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Thread: The business class doesn’t understand the Enlightenment

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    The business class doesn’t understand the Enlightenment

    The business class doesn’t understand the Enlightenment is a criticism of Pinker's “Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.

    Here's pieces of it.

    ...That scientific and technological advances are not the same as progress in human affairs goes largely unnoticed by Pinker. For him, the present is rosy and the future only better. We are the fortunate children of the Enlightenment, our prosperity bestowed not by a benevolent God, but by the power of reason and its primacy in our society.

    ...It’s a neat equation that Pinker lays out, but as is often the case, the reality is more complicated. First of all, there are several versions of the Enlightenment, each emerging from a particular political, geographical, and philosophical home complete with its own debates and disagreements. There was a British, French, Scottish, Polish, German, and—at least in the mind of Catherine II—Russian Enlightenment....

    ...There was also a global component of the Enlightenment. ...American and European merchants, explorers, traders, conquerors, missionaries, diplomats and bureaucrats traveled with ideas and carried them to their foreign destinations....

    ...Our contemporary version of the Enlightenment evolved primarily based on the hegemony of the West, and more specifically on the Anglophone interpretation of it. Nation states developed relatively late, almost simultaneously with the new Enlightenment thinking in the late 17th and the 18th centuries. After the demise of Napoleon, Britain and then the rising U.S. became the leading global powers. They wielded their power over the narrative as much as they did over territory and people and the Enlightenment story they told was one that comported well with their imperial aims....

    The Enlightenment became an intellectual justification and framework for colonialism and imperialism. So much so that John Stuart Mill opined about British imperial rule in India, “Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement.”

    ...During the late 18th century, several thinkers launched a vigorous assault against imperialism, conquest, and appropriation on a global scale. Their arguments took aim at a hypocritical contradiction....

    ...the anti-imperialists, including Diderot, Kant, and Herder, championed the equal dignity of all humans on earth, their original right to freedom, and to a life as beings—not as something generic to be shaped at will by colonial masters. Constructs of superiority and inferiority were resolutely rejected. These major contributors to the Enlightenment condemned imperial ambitions as unjust, dangerous, and impractical....

    ...At first glance, Pinker’s exultation of Enlightenment values may be seductive. Do we want to live in an unreasonable, anti-scientific world? Yet, it’s difficult to not see it as a bold defense of a status quo that is clearly not working. Its antiseptic version of the Enlightenment is one that admits no crucial anti-imperial and anti-colonial ideas. Scientific inquiry is a method, but it is not suitable as a dogmatic worldview. Theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg, Nobel laureate for his work in quantum mechanics, had little patience for the doctrine of “scientism” which only accepts strictly empirical evidence, “The existing scientific concepts cover always only a very limited part of reality, and the other part that has not yet been understood is infinite,” Heisenberg wrote. “It will never be possible by pure reason to arrive at some absolute truth."

    ...
    Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler

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    midcan5's Avatar Senior Member
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    The reality is always more complicated. Where you are on the food chain may cause you to see things differently. Humans have progressed but they still hate each other, is there any need to mention the fascist turns of the modern world, or the hate crimes even in America. Consider three and four in the list below, we've come a long way but there is a way to go and one wonders if the goal is possible.

    "In general terms, "The Age of the Enlightenment" refers to the period between around 1650 and the French Revolution (1789) (others end the era at 1798: the year Coleridge and Wordsworth published Lyrical Ballads), during which time Western Civilization saw an explosion in:

    1) The application of scientific reasoning to, well, everything (yes, everything)

    2) The birth of republican democracy in North America and Western Europe

    3) The application of religious tolerance to political systems

    4) The seeds of social equality in political systems.

    I thought this talk interesting and sorta on topic. Kings and Queens????

    'Killer cognitive bias, air pollution and climate change.'





    https://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/engl_258/Lecture Notes/age_of_enlightenment_in_a_nutshe.htm
    Wanna make America great, buy American owned, made in the USA, we do. AF Veteran, INFJ-A, I am not PC.

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    Great response till TDS got the better of you.
    Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler

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    pjohns's Avatar Senior Member
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    Quote Originally Posted by Stephen Pinker
    Theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg, Nobel laureate for his work in quantum mechanics, had little patience with the doctrine of "scientism" which only accepts strictly empirical evidence...
    It is my understanding that there are only two legitimate methods for collecting knowledge: the rational (i.e. that which we may learn through pure reason) and the empirical (which includes both experience and observation).

    Anything else is simply hokum.


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    Hoosier8's Avatar Senior Member
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    Quote Originally Posted by midcan5 View Post
    The reality is always more complicated. Where you are on the food chain may cause you to see things differently. Humans have progressed but they still hate each other, is there any need to mention the fascist turns of the modern world, or the hate crimes even in America. Consider three and four in the list below, we've come a long way but there is a way to go and one wonders if the goal is possible.

    "In general terms, "The Age of the Enlightenment" refers to the period between around 1650 and the French Revolution (1789) (others end the era at 1798: the year Coleridge and Wordsworth published Lyrical Ballads), during which time Western Civilization saw an explosion in:

    1) The application of scientific reasoning to, well, everything (yes, everything)

    2) The birth of republican democracy in North America and Western Europe

    3) The application of religious tolerance to political systems

    4) The seeds of social equality in political systems.

    I thought this talk interesting and sorta on topic. Kings and Queens????

    'Killer cognitive bias, air pollution and climate change.'





    https://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/engl_258/Lecture Notes/age_of_enlightenment_in_a_nutshe.htm
    The video pretty much describes Michael Mann of the now infamous hockey stick.
    When Donald Trump said to protest “peacefully”, he meant violence.

    When he told protesters to “go home”, he meant stay for an insurrection.

    And when he told Brad Raffensperger to implement “whatever the correct legal remedy is”, he meant fraud.

    War is peace.

    Freedom is slavery.

    Ignorance is strength.

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    Quote Originally Posted by pjohns View Post
    It is my understanding that there are only two legitimate methods for collecting knowledge: the rational (i.e. that which we may learn through pure reason) and the empirical (which includes both experience and observation).

    Anything else is simply hokum.

    There is what we might call traditional knowledge, knowledge passed down from generation to generation. I would suppose most of that at one time was developed experientially but not empirically via the scientific method.
    Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler

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