The Endarkenment

Robert Fenton Gary

That man is a featherless biped cannot be denied.

That the possession of reason is his most characteristic and distinctive attribute beyond being featherless and bipedal is arguable.

The alternative is that post-natal malleability is more distinctive and more characteristic of Homo Sapiens as a species than reason.

Reason and malleability are competitors for the role of most species special attribute of humans.

From the time of Voltaire and Jefferson we have experienced the Enlightenment --- based on the idea that reason is man's most distinctive trait. The case for this idea goes all the way back to Aristotle, although there was never a mass movement of all humanity based on the reason special trait idea until the 17th Century, (or, if you like, the 16th Century for a scholarly quibble).

Anyhow, we are now in the 21st century, and since the dawn of that century we entered the Endarkenment which is based on post-natal malleability as the primary feature that separates Sapiens as a featherless biped from all others.

Education and culture took over around the year 2000 as the thing that makes man as a species special. No other species has this level of post-natal malleability.

The teachers unions know it, and have used this remarkable fact to change the world.

They have taken charge. They are at the wheel. They are driving the Sapiens Bus. Because man is mostly a piece of clay that can be formed like a Bonsai tree is formed. Human nature is up for grabs, and the progressive socialists in the teaching profession have grabbed it, and are bending it to their will.

A.H. the leader of 1939 Germany, was an early knower of the new reality defining humankind. He knew he could shape people like little Bonsai trees to be anything and do anything he wanted them to do.

Orwell, a fiction writer of the early 1930's also knew this fundamental shift in the defining feature and man. Man redefined is the central theme of his book "1984".

Aldous Huxley also reached for a similar idea, but missed the mark because his fiction "Brave New World" centered on the malleability of man through genetic engineering, which remains a possibility, but which so far has not actually occurred at a significant level.

One could make the case that "breeding" or animal husbandry has been applied to humans since the republic of ancient Rome, and this case is credible but not compelling. High society always had the intent to marry the best to the best, and thus to produce the even better. The nation that is great could be made greater yet, as the song goes.

Plato talks about this in his book The Republic.

Plato was an early science fiction writer, well he called it philosophy, but it was really love of possibilities and ideas not love of wisdom per se.

But there was much wisdom in Plato's play with ideas.

Sophia is a hard word to pin down. It could mean deep insight. It could mean the views of a deeply informed and experienced thinker.

Anyhow my information leads me to see that 2000 marked the transition from the Age of Enlightenment to the Age of Endarkenment, which we are now in, and are being manipulated based on the way, like little Bonsai trees, we were shaped to grow, and develop.

I was born in 1947, so I span the point of transition, so I am able to observe its occurance. Thucydides and Herodotus also were able to observe things that happened in their lifetimes. Big things. But not as big as the defining feature of the species itself.

Malleability was there in 1930's and in the Garden of Eden. It was not always our defining feature as it now is. Reason used to be our specific difference. So malleability has taken over, sometime called neotany.

"Free will" is a talking point for intellectuals, of which I am not one. You may invite me to plunge into that briar patch but, it's not for me. Too ningee, too pingee, and I know better. That colloquim has been ongoing for 1500 years and made zero progress. Omar Khayyam mocked it in the 12th Century, and so did Lucretius in the 1st Century, and Democritus before that. So, not jumping in on that, find a Calvinist, thrash it out with him.

I am a work-a-day engineer, trial lawyer, inventor. Not an intellectual, scholar, or philosopher.

I agree that parents can, do, and should play a role in the shaping of the minds of their kids.

I am NOT talking about a course change from "reason" back to "emotion".

No doubt that is true and happening.

What I am saying relates to a change in the DEFINING feature of Sapiens as a SPECIES.

Once that defining feature was reason. Hence the age of enlightenment.

Now the new defining feature is post-natal malleability (like a Bonsai tree).

That means we are not fully born until we get through our "education" phase.

Recent ephemeral switches have arbitrarily been toward more emotion and less reason, but my point is FAR larger than that.

I say reason is no longer the differentiating

Tim adds:

 I think the age of endarkenment (you should copyright that phrase) began some time ago. Certainly there was a counter-revolution in the 19th century against the Enlightenment.

We had the Romantic Era which stressed emotion over reason, and we had the rise of socialism in it's many evil incarnations, which was clearly an anti-rationalist movement, an attempt to ape the Christian religious beliefs (there is a paradise from which Man has fallen, there is a struggle for the world, there is promise of redemption and a return to paradise once we get rid of those nasty industrialists and free markets and learn to live together as one big happy family...) Socialism was a Christian heresy, frankly, and so has much of the modern endarkenment.

So we had Rousseau creating both Fascism and the roots of Communism, and a casual reading of the Communist Manifesto bespeaks an argument made more out of emotion than reason.

When I was in college I took an English course and it emphasized writers who promoted emotion over reason - and that has been ongoing for a couple of centuries now. And like a seed growing into a great plant it has now reached maturity and the Enlightenment is dead as a doornail. We now live in an anti-rational world.

The bad thing is the structures and forms that the Enlightenment put into place are still there but they no longer work as designed because they were put in place under the assumption that Man was a rational critter. You cannot have a Constitutional Republic in an irrational society. It leads only to despotism. Force must be employed to govern the irrational.

Most on the Left understand this full well but they believe (not think) the goal of paradise is worth it. In Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon the Bolsheviks kill the protagonist in the end - after telling him that one day he would be listed as a hero of the Revolution. But now he had to die. That is the belief aspect at work.

At any rate the desire for, well to put it baldly magic runs deep in the human mind and heart. And learning to think requires a lot of effort and diligence and vigilance. It's much easier to feel than think.

And the efforts to educate using the language of the students was a monumental disaster that guaranteed they never learned. The whole point of being a student is to learn structure and form and how to organize your thoughts. But the educrats dumped all that in the eighties and promoted this idea that facts and reason were less important than how one feels.

Barbarians, savages, even animals know full well how they feel; that is no big trick. What the aforementioned do NOT do is reason, think; that requires learning how to do so.

Also, oddly enough the emphasis on STEM over the humanities hurt education very badly. It is all very specific, goal oriented teaching. It fails because people need to learn HOW to think and not what. They need to understand the connections and not just a pre-planned pathway. Art and literature are every bit as important as science and math because it connects the two. History is absolutely critical; you cannot know where to go if you don't know where you've been. Our modern world is completely ignorant of history. Shoot; most people still believe Columbus "proved" the world was round and that everyone thought it flat prior. (That was a lie told in a much-used textbook by a socialist who wanted to attack the older order.)

We are clearly entering a new dark age. How long it lasts depends on how far we fall. Frankly I'm betting it's going to be a long way. We have plenty of knowledge but are putting it on computer and books are being phased out. Once the books are gone and we can't maintain the machines we lose it all. It's happened that way in the past, but never were all our eggs in one basket.

It's going to be a spectacular fall.

Entropy governs our universe. And irrationality is entropic in nature; it is a disorganization. It's NATURAL to be a mindless brute beast. A big part of the problem with humanity is that we are a dichotomy between our brains and our glands. We created civilization to protect us from other brute beasts and from the elements. But we never liked it.

Agriculture required endless hours of toil to produce food or make what is needed. Industry forced us into mines or factories, sweating in great heat and busting our tails. We did it because we HAD to do it. But nobody liked it.

I once heard it said that there were plenty of white people who adopted Indian ways and lived among the natives but few Indians who voluntarily became white people. That was because the life of an Indian was inherently more desirable; you didn't have much but you didn't have a boss riding you all day, or had to be at work at a specific time every day. That is why the old nomadic tribes lasted as long as they did; their lives were in many ways easier. But the wave of history was to centralization and organization, and the nomad died quite easily, and could be beaten in war just as easily, usually (not always; the Mongols are a prime example.)

So I think Robert that you are right in many ways; we are going back to the irrational brutish era. But that is because industry has made life so easy and given so much that we CAN go backward for a time. But that neotany is not going to last, because it will inevitably lead to a collapse and terrible hardships which will force everyone to think or die.

Now our society is aimed at protecting the weak and vulnerable, which ultimately means the stupid and lazy and mindless. That can only happen when a society is rich and well-ordered. As things fall down around us those conditions will change; we won't be able to coddle the stupid or lazy. And without the protections of government these groups will perish.

So what we'll see is more and more despotism as those in power try to reverse the trend. We saw that in the late Roman Empire, as they instituted Emperor worship and began draconian regulations that ultimately led to serfdom and feudalism - the Middle Ages. That was because Rome went through the same thing that we are now going through. This is a cycle of history, methinks.

Sadly all good things must come to an end. The Enlightenment gave us a golden age. The gold is now well tarnished. Soon we will be in another age, and it will not be pleasant.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 09:08 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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