The Age of Enlightenment is Ending
Okay, so this got a little long when I started responding, I dunno, I hope I answered the question. Was in a writing mood and just kept going, probably going to make this a blog post or a zine at this point too lol. Thanks for the awesome writing prompt and let me know what you think!
Question: Just wanna make sure your take on how science, public health, and safety/standardization could be dealt with was attached to this post somewhere. Perhaps below? Like, how do we make sure the good, helpful information sifts to the top rather than conspiracies and cult of personality shenanigans?
So first of all, I don't necessarily think having any opinion on how public health and acceptance of science can be dealt with is useful. I think all the political, economic, and media forces that are radicalizing America are far too big and way beyond my control regardless of what I think about it. And plus opinion overload is part of the problem. We're on a platform that is actively using the latter to do the former. So while I really, really do wish people would just find a cool mask and adopt it into their everyday aesthetic and be chill til the pandemic is over, because science said so, I just don't think that is going to be what convinces anybody until a vaccine comes out, and even that is subject to skepticism. The education system is more broken than ever, I'd expect a decline in population-level scientific thought going forward rather than growth from its present low, without some massive shift occurring.
And the 'why aren't people adhering to science' thing really seems to be a sticking point for a lot of logical people, but I happen to be a half-non-logical person myself and kind of understand why people aren't listening to science. I think we're reaching the end of the Age of Enlightenment, where rational thinking and empirical proof are the chief basis of decision-making. That is really just my honest read at this point, and it's weird that social media, a great marvel of scientific and rational thinking, has made people less inclined to think scientifically or rationally but so many do that it just cant be the same Age any more. I think logical people need to examine the idea of science and the root of their belief in it, and find a new way to spread a positive message that adapts to this new paradigm of thought.
Science doesn't exist in a vacuum. I see pleas for greater adherence to science as a regular response to political thought without a firm empirical basis. I see the merit of arguments gauged and ranked by their scientific basis. But I see little direct discussion of how unchecked scientific progression has caused most of the problems we face as a society. The science a society creates reflects it priorities and values. We see more often than not science has been used as a cudgel by political and corporate institutions, and as new technology (manifested science) enters our society it has typically reinforced the harmful, profit-driven, and power-seeking motives of those hierarchical organizations that were able to research and produce it. There is no climate crisis without the Haber-Bosch process, no chemical weapons. There is no mass marketing without sociology and behavioral science. Facebook itself is a scientific triumph that ultimately degrades public discourse and trust in scientific authority.
So while 'science' as an abstract concept may be neutral, the neutral is a tool of the dominant. And you can't laud science without talking about its handmaidens: mechanization, thought dominance of a conventional expert educated class over all others, increased potential for mass violence, ecological collapse. These are the fruits of a society that regards rational thought, empiricism, and scientific proof as the chief decider of whether something is true or important, and these results are all anti-life-on-this-planet.
I know this is one-sided and that the Age of Enlightenment has brought a lot of good into the world (http, indoor plumbing, vaccines, and electric railways are my favorites) but this year has made it clear to me the Age of Enlightenment is ending and there needs to be space in our society for value systems outside of standardized scientific fonts of knowledge.
You note the cult of personality and conspiracies- Trump supporters and QAnon. These groups are clear repudiation of logic, science, and expert advice being the main guide of decisions for huge swaths of our neighbors. These groups' rise can be interpreted two ways- it is either pure tribalism- clinging to thought-similar groups and expressing distrust of others in a time of perceived crisis. Or, it is tribal instinct that has been engineered by political actors using platforms like Facebook to cult-ivate this response that the logical find inexplicable. Either way, I am forced to admit that millions are abandoning logic as their decision-making criteria, at least the logic of the nation-based, top-down modern world.
Social justice is also a not-strictly-rational value system. We need to redesign our society at its core with radical social justice measures. I think more people would agree with that statement than there are Q people or Trump supporters. And I am sure there are very empirical and logical reasons, scientific studies proving why this would make the world better. But I will go out on a limb and say most people don't care whether it is logical or not to make our societal more equitable. We don't need to beat Ben Shapiro's Facts! and Logic! in a debate to prove social justice should be a priority. It doesn't matter if it is the logical thing to do, it is the right thing to do.
In the past, overtrust and reliance on scientific authority has justified genocide and state violence. It has led to famines (Soviet Russia, Maoist China) It has created dioxin, DDT, thalidomide, oxycontin as solutions to the world's problems, creating a hydra we chop at with the same strategy. When 'science' comes in conflict with 'humanity', which do you pick?
Which I know isn't in most cases. I'm being extreme. I'm just trying to say there needs to be room in our culture to embrace the merit and reasoning of non-scientific decision making, because there ARE forces that are more important than logic and humans are guided by those things. And because science is always growing and changing, the information any given scientist presents is always going to be a little bit wrong and sometimes it is very wrong (phrenology, lobotomies, acquired traits…) meaning it can never be the perfect basis of decision-making it is held up to be. Every society should ask itself how it can help channel the need in each of us for non-scientific space in our lives. I think conservative media outlets basically have control over this space in our society and they are channeling it for Very Bad Things.
What if all of the fervor and power behind Q supporters' eyes was focused on rebuilding society positively, with cooperative economics or local alternative energy plans? Calling to the logic of non-logical people is obviously not working. Trump and Q are telling a story about the world, his detractors are presenting a graph.
There is a limit to how much empirical, expert thought can convince humans to do things, and we have reached it, the Enlightment undone by the pinnacles of its technological and political advancement, thought-controlling pay-to-play algorithms that somehow looped the human brain back into magical thinking guided by faraway unknown actors.
When I say change the narrative, I mean it literally. Like have you read the Q shit? I get why it has hooked people. It's like Tom Clancy and Hunter S. Thompson and Steven Siegal co-wrote an experimental serial novel together. If it had been published as a random genre fiction paperback I wouldnt have been surprised at its success because it is vivid and captures the imagination, with distinct characters and subplots and secret codes. What active narrative thread with a more positive vision exists? None as compelling and interactive as the Q story still being written.
The lowest hanging fruit for bridging the divide between radicalized groups across the political spectrum is to write a better story of what life could be like. In life and in writing. To make being radically in support of social and class justice a more fun and attractive choice than being an alt-right 4chan incel. This will not happen with further surges of chiding infomemes. It will happen by visibly living out social justice principles through projects in your community and giving other people reasons to make their own life story cooler by doing that in their own way. Or by writing out how you want the world to be from your gut and letting people tell you where they agree or disagree, then keep responding- And by being okay with not knowing exactly why you want to do a thing before you do, because you never really can, and lots of other people do that to.
Mystery, wonder, serendipity, coincidence. The non-rational unknown precurses adventure and excitement, the parts of life we live for. I say we lean into these instincts in our attempts to convey the importance of collective public health to people who resist empirical information for one reason or another. Tell the tale of a society that lived through a plague and got better than ever before. Write it down and do it with your life and try to get people to embrace radical ideas for community health that go even deeper into human care than the mandates of any scientific authority. By relating to radicalized people beyond a scientific perspective without compromising on the core principles of why respecting public health is important.
This post is a series of essays to lay out a personal political philosophy revolving around radically re-envisioning the local community as the units of our society. Go to the Table of Contents here or read more in the series:
3. Changing (the Shape of) the World
4. The Age of Enlightenment is Ending