Truth and Enlightenment

What the Enlightenment and Modernity have wrought, and who has problems with it.

As our values of truth and honesty are slipping, it seems worthwhile to review how we got here. People generally have a tenuous relation to reality. What we see through our eyes is only its surface. We can see plants all our lives and yet have no understanding of how they work and how they came to be. Such knowledge has to come through painstaking inference into a mental model, based on clues, experiments, mutations, exceptions, and the like. Humans are champions of inference, as attested by conspiracy theories and religion- ways that our need to for theories of reality outstrips our actual knowledge, sometimes flagrantly.

Historically, there have been occasional periods when intellectuals had the prosperous and calm conditions to make progress on this front, out of the mire of preconceptions, superstitions, and traditions, and into a more measured and rational view of reality. Not that there is ever a perfectly rational view, but there are clearly more and less rational views possible. The ancient Greeks experienced one such period, founding schools of philosophy that lasted hundreds of years, and fostering the greatest scientist, teacher, and thinker of the ancient world, Aristotle. But the greatest such period was the Renaissance and subsequent Enlightenment of Western Europe, when the learning of the ancient world combined with mounting prosperity and technological development to dispell the fog of Christian theology, and made of scholarship an independent, rigorous, and institutional pursuit that continues today.

Painting is an example of this movement. The Renaissance painters learned perspective, and reveled in new powers of realistic portrayal. Realistic painting may now be old-hat, even déclassé, but after the rude iconography of the Middle Ages, it was revolutionary, reminiscent of the incredibly naturalistic statuary of Greece and Rome at their heights. Similar movements in all areas of intellectual life, including science, philology, history, politics, and social thought generally, and philosophy, brought us to modernity, where our relationship to nature is fundamentally transformed, from that of a mystified and dependent spectator, to that of a deeply understanding (if not always respectful) steward. While morals and ethics are not themselves a matter of truth and natural observation, (though they have a lot to do with integrity and honesty), the same truth-finding ethic trained on social institutions brought down, step by step, the superstitious hold of the religio-monarchical system, to the constitutional / social contract systems of today.

Francesco di Giorgio, ~1490, an idealized architectural view.

But some are not happy with this change in perspective. There were obviously losers in this process of cultural and intellectual maturation. Principally religion, which tried mightily to understand the nature of reality, while mediating our relation to it, but couldn't help putting the cart of dogma and power ahead of the horse of intellectual integrity. For honesty and truth begin in the method of getting there. True humility, not the false and preening humility of putting one's god before all other gods and considerations, is the first step to being able to even see the subtle stirrings of nature, and then to follow them out. Charles Darwin was orginally intended for the parsonage, but as he unfurled the relentless mechanism of biology, and experienced its stabs in his own life, he ended up an evident atheist, woken up to a more sober, mature, and we might say enlightened, view of our nature and situation.

Reality isn't always pretty. Facing it takes fortitude and work. Thus the astonishingly durable, if slipping, hold of religion into this, the twenty-first century. Thus also the attraction of fake news and con artists, not to mention religion. Far easier to have comfort and hope in false and familiar beliefs than to accept uncertainty and ignorance, and do the work required to resolve them, even partially. Who would have thought that, at the so-called end of history, when the US won the cold war, and spread its blend of capitalism, relative freedom, and intellectual ambition across the world, that such moral rot would set in here at home, with our plutocrats, (with the connivance of Russia, of all things!), standing at the head of an army of resentful religious traditionalists, straining every nerve to spread distrust, small-mindedness, and lies over the land?

• Intellectuals- the first targets of authoritarians and fascists.
• And State is the department of intellectuals, at least till now.
• Which country takes the cake for lying?
• But our Republicans are in contention as well.
• What's the matter with Kansas.. will soon be the matter with the rest of us.
• ... Until the revolution.