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(This post has been sitting half-completed in my drafts folder for at least a month and a half. Thanks to @fuckduck9000 and @Hoffmeister25 for inspiring it.)
What is the Enlightenment? What is its essential nature, such that a thing can be said to be more or less like it, more or less of it, more or less descended from it? Which of its philosophical axioms are foundational, and which are peripheral? Which historical events are a result of its influence, and which are unrelated?
The question of the Enlightenment's central character seems like it ought to be easy to answer, given the ideology's prominence in our consensus origin myth. The Enlightenment is generally held to be the author of the modern world, the philosophy that ended millennia of benighted rule by superstition, ignorance and cruelty, the wellspring of humanistic ideals, of compassion and empathy, of the meteoric progress that has since transformed human civilization beyond recognition, shattered the fetters of hunger, sickness and want. Its hopeful brilliance is contrasted with the strangling dogmas of the dark age that followed the collapse of Rome. Indeed, I expect most of the community here probably holds that describing the nature of the Enlightenment is easy, almost too easy to be worth bothering with.
I disagree. I've tried to present this disagreement numerous times, but each time I've found an inferential gap that swamps whatever the original topic of the discussion might have been, and that required a level of effort that seemed prohibitive. This post is an attempt to approach that gap on its own terms, and at least somewhat methodically.
I think a good place to start is with a simpler question: Of the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789, which hewed closer in practice to the essential spirit of Enlightenment ideology?
These two revolutions occured a mere 13 years apart. Both societies were heavily influenced by Enlightenment ideology, and conciously sought to recast their social structures according to the precepts of that ideology. On the other hand, the interpretations, implementations, and ultimate outcomes differed vastly between the two. Clearly the divergence was significant, and it seems reasonable to presume that one diverged further from the root ideology than the other. By describing our understanding of that divergence, we can give a clearer picture of what we see as the Enlightenment's core nature, while being kept honest by the historical record of its commonly-accepted champions.
The American Revolution:
The American Revolution emerged from an emphatically Christian society; that is to say, a society of serious individual and communal Christian faith welded together by the Protestant tradition. It was a society with a 70% and rapidly growing male literacy rate, thanks largely to Protestant commitments to the necessity of widespread literacy, the better to read the Bible.
Both Leadership and the public see themselves as explicitly Christian. A lot of the leadership really is devout, those who are not (Jefferson and Franklin most notably) at least pretend to be both in public actions and private deliberation. (It's possibly also worth noting that Jefferson and Franklin were notably sympathetic to France's revolutionaries).
The revolution's social goals are limited. No universal equality, no abolition of slavery, no overturning of the existing social order. It's not even really a change of government, as most of the revolutionaries and their support structures are already de-facto running things.
The Revolution consistantly aimed to limit the power of government, even popular government, even if turned to apparently noble ends, against the rights of individual citizens. In doing so, they expressed a deep skepticism for all human judgement, even their own.
The French Revolution:
The French Revolution emerged from a very different sort of Christian society. Faith appears to have been far less personal and far more communal in nature, with enforcement being top-down rather than bottom-up. I've been unable to find figures for literacy rates, but the references I've found indicate it was considerably lower than in America, perhaps in part due to the linguistic fragmentation of the French populace.
To my knowledge, the Revolution's leadership were uniformly militant atheists, or else hiding their faith very, very deep. Religious belief was considered obvious superstition. Numerous attempts were made to channel religious impulses into the deification of human reason.
The Revolution's social goals were extremely broad, perhaps unlimited. They aimed not merely to build a new country, but explicitly a better society, a rational society, a just, free, equitable society. Universal equality of all citizens was the standard. Slavery was abolished. The existing social order was demolished, the monarchy and nobility slaughtered or exiled, the Church brutally subjugated, religious observence suppressed. The revolutionaries believed that they had everything they needed to build, if not an outright utopia, at least the best society the world had ever seen, by far, and they intended to make it happen.
Given their faith in human reason and scientific insight, the Revolution felt no need to limit the power of government, especially popular government, in pursuit of noble ends, even if this meant trampling the rights of individual citizens. They believed they knew what the right thing to do was, their reason was sound, and checks and balances just got in the way, slowed them down in the fight against their enemies.
Which was closer to the true spirit of the Enlightenment?
My answer: The French Revolution, and by a wide margin. The French Revolution was built around the idea of Progress, of man's capacity to fundamentally reshape his conditions and himself, of his ability to cast off the shackles of the past and move on to a brighter future. It was built on a supreme confidence in human reason, a self-assurance based on what I consider to be the core thesis of the Enlightenment:
We know how to solve all our problems.
Over and over again, its leaders and the policies they implemented demonstrate an unrelenting, unreflective certainty; they were not experimenting, inching their way through possibility-space in search of an unknown solution, but rather executing a recipe with a firmly-expected outcome. They considered themselves pre-eminent scientists, not because they were actually engaging in science, but because they zealously and meticulously applied the label of "science" to their ad-hoc, utterly untested and (as it happens) completely unworkable social theories. Actual scientific results were mixed: the metric system seems to have been a tolerably good idea, metric time less so. Shutting down educational institutions over charges of inequality and guillotining Lavoisier were perhaps less than perfect contributions to the advancement of human knowledge. Though the lip-service to science, progress and reason never wavered, it is easy to see that ideological commitments to entirely unscientific and even irrational beliefs remained dispositive throughout.
In these features, the fundamental nature of the Enlightenment is revealed.
(The above was written off my best understanding of the two Revolutions, and a moderate amount of googling. Corrections and arguments over the description are welcome as well.)
I believe it's more complicated that you're letting on, but you're touching on one of the major things that define the Enlightenment: Scientific Government.
The best example of this idea is found in Francis Bacon's New Atlantis. The incomplete novel describes a fictional utopian land where "generosity and enlightenment, dignity and splendour, piety and public spirit" are the law of the land. A place ruled by an institution called "Salomon's House" that was explicitly the model for all future academies of science including the French Académie des Sciences and the English Royal Society.
At core, the Enlightement is a Platonist revolt against an Aristotelician order. A revolution of humanist philosophers against realist clergymen. And it is therefore no surprise that its essential direction is towards redesigning the world to fit the whims of those now philosopher kings. No surprise that it now culminates in technocracy and managerialism.
From this standpoint, it becomes easy to understand how Enlightenment led to the ascendency of physiocrats turned Liberals, and how it birthed both Communism and Fascism. All these are visions of the world based on technics ruled by would be elite technocrats that design society according to scientific principles.
But those paradoxes you point out I believe show how this isn't the whole story. How come the ideology of scientific government is so against science when it goes against the interests of the ruling class?
Well because like all ideologies it's a completely fictitious excuse to justify the rule of a particular elite, it's color is that of Science merely because the industrial revolution and its marvels gave it a lot of cachet. There was lots to buy with the name of Science for centuries. But if the ascendency of the liberal bourgeoisie didn't coincide with such discoveries, it is my firm belief that the Enlightement would have taken a completely different color.
The spirit of technics lives in Western civilization since these times, and it is useful to understand how its tribulations are justified and understood. But it is not useful in understanding how they are caused. As that still obeys the same pragmatic considerations of power it ever has.
In fact I believe, unlike I expect many here, that the future doesn't hold very much for this vision. I believe that this formula of rule by scientific experts is slowly coming to an end, crushed under the weight of its own contradictions. Unable to renew itself through new industrial marvels it is now only promising a virtuous ecological agony. And I see no way for this to inspire any ascendant elites.
Well, we’ve heard that story before, and it didn’t work out… what’s different about this time?
Maybe it is how it is supposed to be. Because there is a difference in Science and "science" and the pattern here is that Science has remained but "science" gets kicked out. We have gotten rid of concepts race biology for eugenics and phrenology because it is "science", but when we get rid of one other takes it place like "Gender Studies" and CRT and we are about to repeat that cycle by getting rid of it and replacing with some other junk.
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Tech stagnation, policy starvation, and accumulating evidence.
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...Well, shit. Just steal all my thunder, why dontcha!
Credit to all, I would say.
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