Beyond The Holy Circle

Enlightenment Philosophers battled for a revolutionary freedom beyond what they called "The Holy Circle" that dominated their culture. The wall-busting Net, it turns out is also busting up the "Holy Circles" of our time. The Net isn't just one revolution, but a series of social revolutions. More and more, it's beginning to look like the first Enlightenment never ended, but just took a breather until the Digital Age arrived. Second in a series.

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