I want to expand a bit on my previous post, because I can't seem to emphasize enough how important philosophy is to an individual's, and a society's, quality of life.
Life, for the longest time, was depraved and miserable. Up until even the 1600's, nothing had really changed. Wars were fought for no good reason. Sometimes they were over greed, one man wanting a title to another man's lands. Other times they were over religion, insisting people pray in one way instead of another. Rebellions would break out constantly as ambitious fools sprayed their countries with blood in the hopes they could become the next King. If you read any history, the stories are all the same. Persian history, Greek history, Roman history, British history -- endless foreign wars, endless civil wars, all for petty, selfish, and meaningless reasons. The historians and philosophers of each era diligently recorded the stupidity of their fellow man and often lamented about it, but nothing was ever done to stop it.
Alongside man's insane bloodlust were so many other sins. The idea that people could be property, a mere tool for another's satisfaction. People were worked to death in mines and galleys so that others could live more leisurely. People killed each other simply for a crowd's entertainment. Women were forced to serve in harems to service their ruler's insatiable lust. All of this was somehow papered over by the rest of society, overlooked, as though they couldn't see the obvious pain and degradation they were putting fellow human beings, with souls just like theirs, through.
Alongside slavery was the use of torture. Innocent people were forced to confess to crimes they didn't do, like treason or witchcraft, via torture. All sorts of devices, all more imaginative and cruel than the last, were used on innocent women, the very people men were designed to love, cherish, and protect. How could men even think of all the various ways to hurt others? Why didn't their mind skitter away from the thoughts in horror and refuse to even imagine what were the most 'effective' ways? How could anyone steel themselves enough to use these devices on others? And for what ridiculous reasons. Not to learn of where an atomic bomb was about to go off. Not to forestall the end of the world. No. Torture was used to prove someone was a witch. Torture was used to prove someone was a traitor. As though any confessions extracted through torture prove anything. As though anything said under duress can be taken seriously.
Show trials where innocent people were arrested and executed simply for drawing a lord's suspicion, or solely for being resented by his peers -- oftentimes for being more honest and competent than they were -- were the standard. Anyone with wealth was a target of lawsuits and arrests so that his wealth could be expropriated after being found 'guilty.' Guilty mainly of having money someone else wanted. There were no laws for establishing proof. There was no way to secure witnesses, question testimony, demand evidence. There were no protections at all. Trials always had one, inevitable conclusion.
Not only the high and mighty were awash with the blood of innocents. The low and the stupid would participate in witch hunts, pogroms, and slaughters of their own. They would gleefully persecute and massacre members of different religious beliefs or different ethnicities who had never done them harm. Men were brutes who never thought twice about beating their wives. Children were forced to marry against their will. It's hard to picture the brutality of ordinary life back then. Virtually everything they did then would be considered a crime today. Virtually everything we do today would be considered a crime then.
But then something changed. Something called on mankind to better itself. Suddenly, we started caring about 'the rights of man.' We started worrying about the 'plight of the poor.' It's like people woke up for the first time in their lives. They looked around them and realized, aghast, what they had been doing. This was the Enlightenment. A movement that preceded the industrial revolution, and no doubt caused the industrial revolution. Everything in the world today we have thanks to the European Enlightenment. Our human rights, our world peace, our religious pluralism, our capitalism, our globalism, our democracies, our science, the banning of torture, domestic abuse, slavery, and our freedom to marry with our hearts. All of the science was made possible through the freedom of inquiry, a right first granted to us under the Enlightenment. For the first time it wasn't heresy, punishable by death, to actually sit and wonder why the world was the way it was and how the forces of nature operated. It wasn't heresy to cut up a cadaver and discover how the human body worked, and what was the cause of disease. Newton's laws of motion weren't heresy, Darwin's natural selection wasn't heresy, Copernicus's model of the cosmos wasn't heresy. Everyone was free to discover, free to learn, free to think for the first time since the ancient Greeks. (And even they killed Socrates for heresy -- so perhaps people were free to think for the first time EVER in Europe.)
Once people were allowed to think, they were able to point out all the ludicrous beliefs and traditions of the world. They were able to criticize the status quo, and demand better from their fellow man. They used reason, empathy, and erudition to become a second legislature to the world. Suddenly phrases like, "Kill them all and let God sort them out," were frowned upon, even rejected by a populace that had gotten its hands on a printing press and numerous pamphlets from esteemed original thinkers. Kings found themselves less popular than Locke, Voltaire, Hume, Rousseau, or Kant. They actually found themselves constricted by what these philosophers might criticize or denounce. For the first time, there was a tribunal higher than 'might makes right,' higher than 'the divine mandate,' a tribunal of pure reason and the well-being of Man that the mighty had to answer to and tremble lest they offend.
Once people were allowed to think, they began inventing. Steam engines, cars, vaccines, refrigerators, railroads, planes, rockets and computers. One invention always led to the next. Discovering one natural principle always let chemists and physicists and biologists tease out the next. Our progress has never stopped since that European dawn.
Governments were reformed, women treated as the equals of men, slaves freed, citizens given the vote, lords abolished, and the wars stopped. Now, fewer people than ever die by war. War is not seen as a legitimate solution to conflicts between states, nor are many 'state conflicts' seen as legitimate in the first place. People are allowed to live how they please, worshiping whom they please, trading with whom they please, and everyone just gets along. The purpose of government in the past was solely to raise armies and wage war on each other. Today government is a means to prevent crime, provide for the general welfare and facilitate commerce. Such nobler ends! And to such better effect! The world has never been so rich. People have never been so safe. Life has never been so good. Our lifespans have doubled, trebled ever since the Enlightenment. Famine and plague are things of the past. Many nations go entire lifetimes without waging a single war.
If not for the philosophers of the Enlightenment, none of these things would have come to pass. The scientific method never could have been invented. Tyranny could never have been constrained. Human rights could never have been posited. Peace could never have become the norm. These philosophers in turn couldn't have made their own achievements if not for the invention of the printing press, the protestant reformation that threw off the weight of tradition and mysticism in the Catholic church, and the Renaissance of European arts that drank up beauty and truth from the ancient Greeks and Romans like a thirsty man in a desert. Europe had finally become a garden where philosophy could grow, people had finally matured enough to listen to what wisdom had to say. But progress didn't come from better weather, or better plows, or victorious generals, or anything amoral. What's so delightful about the Enlightenment is that we finally discovered that Goodness was the key to the entire universe.
The Good. The True, the Beautiful, the Loving, the Compassionate, turned out to be the path to transcendence. To an age of billions of men, living together in harmony, listening to perfected symphonies, richer than the grandest pharoahs, sending rockets out into space. In some quirk of fate, the first people who chose to stop being cruel, rapacious, heartless animals, suddenly found themselves the most powerful, richest, and happiest of men. With that power, they easily conquered the world -- and more importantly, spread their philosophy to the ends of the Earth. Now the whole world operates according to the Enlightenment, more or less. Those who deviate from it, are the worse for it, and still have to pay putative respect towards it. Take for instance the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea." When even the most backwards states in the world have to pretend they've adopted the beliefs of the Enlightenment, you've won. Nothing will reverse this tide. Egypt learned this lesson a few days back. If you oppose the Enlightenment, you will lose.
The Enlightenment told us we ought to be kind and fair to one another. We should treat each other as ends in themselves, not means. We should consider them as fellow members of a social contract, given the same rights and duties as we ourselves have. We should treat each other as we would wish to be treated. The Enlightenment taught us that freedom of speech was paramount to a healthy state, that without it everything fell to rot, corruption, tyranny and stagnation. The Enlightenment taught us government derived its just powers from the consent of the governed, and that if a state could no longer serve the people, the people no longer needed to serve the state. It's hard to believe how important these lessons were. Millions of people live today because of these lessons, who would have otherwise been 'purged' or 'executed' on the pretexts of the past. Billions are richer, freer, and happier than they ever would have been using pre-Enlightenment ideals.
Someday, the Calendar should change from the useless start of the Christian religion, which taught us nothing and was the cause of half the barbarity in Europe, and instead start with the Enlightenment. Perhaps it could start with the publishing of Newton's Principia, or perhaps it should start with America's Declaration of Independence, the most admirable summation of Enlightenment thought anywhere. This was the real start of the world. This was the real origin, the real genesis, of everything good under the sun. Why should we concern ourselves with slavers, tyrants, torturers and inquisitors? They are beneath the enlightened mind. They are beneath an enlightened society. Dating our history back to include their time periods is an insult. We have nothing to do with them. We are nothing like them.
But the Enlightenment isn't done. Philosophy isn't done. This is our mistake, our weakness of the modern age. Some liberals think the Enlightenment is 'almost there,' all we need is one more push for the equality of homosexuals and the world will be set straight. This is myopic. The problems people face today have nothing to do with the persecution of homosexuals. The problems are young and old. There are old problems like Islam, and young problems like Communism. There are old problems like lack of temperance, and young problems like dysgenics. There are old problems like overpopulation, and young problems like broken homes. The Enlightenment overshot itself in asserting personal freedoms. It was unwilling to address existential threats to a community --> Things such as resource depletion, environmental degradation, overpopulation, below replacement birth rates, dysgenics, and self-destructive behavior. Enlightenment philosophy isn't to blame, it's hard to address problems that no one has ever imagined or experienced before. But what it means is we can't rely on the Enlightenment to provide us with our answers for everything anymore.
Extrapolating from Enlightenment principles will not answer any of our modern questions or address any of our modern concerns. We have extrapolated the Enlightenment as far as we can. There is nothing else left to learn from it. Can society struggle on without any updates to the Enlightenment? Sure, if we want to be exactly the same as the dark ages. If we have no further drive to progress, if we don't want to help anyone else who still suffers from the way things are, if we just want to go extinct with the passing of the sun. But perhaps the first lesson from the Enlightenment was that philosophy itself is a field of discovery and invention. That there was no last word in morality's book. When philosophers make inventions, when philosophers make discoveries, only then can the world start to move forward again. Only then can we reorganize society along better lines, shake off our dusty, obsolete traditions, and try something new. Old ideals are shackles, shackles that will only keep reproducing the same old results.
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results.
Likewise, it's useless to keep applying Enlightenment answers to problems that the Enlightenment has proven it is incapable of solving. Any problem that still exists in America or Europe today isn't something the Enlightenment can solve. If it could, it already would have. We've had hundreds of years, after all, to apply every last vestige of those ancient thinkers' philosophy.
Americans and Europeans are like full cups. They are filled to the brim with ancient religions, ancient philosophies, ancient moral codes they refuse to review or question. Because the cup is full, nothing more will fit in. Any new ideas are summarily rejected because they conflict with beliefs already 'in the cup.' At this rate they may as well be pre-programmed machines, since they never deviate from the manufacturer's mold anyway. We must unlearn everything we've learned, reject everything we've accepted, and start over at first principles.
Only by changing first principles could we possibly hope to reach new, different, more effective conclusions. The Enlightenment didn't take the Bible for 'granted' and then work from there. They started from first principles. Descartes, most famously, started with just 'cogito ergo sum.' We have to be as brave, original, free-thinking and wise as they were. We have to be inventors too.
Given the facts we know today, about genetics, about history, about comparative well-being between the different nations, about cosmology, about evolution, about economics, what can we conclude? How could we design a state even better than the one we have today? How can we solve the unsolvable problems of our time? What would people have to first believe before they were willing to live differently, to pass different laws? That's the task of today's philosopher. If new philosophers point the way, inevitably some society somewhere will try it out. Just like America decided to try out the philosophy of the Enlightenment, and we found out it worked out rather well for ourselves. The next 'Egypt' might revolt from the Enlightenment, and demand the new philosopher's invention be put in place. Or maybe it will be a place so backwards they never experienced the Enlightenment, and they could leapfrog ahead of everyone. If North Korea adopted a new, modern philosophy, how ironic if it were to speed ahead of everyone else?
Imagine a country that fully embraced evolution, eugenics, and scientific research. A society with a citizen's dividend that left no one behind, and an education that included virtue and art that encouraged marriage. A society that expected more from its people than drinking and drugs, and like the Spartans gave people too much pride and discipline to live in sin. A society that only allowed in the most deserving of immigrants who could truly enrich their native populace. A society that actually had more children than it had parents. A society that protected its environment and used clean, renewable energy they built themselves, exporting the surplus yield to the outside world as a product instead of needing to import fuel as a cost.
How many years before they became the most powerful, prosperous state in the world? How many years before other countries started to emulate them, for fear of being left behind, or because their citizenry was fed up with living sub-par lives? How many years before they conquered the world, just like the Europeans did after the Enlightenment? I don't know, but I do know that it would happen. History has taught us that those who live closest to God's will dictate terms to those who live furthest from it. Progress, prosperity and power is the reward of righteousness.
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