#97: The Enlightenment & Progressivism

September 2, 2011

I

The Enlightenment, as I was taught to think about it, was in effect the beginning of civilization. Before the Enlightenment, there was only barbarism in various forms. With the Enlightenment, the process of human and social perfecting was initiated. The people who taught me thought that the Enlightenment was the BEST thing that ever happened, better even than cream cheese and lox.

When considering the Enlightenment, it’s prudent to distinguish between what was going on in the 17th and 18th centuries respectively. The former was the cradle of innovation, the latter the period of the exploitation and marketing, if not the hijacking, of that innovation. It is good to remember that Galileo (15 February 1564 – 8 January 1642), Descartes (31 March 1596 – 11 February 1650), Newton (4 January 1643 – 31 March 1727), and Locke (b. 1632, d. 1704) all did their great work in the 17th c, while the 18th c featured only Hume and Kant among the really great thinkers. Far more influential in the 18th, were the literary and scientific dilettantes knows as the philosophes, notable among whom were figures like Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau among many others. These people were the “progressives” or “social critics” of the 18th c.

The success of Newton in physics was disseminated and marketed in Europe by Voltaire to the degree of making Newton a new continental secular saint and of making his secular methods a model for all human undertakings. According to the philosophes, the ancien regime in all its forms was to be relegated to the compost heap of history and replaced by structures and conventions dictated by human reason alone. Existing values, existing traditions, existing laws, even existing fashions, absolutely everything about the existing state was to be rejected, abandoned, and dismissed. The ancien regime was to be erased. The new state was to be invented “from scratch” out of whole cloth.

To be fair, there was an awful lot to complain about in the European 17th c. Not least, there was the 30 years war (1618-1648) in which countless people died and in which most of the nations of Europe were bankrupted. Disease, starvation, pestilence, banditry, murder, and rape were the order of the day right across the continent. It’s not surprising, therefore, that people were at least beginning to question the ones in charge as well as the religious organizations supporting them, nor is it surprising that these questionings should mature into a full-blown movement one hundred years later as well as a cataclysmic revolution in France in 1789, the largest and oldest national entity in Europe.

But while there was very cautious and anonymous dissent even in the 17th c (as evidenced by a “clandestine” literature), the original Enlightenment was really nothing other than the evolution of a self-aware natural science. It was not at all the progressive social movement it was going to morph into in the later 18th c. It is in the nature of such a seismic change that in its original manifestations, its boundaries and methods should not be very clear, which allows for the possibility of the over-extension of its authority and influence. And this is what happened in the 18th c.

But shifting the responsibility for social institutions and political planning from divine authority to “pure reason” misunderstands the nature of science in a naïve and dangerous way.

[Note: Just how naïve can be seen one hundred years later in the influential novel “What is To be Done” (1863) by Nicolai Chernishevsky, a Russian anarchist. The Russians imported their ideas from France and Germany, even borrowing their languages for “enlightened” discussions. The degree of simple-mindedness exhibited by the “rationalist” characters of this novel boggles the contemporary consciousness. Not even the passage of 100 years diminishes the stupid earnestness of an Enlightenment-style reformer.]

First, science and its methods only provide empirical data and ways of making predictions; they do not and cannot provide values or objectives.

Second, and equally important, is that science inherently involves experimentation and empirical confirmation. But do we want our societies to be experimental?

On the one hand, it seems like an attractive idea. Let’s find out what works and run with that. But here’s the rub.

Experimentation necessarily involves CONTROL. Unless variables are kept constant, the experimental results are unconvincing. What this means is that in order for humanity to “discover” the best way to organize and live, it must subject itself to the level of control that allows for experimentation. This is called autocracy, and it did not work all that well in the 17th c and before. Clearly, however, the theorists of the French Revolution did not blanch at the idea of population control at all – those whom they could not control, they summarily murdered. And while they might themselves object that they were not “experimenting”, history puts the lie to that objection. France is now on its FIFTH constitution; if that doesn’t suggest the first one was an experiment, I don’t know what would.

In addition to implying autocracy, however, the experimental method applied to society also implies that populations be used as guinea pigs. Modern science itself has imposed limitations on human experimentation, perhaps the same should be done for political theorists who seek the perfect society. Needless to say, none of the intellectual descendants of the philosophes have had any qualms about experimenting with human beings, neither the National Socialists nor the International.

In summary, I am arguing that the 18th c progressives, the ancestors of modern Socialist progressives, over-extended the model of natural science and made so-called “reason” their new God. In addition, I am arguing that autocracy is an inevitable companion to this overextension of science. A prioristic progressivism, the only kind there is, with its blind dependence on “reason” and “science,” inexorably leads to totalitarian control.

II

After all is said and done, however, today’s Socialist progressives are not the same as their 18th c models. The reason is that those in the 18th c were genuine utopian idealists attempting to find a new instrument, a novum organum, with which to carve out a new and improved future for mankind. This does not seem to be true of today’s iterations.

I say this because today’s progressives do not take the scientific model seriously, as would have their predecessors (I presume).

Socialist policies have been tried in multiple versions and all have failed miserably. These can be treated as experiments whose conclusions are uniformly that Socialism inevitably fails: brutal Socialism fails brutally and swiftly, soft Socialism fails slowly and painfully. Russian Socialism was brutal and when it failed, it failed brutally and swiftly; European Socialism is soft and it is failing slowly and painfully.

An 18th c Socialist would know enough science to know when to stop.