Thread: Enlightenment and Romanticism Board: Oblivion / Ship of Fools.


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Posted by Candide (# 15755) on :
 
Hey guys. Long time lurker, rare poster here.

There's been an issue on my mind lately, which I felt that this forum might have quite a few insights regarding. (One insight might be that I'm out of mind. That would be a fine reply too.) Hopefully I can explain it sufficiently to make sense. Please let me know if I'm being too unclear.

Basically, I'm worried that the visible political, ideological and ethical trends of today, have a certain similarity to the Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment ideals of the 18th century.

The Enlightenment ideals were typically freedom, reason, the banishment of superstition, and so forth. Romanticism came as a reaction, in different guises, but included among other things such ideals as a divine spark in the individual, a strong belief in community, in nature and in artistic insights. (Nothing new here. Most of us has sat through a few lectures on this stuff at some point in time.)

The reaction against the Enlightenment likely came as a result of the failure of those ideals, especially as the results of the French Revolution turned more and more destructive. A similar situation might be seen today, albeit not in as clear cut a manner, as armies marching across a European battlefield.

What I perceive as the current shortcomings of contemporary "Enlightenment" lies in, among other things;
- creating a society that demands considerable knowledge, awareness and rationality of every individual, and constantly raising the bar
- challenging preconceived ideas that may very well be empirically wrong, but which also provided a set of ideas that all could connect to, and by so doing creating a greater feeling of community.
-having a poor ability to challenge the "fakers", the lower rung of scientific journals filled with "scientific evidence" which have been tailor-made to sell a specific product, or similar.


Reason alone is a trying ideology, especially for those blessed with very little reason. (I may likely be one of those). By ripping apart the superstition, the half-truths and the outright lies of society, quite a few people will be left feeling isolated and uncertain. They again, will be easy prey for ideologies that offer certainty. In their worst variations, they can take the form of fascism. In slightly less darker forms (but still pretty damn dark), it can be anti-vaccinism, belief in chemtrails, and a great host of other notions.
What these ideas often have in common, is that they are empirically usually fairly easy to disprove - but still gather adherents from across the world.

Usually we respond to such ideas by pushing -more- facts, -more- data their way. But the facts and the data, aren't always capable of shifting someones opinion. Far from it. It seems a reasonable hypothesis, that the disagreement is about more than merely what's the correct fact - it is sometimes a disagreement about what knowledge is. As such, it might be that we are trying to solve a problem, by heaping on more of the stuff that caused the problem in the first place.

Nothing of this is new. Adorno and Horkheimer wrote in the 1970s about the "Dialectic of Enlightement", in which they claimed that the world since the French revolution, had been a continual conflict between "freedom" and "equality".
One interpretation of that is that a society that invests deeply in reason, creates a strong individualism and considerable competition. All competition creates losers, who consciously or subconsciously see that they'd be better off in a different type of society. This in turn brings adherents to a romantic belief in community, in mysticism and skepticism towards science.

(Of course - If this belief is successful, it will create a strong sense of community that will feel stifling for some individuals, who will attempt to carve their own paths, which leads to a continual cycle of change between community and individualism.)

Finally, to the point.

Is there something to this perception of society? Are such varied phenomena as mentioned earlier, at least partially the result of a reaction to our current "Enlightenment"?

And if there is something to it, should we strive to change something about society, on account of it? Obviously, reason is far too precious a gift to set aside. But can we change sufficiently that while still enabling scientific thought, we also can provide a society that includes all? Or is the dilemma between "freedom" and "equality" unsolvable?
 
Posted by RuthW (# 13) on :
 
Really interesting questions here. I think you're onto something, but I'd develop the discussion of causes.

quote:
Originally posted by Candide:
Reason alone is a trying ideology, especially for those blessed with very little reason. (I may likely be one of those). By ripping apart the superstition, the half-truths and the outright lies of society, quite a few people will be left feeling isolated and uncertain. They again, will be easy prey for ideologies that offer certainty. In their worst variations, they can take the form of fascism. In slightly less darker forms (but still pretty damn dark), it can be anti-vaccinism, belief in chemtrails, and a great host of other notions.
What these ideas often have in common, is that they are empirically usually fairly easy to disprove - but still gather adherents from across the world.

Usually we respond to such ideas by pushing -more- facts, -more- data their way. But the facts and the data, aren't always capable of shifting someones opinion. Far from it. It seems a reasonable hypothesis, that the disagreement is about more than merely what's the correct fact - it is sometimes a disagreement about what knowledge is. As such, it might be that we are trying to solve a problem, by heaping on more of the stuff that caused the problem in the first place.
I think there are other things that have also taken place, at least in the US:

First, we have a staggering level of innumeracy and scientific illiteracy. For example, people will read something about how something will increase their chance of getting a certain disease or condition by 15%, not realizing that if their chance of getting that disease is vanishingly small to begin with, a 15% increase of that teeny tiny chance is still really, really small. Another example: lots of people don't understand the differences between different kinds of scientific studies, especially studies in which people are one way or another studied -- eg., a study that looks at what a thousands of people report over the course of years about their eating habits and health and draws conclusions via controlling for variables vs. a study that feeds a small group of people a certain diet under controlled circumstances for a short period of time and compares the results of their weight and blood tests to those of a control group. Both very good things, but good for different things.

Beyond that there's the even more basic misunderstanding about how science works: what a hypothesis is, what a scientific theory is, why it seems like the experts can't make up their minds whether chocolate and wine are good for us or not.

Instead of just ripping away superstition, received wisdom, and the ways people have usually thought about things, people could have been educated. They didn't have to be left isolated, but they were; because of crappy or non-existent scientific education and crappy, misleading, and sensationalistic science reporting, many people never get a chance to embrace the ideology of reason.

Second -- and I find this one the more troubling problem because it will be harder to fix -- a lot of people have lost faith in the doctrines of what you might call the most recent iteration of the Enlightenment because the elites and the people promulgating those doctrines have not proved trustworthy.

So why believe in reason? What's in it for most of us? People don't reject reason simply because it's hard and cold. They also reject reason because it is being used against them. It's not just that they're losing in the competition -- it's that they never had a chance.

So I'd like to see better scientific education, but even more I'd like to see transparency and fairness.

[ 19. September 2016, 00:17: Message edited by: RuthW ]
 
Posted by Kaplan Corday (# 16119) on :
 
The current and dominant pomo/poststructuralist dismissal of the Enlightenment takes the form of labelling it pejorativel as the "Enlightenment Project" and caricaturing it as a racket on the part of totalising white, Western males to destroy community and identity by the imposition of allegedly progressive ideals such as individualism, universal rationality, cosmopolitanism, liberalism and democracy.

Whatever one may think of that, it is at least true to say that the Enlightenment was neither monolithic nor homogeneous, and contained all sorts of disparate and conflicting concepts.

It can't be summed up in a few words.

quote:
Reason alone is a trying ideology
Not only trying but impossible.

Science and reason should certainly be applied to the areas of life to which they are relevant, but there are vast and important areas of life which are not susceptible to scientific or rational analysis, and the attempt to do so results in ongoing category errors.

Insofar as it is possible to generalise, the Enlightenment combined on the one hand scientific reductionism, with on the other hand a raft of prescriptive value judgements on issues such as democracy, liberalism, humanism and secularism.

However one of its leading representatives, David Hume, demonstrated the impossibility of deriving an "ought" from an "is", so where do these quasi-ethical absolutes come from?

quote:
is the dilemma between "freedom" and "equality" unsolvable?
Yes, in that it is impossible to combine absolute freedom with absolute equality.

At one extreme there is Ayn Rand-style libertarianism, and at the other, Hoxha's Albania or the Kim dynasty's North Korea.

In contemporary Western democracies there is a permanent struggle to achieve the optimum compromise.

Perhaps the truth lies not in the middle but at both extremes, and we should emulate figures such as George Orwell who fought passionately for the ideals of both socialism and liberty without attempting to be consistent.

[corrected UBB code]

[ 19. September 2016, 07:12: Message edited by: Alan Cresswell ]
 
Posted by Candide (# 15755) on :
 
First - thanks for some very good points.

quote:
Originally posted by RuthW:
I think there are other things that have also taken place, at least in the US:

First, we have a staggering level of innumeracy and scientific illiteracy. For example, people will read something about how something will increase their chance of getting a certain disease or condition by 15%, not realizing that if their chance of getting that disease is vanishingly small to begin with, a 15% increase of that teeny tiny chance is still really, really small. Another example: lots of people don't understand the differences between different kinds of scientific studies, especially studies in which people are one way or another studied -- eg., a study that looks at what a thousands of people report over the course of years about their eating habits and health and draws conclusions via controlling for variables vs. a study that feeds a small group of people a certain diet under controlled circumstances for a short period of time and compares the results of their weight and blood tests to those of a control group. Both very good things, but good for different things.
Your primary argument seems to be that there is a lack of knowledge, mainly due to poor education, as well as the secrecy of certain groups. I'll certainly agree to that. Some questions can be raised as to why there is too little knowledge however.

While there's of course considerable parts of the world wherein education is hard to come by, and even a basic understanding of science might be outside the grasp of even the most willing participant, then that's not really the case for a large portion of the first world. Education up to a fairly high level is easily available for most. (Some of course have personal challenges, economic issues, etc., but I can't see that this answers the entire issue).

The psychologist Martin Seligman claims that the five biggest sources of happiness for most people are : Pleasure (food, sex, etc), engagement (being involved in a challenging, but fun activity), relationships (pretty self-explanatory), meaning (being part of some higher purpose) and accomplishment (realizing your goals).

Becoming like Socrates - becoming aware of how little one does know - provides fairly little happiness. (It might provide a lot of sense, but that's... not always that important.). There is however a lot of meaning in "alternative" insights. There's purpose and accomplishment in having spotted the "lies" of the vaccine industry. There's meaning in the rhetoric of extreme right wing politics. It reduces the world to the "good" and the "evil", and places you firmly on the side of good.


Michael Barkun's book A culture of conspiracy used the term "stigmatized knowledge". He drew links between far-right wing politics and the sort of belief that involves aliens, chemtrails and a great host of other questionable beliefs. He discovered that the same people were often attracted to all of these notions, even if they don't seem connected. The appeal of these ideas, seems to be that they are in opposition to established science.

I think it sometimes becomes a question of competition between different sets of knowledge, and what they can offer. Is a person who doesn't believe him- or herself capable of achieving sufficient insight in modern science, likely to choose empirically verifiable facts over more romantic ideas? Unlikely, if the romantic ideas are easier to grasp, provide a feeling of a more meaningful (albeit not more truthful) life, provides the feeling of accomplishment and of being special, etc.


In some cases perhaps, the attraction of "romantic knowledge" (if you'll pardon the term), and a poor education system, may very well work together. The less likely someone is to succeed in the established "enlightened" education system, the greater the appeal of searching out the alternative.
 
Posted by Kaplan Corday (# 16119) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Candide:
links between far-right wing politics and the sort of belief that involves aliens, chemtrails and a great host of other questionable beliefs.
Loony anti-scientific theories (which you politely call "questionable beliefs") are held right across the political spectrum.

Stalin persecuted Soviet scientists who didn't go along with Lysenkoism, a "proletarian biology" every bit as idiotic as "Aryan physics".

During the Cultural Revolution, Chinese doctors who questioned Mao's ideologically based fiat on the imperative to replace anaesthetics with acupuncture were condemned as revisionists.

One of the most left-wing people I have ever known was a teaching colleague (I think he belonged to some sort of Fourth International splinter group; is there any other sort? "Two Trots, three factions" and all that...) who was opposed to both fluoridation of water and microwave ovens.

Here in Australia, at any rate, many anti-vaxxers seem to be educated, middle-class types who might be expected to vote Green or Labor.
 
Posted by Ricardus (# 8757) on :
 
Two thoughts:

1.) I think it's arguable that Romanticism isn't a reaction to Enlightenment but a facet of it. Kant (AIUI - I'm going by second- or third-hand readings) took everything that clearly has value but that doesn't fall under the categories of pure reason or practical reason, and put it in a bucket marked 'the Sublime'. Thereafter, the Romantics are the people who drew their art from that bucket.

One consequence of this is that, having separated the Sublime from things that involve reason, Romantic art loses any rational component and is devoted instead to emoting over grandiose landscapes and being ditched by your girlfriend.


2.) Kant's definition of Enlightenment (from Was ist Aufklärung?) amounts to 'thinking for yourself'. In reality, ISTM there's a very fine line between people who think for themselves, and cranks. In the largely secular UK, for example, creationism requires an admirable degree of independent thought - in the sense of not being swayed by the popular impression that creationists are nutcases - but I would not describe creationists as enlightened. On the other hand, most people accept the reality of evolution because scientists say so (we aren't in a position to make the observations ourselves) - and though we are probably right to do so, this brings us right back to a Medieval-style argumentum ex auctoritate or argument from authority.
 


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