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Beyond The Holy Circle
The Net, it turns out, isn't a single revolution, but a series of social revolutions, with a lot in common. Together, they suggest that the Enlightenment never really ended, just took a breather until the Digital Age.
One of the most dramatic legacies of Enlightenment philosophers was their shocking, often brave challenge to Orthodoxy, especially that of organized religions like Christianity, and to the power of the existing monarchies that ruled the world. The Puritans and Anglicans, along with the Jesuits and other elements of the Catholic and Protestant churches, engaged the philosophers - rationalists, scientists, technologists: the nerds and geeks of their time -- in ferocious battles about faith and reason.
Describing the confrontation between Christianity and the Enlightenment - a debate that would be almost unthinkable in modern-day America, where religion has become a sacrosanct subject, (few mainstream politicians, journalists or political figures would dream of openly challenging it's underpinnings) -- the philosopher Edward Gibbon wrote about the need to reach one's own conclusions about the world "beyond The Holy Circle."
That is, to think beyond the dictates of Christianity, which was at the time the dominant philosophical and ideological force in the West.
When I wrote in a column last week that many of the goals of the Enlightenment - secularism, humanity, freedom from arbitrary power, freedom of speech, freedom of trade, freedom to realize one's talent's, freedom of aesthetic response, freedom of moral men and women to make their own way in the world - were similar to emerging values of many of the people - especially the younger ones -- building and shaping the Internet, I got a radically different response than I received even a few years ago when I raised the idea on a different website.
The idea that there were, in fact, shared values on the diverse, quarrelsome and idiosyncratic Net, and that these values were driving immense changes in society seemed reasonable to people, even logical.
More than 500 people e-mailed me in the day or so after this last column - many more since. They were writing from universities, Web development and software companies, and at least 10 countries, including India, England, New Zealand, Canada, Mexico and Argentina.
The idea of linking the Enlightenment to the Internet touched a chord. "That's a very interesting idea, "e-mailed Jude from Stanford. "The Net seems such a chaotic mess to me, and we spend so much time playing with our toys and our games that it's easy to miss that there really are core values, and they are widely shared. We're obviously very different people, many of us, but in a way a lot of us involved in building the Net as opposed to using the Net are trying to do the same thing, even though we can hardly ever come together and talk about it. And it's significant."
Ivan, a programmer, agreed that a core value on the Net and the Web was freedom. "I feel as if this is all really about gaining more freedom, and taking responsibility for myself, my technology, the information I get and share. All the time, I hear people I work with talking about their good or bad technology. It's theirs - they made it and they use it the way they wish. I know from my own college reading that this is very definitely an Enlightenment idea, although I never thought about it that way."
Shauna, a self- described "hip female-with-a-kid geek," wrote from a working mothers website that the values of the Enlightenment - independence, empowerment - were the core values of her site, and her life, much of which is spent online. Adrian, a Linux programmer from Seattle told me the same thing at a book signing there. "I really connected with that idea," he said. "It's why I spent so much time learning Linux. It's about freedom and autonomy."
After I quoted Immanuel Kant's suggested Enlightenment motto "Sapere Aude," (Dare to Know), I began getting e-mail from at least a dozen people adopting it as a quote on their e-mail sigs.
Christianity is no longer the predominant philosophical force as it was during the Enlightenment. (In our time, corporatism is the nemesis of the individual.) America's founders separated Church and State, and other religions - Judaism, the Muslim - have become powerful in their own right.
In the past few years, a series of radical social and technological movements emanating from the Net and the Web have challenged conventional orthodoxy in its 20th century incarnation.
There is, of course, still a Holy Circle, and it has, at least until recently, dominated our social, political and cultural agenda. It still advances a collection of dogmatic ideas about politics, religion, sexuality, the form of government, morality and the control of information. Liberalism has a fixed dogma, and so does conservatism. The politically correct on the left and the moral purists on the right both constantly seek to control speech and curb free expression. Moral guardians dictate "appropriate" behavior. Corporations have extremely powerful notions about the flow of money and products, ideas that are ratified into law and enforced by government regulation.
Today, this Orthodoxy is shaped by smaller, if deeply entrenched institutions - journalism, politics, academe, powerful companies. All have expressed fear, resentment and concern over the rise of the Internet, even as they increasingly seek in different ways to curb, control or exploit it. Especially frightening to them is the freedom, power, money and influence beginning to flow away from them and towards the millions of people using computers to connect to one another.
Journalists complain that the sanctity of facts can't be protected in so open and de-centralized an environment. Many of these journalists and the politicians they work so closely with openly deride and fear a culture in which the public can express itself instantly and accurately, and in defiance of them - Washington journalists and politicians are the literal embodiment of the Holy Circle -- as it did so successfully all last year.
The clergy sermonizes about protecting dogma and faith in a world in which the young have access to all the information in the world, including heresy. Parents seek to filter and block ideas they consider dangerous (even though there's usually little evidence that they really are) or can't control.
Although journalism and politics are preoccupied by their own curious notions of morality and their irrational and disconnected political agenda, the Internet is especially enlightening to millions of people who set their own agendas and worry about their own individual issues, just as the Enlightenment philosophers hoped would happen in their time. Only they didn't have the connective technology to spread their ideas far beyond their own quarrelsome communities.
Blinded by a sluggish media and political culture, society has been slow to grasp the implications of the revolutionary, techno-drive movements spawned here. The Mp3.com already stands, along with the TV zapper, as one of technology's most political and significant creations. The idea of the Mp3 has, in only a matter of months, forced one of the richest businesses in the world - the music industry -- to reconsider the very ways in which music is contracted, recorded, distributed and sold.
E-trading has hit Wall Street like a bomb, de-centralizing the trading industry overnight and opening up capitalism and stock trading to millions of new customers in their homes and offices.
The open source and free software movements have, for the first time in modern history, reversed the trend towards control of information away from a handful of increasingly powerful and predatory companies who have been profiting from it, and back towards millions of individuals. New messaging systems like ICQ chat and Hotlines are transforming communications, sparking countless personal and corporate conversations out of sight and beyond the consciousness of the Holy Circle.
The list is growing all the time. And it's impressive.
Across the board, this new technology is liberating millions of people, in wave after wave of experimentation and change.
"The battlefields of history are strewn with unintended consequences," wrote Peter Gay in his book The Enlightenment. Hardly any of the very dramatic and evolutionary changes listed above were anticipated. But many of them speak directly to Enlightenment ideals -- above all, to freedom in different forms.
If Immanuel Kant preached that the Enlightenment was about the idea of daring to know, he also understand that many people wouldn't want to know. Thus the tension sparked by periods like his and ours. He was mesmerized by the possibilities of his time - especially by the new freedom to share ideas openly and creatively - but skeptical about how this freedom might be used. He and many of his colleagues considered the Enlightenment to be a dismal failure. They couldn't have imagined that some of their most dazzling, if indirect, achievements - the American and French Revolutions, and even the Internet - were still to come.
"If some ask," Kant wrote, "are we living in an enlightened age today? ,the answer would be, No." But, he added, "we are living in an Age of Enlightenment."
Kant might have asked the same question in the age of Kosovo and Monica Lewinsky. Online, many grasp that they're witnessing both a transformation and a revolution. Yet it's hard to look at our own culture or the one beyond - or to try and talk about ideas civilly and openly online -- and really believe we're living an enlightened time.
In Kant's world, the Holy Circle and many of the people it influenced, resisted these new freedoms, and many of the ideas that flowed from them. "People talk a lot about Enlightenment and ask for more light," Georg Lichtenberg wrote, "But my God, what good is all that light, if people either have no eyes, or if those who do have eyes, resolutely keep them shut?"
In our online world, we break down powerful walls as if they were made of tissue, taking what we want and saying what we please, asserting our freedom and demanding choices.
There were dozens of Enlightenment philosophers, but one of the most compelling - and useful today -- was David Hume. Hume, wrote one biographer, followed his thinking where it led him. He was willing to live with uncertainty, incomplete explanations, and without complaint. He was a cheerful Stoic, courageous and determined.
Hume's writing was marked by straightforwardness and modesty and, perhaps more than any other philosopher of his movement, he preached the ideals of an enlightened age. His writing provides inspiration for the frayed and sometimes befuddled pilgrims navigating this one.
Since God is silent, Hume wrote, man is his own master: he must live in a disenchanted world, submit everything to criticism, and make his own way.
You can e-mail me at jonkatz@slashdot.org
This essay is not unlike the kind of rhetoric we had in the psychedelic revolution of 1960s. The internet has a lot of similarities with the whole drug culture of the sixites, and Jon Katz is just another Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary, and William
Burroughs all rolled into one.
Much like drug addicts, internet users "tune in, turn on, and drop out" from all human contact in order get high on the "rush" of the internet experience, while people like Katz claim the internet as a tool of "enlightenment", and anyone still "stuck" within the mainstream culture just don't get it(The internet is so groovy and far out man!)
Jon talks about "Shauna," and "her life, much of which is spent online." A life spent online is not a real life, but a just a facade of a life. Katz has said that "a central issue for our time" is "figuring out how to live, trying to forge a life of balance, purpose and meaning." In no way is a life online "a life of balance", anymore than the communal life of the sixties drug culture was a "balanced" life. Neither the internet nor drugs is going to lead to any kind of "enlightenment".
Mr. Katz is slowly beginning to believe that he is a modern day Kant or Hume. You can sense the rising tide of demagoguery when he says something like: "After I quoted Immanuel Kant's suggested Enlightenment motto...at least a dozen people adopt[ed] it as a quote on their e-mail sigs." Or this absolutely ridiculous statement: "The Mp3.com
already stands, along with the TV zapper, as one of technology's most political and significant creations." You're joking right?
Katz claims that "Across the board, this new technology is liberating millions of people,
in wave after wave of experimentation and change." Well, just go to any American ghetto and ask how "liberated" the internet has made them. Just substitue "new technology" with "psychedelic drugs" and the message is the same: "If we just use our awesome powers of reason we can become our own Gods."
Okay, when are they handing out the kool-aid?
Posted by george_k:
Hi.
I was sent your piece "Beyond the Holy Circle" (slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/03/28/154238), by a friend. Your suggestion that the "wall-busting net" has enormous and almost certainly unpredictable consequences is a useful and fruitful one.
However your effort to construct a philosophy of history, traced back into the Enlightenment, suffers from a lack of historical perspective on the Enlightenment. Your characterization of it as a struggle between rationalist "geeks" and proponents of "orthodoxy," although certainly entertaining and guaranteed to be an effective rabble rouser in certain circles, is largely misleading. To characterize the enlightenment as a manichean struggle between the forces of rationalist science and superstitious orthodoxy is simply to misread the historical record, and to misread it badly. Only Galileo, in the five hundred years between the high middle ages and modernity, fits that paradigm. Much scientific and mathematical progress was made in the Enlightenment by orthodox Christians. Prominent Anglicans, Calvinists, and Jesuits were among the most significant enlightened scientific thinkers. Issac Newton, the very model of enlightened rationality for both Kant and Hume, abandoned his mathematical and scientific studies to concentrate on unpacking the mysteries of the book of Revelation; he was an orthodox Christian. Pascal, whose work in the mathematics that led to the science of the enlightenment is only overshadowed by Newton's, was an orthodox Christian whose theological works are still studied. Leibnitz, with Newton the inventor of calculus, sought to demonstrate the existence of God philosophically. The philosophical tradition flowing from Descartes, widely held to be the father of Enlightened rationality, is rooted in high medieval scholasticism. The rise of Reformed theology was a critical component in the development of the scientific method; indeed it is in puritan England and Reformed Holland that much of the work of the Enlightenment went on. Bacon and Mendel were both orthodox Christians. If you have spent any time reading the enlightened orthodox Christians, e.g. Jonathan Edwards, you would know that they are as concerned for rationality, conceived in an Enlightenment model, as were the enlightened deists and atheists.
Further, Hume's philosophical and moral convictions were not drawn from his enlightened epistemology; if drawn from anywhere, it was the classical stoic tradition of ancient Rome and Greece that underlay his anthropology and ethics (as he himself states). While his epistemology, if logically thought out, results in the destruction of any postive rational knowledge at all (Cf. the Essay on Human Understanding) and so of the possibility of any true enlightenment. It was precisely because Kant feared that Hume's critiques would destroy the possiblity of rational knowledge that he wrote the "Critique of Pure Reason." And with the collapse of the claim that Euclidean geometry represented the necessary modalities of human mathematical reasoning, Kant's effort fell as well.
The stoic moral position has a long and noble history. And it has much to commend it. But it was not created by the Enlightement. And although there were noble Enlightenment stoics, e.g. Gibbon, Hume, there were others, e.g. Rousseau or Berkeley who adopted very unstoic positions, Rousseau who developed a modern notion of false consciousness and Berkeley who developed an Enlightenment epistemology very like Hume's to validate an orthodox Christian posture.
How the invention of the pc and the growth of the web will transform the human condition remains to be seen. It seems clear that we are only beginning to grasp some of the parameters of those changes. But to seek to validate those changes by false and misleading appropriations of the western tradition cannnot help us understand the changes; it can only make it more difficult for us to understand what is really going on.
Sincerely,
George Kuykendall
George Kuykendall
Industri-Matematik International
Suite 201, 5 Greentree Center
Marlton, NJ 08053
Ph. (609) 797-3382
Fax (609) 797-6660
It all comes down to freedom. This is what men, all men naturally desire.
However, what mankind most needs to be freed from is not outside authority, but the failings of our own character. "For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do--this I keep on doing." (Paul of Tarsus, c. 60AD).
This is still true today. People still do that which they would rather not, then cover it up in an attempt to think themselves free agents. While freedom from external authority is important, it is far less interesting than freedom from the domination of our own failings.
As long as we continue to look to politics (or anything external) for our freedom, we are wasting our time. If my mind and heart are free, then I will be free, even in chains.
-- Slashdot sucks.
"While freedom from external authority is important" -- i.e. I never said it wasn't (this pretty mich is the assumption that all the comments on this thread have made). But freedom from external authority without requisite character changes (freedom from our own failures) has, invariably, led to evil.
If you look at all the greatest atrocities in history, they have come when someone, anyone, was freed from accountability for their own actions.
I'm afraid that this is what too many "pseudo-enlightenment" people mean by freedom: a lack of accountability.
-- Slashdot sucks.
Christianity is no longer the predominant philosophical force as it was during the Enlightenment. (In our time, corporatism is the nemesis of the individual.) america's founders separated Church and State, and other religions - Judaism, the Muslim - have become powerful in their own right.
In the past few years, a series of radical social and technological movements emanating from the Net and the Web have challenged conventional orthodoxy in its 20th century incarnation.
There is, of course, still a Holy Circle, and it has, at least until recently, dominated our social, political and cultural agenda. It still advances a collection of dogmatic ideas about politics, religion, sexuality, the form of government, morality and the control of information. Liberalism has a fixed dogma, and so does conservatism. The politically correct on the left and the moral purists on the right both constantly seek to control speech and curb free expression. Moral guardians dictate "appropriate" behavior. Corporations have extremely powerful notions about the flow of money and products, ideas that are ratified into law and enforced by government regulation. [emphases mine]
Multinational corporate control of the media is one of the most anti-democratic outcomes of modern communications technologies. Both Television and Radio don't allow for full duplex communication; those who own the transmitters control the communications content to all recipients. And they have used this monopoly to force everything from Playtex pantyhose to war without reasonable debate throughout much of the twentieth century.
Right now some of the largest multinational corporations are currently threatening everything from worldwide food production (Monsanto and it's Terminator gene) along with ADM and a number of other food producers and processors who appear intent on monopolizing world food production and distribution, the environmental devastation of core life sustaining bio-infrastructure (chemical and oil companies like DuPont and Exxon), along with almost total world capital control by the elite. If this Internet Thing gets out of hand and begins threatening elite control over worldwide resources I think we should expect a strong corporate backlash to control how the Internet is used and who has access. Given who finances congressional campaigns and the success they have achieved at incorporating special interest gains into leglislation through political action committees, don't expect our representatives to take a stand beyond their direct self interests.
We should all be frightened to note that hostID like serial numbers are being integrated into Pentium III chips at the same time that Microsoft has admitted that it collects personal data about end users and watermarks all documents generated from Microsoft Word. While this may seem great now that we've arrested the alleged Melisa virus author, anyone who writes dissident material should feel a chill down their spine. This threatens our very democracy as a basic violation of pricavy rights. Yet throughout the last twenty years our basic civil and property rights have been thwarted and subverted in the name of the Drug War, anti-terrorism, and tort reform. It should surprise no-one when we finally realize we have moved from a representative democracy (republic) to corporate socialism and individual social darwinism. This is really fascism, but that word has been so abused that it's meaningless in today's rhetoric.
The biggest human rights success of our age has been the discovery by the elite that propaganda is a cheaper method of control than outright brute force. But don't be foolish and think that a populist movement fueled by easy public access to bi-directional communications will cause the multinational elite to roll over and give up. They have shown time and again that when they're control and wealth is threatened they will take extreme (and often violent) action.
1st off, good job Jon, stick with the philosophy.
Without question the overriding dogma of our (American) society is the corporation. The Corporate culture if you will. The embodiment of capitalism in an individual (how corporations are treated by law). Now this structure is being directly challenged in one area where the product simply does not support any previously built model, information.
Our capacity to process and disseminate as well as replicate information has reached what I would have to believe is near the null point. I mean, could it get much easier to share a single thought or bit of information with the entire world (besides lacking the serving power). Becuase of this any good idea can be quickly spread and incorporated into daily lives. Bad ideas have the same potential, but often their nature is their ultimate undoing. To go take it literally, the EnLIGHTenment grows as each person shares the light bulb of eureka with their peers, family, and any random schmoe with a Net connection and some time.
Becuase of the Digital nature of this Age, information can be reproduced ad infinitum, and when the supply is infinite, no matter what the demand, the price is zero. I have seen many times the argument, or distinction, between Frees (speech and beer). Yet what about a speech about beer, or more to the point how to make beer. One can, in a special situation, lead to the other directly. This is what we have HERE
I was suprised that Katz didn't mention a good example of our new (gnu) culture directly clashing with the old. Linux vs. Windows is the perfect example of a real-time battle between the power of status quo (profit taking corporations) and the power of change (OSS). Even in the face of indisputable fact many will stay with their eyes tight shut against the light, merely becuase that's the way they think it should be, because that's the way it has always been.
(of course you all know this, but it's still fun to say)
What else to say....oh yeah, if you like music go get MP3Spy before the lawyers do. Another example of information (in this case, art) wanting to be free.
+&x
Young girls are told via advertising, "In a world where you can be anything, be yourself," yet the ad to which that phrase is attached is encouraging them to "be themselves" by buying a specific brand of clothing. Microsoft asks, "Where do you want to go today?" implying that their software somehow frees its users from their shackles. Or, take the soft drink ad that says, "Image is nothing. Thirst is everything. Obey your thirst." Yet they are very carefully projecting an image, and are inviting prospective customers to buy into that image. In all these cases, the companies are mouthing the words of freedom, yet seeking to subsume those words into the strictures of America's crazy brand of capitalism. At the best, they're being misleading. At worst, they're twisting our language.
The same type of thing is being done to the web. You can visit any number of sites that speak of empowerment, yet most of them have as their sole goal the selling of eyeballs to advertisers. The stories that are written, and the forums that are provided, are dictated by what will serve the advertisers the best, not what will serve the users the best. Yet again, the look and feel of freedom is used to coat a loss of freedom.
We're all being given freedom in many areas, but only within strict limits set down by who profit from our behavior. We can indeed get around that through the online medium, but we still have to be careful. We still have to keep on our toes, and always ask ourselves what the forum we're participating in is really about.
-Joe