THE LAST BEST HOPE

Our activities are now altering our planet’s climate and extinguishing species at a faster rate than we can determine for any previous such change during the 65 million years since the impact of our dinosaur-killing meteorite. Our glaciers and ice caps are observably melting, mean sea level is measurably rising and at an accelerating rate, and the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events are increasing. We are also emerging from a global pandemic, but with the expectation that we will be into the next one within a few decades at best. And our strange response to all of this seems to have been a resumption of the ancient battle between fear and desire-grounded authoritarianism and reason and empathy-grounded democracy, which most of us thought had been settled during the European Enlightenment. I am writing here to offer my thoughts on why it wasn’t settled, how it not having been settled has led to both our environmental self-sabotage and political regression, and how we might still be able to halt and reverse these.

To sneak peek ahead to the action item, I will be arguing for a very simple change. It will seem at first glance to be both trivial and something that we are already doing. Then, from a little deeper understanding, it will seem to be both undesirable and impossible. If I can persuade readers to stay with me over those hurdles then I think that as I build my case it will become understandable as our only sane option.

My proposed change is our acceptance of on-demand-repeatable physical observation as our deepest determinant for knowledge. To unpack this a little; I mean our acceptance of the authority of our senses – in what we can see, hear, feel and smell; and on demand repeatably demonstrate through the senses of other people – as our most reliable basis for selection or rejection of any knowledge proposals. I do not mean ‘as our sole basis’. I am not suggesting abandonment of our old amygdala grounded subjective determinants (of fear and desire) in areas that we can see to be not yet within the scope of our on-demand-repeatable physical observations. I mean merely our binding commitment to these observations – which I will henceforth abbreviate to ODRPO – as that which we will not hold other knowledge in direct contravention of. To put it still more simply; I will be arguing for our acceptance of whatever on- demand repeatably and shareably looks like a duck, waddles like a duck, smells like a duck, quacks and so on, as a duck; however much we may desire or fear its being something else¹.

As just suggested, most of us now believe ourselves to have already made this commitment. But such belief has been self-deceptive, in that we can on demand repeatably see ourselves to have been propagating systems of emotionally seductive yet blatantly contra-ODRPO knowledge. We have been doing this from evolutionarily adaptive and broadly sympathetic motives, but it has always involved serious collateral damage. We have been unable to see such damage exactly because of its adaptivity; essentially, in a broader and deeper analog of our oil companies being unable to see global climate disruption. But I will show in this essay that, on balance, our propagation of directly contra-ODRPO knowledge systems as reality no longer is adaptive. The oldest and deepest of such systems are our religions.

During about the past 350 years we have been able to construct alongside our religions a vast edifice of knowledge that is explicitly and deliberately grounded in ODRPO. Every one of our billions of proposals which comprise the established body of science can be followed back, given the relevant instruments and understanding, to a direct and shareable “Are you this, or are you that?” interrogation of physical reality. But our ancient systems of superstition featuring supernatural beings can no longer be honestly understood to be in merely mild or partial opposition to science. If/when we can bring ourselves to view them with full intellectual honesty then their opposition can be seen to be total.

To illustrate: Each of our main religions offers as initial justification for our belief in its central supernatural being the historical occurrence of a specific set of directly contra-science events. For example, for Christianity this set includes spontaneous combustion of wet wood, staffs being turned into snakes (and back again), our planet’s rotation being stopped for 12 hours (to enable completion of a battle in which God’s forces were winning), a person being turned into a pillar of salt, virgin birth, walking on water (and turning it into wine), reanimation after three days of being dead, and anti-gravity ascent into the sky. These events are offered within Christianity’s foundational text, the Bible, as our justifications for belief in its supernatural being, God.

And we can see the ironclad logical requirement for a set of such events. From the system’s conveyance of God’s distinguishing characteristics precisely through his performance of these events we can understand our belief in him to rest entirely upon our belief in them. We can see that if we substitute a different set of events – say, transcription of the foundational text by a previously illiterate man in response to dictation by an angel in a mountain cave, and later flight on a winged horse to Jerusalem – then we end up with a different supernatural being (in the case of those events, with Allah), who instructs different behavior from us, including obedience to a different set of priests. And from that we can see that if we dispense with our belief in the historical occurrence of all supernatural events then we dispense with any coherent justification for our belief in any of the supernatural beings. Our clear and simple admission that the events didn’t actually happen logically subsumes admission that the beings don’t actually exist. We can admittedly choose instead to jettison logic, but let me return to that in a moment.

To complete first, and in light of the above, my demonstration of the now total incompatibility between religion and science: we can see science’s most significant change during the past 350 years to have been its vast increase in internal coherence. Not only can we see all of science’s billions of proposals to be directly traceable, through valid reasoning chains, back to ODRPO; we can also see them to be internally linked – again, through valid reasoning chains – to each other. This cross linkage has now progressed to the point of our being able to understand that actual occurrence of even one of our religions’ foundational supernatural events would be sufficient to effectively invalidate our entire scientific edifice. In line with Karl Popper’s “single repeatable negative observation disproof”, which we will come to soon, it would tell us that our universe is fundamentally not as science and reason have been indicating it to be.

Traditionally, those who seek to rationally defend religions have tried to finesse our growing understanding of their incompatibility with science by pointing out that their supernatural beings are, by definition, not bound by science’s limitations. They claim that their particular religion’s supernatural events could and did happen precisely through being caused by its supernatural being. But this finesse is logically invalid. We cannot simultaneously base our belief in the existence of a being on the occurrence of certain events while believing in the occurrence of those events on the basis of their having been done by that being. Our name for the involved fallacy is tautology, and we regard it as a fallacy because we can see it to be constructible for the justification of any proposal whatsoever, from which it is incapable of justifying any specific proposal over any other.

Basically, we can understand that instead the rubber genuinely does need to meet the road at some point; that we need to be able to reference down to some independent – “honest third party arbitration” – determinant that is available to all of us and is not governed by our intrinsically self-serving subjective biases. We need this because – at our deepest accessible epistemic level, and after all our emotionally seductive and self-gratifying sentimentality has been gently set to the side – there is only one other alternative. It is that of Thrasymachus, and the Athenians threatening the Melians; that “might equals right”. This may finally be what we want, or as many still believe, “the best that we can do”. But I am writing here for those who have throughout history already been leaning in the other direction.

None of what I’ve been saying is rocket science. Most of us who already have some commitment to reason and science have been aware of their growing incompatibility with religions for many generations. Yet we have been effectively choosing to avoid thinking too much about this ourselves and to diplomatically gloss over it in our interactions with religious people. This has been grounded in what I will be introducing below as the “Moderate Enlightenment and Postmodern Truce”. Basically, in our having been well educated in our inability to resolve the operative question – Gods, or no Gods? – and so in the futility and counter-productivity of our raising it. I will show that in this we have again been deceiving ourselves; that reason can in fact deliver a clear resolution.

More seriously, I will show that if reason can do this and we emotionally reject its ability to do so without being able to provide any coherent substitute for reason – so, any alternative platform from which we can honestly understand ourselves to be maintaining the rejection – then our epistemic stable door is open and our horse is in the next county. However cleverly we may continue to delude ourselves to the contrary, our position effectively is “might = right”.

To demonstrate: If we are willing to suspend reason to protect our belief in an imaginary supernatural being then from what position are we able to reinstate it for opposition to an aspirant savior-strongman’s claim that he is that being’s chosen earthly representative? Once we have embraced the principle of rejecting reason because we don’t subjectively like its conclusions then how can we require better from our wannabe strongmen in response to any reasons that we may be able to offer them against coercively forcing us to do their bidding? To revert to my original analogy; in the absence of any previously agreed and binding third party our tires are just uselessly spinning on oiled ice. Thrasymachus wins. Whenever our spoken or written resistance have seemed to our authoritarian rulers to be becoming “dangerously” effective then the argument has been ended by the sword; or nowadays by the rifle butt or jackboot. This is not entirely, but substantially, what we can see ourselves to have been doing throughout our developmental history to date. This essay’s underlying question – and the one that we are still deeply educating ourselves for inability to see – is do we want to keep doing it?

We did try, under our designation as “the new atheists”, some rational re-engagement with religion primarily during the 1980s and 1990s. But we did so with an effectively fatal level of deference. We did not explicitly suggest ODRPO’s clear and simple antidote, and we did not discuss the vast collateral damage that I will show here to have always been associated with our propagation of knowledge systems that we can see to be in direct contravention of ODRPO. To reiterate, these have been first and most clearly our superstitions of religion; but then – through our early mental training involved in their acceptance, and the explicit sanctions of their supernatural beings – all our similarly desire and fear grounded secular superstitions of self-serving racism, sexism, homophobia, ethnic superiority, blatantly dysfunctional economic ideologies, bias for coercive patriarchal rule, xenophobic nationalism, and so on).

It is not an accident or coincidence that our proponents for all these are rediscovering their commonality of cause in the present recoalescence of our pre-Enlightenment battle lines. They can all be seen, if/when we become desperate enough to view them with full intellectual honesty, to be growths from a common root. This essay’s main thesis is illustration of that root, within the proposal of our finally taking our most affective possible step for shrinking it. To reiterate; accepting for ourselves, and starting to teach to our children, ODRPO as our deepest determinant for knowledge.

I will return to this soon. But first, and as promised above, I need to provide some historical background on how we’ve painted ourselves into our present corner; as this will be seen to address many initial objections and to segue into my case for the urgency of our taking action.

I will do this by providing two highly condensed sketches of our mainstream western philosophical development over the past 400 years. The first will be my understanding of what we might call “the consensus narrative”; the one that I think will seem familiar to most educated people. The second will be my critical re-work; in effect, where I believe the consensus narrative to be wrong, or think that our choices and/or fate might have been able to serve us better.

The Consensus Narrative:

Starting from 1620, we are in the opening years of the European Enlightenment. The stage has been set for it by a spectacularly fortunate, and almost certainly non-repeatable, confluence of factors. The 1000-year-old intellectual straitjacket maintained through alliance between all of Europe’s secular powers and a monolithic religion has been broken by Christianity’s growth of a second head, and the two heads immediately attacking each other². Invention of the printing press has further weakened Christianity’s grip by breaking its monopoly on education, and European academia has been reenergized by a massive infusion of high quality Greek, Roman and Arab thought, courtesy of the Italian Renaissance and Spanish Reconquesta³.

Further, and of by far the deepest significance, Europe has discovered and is in the process of assimilating a vast new world. Exploitation of the human and material resources of the Americas has created huge new revenue streams, and these are flowing disproportionally into the accounts of a new and rising social class. Traditional aristocratic power, based on property and inheritance, is being eclipsed by technical and commercial power, based on knowledge, diligence and innovation. The spirit of the age – at least for the wealthy white men who are doing most of the writing about it – is of growing confidence, broadening horizons, and unlimited potential⁴.

What we call the Enlightenment can be best understood as two distinct streams; which developed in parallel, but then cross pollinated, squabbled, and sometimes came to the verge of open war over the next 170 years. Each was launched from the writings of a great philosopher in the mid 1600s: the “Radical” Enlightenment, in 1637, from Rene Descartes’ Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason, and Searching for Truth in the Sciences⁵, and the “Moderate” Enlightenment, in 1651, by Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, or The Matter, Form and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil.

Descartes’ Discourse was unapologetically rational and iconoclastic. It championed natural philosophy (the precursor of science), and personal exploration rigorously constrained by reason and logic as our most reliable determinants for knowledge. Hobbes´ Leviathan was by contrast conservative and political. It too championed reason, but undergirded by a realpolitik assumption that reason can never be developed sufficiently in most people to free us from the need for coercive authoritarian supervision based on socially sanctioned and bonding systems of religious and secular ideology. Our “war of all against all,” said Hobbes, can only be successfully resisted by our transfer, through a “Social Contract,” of all our individual powers to a Sovereign⁶ who will be responsible for making and enforcing our laws and protecting our religion.

The next milestone event for the Radical stream was Brauch Spinoza’s anonymous publication, in 1670, of his Tractatus Logico Philosophicus (Logical Philosophical Treatise). This was a stunningly bold and skillful implementation of Descartes’ recommendations. It sought to provide for natural philosophy the kind of solid foundational framework that had been provided by Euclid’s axioms for geometry. It also ignited an intellectual firestorm, by making the first serious rational case against the existence of the Judeo-Christian god.

Spinoza did believe in God, but his god bore no resemblance to Christianity’s super powerful Bronze Age king. Spinoza’s God was, essentially, Nature; so could be most sincerely worshipped through our intellectually honest striving for deeper understanding of physical reality – most simply, through our pursuit of science.

Spinoza’s firestorm continued to burn for the next 100 years, quickly becoming and then remaining our clearest test for differentiation between the two enlightenment streams. Our “Spinozists” were the Radicals; while those who also supported reason but with varying degrees of exemption for our religions and their dependent authoritarian political systems were the Moderates. Open support for Spinoza could not be expressed by even the most courageous Radicals⁷, as this would have landed them first in jail and then, in the absence of a public recantation, on the gallows or guillotine. But their books and pamphlets were written, published anonymously, and disseminated clandestinely.

In addition to trading amongst themselves there arose, in Paris, London, Amsterdam and Berlin, and soon in New York and Philadelphia, bookstores where those in the know and known by the proprietor could obtain the subversive texts. Those in opposition – both the Moderate writers, who were to varying degrees in sympathy with the Radicals, and often writing benevolently to try to reign them in for their own sakes and that of our overall Enlightenment project, and the status quo defense “Counter Enlightenment” writers, who saw the whole project as an existential threat to civilization and Spinoza as the direct agent of Satan – also had their channels for obtaining the texts and so being able to respond against them.

An important development for both Enlightenment streams was David Hume’s publication, in 1739, of his Treatise of Human Nature. This was slow to gain intellectual traction, as it contained reasoning that was distasteful to both sides. Our then current understanding of the legitimacy of science and reason’s challenge to our older subjectively grounded belief systems was thought to rest on our ability to prove science’s proposals through the logical mechanism of induction.

Religion’s proponents believed their knowledge to be proved through eyewitness testimony, God’s authoritative revelations, and their powerful subjective feelings of certainty. Radical enlighteners believed themselves to need something of similar weight, and they seemed to have found it in their agreement to accept some large but finite number of confirmatory observations of a proposal as proof of its truth. For example, having made millions of observations of white swans over thousands of years as proof of the proposal “All swans are white”.

Hume’s logical demonstration that this mechanism (induction) could never actually deliver proof in any meaningful sense came unfortunately at about the same time as our discovery in Western Australia of black swans. As the full implications of Hume’s treatise started to be understood by all sides they seemed to undermine our epistemic foundation for the whole Enlightenment project. A solution would be found, but not for almost 200 years, and in the meantime “Hume’s problem” would significantly weaken both Enlightenment streams in relation to our Counter Enlightenment opposition. From their side, if we didn’t have truth, based on proof, then we had no adequate platform from which to oppose their religious and secular ideological beliefs.

An additional development that surfaced from about this time was the rise, mainly through the writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712 - 1778), of an openly counter rational and counter scientific stream which was soon named “Romanticism”. Romanticism co-opted the language and style of reason and logical argument, but to advance highly irrational positions on the basis of their emotional appeal. Rousseau was a gifted writer with an attractive style of apparently great personal honesty, and many educated Europeans and Americans were becoming intellectually fatigued by our long war of Radical vs Moderate vs Counter Enlightenment. Rousseau basically said: “To hell with all that, we can do better by simply following the dictates of our hearts.” This was a very easy sell, and it did little harm up until the 1790s. But, as we will soon see, it then made up for its slow start.

Broadly and approximately, the Radical Enlightenment was centered in Amsterdam and Paris, and the Moderate in London and Berlin. This had implications for the Radical/Moderate mix that was crystalized into America´s founding documents (the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights). From our having started as an English – rather than French – colony, and from the disturbing events which were happening in France as our Constitution and Bill of Rights were being written, their bias was pushed towards the Moderate side.

Our Founding Fathers were also men of significant education and wealth, who were therefore wary of moving too far or fast towards the Radical side due to the trust in their social inferiors to which this would have committed them. Crudely, they were skeptical about the ability of less well educated white men – to say nothing about that of women, or even men of non-European race or ethnicity – to resist the emotional seductions of the first charismatic wannabe dictator who might offer them radical wealth redistribution. They were likewise skeptical about the capacity of those in whom, from their point of view, reason itself was relatively underdeveloped to maintain civil behavior in the absence of a stabilizing and constraining system of superstition. (Basically, this was the core Moderate Enlightenment position, as captured by Voltaire’s famous quip about not believing in God himself but being desirous that his servants should continue to do so, from his understanding that it would make them less likely to steal his silverware.)

The disturbing events happening in France were, of course, the French Revolution. As this unfolded and descended by 1793 into the Reign of Terror under Maximilian Robespierre it seemed to horribly vindicate our Founders’ caution. Between those who died in prison and on the guillotine approximately 26,000 people were executed in barely over 13 months. The Terror was seized upon by both our Moderate and Counter-enlightenment camps as a “we told you so” illustration of the madness of trying to govern ourselves primarily through reason rather than through our traditional religious and political ideologies. This hubristic overreach narrative gained broad acceptance on both sides of the Atlantic, and was soon deepened and reinforced by the publication of Goethe’s Faust in 1808 and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in 1818. The old Greek story of Icarus, who plunged to his death from trying to fly too high on his self-made wings, was also trotted out for our (the Radicals’) mortification.

From such developments, and the still underlying drag of Hume’s problem, Radical Enlightenment had effectively been beaten back onto the ropes by the middle 1800s. America’s founding documents had to a large extent been written as, and then broadly accepted as, a Moderate Enlightenment brokered truce between the Radical and Counter Enlightenment camps. Significant compromises were made from both sides: from the Radicals, a general “don’t ask, don’t tell” toning down of our rhetoric against religions and an agreement to tax breaks for their commercial enterprises; and from the Counters, a commitment not to seek restoration of the church and state alliance that has historically proved so effective for their establishment and maintenance of authoritarian control.

Educated Americans have generally been proud of the achieved compromise, referencing its grounding in our ancient Greek wisdom of “everything in moderation”, and the Roman “via media”. But from the standpoint of this essay’s thesis, and to skip just slightly ahead, this has been rather like praising a food or drink for being only partially poisonous.

The Radical Enlightenment experienced a final rally in the spate of European revolutions of 1848, but these were primarily political and secular; aimed at reforming authoritarian power structures rather than challenging their philosophical roots. More significantly, 1848 also saw the publication of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, whose philosophical movement soon displaced Radical Enlightenment as the most urgent concern for intellectual defenders of Europe and America’s status quos.

I will gloss over the rise and decline of communism here, as it is peripheral to my thesis and has already been well covered by Karl Popper´s critical writings⁸ on Marx. But my narrative has now and in any case arrived at Karl Popper. Popper’s 1934 book The Logic of Scientific Discovery⁹ provided an elegant Gordian Knot cutting solution to Hume´s problem. Popper showed that science observably never has proceeded, and logically could not proceed, via inductive proof of some proposals as truth. Science progresses. Its operative mechanism could not therefor be an infinite shoring up of new or existing proposals by accumulation of confirmatory observations. There had to be something else; something more selective.

The mechanism that Popper showed to be functional and to fit with science’s history was our consideration of proposals from any source whatsoever (inductive reasoning being merely one of the many possibilities) to see if we could state them clearly enough to make them vulnerable to ODRPO grounded disproof; and then, if so, to plan our experiments for that.

Basically, Popper noted and then brilliantly exploited the logical asymmetry between proof and disproof. While, as per Hume, no finite number of confirming observations can logically justify us in making a proof claim, even a single clear and reproducible falsifying observation can support a valid claim of disproof.

Popper’s methodological reformulation was quickly accepted by most working scientists, so through it our edifice of scientific knowledge has affectively not been, since 1934, the totality of our proposals that can be proved. It has instead been the totality of our proposals that can be demonstrated through ODRPO to be better than any logically exclusive ones, for now. This tectonic shift of science’s epistemic base caused quite a stir within science but apparently very little beyond it, as is evidenced by religious people continuing to trot out their traditional final fallback defense: “Well, science can’t prove that my God doesn’t exist”.

Again, and to be very clear: science has now been officially out of the proof business for 90 years. What science can demonstrate, to the absolute maximum possibility of coherent demonstration for any proposal of human knowledge, is that the historical events upon which we have been basing our initial beliefs in the existence of our various Supernatural Beings didn’t actually happen. We can keep maintaining our collective tacit agreement to suppress this realization for the protection of our Moderate Enlightenment – and later Postmodern – truce; but our doing so does not invalidate it.

As knowledge of Popper’s solution slowly leached out into broader academia its main point was often 180-degrees misunderstood. In finally being able to clearly state its methodology, and thereby show how all its proposals are able to qualify as such, science became our species’ first epistemically coherent body of knowledge. To explain: our competitive systems of religious and secular ideology can likewise state their methodologies (their claimed eyewitness testimonies, subjective certainty, divine revelation, and so on). But: A. These methodologies can be seen to be incoherent; to yield logically exclusive results (e.g., Sue’s subjective certainty may logically exclude Steve’s god’s divine revelations, or Joe’s foundational text’s eyewitness testimonies). B. Our whole systems arrived at through such methodologies can be seen to be logically exclusive (Yahweh is not Jehovah, who is not Allah, who is not Krishna, or Zeus, etc.). Yet rather than being understood as a strength, science’s admission that it cannot finally prove its proposals as truth was – and is generally still being – interpreted as a cowardly retreat from the epistemic battlefield.

In the meantime, with the Radical stream now substantially discredited and culturally sidelined, Romanticism had been able to grow from its primarily French and German roots into our early 20^th century systems of patriotic authoritarian nationalism.¹⁰ These were based on emotionally seductive but deeply irrational philosophies of religious, ethnic and racial blood and soil mysticism, and typically with an appealing pseudo-scientific boost from Social Darwinism.¹¹ Such systems – as we now seem to be slipping back into – proved to be just the ticket for opportunistic monsters wishing to pursue their aggrandizement through world wars. (And if we choose to continue our present slippage then we can count on them to redeliver.)

Two final developments will complete my sketch:

First, the publication in 1962 of Thomas Kuhn’s influential The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. This was at one level just a more accessible and detailed restatement of Popper’s Logic of Scientific Discovery. It reiterated that yes, science really is, once and for all, an edifice of human knowledge; with all the strengths and weaknesses implied thereby. The weaknesses include our susceptibilities to fashion, deference towards established leaders, and emotional investment in our own or friends’ discoveries. Kuhn was scrupulous in emphasizing that science was also our first and only such system deliberately constructed with mechanisms to counter these weaknesses and that, over time, the mechanisms could be seen to be working. But, and as with our reception of Popper’s solution to Hume’s problem, many who had an emotional vested interest in doing so “understood” Kuhn’s takeaway point to be that science is ultimately no more reliable than any of our other knowledge.

Finally, and leveraging from reason’s embattlement through all the foregoing, certain French intellectuals¹² started to construct during the 1950s a deeply obscurantist and anti-rational stream which became known in its philosophical presentation as post-structuralism, and in its broader cultural diffusion as postmodernism. Its arguments seemed to have as their objective a final uprooting of any remaining anchor points for objectivity¹³. All knowledge proposals are claimed to be ultimately personal, subjective, and culturally biased; even and including the meaning intended by their authors for these claims.

To offer my understanding of the position of one of post-structuralism’s acknowledged leading proponents, Roland Barthes: John can read Sally’s text and interpret it to mean X, while Jim can read the same text and interpret it to mean Y, but they cannot then find out, even by asking Sally, what it really means as Sally will not be able to adequately explain to them – or even to herself – the complex interplay of cultural, linguistic and power relationship assumptions which lead her to write what she wrote¹⁴. If this sounds too silly to have had any chance of gaining intellectual traction then it is probably due to my own failure in omitting from my presentation the traditional larding of impressive sounding jargon words as, observably, it did gain traction. It quickly infiltrated the humanities departments of most European universities, and had even greater success in America. Its ascendance effectively completed the divorce between science and our humanities that had been foreseen and passionately warned against by C. P. Snow in his 1959 book The Two Cultures and The Scientific Revolution, and then confirmed by E. O. Wilson in his superb 1998 book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge.

Between postmodernism’s position – of all human statements being incapable of delivering objectivity or clarity – and science’s position – that we do have entirely sufficient objectivity and clarity for our needs through our ability to reference down to ODRPO’s honest third party arbitration – there was no longer any real possibility for constructive dialog between the two camps. In America this was also closely intertwined with our 1960s and ‘70s upwelling of sentimentality and antipathy to reason and expertise that has been so well described by Kurt Andersen in his 2017 book Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, a 500-year History.

My sketch has thus arrived back to the present, where we are facing the powerful and synergistically reinforcing challenges noted in my opening paragraph, but with reason now culturally sidelined to the point of being virtually helpless; its attempts to offer help generally eliciting merely snappy comebacks like “Says who?”, or “That’s just your opinion.”, or “You’re not the boss of me”. Basically, under the blanket protection from reason provided by our post-enlightenment truce romanticism and postmodernism have been able to effectively colonize all levels of our internal and public discourse. There is no longer any stigma to believing whatever we experience as most emotionally resonant, provided only that we do so passionately and/or from the basis of some ancient and venerable text. Our minds have been well trained from birth for acceptance of this as our standard operating procedure. No one has been forcing us to do it, and we could stop. But, as already noted, we have been educating ourselves for inability to see that option.

To show that our present position was and is not inevitable – with the implication that we could still change it – I must now revisit a few points from my historical sketch; but this time with some meta-level comments on where I think that we might have made better choices, or simply had bad luck.

What Might Have Been:

Starting as before, from 1620, our early and middle periods of the Enlightenment could not have gone substantially better. We needed Descartes, Spinoza, and perhaps most of all David Hume, as we had arrived at an effective stalemate prior to his identification of induction’s inadequacy as a proof-of-truth mechanism. We might even have needed Rousseau, for his writings up to Social Contract in 1762, as some of our best radical texts were written in critical response to his. But we would have been almost infinitely better off without Social Contract’s dangerously vague idea of a “general will”.

Rousseau needed a general will concept for the same reason as that of its initial proposer, Hobbes. Any political philosophy that advocates total surrender of its citizen’s powers to a Sovereign – rather than, as in democracies, to a body of elected officials who must periodically resubmit themselves to selection through their citizens’ votes – needs to claim inclusion of some other mechanism through which the sovereign can be to at least some degree guided by the citizens’ wishes. Without this the system’s unfairness and absurdity (might = right, and winner takes all until supplanted by some younger and/or luckier and/or more vicious “winner”) is too obvious to all participants. Briefly, our support for our naked emperors has always required provision of at least some suggestion of a fig leaf.

Robespierre’s fig leaf was large, in that Rousseau’s concepts of the sovereign and the general will were particularly nebulous and subjective¹⁵. This left his general will wide open to interpretation by Robespierre as a kind of spiritual national and ethnic consciousness that could be felt or channeled by a talented and attuned leader – unsurprisingly, and of course, by Robespierre. (As a brief pause and digression: this claim of a mystical blood and soil national consciousness that has in some sense chosen, and/or can be channeled by, “The Great Leader” has been regurgitated and reused by virtually every other opportunistic authoritarian thug after Robespierre; up to and very much including Russia’s present tyrant and America’s aspirant one¹⁶).

In late 1700’s France, Rousseau’s Social Contract was by far the most influential document among the literate portion of the populace for initiation and guidance of the Revolution; and Rousseau was anything but a Radical Enlightenment servant of reason, so the post-Terror shift of blame by our Moderate and Counter Enlightenment camps onto the Radicals and reason was essentially a political hatchet job¹⁷. What really crashed and burned in Paris was not reason, but Rousseau’s exciting and seductive romanticism. Further, and in view of where Romanticism was soon destined to lead us, our transfer of the blame that should have accrued to it instead to the Radical stream and reason was a little like shooting our genuine heroine in the back while she was trying to protect us from a monster. Its unfortunate consequences have been playing out and metastasizing ever since, and have largely precipitated our present downward spiral.

Returning to late 1700’s America, our Founding Fathers’ attempt to incorporate their most valuable Moderate Enlightenment insights into our foundational documents was noble and as well executed as could reasonably have been hoped for at that time. But the idea is now gaining ground within Enlightenment scholarship of our entire Moderate Enlightenment stream having been deeply flawed ¹⁸. We can see it to have represented at best the mutually agreed postponement of a battle that we never really had any intellectually honest prospect for avoiding; and at worst to have amounted to opportunistic exploitation by us wealthy white men of our unearned financial and educational birth advantages for perpetuation of our dominance.

To clarify: We have been assuring ourselves and each other that our reticence towards clear and powerful explanation of the dangerous irrationality of their positions to religious people has been due to our kindly concern for their wellbeing, from our understanding that they are deriving comfort and support from their superstitions, and/or to our sad but realpolitik acceptance of their minds being too weak to be able to follow our arguments. But I think that our time has now come for maximum self-honesty on the extent to which we may instead have been acting from Voltaire’s less laudable motive, of concern for the security of our silverware.

In particular, and on the matter of “their minds being too weak”, there does seem to have been something malodorous about the position of Hobbes, Burke, Adams, Hamilton and all our other Moderate proponents of sovereign or “limited democracy” government. It should not have taken them – and us too, as it’s now back on the rise in many of our societies – so long to understand our denial of equal opportunity education and full voting rights to women and brown people from our convenient assumption of their minds being too weak as nothing but a cruel negative feedback loop that we were maintaining. Basically, that they have always been less smart than ourselves only and exactly to the extent that we have been coercively keeping them that way. (I’ll put half of my lab rats on half rations; and then, after a month, euthanize all the skinny ones.)

To revisit Karl Popper’s final provision of a coherent epistemic basis for science, I think that my community – not just scientists and engineers, but essentially all signatories to Jonathan Rauch’s “Constitution of Knowledge” – should have turned this immediately into a much larger issue. We should have written the articles and done the interviews to communicate gently to all proselytizers for our religions and their subsidiary systems of self-serving irrationality: “Okay. This is how our knowledge works. This is why we believe what we believe. We are now asking you – respectfully, and because we would honestly like to know for the important prospect of finally being able to start working with you towards solution of our urgent social and environmental problems – How does your knowledge work? Exactly what can you finally offer, beyond “might equals right”, as justification for your proposals?” This essay’s suggestion is that they have never really had a damn thing; that it has all and always been, as in the droll example of our world supporting turtle, “turtles all the way down”.

To return now to the rise of post-structuralism; my community was basically just asleep at the switch. With relations between science and the humanities being already at a low ebb, as per C.P. Snow’s observations, we were unfortunately just not paying as much attention as we should have been to what was going on in their classrooms and journals. We did not begin to take it seriously until the 1990s, by which time its damage was virtually irreversible. Paul Gross and Norman Levitt’s excellent 1994 book, The Academic Left and its Quarrels With Science, was too little and too late to stop the rot.

Even Alan Sokal’s definitive demonstration of the post-structural emperor’s nakedness¹⁹ – via his spoof article “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”, which was accepted and published by the system’s preeminent journal (Social Text) in 1996 – could not dent the vast structure of university departments, issued degrees, and tenured professorships which had by then been erected.

I think it will be obvious by now that my proposal for our binding commitment to ODRPO also amounts to a plea for our abandonment of the Moderate Enlightenment and Postmodern Truce between science/reason and all our logically exclusive systems of subjectively appealing superstition. The battle is observably reigniting, with many of our intellectual opponents already openly recommitted, but most on my own side seem dangerously determined to pretend that the truce is still holding.

I am claiming our religions as the most obvious, earliest taught, and highest profile of our irrational systems; and so as our most effective point for renewal of Radical Enlightenment opposition. But in addition, and as suggested throughout this essay, I am requesting our first reengagement at their level because their early damage can be seen to be perpetuating our minds’ vulnerability to all the rest²⁰. Our propagation into young minds of systems of irrational superstition as factual has been granting many benefits – including, but not limited to, emotional comfort, increased social cohesion, and aid in our formation of authoritarian hierarchal structures for increased efficiency in hunting and warfare – but these systems have always been deeply corrosive to our development of reason.

We have been able to live with this problem to date because it has been keeping us too ineffectual to be capable of catastrophic damage to ourselves or our environment. But from science’s rise having gone exponential during the past few hundred years we have now lost that protection. From our nuclear military capacity for murdering each other by the millions – rather than in our traditional hundreds and thousands – and industrial capacity for effective sabotage of our planet’s climate and biosphere, I think that our collateral damage and risk from continued propagation of our reason-antithetical knowledge systems as reality have become untenable.

I’ve therefore been desperately trying to communicate through this essay that we do finally have both the possibility and the need for perpetuation of the benefits that we have been getting from such systems but without continuing to propagate them as legitimately opposable to science and reason. Basically, that we could and should finally go ahead and accept them as potentially instructive and emotionally inspiring mythologies rather than as legitimately contra-rational descriptions of reality²¹. This is what would be achieved by our collective acceptance of ODRPO; not as our sole, but as our deepest – and so non- controvertible – basis for knowledge. We should by now finally be able to understand our religions to have always been like fire; able to warm our houses, but also to burn them down²². Within this analogy our prior and deeper commitment to ODRPO has the potential to at last grant us safe fireplaces.

We could in theory begin to educate for this in our homes and schools. Our young developing minds are observably not, as per Locke, tabula rasae. But from our most current research into their formation – accelerated by our powerful new tools like CT, fMRI and PET scanning – they are substantially more malleable than we were fashionably supposing even just a few decades ago. Malleable enough, I think, for their development even in relation to our system of directly ODRPO grounded knowledge of the emotional and spiritual depths of wonder and appreciation that we have traditionally been supposing to be possible only in relation to our irrational systems²³.

To finally and explicitly spell out the collateral damage that we can see ourselves to have been propagating through our teaching of irrational knowledge systems as factual: We can best understand reason’s development in young minds as the establishment of a positive feedback loop between themselves and physical reality. From this understanding our most effective initiation would be their priming, during the approximately 7 years within which we know their physical hardware basis for reason to be still under construction²⁴, with already ODRPO grounded proposals; so that as their relevant brain hardware does start to come online it finds its needed software ready to hand.

Ideally, the sequence goes like this: From a young mind’s acceptance of proposals that it can rationally understand – as its potential for reason does develop – to be grounded in ODRPO and thereby to be both coherent and effective (coherent in their provision of a base structure onto which further ODRPO grounded knowledge can be infinitely added without internal contradiction; and effective in prompting the mind to actions that it can see to be achieving its intended results) it experiences reason as both valuable and powerful; giving it both the desire for and the ability to more easily absorb additional ODRPO grounded knowledge; which further increases its effectiveness and commitment to reason, and so on up through the positive feedback spiral.

But then, if we can grasp this, we must also recognize the potential for a concomitant downward spiral. Our teaching during those critical first 7 years of systems of reason-antithetical knowledge – about logically exclusive supernatural beings and their emotionally seductive support for all our further self-gratifying but similarly irrational beliefs in our sexual, racial, ethnic, and nationalistic superiorities – can be seen to have always amounted to a vast exercise in shooting ourselves in the feet. In a nutshell, and to finally call this spade a spade, we have been priming our children’s minds with knowledge systems through which and in terms of which their development of reason has been at best crippled.

But how, you may ask, could our evolution have failed to catch this? The answer is that evolution has never had a dog in the fight; because from its standpoint everything has been working just fine. Evolution contains no mechanism for optimizing the length, quality or emotional richness of its products’ lives. It “cares” only about their relative success in propagating their genes into the next generation. From that understanding, and prior to our possession of the observably better alternative that science has only grown into during approximately our last 300 years, our irrational systems have indeed been adaptive. They have been facilitating our cooperation in large enough groups to be effective; for collective hunting, and then agriculture; and, always, intertribal warfare. So if we now finally have both the understanding and the desperation to strive for something better then we, rather than evolution, are going to have to actively choose it. This essay is a plea for making that choice.

We can see that we do now have “a better alternative”; and one that could facilitate our cooperation on the worldwide scale needed for addressing our present convergent problems. But effectively switching over to it, from the emotional grounding of our majority still primarily within the irrational systems, will represent a monumental Catch-22 challenge. Reason can rise to it, but it will require our clear understanding of the problem and the level to which its stakes have already risen.

As suggested above, we may have already missed a couple of possible inflection points. Had the French Revolution gone at least as well as America’s then, and as per the well documented dreams of our leading Radicals at that time²⁵, a falling dominos chain might have been started in which the rest of Europe’s religious and secular authoritarian power structures would have been too discredited to be able to maintain propagation of their legitimizing systems. And from that we might have been able to flip the deep level switch on which this essay has been tugging some 240 years sooner.

To illustrate through my favorite passage from Philipp Blom’s superb 2010 book A Wicked Company, The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment:

“Baron d’Holbach’s salon and its principal protagonists did foment revolutionary ideas, but it was more than a mere political revolution they were thinking about; they did write and publish subversive books, but they wanted to bring down something infinitely more vast than the monarchy or even the Catholic Church. The vision they discussed around the baron’s dinner table was one in which women and men would no longer be oppressed by the fear and ignorance instilled by religion but could instead live their lives to the full. Instead of sacrificing their desires to the vain hope of reward in an afterlife, they would be able to walk freely, to understand their place in the universe as intelligent machines of flesh and blood and pour their energies into building individual lives and communities based on their inheritance of desire, empathy, and reason. Desire, erotic and otherwise, would make their world beautiful and rich; empathy would make it kind and livable; reason would allow an understanding of the world’s immutable laws.”

This, in a nutshell, is what our resurgent counter enlightenment proponents are back to assuring us that we just can’t have. “Don’t even try, because ‘human nature’ won’t allow you to succeed”. “If we could do it then of course we would have by now”. “Be sensible, conservative”. “Don’t rock the boat”. “Remember Icarus”; and so on…. (Basically, the whole conservative refrain from Bruce Hornsby’s superb song The Way It Is.)

Our second missed opportunity arose, as suggested above, from Karl Popper’s 1934 provision of a coherent epistemic basis for science. As noted, we could and should have immediately used that to push for a reopening of our pre-truce dialog with all our proponents for emotionally seductive irrational knowledge systems; which, again, might have brought us to this essay’s suggested solution some 90 years sooner.

From our present position this essay is a last ditch and hail Mary attempt to communicate what needs to be communicated while we still have some prospect for acting on it. While reading in 2011 Christian Parenti’s Tropic of Chaos, Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence I was also immersed in European Enlightenment reading; from which juxtaposition my disturbing take away was that we seemed to be slipping into a negative version of the positive zeitgeist that had been so supportive of science and reason’s growth during the Enlightenment. Basically, that inasmuch as our underlying mood in 1620 was of broadening horizons, confidence and hope, our present mood – as influenced by our self- infliction of rising temperatures and sea levels, strengthening storms, pollution, pandemics, and accelerating species extinctions – is of coalescing problems, confusion and despair.

Traditionally, and observably over our whole span of known history, such negative zeitgeist seems to increase our vulnerability to the seductions of religions and their self-styled authoritarian saviors. There are, supposedly, “no atheists in foxholes”. And “when the going gets tough” then yes, a few of the tough may get going; but far more of us seem to look around for a big bad alpha male who will promise to take care of us. (“Only I can do it”, "Our problems would never have happened had I been in control", and so on). This evolutionarily sanctioned weakness runs all the way back through our pre-hominid roots. Jane Goodall documented it extensively in her Gombe Stream chimps. And in the years since publication of Mr. Parenti’s book our self-proclaimed savior-strongmen have observably been enjoying a collective renaissance.

Our problem is that this, then, also feeds into the downward spiral. The seductive irrational systems promoted by our authoritarian strongmen as grounds for their rule invariably produce terrible real-world results, which thereby increase our desperation to identify still more manly strongmen and/or more emotionally comforting and bonding irrational systems²⁶. Such has been our underlying evolutionary bargain, outside of a few tantalizing false dawns as in Periclean Athens and the small Radical Enlightenment enclaves of Amsterdam and Paris, for many thousands of generations. To hit this essay’s foundational question from yet another angle; how determined are we to remain merely evolution’s bitch? (Particularly when we know what evolution’s endgame has already been for about 98% of its creations.)

In reference to our now reigniting death struggle between our self-styled savior-strongmen and democracy this essay’s implication is that we should revisit Thomas Jefferson’s famous quote – about its being okay for his neighbors to maintain reason-antithetical belief systems so long as these didn’t pick his pocket or break his leg – and ask whether in our modern democracies, with their obvious dependence on some basic level of scientific literacy and thought clarity in the electorate as insurance against our choice of leaders who lack either, there can really be any such thing as non-pocket-picking and non-leg-breaking reason-antithetical belief systems. This essay’s overall and on-balance answer is no.

We might also, and while we’re at it, revisit Timothy Ferris’ excellent 2010 book The Science of Liberty. We could then at least try to explain to our resurgent counter enlightenment leaders²⁷ why they should – for their own sakes, in the conservation of their time, blood and treasure – be able to provide some responses against Mr. Ferris’ book full of well-reasoned and observation grounded arguments against their possibility of even medium term success. Their present position is akin to that of flat earth believers who, in response to the vast, coherent and synergistically reinforcing body of evidence for our planet being spherical simply refuse to engage with it.

We are now observably well into our downward spiral, from which this essay’s request for meta-sabotage – through our mutual and binding commitment to ODRPO – of the vast historical self-sabotage loop that I hope I’ve been able to show us to have been running may come as too little and too late. But as my best and parting shot, and to at least go down swinging, let me leave you with a little thought experiment:

You are coming down a staircase from the roof of a tall building when you meet, on the way up, a man wearing a Superman suit. You ask him where he’s going; and he says, “Up to the roof, so that I can jump off and fly”. What is now your moral responsibility? Do you let him pass, from your understanding that he would find your opposition to his belief in his flying ability upsetting, and/or would be too stupid to be able to grasp your arguments, or do you make that attempt to the maximum of your persuasive ability?

Our present situation is even worse than in this example, in that the Superman jumper was not proposing to take us with him; but along our now reforming battle lines – between the partisans for science and reason, liberal democratic government, fairness, empathy and rules-based international relations and those for our systems of subjectively appealing superstition, coercive authoritarian rule, dominance, opportunism and international duplicity; and worse still, with the whole conflict reigniting against our present backdrop of inexorably rising global climate disruption – I don’t think that any of us will be able to remain neutral or unaffected. Most of my anticipated readers for this essay are likely to be high enough on the socioeconomic pyramid to be still relatively unscathed for now. But as per Mr. Parenti’s astute observations and predictions, and their grim accuracy thus far, the base of our pyramid can be seen to be already burning, and the flames to be moving ever higher.

I do understand the radicalism of my proposal here; the enormity of this essay’s request. But I honestly believe it to offer “our last best hope”. I am not suggesting any immediate or collective attempt at mass conversion of our believers in appealingly authoritarian Supernatural Beings and their self-styled earthly representatives – or even in the subsidiary irrational systems being abetted by our early training in these (our transparently self-serving racial, sexual, political and economic ideologies, “deep state” climate sabotage via “chemtrails”, magnetic and/or mind controlling vaccines, lib/dems' steered hurricanes, satanic child pornography pizza parlors and so on) – but simply our commitment to my proposed change within our own minds and then use of it honestly and consistently in our discussions with our intellectual peers who remain mired in the Moderate Enlightenment and Postmodern Truce. I have tried to work into this essay some powerful new insights for our side in that endeavor, and I am hereby directly requesting the help of all my fellow “Constitution of Knowledge” signatories²⁸ in its progression. I do also understand that my own writing remains, despite my best efforts, dense and challenging. But I am hoping for superior competence from at least some of my readers.

As in Aragorn’s plea to Théoden – and as per our now daily news inundations about “alternative facts”, climate change and vaccines denialism, erosion of our personal rights (including freedom of speech, and, if female, even control over our own bodies), greed driven political refusal to mitigate the flooding of our society with guns, and the general abandonment by our Counter Enlightenment proponents of the church/state separation commitment to which they agreed in our Constitution – this essay has been trying to show that “open war is now upon us, whether we would risk it or not”; that the Moderate Enlightenment and Postmodern Truce is already and irreparably broken; and this time, for the sake of both ourselves and our planet, we must not be again diverted into any similar kind of “don’t ask, don’t tell” or “sweep it all under the carpet” compromise. My dream for this essay has been to light the mountain top signal beacons, and to show that there is still a way for us to do what we need to do.

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