eugenics, though:
It would have been better if Plato had decided, as Aristotle was to decide, that there was nothing much to be done with people like Thrasymachus and Callicles and that the problem was how to avoid having children who would be like Thrasymachus and Callicles.
But speaking of science and ethics, I think it’s really kinda weird that humanity had the Golden Rule from traditional sources since antiquity, but didn’t invent the math to describe it until the mid-20th century — the same time frame in which engineering gave to politics the ability to destroy the world.
It should be noted that a moral tradition needs not be theistic in nature, much less Abrahamic-Zoroastrian—Confucianism is a case in point here. And even a “material universe” cosmology may be sen in a variety of quite diverging ways. A particle physicist may argue—much as Democritus and Epicurus did—that our ontology should be a reductionist one, founded on some kinds of irreducible elements, and that it is a moral imperative to understand these tiny elements of nature by running huge, incredibly costly and perhaps risky experiments using particle accelerators.
Nonetheless, others, perhaps more interested in ecologies and human societies, may object that particle physics tells us quite little about our everyday lives and how we can best thrive in a nurturing milieu (as in both an ecology/environment and a community/society), which many people would indeed consider as a “right”, or at least as something ethically relevant. Perhaps they would have us focus on very different things to “look” at: maybe indigenous peoples—as societies that have “stood the test of time” in a very real sense—and even our closest animal relatives in the Hominidae taxon (which, incidentally, are now significantly endangered due to human activity). So, yes, there is clearly a relevant conflict here, but it’s far subtler than what you’re referring to. In the end, medieval philosophers and theologians may well have the last laugh, as “reason” and scientific inquiry turn out to be the slaves not just of our passions, as Hume would have it, but even moreso of our ethics and morality.
You are taking particle physics for the totality of science throughout, cherry-picking a part of science most remote from everyday concerns, ignoring the rest of the elephant. We know the chemical elements, the methods of taking them from the ground, how to combine them in a million ways to produce the cornucopia of our everyday life. We know how plants grow and how to make them grow better. Because of that we build better buildings, make better roads, and grow better and more plants than our ancestors. We can talk to each other around the world in seconds and travel there in hours. Science! It works!
Perhaps they would have us focus on very different things to “look” at: maybe indigenous peoples—as societies that have “stood the test of time” in a very real sense
Who is indigenous, and what is the test of time? We are all indigenous to this planet, and for better or worse, the ones that people call “indigenous” are conspicuously not standing the test of time since encountering the ones that picked up the material ball and ran with it as fast as possible. Throughout history, the test of time has been the test of whether or not you got overrun by your neighbours. I’m not arguing that might makes right, but might certainly makes might.
In the end, medieval philosophers and theologians may well have the last laugh, as “reason” and scientific inquiry turn out to be the slaves not just of our passions, as Hume would have it, but even moreso of our ethics and morality.
That leaves out the fact the science works, and the more you do it, the more it works. It is not the slave to our passions, but the tool of our passion to make everything in our lives better, and we use it to the full. Science isn’t cathedrals to particle physics, it’s food on the table, houses to live in, and matter rearranged to our desire. Religion works only until everyone realizes there’s no-one behind the curtain. The curtain hangs in tatters.
You are taking particle physics for the totality of science throughout, cherry-picking a part of science most remote from everyday concerns, ignoring the rest of the elephant.
Perhaps I was not clear enough, but that wasn’t my intention—far from it. I was trying to highlight the diversity of scientific inquiry, by choosing a few representative fields. The elephant has many, many parts to it, and some of them are distinctly less useful or likely to “work” than others. But note that you can’t even talk about what’s likely to “work” without adopting some normative standards first, as you implicitly did in your reply: and our general worldview, with its cosmology (what’s out there? or—even more critically—what’s important? What should we be paying attention to?) and morality (“what should we do?”) is going to have a big impact on such choices, in any but the most crudely-technocratic or runaway-capitalist society.
These are not trivial issues—indeed, scientists of such caliber as Einstein and Oppenheimer were famously forced to grapple with these when they found out—much to their horror and dismay, if popular accounts are to be believed—that “science” had given them the ability to build catastrophically destructive weapons. And our own MIRI is often said to be facing similar concerns in its work on AI.
Whether “religion” is relevant here depends mostly on how you define the term. But AIUI, many scholars would argue that Confucianism qualifies as one, despite it being quite non-theistic, and more in the nature of a collection of moral maxims, and of course, a basic worldview highlighting such principles as cultivating basic kindness, showing loyalty and care where appropriate, and participating in rituals that foster a sense of unity and social harmony. Many people would argue that such a “religion” could be highly appropriate for our hyper-”material” world—whatever it is that we choose “material” to mean.
But note that you can’t even talk about what’s likely to “work” without adopting some normative standards first
“Working” is as objective as it comes. Nobody wants to die of smallpox, and smallpox vaccination works, while prayers don’t. Nobody wants to die at sea, so sailors have to know the tides, and how to determine where they are. No-one wants to starve, so farmers have to know how to make their crops thrive. They won’t get that knowledge by praying for revelation. In short, people have purposes, and can observe whether what they are doing to achieve them is working. The better they can find out what works and what doesn’t, the better they will achieve those purposes, whatever they are.
That is the pressure, objectively and insistently exerted by nature, to find things out. The carpenter making a better table has no need of God to tell him what sort of glue will give way and what will hold fast.
Confucianism is an interesting case, but I think it was sustained not by its own virtue but by the power of the centralised and authoritarian Chinese state, with which it was a good fit with its emphasis on loyalty and deference to superiors. The scientific revolution didn’t happen there. So theocracy isn’t the only thing that can stop science from happening.
As for a religion appropriate to the modern world, the traditions of the past are available to all in the Internet age. Anyone can pick and choose or make their own. But I see little future for mass religions based on fictions and unenforced by state power.
There are a lot of problems with what you’ve wrote here, and I think that gjm’s comment is a pretty good response. However, there is a glimmer of truth in your comment. There were definite attempts to portray pre-1600s cultures as more stagnant and backwards than they were. There are two clear-cut examples. The first is the invention of the Iron Maiden) which was not an actual medieval torture device. (It is worth noting here that actual medieval tortures were still pretty bad. See Pinker’s “Better Angels of Our Nature” for some discussion of the better documented horrors.) The second is the claim that medievals by and large believed that the world was flat. While, some did so, and even some church fathers did so, they were by and large a minority. The belief became more common as a Protestant slur against Catholics and gradually became a more general belief.
More generally, there have been issues of narrative. There’s a standard narrative, often taught in high-school physics classes that portrays no major development in physics between Aristotle and Galileo. This is deeply wrong. Galileo and others of his time-period would not have made the advances they did were it not for people like Oresme, Buridan, and al-Bitruji. Among other important results, they developed the idea of “impetus” which was a precursor to the idea of momentum. It is unlikely that the thinkers in the late 1500s and early 1600s would have made the progress they did without these ideas. But it is also important to note that this may to some extent not be an issue of motivated falsification of history or anything like that. It may simply be a combination of that simple narratives are easy and that it would have been difficult in past times to actually have access to many historical sources. In many ways, one has more access today to many medieval texts than someone in the 1800s would have had.
Also, it really, really doesn’t help to use overblown terms like “crimethink” and it is especially dangerous to fall into the thought-process that what one is thinking is somehow persectuced. Once one falls into that trap it makes the cognitive dissonance much more difficult to deal with when one finds data that might cause one to adjust one’s beliefs. The fact that all the examples above are well known to historians and widely discussed shows how far any of this is from anything resembling throughtcrime.
Little observed fact: The Enlightenment was a (small r) reactionary movement, in the sense of wanting not just to preserve the status quo but to go back to a Greco-Roman status quo ante, and declaring the intermediate period the “middle” or “dark ages”.
Doesn’t this line of thinking pretty much end up portraying a sort of sociopathic troll — a person who possess no values of his or her own, but who is able to provoke to anger anyone who has values — as the ideal?
Apparently when the adherents of an ideological movement seize political power, they put a lot of effort into rewriting the story of the nation state’s recent past which casts the previous order of affairs in a bad light compared to the allegedly improved way the new rulers say they’ll run things. That explains why, for example, American historical accounts of the Revolutionary War usually don’t explore whether the revolutionists had reasonable grievances, or whether King George III had a defensible case for maintaining and asserting his authority over the American Colonies. Americans have come to a collective decision to cut off inquiry into those questions, at least as far as indoctrinating the young goes, because certain kinds of answers throw into doubt the legitimacy of the way things actually happened.
I wonder how much of that has happened on a larger scale to Western civilization because of the political success of adherents to the Enlightenment. Since I discovered Neoreaction and it has poked at the splinter in my mind, I have engaged in crimethink about whether we have an impoverished understanding of social alternatives because the Enlightenment’s intellectuals and their heirs have worked very hard, and very successfully, at making sure that we get a heavily biased view of how things worked in the before-times which makes it look terrible compared to its replacement. Yet the splinter in our minds remains. Just ask questions about whether we really benefit from democracy, equality or feminism, and the emotional reactions from some people (David Brin, for example) show genuine anxiety on their part. These excessively emotional responses resemble how reminders of death, called “mortality salience” in Terror Management Theory, activate people’s anxiety buffers to try to suppress distressing thoughts.
Did our ancestors in the West invent the Enlightenment, with its emotionally soothing message about human nature, to manage some kind of terror we should confront directly instead of trying to hide from it?
For what it’s worth, I’ve been in the UK since about age four and everything I learned about the American Revolution took the view that the Americans were basically in the right. I don’t know how typical this is, but if it is then one explanation (not the only one but maybe the most plausible) is that actually that’s the conclusion most reasonable people would come to when looking at the available evidence, and the most plausible explanation of that is that actually the Americans were (according to typical present-day values) in the right.
I don’t think this sort of overheated language is helpful. No one is going to put you in prison (or even fine you, or even mock you gently) for thinking that current views of the Enlightenment may be misleadingly positive.
Emotional responses are also what one would expect if a thing has (really, truly) been established only with difficulty and much opposition and turned out to be extremely beneficial, and if the person making the response is worried that it’s being attacked again.
It is usually best to determine that something is wrong before undertaking to explain the mental pathologies that produce it. (The idea described at the other end of that link is about doing this to beliefs, but I think one can say much the same about attitudes.)
This seems like one hell of a leap. There are things other than fear of death that lead people to respond emotionally to things. I already mentioned one above, but there are plenty of unflattering ones if NRx has already made it impossible for you to take seriously the possibility that admirers of “Enlightenment values” might be sincere and sane: for instance, maybe people like David Brin have so much of their personal identity invested in such values that criticism of them feels itself like a personal threat. Or maybe they don’t really believe in the Enlightenment any more than you do, but they recognize (as you do) the extent to which present-day Western society is built on it, and fear the consequences if it’s overthrown.
http://www.gwern.net/Mistakes#the-american-revolution
Interesting: thanks.
applause
It’s crimethink in the sense that people automatically downvote anything critical of the Enlightenment.
Evidence?
(It looks to me as if most of the unthinking downvoting on LW is done by neoreactionaries. But being not at all neoreactionary-minded myself, it’s likely that it looks more that way to me than it is in reality.)
Of course, even if your claim were true that wouldn’t suffice to make “crimethink” an appropriate word; the whole horror of the term in 1984 is that the Party tries (apparently quite successfully) to control not only actions, not only words, but thoughts, and did it by means a little more brutal than downvotes.
Backing up your general observation. Someone just went ahead and upvoted advancedatheist’s original comment, upvoated Michael’s comment, and then apparently downvoted every critical comment in this subthread. If they can give an explanation for why they think your responsed to advanced deserved a downvote I’d be really intrigued to hear it.
Nearly any political discussion has a few people downvoting on LW. If that’s the standard every political discussion is crimethink.
There also the idea that policies should be judged on their merits and not based on whether or not they are enlightment policies and as such a post focusing on criticism a policy based on being an enlightenment policy might be downvoted for reasons having nothing to do with “crimethink”.
The Enlightenment began with Epicurus. Perhaps even earlier, but Epicurus is the earliest source we have. Perhaps for as long as one man has said “God”, another has said “Man”.
I’ve been reading “Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Revolution”, by Matthew Stewart, since seeing a quote from it on the current quotes thread. That, and another book I read this year, “Victorian Sensation”, suggest a different history of all this.
This is just a quick outline, or I’d have to spend days writing this up. “Epicurus’ Dangerous Idea”, as Stewart calls it, was simply this: we live in and are part of a material universe. There are no gods, or if there are they don’t care about us, or they’re metaphors for our own ideals, but at any rate they’re not up there in the sky watching out for us and answering our prayers. We are all we have, and we are made of atoms that have come together for a little while, and when we die and they come apart again, we are gone.
Well, of course we are, any of us here might say, but following Yvain’s method of reading philosophy backwards, we should ask, what made this idea so offensive to people from the ancient Greeks onward? God, or the Gods, were part of people’s everyday mental furniture. The Gods taught us virtue and set our foot on the right road. Evil acts were, quite literally, offences against the Gods. God made all this: when you looked at the world, you were looking at the work of God. God moved the sun, or the sun was a god. God brought sickness, and recovery from sickness. God hardened the heart of the Pharoah and inspired the saints. God quickened the seed in the ground and in the womb, and God decreed that our years were three score and ten.
And Epicurus said “Atoms” and started an itch that never went away.
From that we eventually got to really practising the idea, universal now, that you can find out how stuff works by looking at it. And we’ve never found anything to contradict Epicurus’ original vision. People like Galileo and Newton, and all the scientists before them, put foundations under Epicurus’ speculations by making major discoveries about how the universe worked, and God was nowhere to be found. “I have no need of that hypothesis” runs the anecdote of Laplace and Napoleon, but the idea has been around since ancient times. The poet Kabir wrote in the 15th century:
There is nothing but water in the holy pools.
I know, I have been swimming in them.
All the gods sculpted of wood or ivory can’t say a word.
I know, I have been crying out to them.
“Victorian Sensation” is a book about another book, Robert Chambers’ “Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation”. (If you know Chambers’ English Dictionary, that was published by Robert and his brother William, who were publishers and literary figures in Scotland.) “Vestiges” was first published anonymously in 1844, and ran through many editions. It was nothing less than a summary of the scientific knowledge of the time, as it related to the structure of the universe, the geological history of the Earth, and the development of species. This was well before Darwin’s Origin. Darwin read Vestiges and considered the book an important one.
The atheistic implications of the work were evident to everyone, even though Chambers, like many writers on these things before him, was careful to attribute the marvellous clockwork to the divine hand setting it in motion. But what need of God in a universe that ran by itself?
What sustained the social order in earlier times, the social order that neoreactionaries like to praise so much, was religion. When God is not in His Heaven, overseeing all, rewarding the good and punishing the evil, whither Man? But how can that belief be sustained, in the face of the inexorable power of the single most dangerous idea of all: that you can observe a lot by looking?
John C. Wright is the only example of a Christian neoreactionary I’ve encountered. There may be others, but all the others I’ve seen here on LW or on the sites that have from time to time been linked to, say not a word of religion, beyond praising its moral character. None profess any faith themselves, although other than advancedatheist’s choice of moniker, I have not noticed them professing atheism either. They want the virtue of past times without the religion that was its foundation. They are silent about how to expel the elephant from the drawing room without letting the bull into the china shop.
To find virtue in a material world: a grand project. Who will carry it out?
And an even briefer sketch of now a neoreactionary might answer that last challenge.
The problem in former times of virtue, the neoreactionary might say, is that people did not know enough to be able to demonstrate what is virtue and what is vice. People have always known right from wrong, but they have not known how they know, any more than they knew how they see. Having God as the explanation, even though it be a false one, had the beneficial effect of protecting their knowledge from their ignorance. When people generally began to see that there was no God (including those who believed they believed, but whose God had dwindled to the shadowy ghost in the background), virtue decayed, for we are all like Chesterton’s fence-lifters, discarding a thing, however useful, when we notice that we do not see the reason for it.
But now, the neoreactionary might continue, in the last century, or perhaps just the last few decades, we have discovered the material origin of virtue. This knowledge comes primarily from evolutionary biology and neuroscience, and history reinterpreted in its light. We know how societies flourish and how they decay. We know how we know right from wrong. With this new knowledge, we shall restore virtue to the world.
To which the progressive might even more briefly respond:
Yeah, our people tried some of that in the early 20th century. The project was supposed to make society better by making better people. It applied scientific knowledge of Darwinian evolution, Mendelian genetics, and the science of psychology that gave us the ability to measure feeblemindedness and mental degeneracy.
It was called eugenics. It didn’t work.
Its failure was not that it was pseudoscience. Quite a lot of it wasn’t. Its failure was that it involved giving a political and technical elite a kind of power over other people that couldn’t not be abused — abused to control others; abused to enact ancient prejudices like antisemitism, and new ones like middle-class fear of the poor and rural; abused to allay some people’s fears of a collapsing, degenerating society at the expense of other people’s bodies and lives.
I think you overrate the influence on science on German nationalism. The idea that blood relationships matter doesn’t come out of science. It’s a much older idea.
Or are you speaking about something that doesn’t have something to do with Germany?
What are you talking about? Late 20st century US thought?
The specific ideas behind Nazi eugenics and “racial hygiene” derive — in part — from earlier eugenics and racial-hygiene movements in the US. See, for instance, the Indiana eugenics act of 1907 and, more pointedly, the Virginia Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which combined legislation against mixed-race marriages with compulsory sterilization of the “feebleminded”.
No, early-20th-century US thought,. I should have been more clear: by “new” I meant “new at the time”, not “recent as of today”. The idea that poor rural families were inbred hives of criminality, madness, and race-mixing was one of the motivations behind American eugenics of the early 20th century.
Thing is, it’s true that many mental disorders are heritable. In that regard, the early eugenicists were not operating entirely on pseudoscience. But they went wrong in believing that if nations refused to use law and violence to control people’s reproduction (and, ultimately, to kill the “unfit”), that society (or “the race”) would degenerate.
After WWI Germans did try to copy American culture and might have copied scientifically motivated racism. On the other hand that stopped a bit with the Nazis. They didn’t care about copying the US. “Blut und Boden” (“blood and soil”) was a quite old idea.
“Racial hygiene” isn’t really the same as “scientific racism”. The latter seems to be used more to refer to the anthropological theories of racial superiority, now euphemistically called “human biodiversity” by their advocates.
But “racial hygiene” policies included the elimination of “undesirable” gene lines within the advocates’ favored race — first through forced sterilization, and later through killing.
The German 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring reads like an echo of Harry Laughlin’s 1922 Model Eugenical Sterilization Law, which was the model for the sterilization provisions in Virginia’s 1924 law.
In 1933 in some sense yes. Hermann Muckermann who was co-author of the law did study in the US. By 1936 the Nazi however forbid him from speaking publically.
Yes, that’s the main failure mode of ethical naturalism. “You must die, because SCIENCE!”
What would the progressive atheist’s answer be to the challenge of producing virtue from matter? I’d try writing that one as well, but I think I’d end up caricaturing it.
My libertarian shard says it’s the main failure mode of politics: “You must die, because POWER!”
No idea, but mine is game theory coupled with compassion — a System 2 mathematical insight and a System 1 intuitive and trained response. Ethics comes down to symmetry among agents: my good is no more or less The Good than your good. Humans can recognize this both as a matter of explicit mathematical-philosophical reasoning, and using intuitive-emotional responses (which can be trained). Virtuous humans both recognize and feel that symmetry, and vicious humans do not recognize or feel it.
The basic ethical failing that leads to atrocities is not usually the lack of System 2 ethical reasoning, but the sentiment (or System 1 trained reaction) that those people are not really people; they are some sort of mockery of people who do not deserve compassion. See Rorty, “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality”.
What we see in the history of eugenics politics is the notion that society can progress by freeing itself from having to care about certain kinds of people — so that they can be subjected to medical violation, mutilation, or extermination. But this is the same thing that we see in religious antisemitism or any number of other sources of the dehumanization meme. Dehumanization works the same evil whether it’s couched in the language of progressive science, the Lutheran language of Nazi antisemitism, or in the order to the Albigensian crusaders: “Kill them all; God will know his own.”
Rorty’s critique of ethics since Plato has a weird echo when we’re talking about eugenics, though:
But speaking of science and ethics, I think it’s really kinda weird that humanity had the Golden Rule from traditional sources since antiquity, but didn’t invent the math to describe it until the mid-20th century — the same time frame in which engineering gave to politics the ability to destroy the world.
It should be noted that a moral tradition needs not be theistic in nature, much less Abrahamic-Zoroastrian—Confucianism is a case in point here. And even a “material universe” cosmology may be sen in a variety of quite diverging ways. A particle physicist may argue—much as Democritus and Epicurus did—that our ontology should be a reductionist one, founded on some kinds of irreducible elements, and that it is a moral imperative to understand these tiny elements of nature by running huge, incredibly costly and perhaps risky experiments using particle accelerators.
Nonetheless, others, perhaps more interested in ecologies and human societies, may object that particle physics tells us quite little about our everyday lives and how we can best thrive in a nurturing milieu (as in both an ecology/environment and a community/society), which many people would indeed consider as a “right”, or at least as something ethically relevant. Perhaps they would have us focus on very different things to “look” at: maybe indigenous peoples—as societies that have “stood the test of time” in a very real sense—and even our closest animal relatives in the Hominidae taxon (which, incidentally, are now significantly endangered due to human activity). So, yes, there is clearly a relevant conflict here, but it’s far subtler than what you’re referring to. In the end, medieval philosophers and theologians may well have the last laugh, as “reason” and scientific inquiry turn out to be the slaves not just of our passions, as Hume would have it, but even moreso of our ethics and morality.
You are taking particle physics for the totality of science throughout, cherry-picking a part of science most remote from everyday concerns, ignoring the rest of the elephant. We know the chemical elements, the methods of taking them from the ground, how to combine them in a million ways to produce the cornucopia of our everyday life. We know how plants grow and how to make them grow better. Because of that we build better buildings, make better roads, and grow better and more plants than our ancestors. We can talk to each other around the world in seconds and travel there in hours. Science! It works!
Who is indigenous, and what is the test of time? We are all indigenous to this planet, and for better or worse, the ones that people call “indigenous” are conspicuously not standing the test of time since encountering the ones that picked up the material ball and ran with it as fast as possible. Throughout history, the test of time has been the test of whether or not you got overrun by your neighbours. I’m not arguing that might makes right, but might certainly makes might.
That leaves out the fact the science works, and the more you do it, the more it works. It is not the slave to our passions, but the tool of our passion to make everything in our lives better, and we use it to the full. Science isn’t cathedrals to particle physics, it’s food on the table, houses to live in, and matter rearranged to our desire. Religion works only until everyone realizes there’s no-one behind the curtain. The curtain hangs in tatters.
Perhaps I was not clear enough, but that wasn’t my intention—far from it. I was trying to highlight the diversity of scientific inquiry, by choosing a few representative fields. The elephant has many, many parts to it, and some of them are distinctly less useful or likely to “work” than others. But note that you can’t even talk about what’s likely to “work” without adopting some normative standards first, as you implicitly did in your reply: and our general worldview, with its cosmology (what’s out there? or—even more critically—what’s important? What should we be paying attention to?) and morality (“what should we do?”) is going to have a big impact on such choices, in any but the most crudely-technocratic or runaway-capitalist society.
These are not trivial issues—indeed, scientists of such caliber as Einstein and Oppenheimer were famously forced to grapple with these when they found out—much to their horror and dismay, if popular accounts are to be believed—that “science” had given them the ability to build catastrophically destructive weapons. And our own MIRI is often said to be facing similar concerns in its work on AI.
Whether “religion” is relevant here depends mostly on how you define the term. But AIUI, many scholars would argue that Confucianism qualifies as one, despite it being quite non-theistic, and more in the nature of a collection of moral maxims, and of course, a basic worldview highlighting such principles as cultivating basic kindness, showing loyalty and care where appropriate, and participating in rituals that foster a sense of unity and social harmony. Many people would argue that such a “religion” could be highly appropriate for our hyper-”material” world—whatever it is that we choose “material” to mean.
“Working” is as objective as it comes. Nobody wants to die of smallpox, and smallpox vaccination works, while prayers don’t. Nobody wants to die at sea, so sailors have to know the tides, and how to determine where they are. No-one wants to starve, so farmers have to know how to make their crops thrive. They won’t get that knowledge by praying for revelation. In short, people have purposes, and can observe whether what they are doing to achieve them is working. The better they can find out what works and what doesn’t, the better they will achieve those purposes, whatever they are.
That is the pressure, objectively and insistently exerted by nature, to find things out. The carpenter making a better table has no need of God to tell him what sort of glue will give way and what will hold fast.
Confucianism is an interesting case, but I think it was sustained not by its own virtue but by the power of the centralised and authoritarian Chinese state, with which it was a good fit with its emphasis on loyalty and deference to superiors. The scientific revolution didn’t happen there. So theocracy isn’t the only thing that can stop science from happening.
As for a religion appropriate to the modern world, the traditions of the past are available to all in the Internet age. Anyone can pick and choose or make their own. But I see little future for mass religions based on fictions and unenforced by state power.
There are a lot of problems with what you’ve wrote here, and I think that gjm’s comment is a pretty good response. However, there is a glimmer of truth in your comment. There were definite attempts to portray pre-1600s cultures as more stagnant and backwards than they were. There are two clear-cut examples. The first is the invention of the Iron Maiden) which was not an actual medieval torture device. (It is worth noting here that actual medieval tortures were still pretty bad. See Pinker’s “Better Angels of Our Nature” for some discussion of the better documented horrors.) The second is the claim that medievals by and large believed that the world was flat. While, some did so, and even some church fathers did so, they were by and large a minority. The belief became more common as a Protestant slur against Catholics and gradually became a more general belief.
More generally, there have been issues of narrative. There’s a standard narrative, often taught in high-school physics classes that portrays no major development in physics between Aristotle and Galileo. This is deeply wrong. Galileo and others of his time-period would not have made the advances they did were it not for people like Oresme, Buridan, and al-Bitruji. Among other important results, they developed the idea of “impetus” which was a precursor to the idea of momentum. It is unlikely that the thinkers in the late 1500s and early 1600s would have made the progress they did without these ideas. But it is also important to note that this may to some extent not be an issue of motivated falsification of history or anything like that. It may simply be a combination of that simple narratives are easy and that it would have been difficult in past times to actually have access to many historical sources. In many ways, one has more access today to many medieval texts than someone in the 1800s would have had.
Also, it really, really doesn’t help to use overblown terms like “crimethink” and it is especially dangerous to fall into the thought-process that what one is thinking is somehow persectuced. Once one falls into that trap it makes the cognitive dissonance much more difficult to deal with when one finds data that might cause one to adjust one’s beliefs. The fact that all the examples above are well known to historians and widely discussed shows how far any of this is from anything resembling throughtcrime.
Little observed fact: The Enlightenment was a (small r) reactionary movement, in the sense of wanting not just to preserve the status quo but to go back to a Greco-Roman status quo ante, and declaring the intermediate period the “middle” or “dark ages”.
Doesn’t this line of thinking pretty much end up portraying a sort of sociopathic troll — a person who possess no values of his or her own, but who is able to provoke to anger anyone who has values — as the ideal?
The ideal debater is probably not the ideal person
Oh, I agree. And I don’t think we should conclude very much about the value of the Enlightenment from the fact that it’s easy to troll David Brin.