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I've been kind of wondering if we will start to see an increase in anti-enlightenment arguments given the issues we face with no clear way out. Given climate ch

I've been kind of wondering if we will start to see an increase in anti-enlightenment arguments given the issues we face with no clear way out. Given climate change for example, was the industrial revolution a mistake? If it was an inevitable consequence of the enlightenment era, then was that a mistake? Too early to tell, but if we end up destroying ourselves I guess the answer would have to be "yes", but it's a hard pill to swallow.

dantheman 6y ago
I'll take climate change for modern medicine and technology. I think any anti-enlightment thinkers are really need to understand what life was like before that.
- schemy 6y ago
  But that would mean they believe in history. It's after all just dead white men.
- CalRobert 6y ago
  The concern is that climate change will also remove modern medicine and technology (and food, and water) for a huge number of people.
  - maxerickson 6y ago
    That's kind of a rough calculation when you look at how many people there were in 1950 and why so many more are alive today. Pick your path of suffering or something. Which I guess is why the other poster winds the clock back before the industrial revolution.
krapp 6y ago
That's been happening for a while, but mostly as a techno-utopian reskin of last century's racist and fascist ideologies[0]. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment
- elliekelly 6y ago
  And the “Intellectual Dark Web”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_dark_web https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_dark_web
chrisco255 6y ago
Given the 1C increase in global average temps, should we go back to subsistence farming and 1/10th of the population? I wonder if you went back in time and asked your ancestors that question. I believe, after you explained to them how you spend most of your day browsing with a magic rectangle, sit in cush air conditioned environments, have access to full motion and interactive media and entertainment, can order nearly anything you like delivered to your door within 48 hours, can travel across continents in mere hours without risking death of dysentery or getting your wagon train raided by bandits, etc. they would ask you what the catch is. 1C hotter? No really...what's the catch?
- grugagag 6y ago
  But the catch is not well put, it’s not going to be just 1C hotter which in my oppinion is off, but the erosion of the coastlines, the near total melting of polar glaciers round, massive rise in sea levels, mass extinctions of many species, chaos and war amongst the remaining people for the diminishing resources, etcetera. All these for technology and comfort at the hands of humans with enormous costs for everything else. And the potential extinction of our own species in a much shorter/accelerated timespan.
  - chrisco255 6y ago
    I don't know if you've seen the latest, but Greenland just had record ice gain during the middle of the ordinary melt season, after an already substantially strong year (and 3 out of the last 4 years have seen substantial gains): http://polarportal.dk/en/greenland/surface-conditions/ http://polarportal.dk/en/greenland/surface-conditions/ we are thousands of years away from polar melting, if ever. We have less war than they did prior to the industrial revolution. Prior to industrial revolution we didn't even have the resources to care about extinctions and they were happening anyways.
    - scroogeydop 6y ago
      Yawn. Same tired arguments.
    - 6y ago
SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the vast majority of people lived in what we'd today call "soul-crushing poverty", and it wasn't uncommon to have bad harvest years where a couple percent of a nation's population starved to death. There's no way climate change is bad enough to make a world where shirts are luxury items preferable.
- hodgesrm 6y ago
  Or plagues and/or wars that killed a third or more of the population. The Black Death and the 30 Years War are both in this category.
- natmaka 6y ago
  Didn't world wars and modern oppression from various regimes kill many?
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    They did, but wars and oppression aren't an invention of the Industrial Revolution. Premodern leaders were very capable of killing and oppressing people at scale when they put their minds to it.
    - InitialLastName 6y ago
      To put that further, the wars and automated atrocities of the industrial age wouldn't break the noise floor of human suffering in pre-industrial history. By some estimates, Genghis Khan was responsible for the deaths of 40 million people, and all he had were horses. Europeans coming to North America led to the deaths of ~50 million people in the 16th century, mostly by accident.
      - natmaka 6y ago
        "Human suffering" seems difficult to assess, and all Industrial Revolution effects will only be known during post-industrial history (maybe after some thermonuclear/bacteriologic war). Many/most Genghis Khan "victims" are highly debatable: "most of them were victims of plague, floods and famine long after the war in northern China was over in 1234 and were not killed by Mongols" ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genghis_Khan#In_China](Source) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genghis_Khan#In_China](Source)). Even the most certain Genghis Khan victims, resulting from systematic slaughter in non-obedient zones, are postmarks in history because they were very unusual (and probably exaggerated). There are few other pre-industrial similar events, however there are many post-industrial similar ones (extermination camps, genocides, battles of Stalingrad/Verdun ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_battles_by_casualties](Source) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_battles_by_casualties]..., ...). IMHO "mostly by accident" invalidates your point.
megameter 6y ago
The realm of anti-enlightenment inquiry I am interested in right now is not the "tragic mistake" but rather the shift to a mercantalist view of the world. The later medieval period in Europe saw major scientific discoveries, and an argument sometimes made of the capital-R Renaissance was that it was more flashy than productive. But the mercantalism, I think, was precipitated by the plague years and the resulting labor shortages. These are often seen as a good since they produced wage increases. But they also motivated development of stronger controls over the person - the nation is tied to the individual via legible identity as a wage earner, rather than as a member of the village, and slavery thus reemerges as a way of shifting around the accounting by denying identity. And so by the 1600's, you have press gangs kidnapping people, and debtors becoming indentured servants, as well as the slave trade. In this light, this whole thing of civilization has been a seesaw of problems since antiquity.
Nasrudith 6y ago
As a reaction it is a highly silly example of scapegoating that looks for simple solutions. Granted there is ample historical precedent of such anti-intellectual scapegoating. To be frank the behavior resembles a "shit rolls downhill" cycle of abuse where they will blame and harm whomever is weaker but able to be a target of envy. Lack of progress doesn't make it more sustainable. Very early farming was a semi-sedetary "slash and burn" the forrest and then relocate once the soil is depleted and let the forrest reclaim their abandoned buildings while they go to despoil someplace else.

dantheman 6y ago

I'll take climate change for modern medicine and technology. I think any anti-enlightment thinkers are really need to understand what life was like before that.

schemy 6y ago
But that would mean they believe in history. It's after all just dead white men.
CalRobert 6y ago
The concern is that climate change will also remove modern medicine and technology (and food, and water) for a huge number of people.
- maxerickson 6y ago
  That's kind of a rough calculation when you look at how many people there were in 1950 and why so many more are alive today. Pick your path of suffering or something. Which I guess is why the other poster winds the clock back before the industrial revolution.

krapp 6y ago

That's been happening for a while, but mostly as a techno-utopian reskin of last century's racist and fascist ideologies[0]. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment

elliekelly 6y ago
And the “Intellectual Dark Web”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_dark_web https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_dark_web

chrisco255 6y ago

Given the 1C increase in global average temps, should we go back to subsistence farming and 1/10th of the population? I wonder if you went back in time and asked your ancestors that question. I believe, after you explained to them how you spend most of your day browsing with a magic rectangle, sit in cush air conditioned environments, have access to full motion and interactive media and entertainment, can order nearly anything you like delivered to your door within 48 hours, can travel across continents in mere hours without risking death of dysentery or getting your wagon train raided by bandits, etc. they would ask you what the catch is. 1C hotter? No really...what's the catch?

grugagag 6y ago
But the catch is not well put, it’s not going to be just 1C hotter which in my oppinion is off, but the erosion of the coastlines, the near total melting of polar glaciers round, massive rise in sea levels, mass extinctions of many species, chaos and war amongst the remaining people for the diminishing resources, etcetera. All these for technology and comfort at the hands of humans with enormous costs for everything else. And the potential extinction of our own species in a much shorter/accelerated timespan.
- chrisco255 6y ago
  I don't know if you've seen the latest, but Greenland just had record ice gain during the middle of the ordinary melt season, after an already substantially strong year (and 3 out of the last 4 years have seen substantial gains): http://polarportal.dk/en/greenland/surface-conditions/ http://polarportal.dk/en/greenland/surface-conditions/ we are thousands of years away from polar melting, if ever. We have less war than they did prior to the industrial revolution. Prior to industrial revolution we didn't even have the resources to care about extinctions and they were happening anyways.
  - scroogeydop 6y ago
    Yawn. Same tired arguments.
  - 6y ago

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the vast majority of people lived in what we'd today call "soul-crushing poverty", and it wasn't uncommon to have bad harvest years where a couple percent of a nation's population starved to death. There's no way climate change is bad enough to make a world where shirts are luxury items preferable.

hodgesrm 6y ago
Or plagues and/or wars that killed a third or more of the population. The Black Death and the 30 Years War are both in this category.
natmaka 6y ago
Didn't world wars and modern oppression from various regimes kill many?
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  They did, but wars and oppression aren't an invention of the Industrial Revolution. Premodern leaders were very capable of killing and oppressing people at scale when they put their minds to it.
  - InitialLastName 6y ago
    To put that further, the wars and automated atrocities of the industrial age wouldn't break the noise floor of human suffering in pre-industrial history. By some estimates, Genghis Khan was responsible for the deaths of 40 million people, and all he had were horses. Europeans coming to North America led to the deaths of ~50 million people in the 16th century, mostly by accident.
    - natmaka 6y ago
      "Human suffering" seems difficult to assess, and all Industrial Revolution effects will only be known during post-industrial history (maybe after some thermonuclear/bacteriologic war). Many/most Genghis Khan "victims" are highly debatable: "most of them were victims of plague, floods and famine long after the war in northern China was over in 1234 and were not killed by Mongols" ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genghis_Khan#In_China](Source) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genghis_Khan#In_China](Source)). Even the most certain Genghis Khan victims, resulting from systematic slaughter in non-obedient zones, are postmarks in history because they were very unusual (and probably exaggerated). There are few other pre-industrial similar events, however there are many post-industrial similar ones (extermination camps, genocides, battles of Stalingrad/Verdun ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_battles_by_casualties](Source) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_battles_by_casualties]..., ...). IMHO "mostly by accident" invalidates your point.

megameter 6y ago

The realm of anti-enlightenment inquiry I am interested in right now is not the "tragic mistake" but rather the shift to a mercantalist view of the world. The later medieval period in Europe saw major scientific discoveries, and an argument sometimes made of the capital-R Renaissance was that it was more flashy than productive. But the mercantalism, I think, was precipitated by the plague years and the resulting labor shortages. These are often seen as a good since they produced wage increases. But they also motivated development of stronger controls over the person - the nation is tied to the individual via legible identity as a wage earner, rather than as a member of the village, and slavery thus reemerges as a way of shifting around the accounting by denying identity. And so by the 1600's, you have press gangs kidnapping people, and debtors becoming indentured servants, as well as the slave trade. In this light, this whole thing of civilization has been a seesaw of problems since antiquity.

Nasrudith 6y ago

As a reaction it is a highly silly example of scapegoating that looks for simple solutions. Granted there is ample historical precedent of such anti-intellectual scapegoating. To be frank the behavior resembles a "shit rolls downhill" cycle of abuse where they will blame and harm whomever is weaker but able to be a target of envy. Lack of progress doesn't make it more sustainable. Very early farming was a semi-sedetary "slash and burn" the forrest and then relocate once the soil is depleted and let the forrest reclaim their abandoned buildings while they go to despoil someplace else.