OnlySubs Episode 84: Regaining Narrative Control is now available exclusively for New Discourses contributors on the following platforms:
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I have a metric for how well we’re doing against the Regime: how long it takes people to see through a narrative blitz and pull discussion back to reality. This aligns with my idea that we’re entering into a Second Enlightenment, and dire as things are, I see reasons for hope. In particular, while it took mainstream people years to start to see through the Trump Derangement Syndrome narrative, Covid-19 and Black Lives Matter took only months. Now, with the conflict in Ukraine, we’re seeing serious skepticism arrive in roughly a week. This means that a full-on narrative offensive from the Regime is less effective today than it was at any point in the past, and the time it takes to see through the narrative push and wrench it back to reality is decreasing. I read this as a profoundly positive sign. Join me in this episode of James Lindsay OnlySubs, my subscribers-only podcast, to explore this idea and dork out with me on it through a JRR Tolkien metaphor.
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6 comments
“The ‘Enlightenment’ was the winning of the right to use reason where it contradicted the authority of the church of the day.”
This quote (I cannot find the source at the moment) is from 1651 and followed the first trial in Europe by the church of the day (protestant or catholic, it doesn’t matter which) for “heresy” that was overruled by secular law. This ruling set a precedent and thereafter no church could use their partisan imaginary beliefs in “heresy” and “blasphemy” as justification for torturing and exterminating any person who they accused of transgressing those beliefs.
I believe it was this breakthrough in human freedom from the arbitrary cruelty of any religion’s absolute power in favour of secular jurisprudence that fuelled the claims, exaggerations and fury of the men of the historical period called the “Enlightenment”. The question is not whether some scientific facts were discovered by believers or unbelievers from 500 AD onwards. The point is that the church abused its power in horrific and literal overkill for 1500 years. This brutal and obscene power over human life was despised by anyone of conscience and these men of the 18th century rejoiced that this beast was at last caged and humans protected from its vindictive tyranny and unspeakable horrors.
This whole discussion of “Enlightenment” is now moot anyway, since we are back where we started 450 years ago. This right to use reason where it contradicted the authority of the church of the day began in 1651 and ended in February 2015 when the authority of a new church of the day once again superceded reason. Following the Charlie Hebdo exterminations yet another “blasphemy” was elevated above the secular legal right to criticize or mock any “church”. The men of the 17th century cheered the end of the tyranny of the church of their day. The Woke of the 21st century cheered their opportunity to exploit the supremacy of a new “church” of the day that they willingly elevated to legal and “moral” primacy over the secular right to oppose any ideological or theocratic “church” and its tyrannical “blasphemies” (and “-isms” and “-phobias”).
The “church of the day” in 2022 now wears a new face and the Woke are its Inquisition. The Malleus lives again as DIE and “hate” laws. The comet of human freedom ascended to a perihelion of brief liberation of conscience and has now descended back into the aphelion of “church of the day” menticide and tyranny. Ourobouosian is the word.
Suggestion to James Lindsay: find another word or term that conveys what you mean by your use of the concept “Enlightenment”. Your ideas about the need for a new (or revived) concept of freedom from ideological or theocratic authoritarianism are absolutely and desperately required at this time (as they were in 1651), so don’t let your ideas be diminished or obfuscated by terminological attacks over what apparently is now a dead (or murdered) term. Find a new term. I personally use “Leave Me The F-K Alone”, but I’m sure you can come up with something more substantial, understandable and universal. You’re on the right path. Keep going forward.
typo correction: Ouroborosian — before the pedants attack!
LOL. What you set forth in defense of the “Enlightenment” are the myths and false narratives accepted by gullible people in order to attack the Church and also promote the “Enlightenment” and themselves as “enlightened” thinkers. It is precisely your position that Stark completely destroys in his book referenced in my previous comment, so thanks for playing along and basically repeating what Stark demonstrates via significant source material is completely false.
You have also repeated yet another weak-thinking myth about the Inquisition because you gullibly accept the false history surrounding it. However, back in 1994 the BBC (no fan of any church) broadcast a documentary that greatly irritated people like you because it set the record straight in direct contradiction of yet another false myth/narrative still accepted by weak-minded people today. The documentary (Timewatch: The Myth of the Spanish Inquisition) is still available and can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CY-pS6iLFuc
So as they say in the scientific community, you are so far off the mark that you are not even wrong. 🙂
Now, based on your wholesale acceptance of the myths and false history of the “Enlightenment” and Inquisition, and your obvious hatred of religion in general, I don’t suspect you will even bother to check out the references I set forth, because such is the way of the Woke Approach you have adopted to avoid/ignore arguments/real history, etc. while pretending such things have already been answered and/or refuted, but others more wisely open-minded toward objective truth and historical accuracy may indeed follow-up and truly enlighten themselves in the process while you continue to wallow in darkness and self-imposed blindness. Bravo!
Yawn.
JS:
I understand your intellectual limitations, but if you really want a good yawn, re-read your claptrap. At all costs, never, ever honestly engage the arguments and challenges to your inaccurate narrative of history that you favor simply because it supports your weak-minded bigotry. It is indeed the woke thing to do, master of wokeness.
James:
The most serious problem with your excitement about and promotion of a “second Enlightenment” is the sad fact that you still wrongly believe the mainstream and largely false history/propaganda of the first so-called Enlightenment and the concomitant false claim about the so-called Dark Ages that preceded it. The reality is that the so-called Dark Ages were not nearly as dark as claimed, and the Enlightenment was not nearly as light as claimed, and so accepting false history leads to false conclusions.
One honest sociologist/historian by the name of Rodney Stark is the first place you could look to become better informed on such things. In his eye-opening book entitled “How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity” (2014), Stark devotes an entire section to obliterating the myths of the so-called Dark Ages. The section is entitled “The Not-So-Dark Ages (500 – 1250). In this section of some 70 pages you will find out that many discoveries wrongly attributed to the Enlightenment period actually came about during the so-called Dark Ages, while other later discoveries were based on fundamental and necessary work done during the so-called Dark Ages. Moreover, many remarkable discoveries of the so-called Dark Ages still benefit the modern world.
What you will also find out from this book is the following from a later section of the book which I will now quote in part:
“Just as a group of eighteenth-century philosophers invented the notion of the “Dark Ages” to discredit Christianity, they labeled their own era the “Enlightenment” on grounds that religious darkness had finally been dispelled by secular humanism. As Bertrand Russell later explained, the ‘Enlightenment was essentially a revaluation of independent intellectual activity, aimed quite literally at spreading light where hitherto darkness had prevailed.’ Thus did Voltaire, Rousseau, Locke, Hume, and others wrap themselves in the achievements of the ‘Scientific Revolution’ as they celebrated the victory of secularism, eventuating in the Marquis Laplace’s claim that God was now an unnecessary hypothesis.
Of course, not one of these “Enlightened” figures played any part in the scientific enterprise. What about those who did? Were they a bunch of skeptics too? Hardly.
First of all, thirteen of the scientific stars (25 percent) were members of the clergy, nine of them Roman Catholic.”
(From “How the West Was Won”, p. 309)
What Stark is referencing in the last sentence quoted is a listing of some 52 scientists during this time period who all made significant contributions to science while also being devoted men of religion. This fact/reality also obliterates the false claims made about the “Enlightenment.”
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James: You have done very fine historical work going back into the mid-19th century to perhaps discover things you thought you knew, but now you know better. To avoid making unnecessary mistakes in promoting a “second Enlightenment,” I sincerely urge you to take the time to look into the real history of the “Enlightenment” as well as the many evils stemming from so-called Enlightenment thinking, and to also honestly look at the so-called Dark Ages and Christianity during that time period to discover that the age was not so dark, nor was the Church a bastion of artificial authoritarianism that curtailed the freedom of its followers.
The Stark book is a good start. I hope that you and perhaps others who may read this comment will also pick up a copy and study it carefully, and then go from there to learn even more true history that will lead to a necessary/honest rejection of the unthinking fallacy of groupthink that wrongly declares the “Enlightenment” was an excellent development, and that the so-called Dark Ages was a period of oppression and suppression. Good Luck.