It’s 2023 and no society on earth is in an Age of Enlightenment. What is an Age of Enlightenment? Well, it’s a very good thing, according to most highly educated people, and also, it’s a thing that, if foregone, can’t be traded in for something at least as comparably valuable; therefore, we could conclude it’s ‘worse-than-good’ if we’re not in one. Can we agree on that? It seems like logic demands we conclude that very thing, and I suppose that means we would be compelled to… if we were in an Enlightened Age.
Since this is the first proper posting in this blog (that is, putting aside the intro one), I think it’s important to mould the reader’s expectations about how I communicate. If I ask the question—which I’m going to—“Do you, the reader, want to live in a new Enlightened Age?”, it sounds so simple as to possibly ooze naïveté, but style alone never proves anything, and it’s not my responsibility (nor anyone’s, really) to do mental acrobatics for the reader to make it seem like one is coming at a problem from every-which-way in order to give the impression that the subject was treated coherently from every-which-way. It’s almost as if, in our current culture, it isn’t accepted as enough of a statement for a writer to say that ‘two plus two equals four’, and that in order to be considered sophisticated, a writer is expected to show that ‘five minus one is also four’, and so is ‘three plus one’, etc. But no—two and two is four, and it doesn’t mean that I’m naïve for saying it so simply, then moving on. I don’t have to show that I’ve thought through every combination if I already know they all work. In other words, it’s not my responsibility to prove from the start that it wasn’t I who was naïve to simply mention an idea (though, many authors these days feel this sort of pressure put on their writing, which is sad, really). But, in fact, I’ve been beyond it for a long time, and I think it’s passé to use that style, for what does it really accomplish to try so, so hard to seem self-aware? It’s faddish. It wastes time, collectively. Just assume I’m hyper-self-aware and let’s move on to the bigger questions. Ok?
Here we go: do you want a Second Enlightenment?
‘What does that even mean?’, I can hear the younger generations ask. Well, ok. We can list out some of the things that historians agree were characteristic of the Age of Enlightenment. For example, “Reason” was lauded greatly.
‘What does that even mean?’, I can hear the younger generations ask. (“Younger generations” meaning the Baby Boomers and younger.)
This is where it gets tricky and frustrating for those who DO know what it means. It’s hard to tell a society that they nearly all pay lip service to an idea (such as ‘REASON’) but really have very little clue about what it means. The P.R. war lauding Reason was won by my friends, and its veneration has been passed down, culturally, through the ages; but the understanding of what it is wasn’t successfully passed down—not this many generations later. There are certainly different depths of ignorance about the term. Ordinary folks in Western societies commonly exhibit the most glaring kind of ignorance about it, often conflating “having a reason for something” for being the same thing as “following the dictates of Reason”, A.K.A. “following Reason”. There’s so much to unpack here. They are NOT similar ideas, even though they both revolve around the word “reason”. Everyone can be said to have a reason for the things they do—even animals, almost all of the time. But Following Reason entails that you go where Reason takes you; a sound argument compels you to agree with the conclusion, for one thing. It means we don’t look to who makes the argument, and we don’t take authority into account, nor do we ever fall for any fallacies—not these two, nor any others. Being swayed by no fallacies, in turn, requires that we learn the crucial stuff of Logic, which allows one to distinguish between Reason and sophistry, the two of which—to the uneducated—sound like the same thing when employed. This practical conflation (which is made by a great percentage of the public today) is one of the scourges of our time, and if the reader finds the distinction between these two terms difficult either in theory or in practice, then it proves my point. The public, now, in the West, mostly doesn’t understand something crucial that its ancestors did understand. Do you dare think I’m wrong? Here’s a dare. Examine the way you, yourself, come to conclusions—do you ever try to figure out which ideas are “safe” before deciding on what’s true? If not, then still, look around; how many others do just that? Answer: a lot. So despite the good buzz that has remained steadfast about the word “reason” all these generations after the Age of Enlightenment, realize that Reason means—among other things—NOT doing this thing that is so common these days: looking to one’s tribe to say what’s ‘truth’. And since I mentioned writing style earlier, I may as well point out that Reason means that we don’t even dismiss an author because their style is not to our liking or they don’t seem sophisticated at first… or ever, really. I mean that. I could, if I like, come off as bonkers or silly: holding imaginary reigns and asymmetrically skipping around to the rhythm of two coconut halves being clippety-clopped together as I make my points; and it wouldn’t matter a bit to someone who follows Reason. We look to the ideas, and what the ideas can provide.
It’s in light of this that Kant summarized the Enlightenment as ‘Humanity daring to know.’ I’m paraphrasing here, and again when I say he also described it as, ‘Humanity summoning the courage to use its own understanding.’ It’s a relatively good summary, but I don’t think it’s the best one possible. There were certainly worse, and there have been many. Even today, writers look back on the Enlightenment and summarize it in ways that still don’t capture its essence, or might even imply that the Enlightenment Age is not even over. Michael Kellogg, for example, recently characterized the Enlightenment as an age revolving around the ideas of progress and freedom: that each boosts and implies the other. It’s interesting to think that this combination of ideas animated that age for the first time in human history; however, it seems clear that these ideas have been a sort of bedrock for all of the ages since then too. Likewise, scientists and technologists definitely “dare to know”, as Kant phrased it, but not exactly in the same broad sense that Kant meant it. So I think it’s clear that Western societies are still animated by some of the same ideas that first made their big appearance (like the connection between progress and freedom, and a whole lot of other things you could point out that were then new) during the Enlightenment, but we are not quite living during an Age of Enlightenment of our own. Not like before. There is a difference. Something was laid aside long ago.
One point of this letter is to tell you what it was. Yes, I am bold enough to say—although vast crowds of intellectuals, in generation after generation, century after century, have tried to summarize the Enlightenment before me—that I believe I alone have been able to put my finger on the true core ideas not only of the Age of Enlightenment, but on ANY Enlightened Age that might possibly come to be.
They are two core ideas—like two sides of a coin. One is that Morality implies Reason. The other is that Reason implies Morality.
When a society doesn’t practice Reason very well, it has a hard time getting itself together, on one page, about what words and high concepts even mean, and we’ve come to that place today, in Western civilizations, so that the younger generations (i.e., the Baby Boomers and younger) can’t understand another citizen talking to them about the idea of Morality if it’s supposed to be free of the influence of some ideology. So since I have to specify, let’s start with lying, cheating, stealing, murdering, and similar things; these actions can all be grouped together as generally having something similar about them; and, in previous generations, they would easily have been acknowledged to be “immoral”, which should provide a decent baseline of agreement for the scale of this conversation; but would it surprise the reader to find out that during the Enlightenment, the philosophes developed a more robust set of ideas about what is immoral than we’ve had in recent times, and that they did so without basing it upon any particular ideology? (Not an ideology, that is, but on a hope, really.) Without appealing to any particular religion, the hip cats of bygone eras instead tried to sort of squint and triangulate about “Natural Law”, which was supposed to be based on Reason; by doing so, they developed some basic ways of thinking about moral situations independent of traditional/Dark Age/Bronze Age ideas of morality. It was systematic, intellectual, and truly revolutionary. In what some have called the Age of Reason (the lead-up to the definite Enlightenment Age), Hobbes published ‘Leviathan’, which put forward the idea of a State of Nature; and, with that, he defined a kind of situation not by the topics it touched but by its structure. The situation he described was defined by the relationship between individuals’ available choices and the values that individuals placed on possible outcomes. What Hobbes defined was really what we would today call “A Prisoner’s Dilemma”, and it was a situation where individuals have an incentive to sell each other out—to defect, to behave immorally, to behave selfishly & safely at the expense of others—even though if everyone did so, everyone would be worse-off than if everyone were cooperating/being vulnerable/hypothetically-moral. The State of Nature was a revolutionary description and thought-experiment that thinkers of the time called upon differently in different contexts, as appropriate; however, in subsequent ages, it was often easily misunderstood, unfortunately. The Prisoner’s Dilemma is a much-cleaned-up encapsulation of the basic idea; this is a type of “game”, or, in other words, “strategic situation”, analyzed in the discipline of Game Theory—in fact, it’s one of the most popular games to teach and apply. Broader variations on The Prisoner’s Dilemma can be used to model lying, cheating, stealing, and even murder, littering, and other social ills. The major variations on The Prisoner’s Dilemma ARE (as best as we can now define) what I’m talking about when I say “moral situations”, and the way I talk about “immorality” is exactly in keeping with the way it was talked about by the intellectuals during The Enlightenment. It was back then revolutionary to think that these all shared a fundamental STRUCTURE, and that things aren’t “wrong to do” because they touch a topic of human activity (such as sexuality), as the scriptures seem to suggest; but that they’re “wrong to do” for a fundamental, natural REASON. All that’s needed is to have a valid reason to say (using a proof) that there’s an answer to the fundamental structure, and you can then prove the answer to be the same for ALL of the moral situations there are. And they supposed there was one. It was revolutionary on top of revolutionary.
They didn’t do it, by the way; they only supposed there was a way to do it. They waited patiently for someone to figure it out… but in other ways, they realized there was no point to being quite so patient. For example, John Locke wasted no time in developing a vast host of conclusions about high level human action, such as politico-ethical rules that depended upon the idea that there really is a “Natural Law” of answers indicating some kind of rightness of behavior. It didn’t seem outlandish, after all. Some things clearly seem wrong, like when the king calls upon Divine Right of Kings, and cites the Bible to say that those who have power are imbued with it by God, so that anyone who fights any power is fighting the will of God. This is just Might Makes Right with extra steps. So, this being clearly evil (certainly to the ones I like to call “the proto-liberals”, like the Whigs), if we are to contradict Might Makes Right in our logical arguments, that merely means that it’s NOT true that Might Make Right, which is to say that at least some actions are either right or wrong. Mind-blowing, isn’t it, folks? That’s the foundation of our political ideas in Western civilization. ‘At least some possible actions are wrong.’ Actually wrong. Is it any wonder that people who were dedicated to honestly going where arguments lead would lean toward the supposition that there probably are answers to moral situations, for if any are wrong, it would certainly be these? And if that simple observation is true, then it’s either that there are answers to moral situations OR we accept Divine Right of Kings and/or the rule of tooth and claw. (There’s no coherent, positively-assertable third option, and you can check it yourself.)
In our own time, so many generations later, elites generally have developed a quite peculiar answer to all of that, with which you will doubtless be familiar: they disingenuously suppose there’s an answer to ‘right and wrong’ and then run away from anyone who seriously supposes that there’s an answer. ‘Urging one high standard and then betraying it’ is a pretty good definition of “hypocrisy”, and this is what’s taught and encouraged today. I happen to possess a knack for discovering people’s underlying rationales, philosophies, and contradictions; so I can attest—if need be, most strenuously—after having heard and discussed with many teachers and professors over many years, that it’s exceedingly common for them to indeed run from those who take the ideas as seriously as the Enlightenment cool kids did, and they often go even further: urging caution about it to their students. Teachers readily encourage their students to rely on ‘social mores’—and not to cite inalienable rights. Bombshells built of literal speech are downplayed and glossed-over—I can’t even count how many times I’ve seen it. And all this is by no means limited to academia; it’s baked, like cured concrete, into the culture of Western elites these days (particularly in the U.S.), influencing everything from how lawyers argue in front of the Supreme Court to how the news media bends the rules of journalism. Platitudinous decrees even make their way into the UN resolutions, but almost no one actually takes the ideas as far as they go. Hypocrisy is the rule today, and we’re taught the need to get on the ‘right side’ while carefully making sure we don’t use Reason to examine where the arguments go—only then are we safe. Safe from Reason.
[This paragraph is somewhat of an aside, but now that we’re clear on a lot of these issues (especially why we define ‘morality’ in this structural way), I hope you realize what this also means about the way I stated the two core ideas of an Enlightenment (that ‘morality implies Reason’, and that ‘Reason implies morality’): that each one implies the other one—that’s why I said they’re two sides of the same coin. For in order to even crisply define ‘morality’ in such a way that it avoids topicality and also stands upon its answer being really ‘right’, it implies that the line we draw around the term not be drawn arbitrarily (not even drawn by a list of structures or particular games we’ve arbitrarily decided upon), and instead is drawn by… Reason, which can in fact (hypothetically) determine what is right/correct. In other words, we technically have to prove that Reason can derive answers to various Prisoner’s Dilemma variations in order to be able to KNOW for sure which of them are moral situations, and which answers are moral ones. So to suggest the known-truth of either core idea (both of which use the term, ‘moral’, in this Enlightened cause); it requires that which will prove both. I just wanted to point that out since it seems kinda poetic and aesthetic. ]
So far, I’ve talked about the supposition that Reason implies Morality, but what about the idea that Morality implies Reason? This, to modern taste, should be much more palatable. Despite the popular hypocrisies of various modern ideologies, it’s popular across the board to ask the question, “What if everyone were to do that?” Using this leading question as a rule of thumb, people feel their way toward morality without being too explicit, so let’s ask the question now, regarding committing oneself to Reason. What if everyone were to constrain themselves to following the dictates of Reason? Well, considering that at this point in the letter, even educated folks who still have a warped idea about what Reason is (enough to blame Reason for the opposite of Reason) can still misunderstand the word, so that another whole letter (at least) would be required to clear everything up; we must simply skip to the answer here and say that for a lot of individuals (probably most), they wouldn’t really want to force themselves to only follow Reason regarding… well, lots of topics; yet, it will make society much better off if they do. If people in general put the effort into knowing the difference between an invalid argument form and a valid one, we would be much improved, for one thing. Public debate would be more enlightening, less deceptive, more likely to produce agreement and valid conclusions, and less likely to produce “fake news”, foolishness, rancor, and anger. Bigotry would subside. Differences could be more easily tolerated. Better ideas and plans would rise to the top of the heap. Society could make more progress improving itself on the things it can actually change, and be more aware of that which it can’t or shouldn’t. Vast amounts of energy wouldn’t be wasted on angry nonsense in the political realm, which energy could be channeled into improvement. The more that people focus on rising to the challenge of sticking to Reason, the better for us all, even if doing so is an uncomfortable trouble for a large swath of the population. The answer is: it’s well-worth it. So, for that swath, they are in a moral situation, as best as we can figure. It’s definitely a Prisoner’s Dilemma, only involving many individuals.
If it makes sense to call anything moral, the act itself of trying hard to follow the dictates of Reason—if you really don’t want to—is moral.
Everyone cool used to know this—it was obvious—during The Enlightenment.
What if we were to accept it again, today? Would you dare to explain this to the people whom you know, particularly during those moments when you can tell they put no effort into following Reason? Would you be willing to tell them they’re not only making an error in logic but are (as best as we can figure) immoral for paying so little heed? I hope so, because if you are willing, and if it catches on, we might be able to start up another Enlightenment.
If any there are who are inclined to accept that much; then, I say, why not go the extra step and laud the other idea too? At this precise moment in history, one doesn’t have to say—nor should anyone have said, during the Enlightenment—that the proposition that ‘Reason implies Morality’ has already been proven. Not being a historian, I could be wrong about the following, but, in general, I don’t think my old friends—the avant-garde of the intelligentsia (except, perhaps, Kant, at the very end of the Enlightenment)—actually ever thought the solution had been attained. They hoped for it. That was enough to make it an Enlightened Age. And isn’t it a good thing to hope for? It would make sense out of our deeper laws and language!
That hope is not faith—nor does it carry any baggage that comes from any version of that other word. Nor is that hope naïve. No one can validly pin that accusation on the hope. Hoping that the concept of morality will be proven “right” using Reason, in the same way that Enlightenment thinkers hoped, isn’t assailable from any angle whatsoever, if we’re constrained to using Reason. There’s nothing technically wrong with it. After all, it’s never been proven that it will never be proven…. That would be what a cynic—or an Enlightenment-hater—would have to prove before demonstrating Enlightenment sentiments to be naïve. It’s still true that as far as we know at this early date in human history, there could actually be correct/right answers to some behavior—even strategic choices, like those in Prisoner’s Dilemmas. Because that’s so, realize that we could even go ahead and behave as if there are such answers; since, if it turns out there hadn’t been, then we were never actually wrong to do so because no behavior can be called “wrong”. (Our behavior would’ve only been “wrong” if, instead of adopting the implications of Enlightenment ideas, we ignored them only to learn later that the ideas had been true all along.)
I think about it that way, and in this way: it could be that a currently-unknown, valid argument can be made against the appeal to tooth and claw…. Is it so scary to hope so? I would think it to be limitlessly more scary if it were otherwise, but maybe that’s just me.
Let’s take ideas seriously, go where Reason leads, spread these ideas around, and hope there is such a truth as the aforementioned, which entails both core ideas of an Enlightenment: that Morality implies Reason, and Reason implies Morality. That’s THE recipe for an Enlightenment Age.
So do you want a Second Enlightenment?
Thought experiment: On a scale of 0 to 1, where 0 is “not at all hopeful—I couldn’t care less”, and 1 is “I’m definitely very hopeful about those two core ideas, and I may as well apply them”, where would you rate?
…All it takes is more people rating higher on that scale, and we’ll have a Second Enlightenment.
Oh, and one final thing, um… If you’re on board, you may now have a duty to spread the word and read on.