It’s the physics equations, stupid
Explaining why Americans would vote for his boss Bill Clinton in 1992, James Carville famously said: “It’s the economy, stupid!”. He was boiling things down to the most essential issue for voters on the ground.
To understand what drove the Enlightment and modernity more generally, I would boil it down to this essential: “It’s the physics equations, stupid!”
Exact and seemingly universal equations for how matter behaves were something new under the sun. They began to arrive around 1600: Kepler’s laws of planetary motion (c 1609); Galileo’s laws of object motion (c 1638); and Newton’s mind-blowing Principia (1687), uniting the celestial (Kepler) and terrestrial (Galileo). And of course the equations just kept coming from there. “These equations are correct!” has been shouted in various ways, with spectacular practical applications and experimental confirmations to many decimal places.
How this has been internalized on the ground, by the average intellectual, goes something like this: “We may not know all the equations yet and maybe we never will, but we’ve seen enough to conclude this is probably what reality is like: it’s ultimately all just tiny bits of matter and energy, blindly following low-level mathematical equations.”
Let’s call this the “mechworld” model of reality. Materialism had always been around in intellectual background; Democritus argued everything was atoms in 350 BC. But the equations turbocharged materialism into something new. They elevated it from one philosophical model among others, to something that felt more like science itself.
Closely related to mechworld is our modern abhorrence of anthropomorphism: unscientifically projecting our gauzy human illusions about God and good and evil and the specialness of humanity onto this grimly cold and neutral atomic universe.
Carnocchio
Pinocchio is the story of a block of wood that desperately wants to become a “real boy”—and the original novel (c 1882 Italy) was suprisingly moralizing and Victorian about what that entailed: you must use your free will to resist temptations and obey conventional moral rules: study hard, save money, obey and financially support your parents, tell the truth, etc. In the end, the supernatural “blue fairy” rewards Pinocchio for his freely chosen virtues, and transforms him from an eye of pine (“occhio” eye + “pino” pine) into a real boy.
Modernity and mechworld run that fable in the opposite direction: call it Carnocchio. We begin as an eye of flesh (“carne”) with illusions about God and morality and free will, but our task as truth tellers is to reject such anthropomorphic blue fairies and remember at bottom we are really just atomic wood puppets.
The truth-telling is key: Pinocchio’s nose grows when he doesn’t, and it’s the logical link between the two fables. Both agree that telling the truth is desperately important: it divides us into sheep and goats. Traditionalist Pinocchio sees it as the divide between the moral and immoral. Nietzschean Carnocchio sees it as the divide between fearless reality-seeking and illusory emotional crutches.
Pink vs Gray
But there’s a logical rift in Carnocchio’s truth-telling imperative. Why is it a positive moral value to tell the truth about mechworld, in a mechworld universe? After all, Christians are bundles of particles who can’t help believing in their anthropomorphic sky god, any more than Carnocchio atheists can help rigorously believing in mechworld. How is it logical, within a mechworld frame, for rigorous Carnocchios to blame lax Pinocchios? It’s the pot calling the kettle wood.
This rift is not some minor slip that can be rectified with a little Socratic coaching. It’s the fundamental driver of modernity. Our moral sense is ineradicable; we are too big to be contained in the mechworld model. Some pink flesh of our own must always spill out, beyond whatever mechanical gray frame we try to rigorously impose on reality. Our very desire to impose the gray frame is bursting with pink free will and pink value judgments: “we gotta be rigorously truthful and not adopt unwarranted hypotheses like God since it would be bad or wrong to do so, bad as in dishonest, sloppy, credulous, delusional, whatever—and we’ll call you out on this.” The pink accuses the gray.
This pink/gray juxtaposition is modernity’s distinctive color palette. We see it again and again in the mechanistic philosophies that followed in the wake of the equations.
The ferocious atheist Mirabaud paints everything gray in his 1770 Système de la Nature ou Des Loix du Monde Physique et du Monde Moral (The System of Nature or, the Laws of the Moral and Physical World). How’s that for a mechworld title?
The universe, that vast assemblage of every thing that exists, presents only matter and motion: the whole offers to our contemplation, nothing but an immense, an uninterrupted succession of causes and effects...
Thus man is a being purely physical...submitted to the necessary, to the immutable laws [of Nature] that she imposes on all the beings she contains ... Man's life is a line that Nature commands him to describe upon the surface of the earth: without his ever being able to swerve from it even for an instant. .. his ideas come to him involuntarily ... he is unceasingly modified by causes ... He is good or bad—happy or miserable — wise or foolish— reasonable or irrational, without his will going for anything in these various states.
Though he sees us all as gray marionettes and paints Christianity a killing gray (conditioned priestly fables to keep monarchs in power), his revolutionary agenda for a better world is a brilliant pink, and he seems to credit his readers with the free will to choose it. Robert Owen, one of Marx’s “utopian socialists”, thought he could condition mankind into productivity and happiness (c 1816):
The will of man has no power whatever over his opinions; he must, and ever did, and ever will believe what has been, is, or may be impressed on his mind by his predecessors and the circumstances which surround him. It becomes therefore the essence of irrationality to suppose that any human being, from the creation to this day, could deserve praise or blame, reward or punishment, for the prepossessions of early education.
But the hand doing the conditioning and choosing its goals must remain pink: its values can’t be mired in a relativistic gray morass, and the conditioner himself can’t be fully conditioned.
Enter hacks
Thanks to the equations, we moderns now hold two contrary models of reality in our heads: one gray (mechworld), and one pink (which varies by individual, but includes at least one’s own free will and one’s own value judgments). How do we hold two contrary models in our heads? With a handful of cognitive hacks, that buffer our pink bits from our toxic gray awareness of mechworld. There are five hacks I see as central, and I believe they were used by Mirabaud, and Robert Owen, and John Locke, and many others. The hacks are what exempted their pink bits from mechworld rigor—and almost all of us still use them for that today.
Since the hacks are all about letting us not think about mechworld, we shouldn’t expect them to be logically coherent, and indeed they’re not. They’re just unexamined, barely-conscious intuitions—and yet they define modernity.
Here’s an example of hacks in action, if you can’t quite see what I’m going on about. Consider this classic mechsplanation of religion, reducing it to a gray product of our early conditioning:
If you grew up in Old Europe you'd be Christian, and in Old Arabia you'd be Muslim. This suggests our religions are a product of our conditioning and not objectively true. Gotcha, religion!
While religious believers don’t think this fully refutes religion, they still see it as a reasonable point against: something they would try to winsomely overcome if they engaged with an unbeliever.
But now apply that exact same mechsplanation to our taboo against racism:
If you grew up in the Old South you'd support slavery, and in Old India you'd support caste system. This suggests our taboo against racism is a product of our conditioning and not objectively true. Gotcha, anti-racism!
Whaaat? For almost all of us, this argument seems weirdly off point, and morally tone deaf to boot. We want to insist: “But the South was wrong about slavery, and they needed to see that!” We don’t feel this mechsplanation undermines anti-racism at all. And we wonder what’s wrong with the person who presented it.
The equivalent would be a Christian exploding: “But the Arabs were wrong about Islam, and they needed to see that!” And anger at the one who posed that weird, relativizing mechsplanation to begin with. But no modern Christian responds that way.
Why does the same mechsplanation land so differently today? Because anti-racism is shielded by stronger hacks than supernatural religion is. Specifically, the supernatural is shielded only by the NoHarm Hack, while anti-racism is shielded by the Harm and Panic Hacks.
More on these hacks later. Meanwhile, the full model is available in powerpoint form here.
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Ordinarily I have no patience for philosophical writing. This, however, I find fascinating and look forward to hearing more.