Pluto and his cornucopia had dreamed of it. Information spread across the world like a prodigal and unlimited stream of immaterial resources accessible to everyone. Combined with the human hand and mind, the network and the microprocessor opened wide the door to the third industrial age and the information age. It was the inevitable promise of progress, some claimed. The triumph of intelligence, said others. The victory of politics, poised to master chance and uncertainty, asserted yet others. Humanity was about to experience a new Renaissance. These were, of course, prosaic and biased statements. Nevertheless, amidst the hubbub and explosion of the world, an evolution of the mind comparable to that of the Age of Enlightenment had indeed germinated.
The offspring of the information revolution
After sixty years of computer revolution, information technologies have truly reshaped the functioning of industrial systems and human activities in almost every corner of the globe. The technological leap is unprecedented in material terms. Yet information, that polysemous link between reality and imaginary, has not led to the promised land of the long-awaited elevation of the spirit, or the Promethean entry into a kind of “end of history”. By this I mean the ability to understand the world objectively, and hence to shape geopolitical relations and social passions and identities in a more balanced way.
Profusion is not reason. The great night of computing has come and gone. The influx of information has not generated a qualitative leap in the roots of Being and in the reasoning that constantly confronts the inextricable thickness of the world. At the same time as it abruptly altered the composition of reality, the information revolution, like the two previous industrial eras, provided no “sacred book” or turnkey epistemology manual to adapt human reasoning to these new realities.
Changing relationship with reality and the Existent
There’s nothing unusual about this evolution. The information age has worked precisely on a double rupture in the relationship to reality. On the one hand, the existing world has become comprehensible through a much more diversified palette of signs and messages. These have significantly extended the way we come into contact with the world and form a mental image of it.
On the other hand, computerization has substantially transformed Nature, as Michel Volle reminds us. Computer resources have modified the Existent, in the sense that what exists has been materially transformed, and it has become possible to act differently on it, on matter, space or energy, by means of new technological processes.
In so doing, the Existent has opened up new possibilities in the realm of human intentions. Modes of confrontation between individuals and societies have expanded, while mechanisms for accessing and sharing representations have multiplied. Instantaneity, ubiquity, precision, automation and pervasiveness are all nouns that have altered the relationship between action and the social and material environment.
Back to the cultural underpinning
The clash of this technological upheaval with the reflexive underpinnings of society is therefore a central issue. As a good philosopher of technology, Gilbert Simondon pointed out the risk of techno-science evolving without a cultural framework. For him, culture generates and regulates technology. The technical object is at once physical, material and cultural. Its implementation depends in each case on a mental, political and organizational environment.
The birth of printing illustrates this interdependence. When Gutenberg created the printing press in the mid-15th century, Protestant currents quickly seized on the invention to reinforce their offensive against Catholicism. The rivalry gave rise to a Europe-wide religious war, later leading to the birth of nationalism. From then on, access to knowledge began to go beyond the mediation of religious authorities. It spread to other theological currents.
Basically, the development of printing was not the primary cause of this conflictual dynamic. It provided an additional tool, and in return sculpted an order in which everyone could imagine accessing knowledge through books. In the philosophical-cultural climate of the time, knowledge was still the monopoly of religious bodies, whether Protestant or Catholic.
The cultural shift of the early Enlightenment
Two centuries later, the philosophy of the Enlightenment ushered in a new cultural era. Reason rose above faith and belief. The search for an objective relationship with reality became a horizon for emancipation and social progress.
The French school of Enlightenment nurtured this upheaval prefigured by the Renaissance. Descartes reorganized thought around the individual and his subjectivity. Rousseau and Montesquieu liquidated royal and religious institutions, affirming the individual’s capacity to decide for himself. In the English school, Locke followed in the footsteps of individual freedom. But he reduced the State’s role to that of protecting rights. Bacon posits empiricism almost as a radical respect for what exists hic et nunc, evacuating all ideological considerations. Adam Smith, then John Dewey, rooted classical liberalism in this triangular relationship between individual rights, constitutional guarantees and the limited power of the state. Finally, in the German Romantic tradition, Kant ratified reason as a privileged way of understanding the world. But for him, the mind was fundamentally limited by its perceptions. Reality always results in one way or another from the shaping of perceptions.
Counter-Enlightenment
The torments associated with this more objective relationship with the world were already giving rise to their own chiaroscuro.
The general will formulated by Rousseau provided the justification for oppressing the individual in the name of the common good. It exacerbated the tyranny perceived preferentially at the level of the social system that oppresses the individual. The religious freedom and tolerance touted by rationalists were clandestinely transformed into a mental weapon against Christianity. The lucid, balanced pursuit of objectivity advanced by the Enlightenment was hijacked in the name of transcending the individual into a reserved, impenetrable knowledge. This approach eventually justified social repression. The French Revolution and the Terror were its offshoots.
Nearly a century later, the Russian Revolution, spurred on at a distance by the Anglo-Saxons like the French Revolution, was engulfed in the same political-cultural caesura. The dialectics of Marx and Hegel took up the legacy of Kant, Voltaire and Rousseau.
The “counter-illuminist” subversion of the West thus began in the 18th century. A new aristocracy, made up of philosophers, various secret societies and Freemasonry, worked subtly to trigger these revolutionary or counter-revolutionary dynamics. It is the adversary of Christianity, the Enlightenment, the Church and the Ancien Régime.
Exegetes of European and French history are far from clarifying these elements. The influence of these ideological networks is still structural within the state apparatus. The renunciation of this aspect of French history maintains a deficit of orientation and “values”, as Michel Volle alludes to.
The triple conservative reaction
Formally, the Enlightenment gave birth to the rule of law and democracy. But Enlightenment philosophy created its own bogeymen. These warred in turn in the ideological, political and religious fields.
Ideological reaction crystallized during the French Revolution, then at the end of the 19th century with the emergence of Marxist and communist ideology. Existentialism, structuralism, postmodernism and globalism extend these subversive counter-ideologies. Each is based on variants of the same impossibility of entering into reality as objective truth, and proposes a form of salvation through the deconstruction of oppressive structures.
In religious terms, Protestantism was born with Martin Luther, and politically vampirized Catholicism, as well as the Hispanic empire. The latter was precisely irrigated by a religious thought elaborated by the Jesuits, compatible with the principles of the Enlightenment. From that time until the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council in the mid-twentieth century, Catholicism was under siege, and the centuries-old offensive against the Catholic Church is nowhere near complete. The Christian world emerged permanently divided.
In the course of these developments, the clerical mediation of knowledge lost its monopoly. For better or for worse, the Enlightenment revolution replaced it with a new intellectual aristocracy. Universities, managerial elites, republican bodies and the press are the new moderators of knowledge. This is the order in which we find ourselves today. And it’s being overturned by the information revolution.
The new information economy created by the Internet
The legacy of the Enlightenment is a mixed bag. Barbaric and medieval obscurantism, which had to be left behind at all costs, gave rise to subversive and counter-revolutionary approaches. These were presented as legitimate, emancipatory projects. In practice, however, their content ran counter to the advance of enlightened rationality and the expansion of individual free will.
But the technical system of the network, software and the microprocessor changed the rules of the game in the 1980s. The computer revolution offers the possibility of conducting one’s own research and investigations, without intermediaries and according to one’s own understanding framework. This disintermediation and the decentralization of the network have reshaped the information economy.
Feudal obscurantism is on the lookout for this new shift. The knowledge aristocracy is pushing for an “administered” information economy. Countless institutions are now fulfilling this function, from UN bodies to health and scientific organizations, universities, social networks and many others. The fashionable fight against fragmentation and misinformation, both seen as structural threats, is intended to silence this fundamental movement. The “narrativist” surge, spontaneously generated by social networks, is fueling this outcry.
More concretely, we have seen how the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a global cacophony between established experts, government authorities and citizen action. Controversies over climate change have also been bringing out cognitive contradictions in an increasingly visible way for decades. A “death of expertise” is already palpable, as Tom Nichols and James Lindsay describe it – in other words, a divorce from the establishment working to selectively shape information and knowledge.
Illuminism 2.0
Like the printing press, the ubiquitous network has fundamentally altered the relationship between free will and access to knowledge. It has made available both an altered vision of the world and an “augmented” representation, i.e. a clearer, more realistic and complete view of reality.
This raises a whole series of questions. Which cultural and epistemological schools are likely to amplify this neo-realist phenomenon? How can we promote regulatory arrangements for the Internet, based on individual rights, transparency of computer algorithms and a limited role for the state and international institutions? How can we build a new system for legitimizing knowledge? How can we channel our reluctance to embrace established knowledge, so that it doesn’t play into the hands of counter-revolutionary obscurantism?
There are many ideological camps battling it out. Rather than a single neo-illuminist movement, today we’re witnessing the spread of “little lights 2.0”, weaker than a single illuminating focus, but indeed plural and decentralized. Various signals point to convergences in political expression. The cultural challenge posed by the information revolution is to bring back to the forefront approaches capable of pragmatically embracing reality, and of identifying the combative ideologies that run counter to this realism.
History is on the move. Isn’t it fascinating to take part also in it using the keyboard of your microcomputer?
