It seems key to the project of “defense of Enlightenment ideas” to figure out whether the Age of Enlightenment came about mainly through argumentation and reasoning, or mainly through (cultural) variation and selection. If the former, then we might be able to defend Enlightenment ideas just by, e.g., reminding people of the arguments behind them. But if it’s the latter, then we might suspect that the recent decline of Enlightenment ideas was caused by weaker selection pressure towards them (allowing “cultural drift” to happen to a greater extent), or even a change in the direction of the selection pressure. Depending on the exact nature of the changes, either of these might be much harder to reverse.
A closely related line of inquiry is, what exactly was/is the arguments behind Enlightenment ideas? Did the people who adopted them do so for the right reasons? (My shallow investigation linked above suggests that the answer is at least plausibly “no”.) In either case, how sure are we that they’re the right ideals/values for us? While it seems pretty clear that Enlightenment ideas historically had good consequences in terms of, e.g., raising the living standards of many people, how do we know that they’ll still have net positive consequences going forward?
To try to steelman the anti-Enlightenment position:
People in “liberal” societies “reason” themselves into harmful conclusions all the time, and are granted “freedom” to act out their conclusions.
In an environment where everyone has easy access to worldwide multicast communication channels, “free speech” may lead to virulent memes spreading uncontrollably (and we’re already seeing the beginnings of this).
If everyone adopts Enlightenment ideas, then we face globally correlated risks of (1) people causing harm on increasingly large scales and (2) cultures evolving into things we wouldn’t recognize and/or endorse.
It seems key to the project of “defense of Enlightenment ideas” to figure out whether the Age of Enlightenment came about mainly through argumentation and reasoning, or mainly through (cultural) variation and selection. If the former, then we might be able to defend Enlightenment ideas just by, e.g., reminding people of the arguments behind them. But if it’s the latter, then we might suspect that the recent decline of Enlightenment ideas was caused by weaker selection pressure towards them (allowing “cultural drift” to happen to a greater extent), or even a change in the direction of the selection pressure. Depending on the exact nature of the changes, either of these might be much harder to reverse.
A closely related line of inquiry is, what exactly was/is the arguments behind Enlightenment ideas? Did the people who adopted them do so for the right reasons? (My shallow investigation linked above suggests that the answer is at least plausibly “no”.) In either case, how sure are we that they’re the right ideals/values for us? While it seems pretty clear that Enlightenment ideas historically had good consequences in terms of, e.g., raising the living standards of many people, how do we know that they’ll still have net positive consequences going forward?
To try to steelman the anti-Enlightenment position:
People in “liberal” societies “reason” themselves into harmful conclusions all the time, and are granted “freedom” to act out their conclusions.
In an environment where everyone has easy access to worldwide multicast communication channels, “free speech” may lead to virulent memes spreading uncontrollably (and we’re already seeing the beginnings of this).
If everyone adopts Enlightenment ideas, then we face globally correlated risks of (1) people causing harm on increasingly large scales and (2) cultures evolving into things we wouldn’t recognize and/or endorse.