Gab@StFerdinandIII - https://unstabbinated.substack.com/
Plenty of cults exist - every cult has its 'religious dogma', its idols, its 'prophets', its 'science', its 'proof' and its intolerant liturgy of demands. Cults everywhere: Corona, 'The Science' or Scientism, Islam, the State, the cult of Gender Fascism, Marxism, Darwin and Evolution, Globaloneywarming, Changing Climate, Abortion...
Tempus Fugit Memento Mori - Time Flies Remember Death
The ‘Enlightenment’ supposedly dethroned the religious occult and ushered in an era of 'rationality' and 'progress'. All hail. Before the 17th century all was dark, misshapen, ugly, superstitious, base, if not debased. Dandies and men in periwigs ‘saved civilisation’. So the story is told.
Few if any of the attendant myths around the Enlightenment are really true of course.
Modern science, innovation, technological application and political-economic improvements had already been on a long and extraordinarily interesting 1000-year journey before the 'Rational Enlightenment' declared itself. The main thrust of this so-called ‘Enlightenment’, purveyed by its self-interested, and self-declared 'geniuses', was to divorce religion and superstition from the pursuit of truth and liberty which was only found in ‘reason’. Reason is never defined. We can correctly state that much of what passes for reason is entirely unreasonable. So too is the worship of the ‘Enlightenment’.
The 'intellectuals' of the Enlightenment, many of whom were deists and in some cases atheists, had to declaim against the Christian medieval world, inventing the nonsense that it was a 'Dark Age'. As opposed to modern society where biological gender reality does not exist; endless war is freedom; reality is optional due to ‘relativity’; plant food controls ‘climate’; Biden won 81 million votes and 50% of all registered voters in 2020; Corona was a pandemic; and drugs convey health, amongst other shibboleths of the ‘age of science’.
Which age is philosophically darker?
The bastard stepchildren of ‘The Enlightenment’, namely Socialism, Communism and the varous strains of Marxism (political, cultural, sexual), developed 'scientific' approaches to managing and understanding the political-economy. Hegelianism, Marxism, dialectical materialism, statism, stage theory, class warfare and declarations of how the world really worked, rallied around this supposedly 'scientific' theory of world affairs. All of this leads to statism.
At the other end of the spectrum, deposited like cow faeces onto the farmer’s field, we have the hyper-individualisation which emanates from the ‘Enlightenment’. This has lead to social atomisation, ‘woke-ism’ the destruction of the normative family, ‘my biological truth’, and the mental illness of queer, pan-gendered sexual perversion, itself a massive market and industry for the government-pharma mafia. In other words societal and individual collapse.
Few of these main philosophical outputs from the ‘Enlightenment’ was or is rational. Only the mentally unfit would declare transexuality a healthy ‘normal’ and ‘reasonable’ condition. By denying the long history of Christianity and the important role that faith plays in developing reason and science and in defining reasonable boundaries and limits, the Enlightenment opened up a vacuum into which any swaggering theory of power with clarity and 'science' attached to it would enter.
The effects have been shattering.
Much of the derivative from Enlightenment thought was simply gibberish laced with virulent strains of anti-Semiticism and profoundly inane anti-Christian bigotry. None of the Enlightenment's ‘geniuses’ did any real research into the Medieval world of course, nor did they understand the thousands of inventions within the political-economic and social spheres which were developed over from 500 to 1500 AD and which made the 17th century so reasonably comfortable to live in, compared to previous epochs. When you research the ‘philosophes’ the most striking feature is the lack of originality and complete ignorance of past history.
The very concepts of ‘reason’ and natural law rights are found in medieval theology and Scholasticism of course, as are the ‘discoveries’ of ‘natural laws’, or those patterns in nature which seem to underlie physical observation and experimentation. Such attitudes were informed in part by ancient cultures, including the Roman, Greek, Jewish and Near Eastern.
Human society was thus well acquainted with ‘Enlightenment’ ideals more than 800 years ago. This was long before effeminate men in garish costumes plagiarised such ideas and claimed them as their own. Where did parliaments (reasoned debate) and universities (reasoned education), both 12th and 13th century constructs found in many states contemporaneously, emanate from? Did the physics emanating from the cathedral school at Chartres in the 12th century categorise itself as dark and superstitious?
The arrogance and hubris of the Enlighteners is an undeniable and outstanding characteristic of their cult.
Are we as clever as we think?
Isn’t our modern philosophy of Scientism and love of all things ‘science’ and ‘secular’ a delusion? We rejoice in our ‘modernity’. The reality is that tooling, innovation and technology are not based on ‘science’ and never have been. A horse plough was not designed from abstract physics. A canal is not a derivative of algebraic theory. Watermills did not invoke Pythagoras. A steam engine has no correlation with research models. Electricity owes nothing to cosmology or physics. Buildings have always been constructed using evidential calculations and experience not abstract theories. Mathematical theory has no relationship to the chance discoveries of transistors which power modern devices.
What then ‘science’? Isn’t hands-on work and practicality the real driver of innovation?
The danger with 'Scientism' as elucidated by the Enlightenment was aptly stated in 1977 by the great Italian historian and philosopher, Augusto del Noce (1910-1989) who foretold that the scientific management of society would result in a totalitarianism. Noce presciently predicted, 'a war against all forms of knowing that are not deemed as scientific'. ‘Science and reason’ would thus become instruments of power, ideologies perverted by privileged elitists. Scientism would wage war on all other ideologies. With confidence we can say:
The irony is obvious. The Enlightenment, which supposedly was a revolt against the superstition and power of the church, is directly responsible for establishing what it was attacking, namely a cult managed by an elite who would enforce 'the right way of thinking and believing.'
The Enlightenment appropriated the Christian ideals of natural law rights, reason, rational debate and declared these to be ‘new inventions’. Most of us would call this theft. This appropriation came however, with an important caveat.
The age-old belief that the human was unique and thus had a singular responsibility to improve this world and live by normative moral constructs and objective reason was rejected. The Enlightenment went in the opposite direction. Natural law, natural rights, the immaterial, the emotional, even the rational which will differ based on the person, culture, history and context of a person’s life; would be perverted and twisted. Only approved ‘reason’, managed by the ‘reasonable’ and wise elite would rule.
Various cults of Scientism and ‘reason’ have long been offered. Utopia’s based on ‘rationality’ include Plato’s ‘Republic’ which was managed by rational ‘guardians’. Plato tried to implement his utopia of reason in Syracuse Italy and was ejected by violence and threats. Saint-Simon and the French revolutionary Enlighteners established a ‘Church of Science’ which was a 19th century precursor to the Reich Church of the Nazis. Utilitarianism [Rousseau, Bentham], or personal pleasure with no restrictions based on your rational objectives became popular and has led to atomisation and the imposition of state-protected groups such as LBGTQ+. Many sub cults of reason have been offered, and all are just variations on Enlightener themes.
The creation of the perfect utopian society, inhabited by the 'perfect man' is in many ways the end objective of the Enlightener obsession with ‘reason’ [pace Saint Simon, Robert Owen]. This has created a deranged focus on using state power to 'mould' children, people and the average citizen to do what 'was in the best interests of society'. The Corona plandemic was clearly an expression of such power and beliefs, itself an echo of Communism and Nazism totalitarian control. Education, the media, and governmental supremacy have been deployed to reform the individual so they can participate in a rational society of perfection.
The elite know best. Science is the only path. Follow and obey. Platonic ideals were plagiarised and repackaged during ‘The Enlightenment’.
Imagine if today some 'genius' declared that the era between 1500 and 1900 was a 'Dark Age', full of nothing but pain, superstition, occultism, illiteracy, dirt, darkness and ignorance. Such a ‘philosophe’ could justify this conclusion by pointing to:
colonialism, black enslavement, witch burnings;
destruction of the Ameri-Indians through plague and war;
abiogenesis and other unscientific gibberish;
‘germ theory’ a monstrosity with no proof;
the establishment of the health-pharma-drugs mafia complex;
frauds which dominate the cults of ‘evolution’ and naturalist ‘science’;
Communism, Marxism, various bloody revolutions;
the lack of hygiene and sanitation;
grinding, absolute, soul destroying poverty for the masses;
indentured white slavery in the US and Australia (30-50% of the US population in 1700 were white slaves, called ‘indentured servants’ - what is a rose?);
the endless stories of war, imperialism, poverty, disease, early death and hopelessness;
the satanic industrial mills of the 18th and 19th centuries and what must be termed white-slavery;
creating the antecedents for the global wars of the 20th century
A declaration that 1500-1900 was a ‘Dark Age’ would not be entirely wrong. But this era is a part of a larger picture, which eventually bequeaths in spasms of progress, encased in an inimitable complexity that is difficult to comprehend, the ease of life we now enjoy in our modern, albeit bankrupt, world. Yet this is what occurred during the 17th century. All eras previous to this were simply branded 'backwards'. How occultist and how bigoted.
Augusto del Noce's 1977 declaration is thus prescient, but also quite obvious when viewing Western development in the 18th and 19th centuries. If an era dethrones man from his central place in the cosmos, and violently attacks faith as 'irrational', and scorns any expression of non-scientific belief, than surely a new cult is being thrust onto society to replace the old order. Cui bono?
Given Ferdinand Braudel’s ‘long view’ of history, why wouldn't 'science and rationality' be used for political totalitarianism and power-mongering ends?
It is duly ironic that Enlighteners, and their various cults of ‘science’, technocratism, progressivism, positivism, rationalism, humanism, secularism and globalism, all premised on ‘reason’, use religious fervour and pre-modern techniques to silence their critics and propagandize their cult. Modern inquisitions abound, abetted by state and corporate power. Heretics are crushed and often killed. All of this is deemed ‘modern’.
Ironically, the self-loving modern secularist-Enlightener, promoting ‘The Science’, has become the intolerant, irrational, cult member that the Enlightenment tried to eradicate!
Further, we can ask pace the prescient insightful Noce, this simple question: ‘Isn't science and elevating reason above all else just a form of totalitarianism?’ Isn't the God of Science as much an act of faith as the God Yahweh or the Trinity of Christ ? Science, whatever that word might mean, riven with corruption, deceit, fraud and ignorance, cannot explain everything and has great trouble explaining anything.
How then can 'Scientism' be reasonable when the very foundations of that rationality have been removed? These are questions that the modern Enlightener, happily pickled in the myths of Enlightenment propagada, would never bother to contemplate, further confirming that Scientism is little more than a cult.
All hail the King.
==Del Noce
Augusto del Noce, The Problem of Atheism (Volume 84) (McGill-Queen's Studies in the History of Ideas). 2022
Augusto del Noce, Carlo Lancellotti, The Crisis of Modernity (Vol 64), 2014.
Augusto del Noce, Carlo Lancellotti, The Age of Secularization (Studies in the History of Ideas, #74), 2017