Comments by "Alan Friesen" (@alanfriesen9837) on "Steven Pinker vs John Mearsheimer debate the enlightenment | Part 2 of FULL DEBATE" video.

  1. But the argument isn't about Utopia, it's about whether or not the enlightenment is the primary engine of progress and morality. Pinker and people of his mindset credit the enlightenment with appreciation of reason, which to a large extent it was, but it wasn't the first instance of it. The enlightenment did play a role in Western progress, but there were much stronger factors in Western world dominance. Narrowness of the Atlantic gave Europe access to rich lands peopled with stone-aged cultures and extreme vulnerability to disease. The ability of some European kingdoms to rape those lands incentivized other Europeans to target the supply lines for plunder, and eventually to take part in the direct exploitation of those lands and peoples directly. This dynamic, along with the Protestant reformation and the Catholic response to it, motivated weapons development at a much higher rate than anywhere else in the world. The enlightened British, Dutch, French, and Americans were all slave-holding societies who created racist and exploitative colonial empires, as did the less enlightenment-associated Russians. They all created two-tier empires based on a ruling nation-state that promoted enlightenment philosophy among those within the privileged nationality but exploited all the imperial subjects outside of it, often using a divide and rule strategy. The fate of less nationalistic empires: Chinese, Persian, and Ottoman, lost ground not because they were unattached to enlightenment philosophy, but because the industrial revolution occurred outside their realms, and because their military investment wasn't fueled by African slaves and American gold. Is the industrial revolution a child of the enlightenment? I would argue that to some degree it is. The scientific method is, and that is not insignificant, but good science had been taking place long before. And even the scientific method can be stifling if it's made into an exclusive dogma. Investment in research possible because of the fruits of exploitation, the need to compete against fellow exploiters, and the development of an economic class of men with time and personal fortunes built on exploitation created the environment that produced the harnessing of steam.
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  2. A nation is not multicultural. That would be an empire, of which the United States is, as are Russia, China and any other country worth living in if you don't happen to belong to the dominant bloodline. The nation state is the most destructive concept ever to come out of the enlightenment.
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