The Enlightenment is limping across the world stage.
Classical liberalism — if not the “liberalism” invective hurled across the halls of Congress like a curse — appears to be on its back foot. Some cheer this reversal while others bemoan the downfall of something great.
But for a moment, let’s put aside the rightness or wrongness of the Enlightenment’s “fixes,” to mankind’s ancient problems and ask — do they seem intuitively correct?
You’d think they would after all this time. Some — like natural law and separation of powers — were the idealistic hobbyhorses of ancient Greco-Roman philosophers and statesmen that only reached widespread prominence among the Renaissance elite. They were built upon till the 16th century, when they were rolled out in constitutions and law, again by an elite.
More than 300 years have passed since then, and Westerners have seen their fruits. But it’s not clear most people believe they’re “correct” solutions leading to good outcomes. Perhaps not even our ancestors who fought for these ideas really believed in “The Enlightenment Idea Stack.”. They’re often unintuitive positions to hold.
Let’s consider some of them:
It’s striking how quickly support for the unintuitive Enlightenment stack eroded. I suspect people who “changed their minds,” now merely feel unshamed in voicing what their intuition screamed all along — this can’t possibly be right. It hurts too much, and I see evidence that these ideas damage what I love.
All of these ideas have a central premise: You, your community, and your region may feel discomfort or pain when these policies rule, but over time, benefits will accrue for society so we’re collectively stronger. But specific good things won’t be attributable to these policies without datasets and modeling. Some effects are impossible to quantify or judge, and so ideology is their main advocate. They’re unintuitive.
How many people are capable of steelmanning the ideas of creative destruction, comparative advantage, and international competition being good, whether or not they want them? Is this because of much-touted declines in abstract reasoning, or did the ideas never make sense to most people?
Free-trade-advocating economists never say trade’s effects are painless, but merely that they’re good on net for America and humanity generally. It is, in effect, a call to experience discomfort in the hope of future gain for the many. Some regions and industries will suffer or die so prices fall and higher value-added jobs get created. It’s a kind of economic Darwinism leading to fitter societies at the cost of some beautiful things being degraded or destroyed.
Ancient philosophers came up with complex justifications for putting the whole above one’s personal interests. Epictetus uses a metaphor likening individuals to the foot of a larger body: “…it will be appropriate for [a foot] to step into mud, and trample on thorns, and sometimes even to be cut off for the sake of the body as a whole; for otherwise, it will no longer be a foot.”
Marcus Aurelius journaled about these ideas precisely because they’re easy to lose track of if we’re not reminding ourselves to look beyond our emotions and interests — “Anything which isn’t good for the hive isn’t good for the bee either,” he wrote.
The Stoics, embraced hardship because they thought it improved us, which is also an unintuitive idea, though now supported by much evidence. “Fire tests gold, misfortune brave men,” Seneca says, and “Excellence shrivels without adversity.”
But most lack these abstract ideals, and they might flee even the minds of adherents when discomfort arrives. And if you need a philosophy practice to justify policy, it’s unintuitive and quite a lift to sell to the average person.
We might ask: did the American Revolutionary War generation — who gave their lives to enshrine pieces of the Enlightenment stack at the core of their new nation — even believe these ideas?
I find it more plausible that only their leaders did, while the majority merely saw where their interests lay. Self-government instead of being ruled by a distant king and parliament? Not having textiles, rum, and their beloved tea imports tarrifed and taxed? Stability and inalienable rights? Freedom to practice their religions unharassed? Trade wherever profit can be made?
These are the things they cared about. I suspect most saw the Enlightenment stack as means to an end and intellectual cover for rebellion against their benefactors.
One of these unintuitive abstractions is built into the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
For most of history, people didn’t find this claim self-evidently correct, and it would be decades before Jefferson’s hypocrisy came full circle. Believing in the inherent equality of man requires mental gymnastics and the bypassing of several biases. It’s still counterintuitive to many people, or outright disbelieved.
Today, intuitive ideas attract a growing vote share.
In 2017, The New Yorker wrote a profile of President Trump, which claimed, “He told associates that he sees exercise as unnecessary, even harmful, because it uses up the body’s finite energy.”
Say what you will of President Trump’s finite energy theory, but it’s an intuitive take, requiring no theory of hormesis to grasp, and lining up with the pain and depletion we experience after heavy labor. It’s so intuitive that both the ancient “humor theory” and the Victorian-era “vital energy” theory came to the same conclusion — exercise must be limited to preserve vital energies and prevent enervation. The president’s entire ideology seems to be built around these intuitive takes, and it’s hard to think of any of his policies that ask adherents to fight their gut feelings. His opponents across the aisle also increasingly rely on appeals to intuition of a different sort.
I’ve no idea if the unintuitive Enlightenment stack will recover its former glory or lose more mindshare, though I think we should take a moment to wonder at the improbability of it coming to prominence in the first place. Perhaps we’re entering an age in which the aims of government must be easily graspable, less abstract, and less idealistic.
But it’s worth asking: whatever direction society takes, which parts of the stack will survive in a theoretical intuitive-only age?
My best guess is “questioning”. The scientific method born during the Enlightenment was more a codification than a creation; science is ancient and intuitive.
When Aboriginal Americans discovered a cure for pellagra by soaking corn in lime water, when Africans learned to stop cassava from poisoning them by leeching out the cyanide, and when a thousand other “uncivilized” cultures obtained incredibly accurate information about healthy and poisonous plants, they must have relied on a process of theorizing, experimentation, and deduction.
“Try out enough solutions and something may click,” makes intuitive sense, but it’s also a wayfinding technique for the truth. This truth-seeking is a hallmark of the irascible few. They stubbornly insist on asking perturbating questions and deducing answers from the floundering replies. It’s been the domain of rebels for millennia.
“Behold the beginning of philosophy! – perception of men’s disagreement with one another, and a search for the origin of the disagreement; rejection and distrust of mere opinion, and inquiry to see whether an opinion is right or wrong; and the discovery of some standard for judgment – just as to deal with weights we discovered the balance, or for straight and crooked things, the ruler.” — Epictetus, Discourses, 2.11.13
Even if the rest of the Enlightenment stack fades and intolerance for individual divergence from the official line grows into oppression, there will always be a Socrates, a Bruno, a Galileo discovering truths no one wants to hear, and asking questions that can’t be answered with the approved intuitive ideology.
To the degree the enlightenment idea stack approximates truth and reality itself, I suspect it can never die, for even if suppressed, its enduring truths will be the clarion call of rediscovery. And to the degree that it’s fluff and ideology? All of mankind should be happy to wave it goodbye.
Only time will tell what falls by the wayside.
Thanks for reading Socratic State of Mind.
If you liked this article, please like and share it, which helps more readers find my work.
