They called it the Enlightenment, the great flowering of intellectual energy, discovery and inventiveness that paved the way for the advance of science and reason. It’s a phrase that stands for what can be achieved when people focus their minds on investigating the evidence, exchanging ideas, testing theories and engaging in rational enquiry.
The opposite of truth and reason
Unfortunately, we are now living through a dis-Enlightenment. In the US in particular, and increasingly elsewhere, facts don’t matter and can be casually denied. Universities have become subject to bullying as compliance with the requirements of one political faction becomes more important than freedom of enquiry and the ability to recruit the best minds.
Museum directors are not appointed for their knowledge but selected instead for their willingness to arrange exhibits as mouth pieces for the reigning ideology. Clear scientific evidence on issues like climate change is dealt with not by thoughtful policy-making but by decisions to stop collecting ‘awkward’ evidence and to destroy what already exists. Leaders presume to tell us one thing before an election and a completely different thing after it and then carry on as if no one cares.
The process doesn’t stop at the cynical denial of facts. Actions which are known to be damaging to human survival are encouraged with flippancy as ‘drill baby drill’ politics takes us ever closer to ‘burn baby burn’. Programmes which reduce the need to buy fossil fuels are cancelled regardless of whether or not they are working and saving money.
The effectiveness of vaccines that help prevent diseases such as polio is cast into doubt by the person in charge of health care, Robert F Kennedy Jnr, not because of any actual evidence of danger but because he chooses to believe his own pet theories without bothering to properly study the evidence. Children will die because the politician placed in charge of the US nation’s health prefers the sound of his own opinions to evidential research.
The rich person’s media – a new Inquisition
When the Enlightenment began the chief threat to it came from established religions and from absolute monarchs who often felt challenged by the difference between what an open-minded investigation of the facts uncovered and what their priests or their rulers wished their charges to believe. This famously went as far, in the case of the Catholic church’s Inquisition, as burning great books, torturing great minds and aggressively asserting great stupidities about the sun going round the earth.
Now that the dis-enlightenment is under way the threat comes from a group of very wealthy people who have little or no interest in anything other than what will make them the most money in the short term. All they need to do is to buy up large chunks of the means of communication and they can spread any pet theory they like. The public is expected to believe impossible boasts and great lies and these are repeated to them so often that sometimes they do.
The onslaught of self-serving propaganda that pays no regard to reality on the ground is not just the product of the peculiar personality of one man or the result of a temporary blip in otherwise normal service of rational world leaders. The advance of authoritarianism is happening all over the world, with Turkey being the latest example of a deeply corrupt leader accusing any honest person who dares to challenge their fiefdom of themselves being corrupt.
Within the US, characters such as JD Vance and Elon Musk are quite capable of leading the country into even darker places. There was an entire intellectual movement behind Donald Trump’s victory that is pushing hard for every method of enriching the already wealthy. They called it Project 2025. Now every effort is being made to rig the US mid-term elections and to destroy the independence of individual states who happen to elect leaders the administration doesn’t like.
Truth, evidence and expertise – the case for principled opposition
In such circumstances it is deeply unwise to try and conduct business as usual and behave as if it is possible for decent and honest politicians in other countries to share values and objectives with oligarchs. Principled opposition makes sense. Attempts to appease those who admire the way Vladimir Putin stripped Russia of all outlets for independent thought don’t. Appeasement simply puts other leaders in the position justifying the unjustifiable, normalising the abnormal and giving credence to outright lies and outright liars.
The one weapon those of us who still believe in Enlightenment values can rely on is the power of the truth. Vaccines work. The human body doesn’t obey the quack theories of a dodgy Kennedy, it responds to effective medicines.
The world economy doesn’t dutifully fall into line with the latest Trump thinking. When he makes a mistake, it hits people in the pocket, as Liz Truss should have taught the entire population of Britain.
The world doesn’t stop warming just because petrol companies gain domination over the publication of ideas. Plastics still enter your mind and your reproductive organs regardless of the determination of rich oil states to continue expanding their production.
There is such a thing as truth. There is such a thing as evidence. There is such a thing as genuine expertise.
The choice we have to make
Yet the facts can’t be heard if the outlets of information are owned and controlled by wealthy people who have a direct financial interest in concealing the truth and spreading misinformation. We therefore have a choice. Either we continue to drift deeper into an era of dis-enlightenment or we place control of the media and of cyberspace into the hands of more reliable people.
We need our media to be controlled by public representatives in much the same way as our juries are. We need randomly elected citizens’ assemblies to make the decisions about what is factually accurate news and what the algorithms should be promoting and suppressing. There is no genuine freedom of speech if the rich and powerful can buy the ability to drown knowledge in a sea of convenient propaganda. And there is no genuine democracy if there is little opportunity for the facts to be heard against the hefty promotion of convenient lies.
