Are We Cancelling the Enlightenment?

The Enlightenment had a good run. Over 400 years ago, an audacious idea emerged among scientists and philosophers that a single shared reality existed that could be measured and predicted using fundamental laws of nature. All the trappings of modern life, every technological convenience and scientific breakthrough flowed from the radical realization that truth exists — not in the proclamations of the powerful, but in underlying nature itself.

The re-election of Donald Trump is a harbinger that the Enlightenment may now be on its last legs. Bored and weary of having to accommodate facts we don’t agree with, many are retreating into bespoke realities served up by social media algorithms. Our ubiquitous devices and online platforms — themselves a product of Enlightenment thought — are ironically becoming its undoing.

Embracing a shared evidence-based reality is hard work. It requires dialogue and compromise among people who disagree and respecting the rights of those we might not respect. Many people seem sick of it. Popular cyber-platforms paired with artificial intelligence provide a convenient off-ramp from a confusing and frightening world that increasingly requires our attention and agency.

Historian and author Yuval Noah Harari notes that “most information is not truth.” Our social media feeds are a firehose of addictive and largely useless images and videos, curated by online algorithms designed not to inform but to keep us engaged.

These information streams are also increasingly polluted with AI-assisted disinformation in an effective effort to weaponize ignorance and undermine the very concept of truth. Why? Because disinformation works. In the words of Holocaust historian Timothy Snyder, “post-truth is pre-fascism.... To abandon facts is to abandon freedom.”

Knife to a gunfight

While Democrats were wearing out shoe leather knocking on doors in an obsolete ground game, Republicans were winning the online information war by convincing voters that inflation and crime were getting worse (they were not). For those readers who still care about truth and evidence, surveys showed that voters who embraced disinformation were far more likely to vote for a populist like Trump. Similar troubling trends exist on this side of the border.

Democrats gamely tried to defend Enlightenment ideals of evidence and reasoning. Like bringing a knife to a gunfight, they carried a podium into a cage match. Republicans instead focused on crafting an alternate reality through social media platforms, some of which are conveniently owned by their most vocal supporters. Even if democracy survives Donald Trump and his dangerous retinue of ideologues and grifters, ballot box decision-making may have already gone the way of the horse and buggy.

Many governing political parties are now embracing the lazy groupthink demanded by their supporters. Avoiding climate catastrophe means drastically reducing carbon emissions, but people enjoy cheap abundant energy and the economic prosperity it provides. What to do?

Instead of facing those hard choices, the United Conservative Party of Alberta recently passed a resolution at its annual meeting proclaiming that “the Earth needs more CO2 to support life and to increase plant yields, both of which contribute to the Health and Prosperity of all Albertans.” Decades of robust climate science were indulgently dismissed in a show of hands by 6,000 UCP faithful gathered in Red Deer. Problem solved.

Donald Trump’s economic plan has been derided by most mainstream economists as likely disastrous for fighting inflation and affordability — the leading issues for most American voters. But mainstream economists don’t dance on TikTok, so who cares what they say?

A spiritual deficit

As damaged as democracy is, the Enlightenment also has some weighty issues to answer for. An underlying reason why so many sometimes feel their existence is meaningless is that ancient myth and meaning that sustained almost every society throughout history has largely been overwritten by incomprehensible science. An endemic ennui now feeds dangerous rates of depression, addiction and of course further retreat into online isolation.

Philosophy and science had been inseparably entwined since the days of Aristotle, but after a messy breakup some two centuries ago, they often pretend not to know each other in public. Science, for all its undeniable technological achievements, has largely abdicated any responsibility to fill the spiritual void it itself created, becoming instead an inaccessible bureaucracy unwelcoming to the uninitiated. We may be among the first generations in human history to try to trudge through life unblanketed by any collective mystical belief.

It is no coincidence that evangelical Christians are some of Trump’s most ardent supporters — despite his lifelong litany of sins, hypocrisy and serial narcissism. Faith rather than facts is clearly what many still crave. Until we so-called progressives can articulate a collective higher calling more meaningful than merely vanquishing our political foes, it will be difficult to compete even with the vacuous fare on Instagram and TikTok.

In the words of Kamala Harris, “we are not going back” to the days of oppressive, corrupt and often criminal religious institutions. But what is the spiritual way forward? Can we discern a more awe-inspiring meaning for our lives consistent with what we know of the natural world? Can we construct a sanctuary that can withstand the winds of rational inquiry and maybe even coax philosophy and science to get back together?

There is plenty of wonder to go around without the need of a demanding deity. Researchers are exploring exciting new ideas like assembly theory that might explain why the universe — in defiance of the law of entropy — seems to crave increasing complexity, and perhaps even sentient life.

Nobel laureate and physicist Roger Penrose, liberated at the age of 93 from having to further impress his academic colleagues, is postulating that the puzzling experience of consciousness might be explained by quantum processes curated within the human brain.

It has been over a century since Einstein humbled all human endeavours with his groundbreaking insights into the nature of existence. In this fraught moment we could use another revelation to remind us how much more unites than divides us.

These developments might seem unrelated to the outcome of the U.S. election. However, what is the use of truth without meaning? If the Enlightenment is to reinvent itself, it needs to remind us all why a single shared reality is worth the effort.