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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.)
As in our previous discussions, the antipode is missing. You condemn the enlightenment, but you ignore and refuse to defend the actual enemies it was up against : the ancien regime and its privileges, the absolutism of Louis XIV and Nicholas II. Let us grant that the french revolution was more ‘enlightened’ than the american revolution. Does that make the american revolution anti-enlightenment?
You adopt the perspective of a liberal english or american visitor in paris, initially supportive, then disgusted by the blood and radicalism. That’s understandable, but it’s not anti-enlightenment. It’s the noncommittal, comfortable position of a tourist. I too prefer my revolutions with as little blood and terror as possible. The only interesting dilemma here is, revolution with blood, or ancien regime.
In 1789, the french system of government was less enlightened than the anglos, but the intellectuals were up to date. So when the center broke, the pendulum swung considerably. What compromise could there be with those who did not recognize the people’s authority, and claimed divine right to rule over them? Only way to dispell the magic “We will cut off his head with the crown upon it.” The King’s trial by ordeal. That lesson, and others, centuries of progress, france had to speedrun, while at war .
Those rascals, one crazy idea after another. The sheer hubris to think they could solve this problem, a venerable institution vetted by our ancestors and the bible.
Not defending it, but he was executed for being a top tax farmer, viewed as a Crassus , not a Galileo.
Why do the features of the people the revolutions defeated matter? The revolutionaries won. They took absolute power. They built the societies they wanted, unconstrained by what came before. If they built abattoirs packed with human misery, how is that the fault of the people they overthrew?
No, it makes it a less central example of the Enlightenment, and it weakens claims that Enlightenment values are responsible for American outcomes. This is important to do, because there is a very clear ideological core of the Enlightenment from its inception to the current day, that core is what America largely passed on, and that core has an abysmal track-record elsewhere.
Ancien regime. How is this even a question? The Revolution killed a shitload of people, failed to solve the problems that propelled it to power, and collapsed into a military dictatorship that plunged Europe into a generation of brutal warfare before plopping the Bourbons briefly back on the throne, before continuing to modernize more or less alongside the rest of Europe. Why should we consider any of that remotely necessary? What possible silver lining are you seeing here?
They failed, though. The whole thing failed. They accomplished nothing but mutual fratricide and mass murder, and then were swept aside by a tyrant who got a considerable portion of their population killed attempting and failing to conquer the world. They didn't dispel any magic. they didn't build a legacy. They didn't speedrun shit, other than than the pointless atrocity counter.
It's another example of how the French Revolution was more Enlightened than the American. I wish the American revolution had abolished slavery as well, but the fact is they didn't, and had to solve the problem the hard way a century later. I think the French abolishing slavery was a great idea! ...But they also collapsed their whole society and got many millions of people killed through the secondary effects, and that happened precisely because of their hubris. So the hubris seems like kind of a problem!
Maybe if their ideology had been a little less bloodthirsty, it might have been a little better at actual science?
I’d think americans would have a problem being ruled by someone who does not require their consent. Where’s that alamo spirit? Do you tolerate insults to your will? I think it is the right, the duty and the pleasure of every man to cut down such rulers. Of course the king had to go, first. It’s not a silver lining, it’s the entire point.
You’re introducing a lot of confusion with your definitions because the anti-enlightenment position you’re trying to occupy already exists as a distinct set of ideas (then as absolutism, nowadays as neoreactionary). And they do not recognize this artificial split between good(american) and bad(fr**ch) enlightenment. So me and my enemies, we all agree, we reject your innovative definitions as unhelpful.
Seems like you’re trawling through a giant enlightenment box, arbitrarily picking stuff you dislike and putting that in your new smaller enlightenment box, while the rest is just relabeled as good common american god-fearing sense. In reality, what made it the enlightenment box is the giant anti-enlightenment box next to it, which you ignore.
They did not solve the problem of rule without consent, they just changed a relatively benign despot for an insanely paranoid and delusional pack of murderers, and then a competent but bloodthirsty tyrant that plunged the whole continent into war. They made everything worse, and got millions of people killed for zero benefit.
In any case, the idea that you make things better by killing the bad people is exactly the problem I'm pointing out here. Killing people should never be a terminal goal, which is yet another of the mistakes an entire branch of Enlightenment ideology repeatedly makes.
The confusion already exists. People claim that the Enlightenment is defined by a commitment to individual liberties, and then claim that the French Revolution was a central example of an Enlightenment project. These two claims are contradictory. My position is that you cannot claim A = !A. I feel like that's a pretty solid position.
Then you and your enemies are ignoring the evidence in front of you, because those two revolutions were very, very different in character from each other. You are being sloppy in your definitions, and I object to that. If we are going to claim that a category is important, that category should be rigorously defined. If that category is an ideological movement, we should be able to define what features determine whether an item is included or excluded from the set, and we should be weighing the historical results of that ideology more heavily than theorizing or public statements of intent. I am willing to accept whatever definition you prefer, provided that definition is then scrutinized properly and rigorously applied. If you want to define the Enlightenment as "only good things and never bad things", I'm fine with that, as long as you do so explicitly, so I can point out that such a definition is useless for analysis of the real world.
No. I'm asking you and everyone else to give your definition of what we all agree was a pivotal ideology, and then sort two very distinct historical examples according to that definition. This should not be hard to, and it is not unreasonable to insist that it should be done. This is what definitions are for.
Then make that your definition, and let's see where the evidence goes. If you want to claim that the Enlightenment is defined by opposition to traditional forms of religion, government and social structure, I'm fine with that. It still leaves America and Britain as distant outliers given that they kept their traditional religion and social structures and even much of their government, and it still leaves the basic problem that the more Enlightened a revolution was, the worse the results it delivered.
Or perhaps I'm not getting the definition right. Feel free to correct me in detail. Make your case!
Me and others have quoted the dictionary at you already. That definition is perfectly serviceable. But you try to create meaning for its own sake, untethered to the minds of other men. Your definition of the enlightenment clashes with
the dictionary
present supporters of the enlightenment
present opponents of the enlightenment
historical supporters and opponents of the enlightenment
american revolutionaries , and their opponents
everyone
I think you’re stretching the limits of acceptable word games, dude. If you want to keep arguing against this ‘bad enlightenment’ , you should call it something else, like ‘rousseauianism ‘, or ‘Cult of Reason’ , some less well-known expression that is not already imbued with a different meaning to the one you want to assign to it.
Plus you’re trying to define a mammal by comparing a cat to a dog, saying this one’s paws are more mammal-like than the other’s and so on. Futile exercise, you need a mollusk or a reptile.
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