The Enlightenment Is A Dangerous Myth

In thinking about the events here of the past couple of weeks, I've come to believe that our world is haunted by the ghosts of those murdered in the mass murders of the 20th century, far more than we admit and far more than we realize.   Which has certainly been the overarching topic of all of those posts dealing with the role that biological science played in the mass murders the Nazis committed.   Instead of being a topic to be dealt with and laid aside, having learned the ultimate lessons of them, that can't be done.  That it is the mass murders of the Nazis which are the focus when those are only a part of the far larger number of mass murders under dictatorships and other governments within living memory is, in itself, worth considering with the utmost seriousness.   Why not the mass murders of Stalin and Mao as well as those of Hitler?  How did we come to make a ranking that elevates one or another of those epic murderers above another?   The numbers are so big that how many millions whose deaths they are responsible for can only be estimated.  And those numbers are so big that even the millions murdered by such as Pol Pot don't win him a place as the world's most evil.

While it certainly has not, the 20th century was the century that should have, once and for all, ended the lunatic belief in The Enlightenment, the idea that science and reason had enlightened the world, casting aside the darkness of religion and tradition with the pure light of knowledge.  That 18th century faith in science was first given and rapidly failed the test of time in the French Revolution as rule by the Philosophes quickly devolved into power struggles and the Reign of Terror, only to be ended by the military-imperialism of Napoleon and the subsequent series of chaotic French governments of the 19th century and repeated episodes of violence and chaos.  Ah, but the alternative to that, the one cited by Byron in the end of Ode to Napoleon,  

Where may the wearied eye repose

  When gazing on the Great;

Where neither guilty glory glows,         

  Nor despicable state?

Yes—one—the first—the last—the best—

The Cincinnatus of the West,

  Whom envy dared not hate,

Bequeath’d the name of Washington,         

To make man blush there was but one!

is not unproblematic as the slave holding Washington quickly was succeeded by John Adams, Jefferson (slaveholder) Madison (slaveholder) etc. into the epic corruptions of the antibellum period, not ending slavery but increasing it, not ending mass murder and theft of a continent but buying, effectively, the legal fiction of a right to the rest of it from French despots and stealing the rest of it from Mexico.  Punctuated by the Civil War, followed by the even more massive corruption of the gilded age to be followed on by the evils done by American governments of the 20th century.   

And that was a piece with the horrific imperial regimes in 19th and 20th century Europe, The Enlightenment didn't prevent them from committing mass murders all over the world, in Africa, Asia, the Americas, Australia and on many islands.  France, Belgium, England, The Netherlands, Germany, Spain, all of them, officially Enlightened or not were as soaked in blood as any 14th, 15th, or 16th century regimes pointed to as superstitious, unenlightened hell holes.   Perhaps the reason we focus so much on the Nazis is that their mass murder was largely confined to white Europeans.  We are guilty of still practicing that kind of racial and geographic discrimination, the Enlightenment has done absolutely nothing to drive that out of us. 

Just as the reputed religious wars haunted those who bought the fictions of the Enlightenment, even as those blighted the reputation of religion and required such naive faith in the power of science as a replacement, perhaps today, we have to face the fact of our own recent history and its own false religion. 

The murderous regimes of the past century were a product of the Enlightenment regimes.   There was no country which was more scientifically sophisticated and advanced than Germany.   The malignant use of that science preceded the Nazis, it was commented on with horror by the eminent American biologist Vernon Kellogg in his documentation of his conversations with German military officers, a number of them trained in science, during the First World War.   As noted here last week, science was active in the death camps of German South-West Africa in the decade before that.  The Nazis, repeatedly gave scientific justifications and explanations for their mass murders.   Nazism was presented as applied science.   And what they claimed was their scientific basis was second only as compared to the claims of Marxists who claimed the scientific nature of their own political, economic and social theories and practices.   A good example to look at for that is the Lysenko affair, in which the Marxists were confident of the rightness of Lysenkoism because it was in accord with the scientific monism which their political system was based on.  

I wouldn't necessarily claim that the extent to which the United States avoided some of these disasters was due to the lack of scientific pretensions of its founders, though that is certainly worth thinking about. 

So I don't think it's either possible or desirable to put this all aside because there is no escaping it. The mass murders continue, the thinking that leads to them continues and, I am afraid, is ever more common and ever more demanded to be the default framing of reality.   The Enlightenment is clearly not what it was billed as being, it didn't bring light, it sure as hell didn't bring peace and equality.  It might be the ultimate myth that kills us all. 

Update:  If That's Enlightenment Who Needs Benightedment?

Yeah, defending the Enlightenment on the lower-mid-brow blogs is so convincing.   It would be more convincing if they showed some signs of being more than functionally literate or cared even slightly about the truth.

So, that Reign of Terror thing was OK by you.