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I've argued yes in the past, and would do so again. Likewise I've argued at some length that the "principles of classical liberalism" are fundamentally flawed, and they've failed in the ways we observe for clear, predictable reasons.
More or less. More precisely, it should not and probably cannot be repeated, and its problems were identified early on. The ideological amalgamation of the American Revolution was a one-shot thing; it worked as well as it did the first time around due to ignorance in the form of an absence of specific elements of common knowledge. Now that those specific elements of common knowledge exist, large portions of the project no longer work and cannot be made to work again.
There was a strong element of this, yes. It was moderated by contrasting, competing worldviews that were absent in, say, the French Revolution, and I believe that these moderating influences explain why it worked as well as it did for as long as it did. The French Revolution provides excellent contrast, as I've argued previously.
I argued this point with Hlynka back in the day, and my recollection was that the dispute came down to semantics; IIRC we both agreed that it came down to Hobbes vs Rousseau, and what label you apply to each of them. Likewise the argument I just linked: The American and French revolutions were very, very different, such that if both were "Enlightenment" revolutions, we should be able to say which was the more "Enlightened" than the other. It doesn't really matter which a given person picks, because the point is that if the term covers both perfectly equally, the term is actually meaningless, and by choosing, one reveals one's own definition. The American Revolution did contain a heaping helping of "top-down, rationalist" thinking, and the structures that resulted have failed us badly, and failed us the worst when we approached them from a top-down rationalist mindset.
What do you think the missing "common knowledge" in question is? The first thing that would come to my mind is HBD, and I think it's a bit of a stretch to think that the Founding Fathers didn't think that cognition could vary between races, or even between individuals. I presume that's not it then.
The various mountains of skulls and famines in the name of technocratic progress and rationality.
At its most common denominator, the Enlightenment presumed that good thinking would lead to good results. The Hlynka-claimed divide is that this different upon whether changes mattered most from internal changes or external environmental changes, but they both shared a belief that if you thought through things better, progress would deliver better results as a matter of course, both in a moral and a practical sense.
WW1 was a major culture shock to this mentality, and discredited democracy-enlightenment-rationalists enough that 20th century totalitarianism became an intellectually viable alternative, precisely because the enlightened European states and cultures did incredibly stupid, senseless, and wasteful things to their own delegitimization... twice. And after WW2, the technocratic elements of the Enlightenment that took power in the form of the communist-socialists social engineers proceeded to build mountains of skulls and engineer famines as a result of, disputably, well-meant social reforms. On the other hand, the more individualist-leaning enlightenment descendants of the West otherwise discredited themselves in various Cold War abuses, ranging from the Imperial Presidency of the Americans, the imperial/post-imperial conflicts for influence over the third world, and so on. Plus, you know, that whole MAD thing of deliberate and purposeful preparation to destroy the world.
Had the American founding fathers had the 20th century as common knowledge of how badly enlightenment value evolution could mesh with state powers, it probably would have triggered some substantial shifts in not only the revolution, but the post-revolution American consolidation.
Have you seen the other piles of skulls? This argument always strikes me as curiously ahistorical. The notion that large scale human suffering began with the Enlightenment or its technocratic offspring ignores vast swathes of history. Pre Enlightenment societies were hardly bastions of peace and stability. Quite a few historical and pre Enlightenment massacres were constrained only by the fact that global and local populations were lower, and thus there were fewer people to kill. Caesar boasted of killing a million Gauls and enslaving another million, figures that were likely exaggerated but still indicative of the scale of brutality considered acceptable, even laudable. Genghis Khan's conquests resulted in demographic shifts so large they might have cooled the planet. The Thirty Years' War, fueled by religious certainty rather than technocratic rationalism, devastated Central Europe. The list goes on. Attributing mass death primarily to flawed Enlightenment ideals seems to give earlier modes of thought a pass they don't deserve. The tools got sharper and the potential victims more numerous in the 20th century, but the capacity for atrocity was always there.
The answer that seems entirely obvious to me is that if "good thoughts" lead to "bad outcomes," then it is probably worth interrogating what led you to think they were good in the first place. That is the only reasonable approach, as we lack a magical machine that can reason from first principles and guarantee that your ideas are sound in reality. Blaming the process of reason or the aspiration towards progress for the failures of specific, flawed ideologies seems like a fundamental error.
Furthermore, focusing solely on the failures conveniently ignores the overwhelming net positive impact. Yes, the application of science and reason gave us more efficient ways to kill, culminating in the horror of nuclear weapons. But you cannot have the promise of clean nuclear power without first understanding the atom, which I'm told makes you wonder what happens when a whole bunch of them blow up. More significantly, the same drive for understanding and systematic improvement gave us unprecedented advances in medicine, sanitation, agriculture, and communication. The Green Revolution, a direct result of applied scientific research, averted predicted Malthusian catastrophes and saved vastly more lives, likely numbering in the billions, than were lost in all the 20th century's ideologically driven genocides and famines combined. Global poverty has plummeted, lifespans have doubled, and literacy is nearing universality, largely thanks to the diffusion of technologies and modes of thinking traceable back to the Enlightenment's core tenets. To lament the downsides without acknowledging the staggering upsides is to present a skewed and ungrateful picture of the last few centuries. Myopic is the least I could call it.
It is also worth noting that virtually every major ideology that gained traction after the 1800s, whether liberal, socialist, communist, nationalist, or even reactionary, has been profoundly influenced by Enlightenment concepts. They might reject specific conclusions, but they often argue using frameworks of reason, historical progress (or regress), systematic analysis, and the potential for deliberate societal change that are themselves Enlightenment inheritances. This pervasiveness suggests the real differentiator isn't whether one uses reason, but how well and toward what ends it is applied.
Regarding the idea that the American founders might have changed course had they foreseen the 20th century, it's relevant that they did witness the early, and then increasingly radical, stages of the French Revolution firsthand. While the US Constitution was largely framed before the Reign of Terror (1793-94), the escalating violence and chaos in France deeply affected American political discourse in the 1790s. It served as a potent, real time cautionary tale. For Federalists like Hamilton and Adams, it confirmed their fears about unchecked democracy and mob rule, reinforcing their commitment to the checks and balances, and stronger central authority, already built into the US system. While Democratic Republicans like Jefferson initially sympathized more with the French cause, even they grew wary of the excesses. The French example didn't lead to fundamental structural changes in the established American government, but it certainly fueled partisan divisions and underscored, for many Founders, the importance of the safeguards they had already put in place against the very kind of revolutionary fervor that consumed France. They didn't need to wait for the 20th century to see how "good ideas" about liberty could curdle into tyranny and bloodshed; they had a disturbing preview next door. If they magically acquired a time machine, there's plenty about modernity that they would seek to transplant post-haste.
If a supposedly rational, technocratic plan leads to famine, the failure isn't proof that rationality itself is bankrupt. It's far more likely proof that the plan was based on faulty premises, ignored crucial variables (like human incentives or ecological realities), relied on bad data, or was perhaps merely a convenient rationalization for achieving power or pursuing inhumane goals. The catastrophic failures of Soviet central planning, for instance, stemmed not from an excess of good thinking, but from dogma overriding empirical feedback, suppression of dissent, and a profound disregard for individual human lives and motivations.
The lesson from the 20th century, and indeed from the French Revolution itself, isn't that we should abandon reason, progress, or trying to improve the human condition through thoughtful intervention. The lesson is that reason must be coupled with humility, empiricism, a willingness to course correct based on real world results, and a strong ethical framework that respects individual rights and well being. Pointing to the failures of totalitarian regimes that merely claimed the mantle of rationality and progress doesn't invalidate the core Enlightenment project. It merely highlights the dangers of dogmatic, unchecked power and the absolute necessity of subjecting our "good ideas" to constant scrutiny and real world testing. Throwing out the entire toolkit of reason because some people used hammers to smash skulls seems profoundly counterproductive. You can use hammers to put up houses, and we do.
Great post! I want to focus on a minor point you made:
Unlike the other two, literacy is not an undisputed good. It is a difficult mode of communication that takes years to learn, and about 1/5th of adults in the developed world never learn to read for comprehension. We prize literacy because, for now, it's required to navigate our society. Will that still be the case ten years from now, when your phone can text-to-speech anything you point it to, and will not only read it to you but also answer your follow-up questions voice-to-voice? (I already do this with languages I don't know, except I prefer to read the translations myself.)
It's still significant that literacy is so widespread in the world, because it implies that most people have the resources and the leisure to have their kids spend several years pursuing challenging training. Is this the best use of those children's time? IÂ honestly don't know. I have greatly benefited from my ability to read and write, and IÂ continue to prefer to do so even when I have alternatives:Â IÂ would rather read a blog than listen to a podcast, and I would much rather read a book myself than listen to an audio-book. But I also know many people who prefer it the other way.
So, is literacy (that is, ability to read for comprehension) truly superior to other forms of recorded communication (audio-visual), and does this superiority justify the years of training one needs to master the skill?
Verbal comprehension is, if anything, easier with the written word than with spoken words. You do lose a little subtext when you don't have body language and intonation cues, but on the other hand it's harder to backtrack to reevaluate confusing parts of a video. And either way, the hard part of comprehension isn't the part where you can translate squiggles to sounds in your head. People who can't correctly answer basic reading comprehension questions aren't going to become able to answer them because a phone reads them out loud. In cases where they realize they're misunderstanding, they might be able to straighten themselves out by asking the phone AI, but too often people don't know what they don't know.
I think where literacy greatly wins out isn't reading for comprehension, though, it's reading for speed, which makes it easy to filter what you read. I naturally read about 3x faster than a natural speaking rate, and I can speed read or at least skim about 6x faster. At those speed differences, reading is just a more profitable use of time than listening ever could be - I can investigate an interesting Motte comment in seconds and decide whether to reread it thoroughly, whereas with something like a YouTube video I have to rely on trusted channels (or in desperation, The Algorithm) to decide what's worth my time. It's only the visual part of the audio-visual media that makes the tedious audio part tolerable; a photo or diagram or so on is often much more efficient than any verbal description of it would be.
Yeah, there's the thing. Doom-scrolling TikTok sounds insane to me, but people do it, even in our mostly-literate world. And the benefits of reading more quickly require you to be able to read quickly; that can be a virtuous cycle if you got into it as a child, or it can be a vicious cycle if you never decide it's worth the bother. It's not a fast cycle, so I wouldn't make any strong predictions about ten years from now ... but a hundred years from now, will reading to your kids so they grow up into the kind of people who enjoy reading to their kids still be an ongoing tradition, not an antiquated fad? I have no idea.
Technically agree about the reading-out part, but I think youve got the mechanism wrong. This is not just about being too dumb to understand things at all (Im quite pessimistic about average intelligence, but have you seen some reading comrehension fails?) - its about the different style of interaction. With reading (or video), you are in charge of making the information transfer work. When something is explained, not just verbally but in conversation, the other can assess your reactions and guide you down the right path, which is much easier and propably more evolutionarily consistent. You really have to get quite stupid before both people regularly believe theyre on the same page when theyre not. And conversational explanation might be AI-able.
That's not crazy, but doesn't it slow down reading even more than a verbal monologue would? And what would the conversation look like? The AI reads, but also stops after each paragraph to ask questions to assess comprehension? I can't think of a mechanism that would be effective enough to work without sounding so patronizing that people would disable it.
Not sure why you think that, but Im not thinking much about speed, just understanding at all. I agree that text is easier than a monologue.
I think in a normal "explanatory conversation", the listerner already talks back with his own understanding, which the "teacher" uses to judge.
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