A Gathering Darkness

Enlightenment is man's leaving his self-caused immaturity. Immaturity is the incapacity to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another. Such immaturity is self-caused if its cause is not lack of intelligence, but by lack of determination and courage to use one's intelligence without being guided by another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own intelligence!

— Immanuel Kant, in “What Is Enlightenment?”, 1784
Following on the heels of President Bush’s endorsement of intelligent design being taught in science classes, the Heretik, in his Question of the Day, quotes the president saying, “People who don't understand intelligent design are living in the past,” (oh dear) and then asks, “Where will intelligent design take us in the next eon? Are you with us or against us?”

I truly find it difficult, uncomfortable, to contemplate in what direction we may go if science continues to be undermined in such startling fashion by our leaders. Scientific pursuit can comfortably coexist with religion, both within a society and often, strange as it might seem to dedicated atheists or the resolutely faithful, even within the same head—plenty of practicing Christians (and Jews) also believe in evolution. But there is a virulent, and ever-strengthening, strain of dogmatic Dominionism which seeks to undermine science at all costs—and it is to our great misfortune that our current president, and many Republican members of Congress, subscribe (and/or pander) to the beliefs of this dangerous population.

The subversion of science is a scary proposition to be sure, and for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the inevitable lag behind allies (and enemies) who don’t shy away from the technologies of the future. But what troubles me the most is the thought that all this indignant uproar isn’t really just about science; it’s about rational thought. It’s about the death of reason. And whether the GOP leadership in its current incarnation genuinely subscribes to a belief system that favors the death of reason, or cynically endorses it without conviction, it’s useful to them all the same.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

— Voltaire
Reason, rational thought, objective truth—these are the things from whence sprung secularism and liberalism during the Age of Enlightenment (and, or including, the Age of Reason, depending on one’s definition—in any case, the late 17th and 18th centuries). Oft-associated with important scientific advances, the Age of Enlightenment indeed saw the application of empirical philosophical ideas to science. Physics, chemistry, and biology started to take the form that we recognize now, as Sir Isaac Newton fused axiomatic proof with physical observation to create a coherent system of verifiable predictions. And, in his spare time, he sorted out calculus, integrating algebraic processes with geometric processes, thereby providing the means by which to work out scientific problems.

The Enlightenment was not just the name of this period, however, but also a larger intellectual movement, advocating rationality as the means to both acquire knowledge across many fields, including government, economic principles, and politics, among other, and to establish ethics. The influence of Enlightenment thought can be seen yet today in progressive thought; my oft-repeated mantra of my rights end where yours begin is a simple example of a rational approach to ethics—it’s an immutable ethic imbued with the flexibility of contextual application. (The resistance to the approach can be seen as well; this is precisely from where the erroneous assertion that liberals have a subjective morality comes.) Though the Age of Enlightenment is generally considered to have ended as the Romantic Movement came into favor, so much of modern thought (and so much that we take for granted) originates from the era that is difficult to say, in some way, that it ever truly ended, so long as much of our society remains ordered upon principles derived therein.

And no one knows it better than the crowd that prefers to exist in the Land of Make-Believe. When they take their aim at science, it’s part of a larger goal, so outrageous in scope and tenor as to be inconceivable to most of us—rolling back rationality as the means to both establish ethics and acquire knowledge.

The first part comes as no surprise, of course; that they claim their ethics divinely inspired is an all-too-familiar refrain, even in spite of the irony that the savior for whom their religion is named was fond of teaching with parables, which by their very nature require the application of rational (and independent) thought.

It’s the second part we seem to have trouble getting our collective heads around—and no wonder, as truly contradictory to modern thought (as we know it) that it is. We continually get angry with (and perplexed by) the President, or Ann Coulter, or the Freepers for behaving so irrationally, but they do so because they are irrational, in its quite literal sense. Rationality is explicitly rejected, in favor of divine inspiration. When the President talks about looking into Putin’s eyes and knowing everything he needs to know about him, or listening to his gut, or going on instinct rather than deliberative contemplation, those are nods to the Irrationalists, the fervent believers that knowledge is not acquired by thought.

Membership in the reality-based community, of which we so proudly claim to be part, is utterly meaningless, as reality to them is whatever they believe it to be—generally whatever they are told it is by someone they trust. Bemoaning their mistrust of science is pointless; they will always be mistrustful of science, and will always be glad that there is, as a senior Bush advisor once noted, someone to “create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too.” As distasteful and inexplicable as such behavior is, as counterintuitive to everything we believe to be right, this is their paradigm: knowledge is to be gleaned from its being revealed from a trusted source. That the trusted source is invariably linked to religion (even so tentatively as Bush, who simply announced himself a Christian and showed himself fluent in the Irrationalists’ language) is no coincidence. They trust God above all, and they cannot believe that He or His earthly representatives would lead them astray.

Faith guides them, but it is a weak faith—and understandably so, rooted in wrong-headedness as it is. Everywhere they turn is evidence to the contrary, and their solution is not self-examination. (How could it be? They cannot even trust themselves to discern truth or reality.) Instead, their solution is to eradicate all threats to their fragile faith. Science is only one part of a larger target, just a stepping stone on their determined path of return to the Dark Ages—a time when their faith, so delicate in the modern world, was unassailable, because it’s all there was. A time before the birth of reason.

In answer to The Heretik’s question, I really don’t know where intelligent design will take us in the next eon, but I know where we are now. We’re on the edge of the end of the Age of Enlightenment, and if the Irrationalists aren’t exposed and discredited before their vituperative ideology infects a majority, it could get very dark indeed.

Sapere aude!