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 l

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.