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Joining me today is Maarten Boudry, a philosopher and author with eclectic interests, including progress, cultural evolution, conspiracy theories, and more. You should check out his Substack. He joins the podcast today to discuss a fascinating essay titled “The Enlightenment’s Gravediggers.”
You start with a very powerful and illustrative story about Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Rousseau was one of the first philosophers of the Romantic movement, which was a big part of the counter-Enlightenment. At this point in history, modernity hadn’t yet delivered anything tangible for the common people, but there was a relative measure of intellectual freedom, so, in that sense, we were already in the early stages of modernity.
Rousseau, before he was an established philosopher, was leafing through a magazine and came across an announcement for a prize by the Académie de Dijon. I don’t have the prize question with me here, but it was something to the effect of, “Have the improvements of the sciences also led to a betterment of morality in our society?” Rousseau describes that the moment he read that sentence, in a flash of insight, he saw the innocence of humanity in its original state and the depravity and decadence of civilization. And so he wrote his essay, a sweeping indictment of the whole of so-called civilization. It says that wherever the sciences are blossoming, wherever knowledge is improving, virtue is declining, and every supposedly great civilization eventually collapses under the weight of its own useless knowledge. By the way, he won the first prize—this is relevant for what comes next.
What I find fascinating is that Rousseau was a very cultured and educated man, but he condemned the whole idea of being refined and learned and cultured. In effect, he was biting the hand that feeds him. The Enlightenment philosophers had created this little island of intellectual freedom, which was the hand that was feeding him by giving him the freedom to study and exchange ideas. And he knew that hand would never punch him in the face. In fact, his friend Diderot encouraged him, even though he totally disagreed, because he relished the provocation of an Enlightenment philosopher tearing down the whole project of the Enlightenment.
That is one of the most fascinating and unique aspects of modernity. We do not just tolerate this sort of behavior; we encourage it. If you understand what is behind that story, it provides a lot of insight into what comes next in the 20th and 21st centuries: this very modern phenomenon of anti-modernity, the capitalist phenomenon of anti-capitalism, and the Western hatred of Western civilization.
Tell me more about the cultural trend of disdain toward Western civilization and capitalism.
There are a couple of different intellectual tributaries to this grand river of anti-modernity. There’s postmodernism, with the idea that we should undermine truth and reason, the foundations of modernity. There’s the victim versus oppressor narrative, sometimes called post-colonialism, which is the idea that you can neatly divide the world into oppressors and victims, which also leads to an indictment of Western civilization. And there’s environmentalism, which rejects the fruits of modernity. In the book, I ask the question, why do these different ideologies exist at all? Is there something about modernity that sows the seed of its own destruction?
The explanation that I eventually came up with is very simple: modern Western civilization is the only hand that allows itself to be bitten. If you were living under Stalin, you could never dream about criticizing the political ideology or economic system; dissent was just not tolerated. The same applies to China and to a lot of other unfree countries. And that leads to a sort of paradox, which I think was first described by an American politician called Daniel Patrick Moynihan, which is basically that there’s an inverse correlation between the number of complaints about human rights violations and the amount of actual human rights violations. If you ever find yourself in a society where nobody is complaining, and everyone agrees that the future will be glorious and the political system is great, you really have to get out of there as quickly as possible because that’s a completely totalitarian society.
You also talk about an alternative explanation: that this self-flagellation is some sort of mutation of Christianity.
As Nietzsche pointed out, a lot of the morality in Christian teachings is a kind of inversion, where the weaker and more vulnerable you are, the more virtuous you are. And there’s also the notion of original sin, that all of us are born tainted by evil. You can find these white guilt rituals on YouTube, where white people prostrate themselves in front of the people that their ancestors oppressed and ask for forgiveness. It’s very similar to the idea of original sin because, of course, they themselves didn’t own any slaves; it’s their whiteness itself, their identity, that they feel they have to apologize for.
However, many of these same people are also explicitly anti-Christian. They have completely secular upbringings and are rejecting Western civilization, which Christianity is part of. So, even though it’s possible that they’re unconsciously influenced by these Christian ways of thinking, it’s hard to prove. It also doesn’t work for all of the cases. It especially doesn’t work for the rightist forms of anti-modernity, which are muscular and aggressive and seem to be based more on pride than guilt.
My simpler explanation is that both on the left and the right, there are simply more opportunities to bite the hand that feeds you. I call this the supply-side explanation. I think the demand for complaining about the current state of affairs has always been there. People like to gripe about everything. I actually came up with something I call the Law of Conservation of Outrage in an earlier piece, which posits that, no matter how much progress society makes, the amount of complaining will always stay the same.
You say in the essay that anti-Western critics often like to pretend that their bravery will be met with universal outcry against them. But with a few exceptions, you note that these crusaders are not only given free reign but are also often handsomely rewarded.
Yeah, they are rewarded in specific contexts. So, in an academic environment, for example, you are rewarded for finding ever more novel ways to condemn Western civilization, and many of these anti-Western and anti-capitalist academics hold university positions that are paid for with tax money, which is basically the surplus production of the capitalist system that they criticize.
Can you talk about some examples of people who criticized their own societies, such as Edward Said and Michel Foucault?
Foucault is an interesting example. Early on, he was a member of the Communist Party, but he very quickly broke with communism. He was a postmodernist, so he didn’t believe in ideology or grand narratives. But he was biting the hand that feeds him in the sense that he was trying to demonize many of the institutions of modernity that we take as exemplars of moral progress.
I’m cutting some corners here, but Foucault’s argument always amounted to, “oh, so you think that we are so much better than we were in the Middle Ages?” In the Middle Ages, they were torturing criminals, but his argument was always that the modern way of treating prisoners or the mentally insane was actually even worse because although it presented itself as morally enlightened, it was really just a sinister bourgeois exercise of power to dominate the weak and vulnerable.
Foucault, of course, had unrestrained freedom to express his hatred of modernity, and he was rewarded by a lot of acolytes and followers who thought he was very brave to question the narrative of moral progress. Ironically, towards the end of his life, he contracted HIV and was treated in the Salpêtrière, which is a hospital in France that played a central role in Madness and Civilization,one of his major works. He bit the hand that feeds him, and the hand nurtured and comforted him until the end of his life.
Edward Said was one of the founders of post-colonialism, of this idea first expressed in his seminal work, Orientalism, that Western civilization, through the centuries, has always harbored a desire to oppress and invade the Orient. The intellectual groundwork for this conquest was laid by fiction and poetry, which, according to Said, presented the Orient as exotic, irrational, and sensual, in contrast with the rational, dominant, and masculine self-image of the West.
To be completely fair, there is some truth to what he wrote. It’s obviously true, especially if you go back centuries, that Western civilization had a very distorted view of other civilizations—just like every other culture in all of history. But Said was not interested in an even-handed or symmetric treatment of Western civilization; he was mostly interested in trashing the West.
The irony in Said’s case is that he studied in Princeton. He had guest professorships and distinguished chairs, and he got lots of awards for condemning Western civilization. Even in Israel, which he, in his later works, condemned as an oppressive, apartheid regime, he was welcomed. His books were published in Hebrew and put on university curricula.
Even more ironically, the opposite was true in the Palestinian-controlled territories. For a long time Said and Yasser Arafat had a friendship, but at some point, Arafat got fed up with Said and banned his books in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which were under Palestinian control. I think there’s no better example of the difference between a hand that punches back and the one that allows itself to be bitten.
Up until now, we’ve been talking about how critics of modernity often receive prestige and accolades. That’s a metaphorical “feeding,” but you also talk about literal feeding. Tell me about that.
In Rousseau’s time, the feeding was purely metaphorical. He lived before the Industrial Revolution, and people were still as poor as they had ever been. The literal feeding only began in the 19th century, and what you see is that the more people enjoy the fruits of a capitalist society, the more opportunities they have to engage in criticism. So, capitalism and industrial modernity become a victim of their own success because they breed this class of people who have their material needs met and can spend their lives biting the hand that feeds them. Karl Marx is a great example. He was living off of the handouts that he received from Friedrich Engels which were made possible by Engels’ father’s cotton factory. Capitalism was affording him the freedom and the material prosperity to write screeds against capitalism.
There was a recent study about how the hotspots of degrowth—the philosophy that calls for an end to economic growth and a controlled shrinking of material production—are all in wealthy countries. You don’t hear a lot of degrowth-ism from people in developing countries because they have a more immediate understanding of the benefits of capitalism and industry. But if you’ve been prosperous and well-fed and affluent for a long time, you tend to take those things for granted. If you read the degrowth literature, they seem to have no clue at all about what it means to farm, for example, and be self-sufficient. They romanticize it, and they can afford to romanticize it because nobody is there to tell them what it was like. Even their grandparents never experienced it.
You end the essay on the nuanced point that, in some way, we should be happy that there are so many critics of our civilization because it is a sign that freedom is still protected.
Yeah, absolutely. Perhaps because I’m an inveterate optimist, I try to put a positive spin on this kind of ungrateful, spoiled behavior. But it is a serious argument; I wouldn’t want to live in a society where people are afraid to speak up. However, I also believe that a society that engages in too much self-abasement and self-flagellation loses confidence in itself, and I worry about what that portends for the future. There are signs, especially in Europe, of technological and economic stagnation. And if you look back to earlier modern eras, there was a lot more confidence and optimism and a stronger belief in progress. I do think something has changed, and we no longer seem to believe in ourselves.
I can give you one example where I think this kind of wholesale rejection of industrial modernity is very harmful. Think about the way that people talk about fossil fuels in Western countries, how they’re destroying the planet, and we have to ween ourselves off as quickly as possible. It’s one thing for a Western activist who is surrounded by fossil fuel products to indulge in these fantasies, but Western environmentalists are also telling poor countries, “Oh, you shouldn’t repeat our mistakes,” meaning you shouldn’t burn all these fossil fuels and engaging in self-abasement, “we are so guilty because we have been doing that for two centuries.” That self-abasement leads them to actively sabotage fossil fuel development in poor countries. The IMF, the World Bank, and a lot of investment banks have openly promised not to fund fossil fuel investments in poor and developing countries. Not at home, mind you: they’re still building coal plants in Germany and gas plants in Norway. This virtue signaling mostly comes at the expense of poor and developing countries.
So, illusions have consequences. Perhaps not yet here because we’re surrounded by so much material affluence, but there are already downstream consequences on the other side of the globe.
