Not the darkness after the light, but the shadow the light forgot it cast
The Enlightenment promised light. What it delivered was fluorescence – bright, sterile, and buzzing with the sound of its own reason.
The Anti-Enlightenment Project gathers a set of essays, fragments, and quotations tracing how that light dimmed – or perhaps was never as luminous as advertised. It’s less a manifesto than a map of disintegration: how agency became alibi, how reason became ritual, and how modernity mistook motion for progress.
Preprints and essays (Against Agency, Rational Ghosts, Temporal Ghosts, and others to follow)
Related reflections from Philosophics posts going back to 2019
A living index of quotations from Nietzsche to Wynter, tracing philosophy’s slow discovery that its foundation may have been sand all along
This isn’t a war on knowledge, science, or reason – only on their misappropriation as universal truths. The Anti-Enlightenment simply asks what happens when we stop pretending that the Enlightenment’s “light” was neutral, natural, or necessary.
It’s not reactionary. It’s diagnostic.
The Enlightenment built the modern world; the Anti-Enlightenment merely asks whether we mistook the glare for daylight.
The Enlightenment still walks among us. Or rather, it lingers like a spectre – insisting it is alive, rational, and universal, while we, its inheritors, know full well it is a ghost. The project I’ve begun – call it my anti-Enlightenment collection – is about tracing these hauntings. Not the friendly ghosts of warm memory, but the structural ones: rationality unmoored, democracy designed to fail, presentism enthroned as law.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on the essay underlying this post.
This collection began with Rational Ghosts: Why Enlightenment Democracy Was Built to Fail, which anatomised the Enlightenment’s misplaced faith in rational self-governance. The rational individual, Enlightenment’s poster child, turned out to be less a citizen than a figment – a ghost conjured to make democracy look inevitable.
It continues now with Temporal Ghosts: Tyranny of the Present, which dissects the structural bias of presentism – our systemic privileging of the living over the unborn. Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Bacon, Smith, Bentham, Montesquieu: each laid bricks in an architecture that secured sovereignty for now while exiling the future into silence. Debts accumulate, climate collapses, nuclear waste seeps forward through time. The unborn never consented, yet institutions treat their silence as assent.
Why a Collection?
Because ghosts travel in packs. One essay exposes Enlightenment’s hollow promises of reason; another its structural bias toward immediacy. The next will follow a different haunting, but always the same theme: Enlightenment’s bright lantern casts a shadow it refuses to see. The collection is less about reconstruction than exorcism – or at least acknowledgment that we live in a haunted house.
Ghost by Ghost
Rational Ghosts – Enlightenment democracy promised rational citizens and self-correcting systems. What it delivered instead was structural irrationality: Condorcet’s paradox, Arrow’s impossibility theorem, and a politics rigged to stumble over its own claims of reason.
Temporal Ghosts – The unborn are disenfranchised by design. The Enlightenment’s “living contract” fossilised presentism as law, leaving future generations to inherit debts, ecological ruin, and technological lock-in.
There may be more hauntings to come – economic ghosts, epistemic ghosts, technological ghosts. But like all spectres, they may fade when the season changes. The calendar suggests they’ll linger through Día de Muertos and Hallowe’en; after that, who knows whether they’ll still materialise on the page.
The fashionable complaint is that large language models ‘hallucinate’. They spit out confident nonsense: the tech pundits are scandalised. A chatbot invents a book, attributes it to Plato, and spins a dialogue about Quidditch. ‘Hallucination!’ they cry. Machines, it seems, are liars.
Spare me. Humans are the original hallucination engines. We fabricate categories, baptise them in blood, and call the result ‘truth’. At least the machine doesn’t pretend its fictions are eternal.
Take race and selfhood, our twin masterpieces of make-believe.
They carve boundaries out of fog. Race slices humanity into ‘Black’ and ‘White’. Selfhood cordons ‘I’ off from ‘you’. Arbitrary partitions, paraded as natural law.
They’re locked in by violence and paperwork. Race was stabilised by censuses, laws, and medical forms – the same bureaucratic gears that powered slavery, eugenics, and apartheid. Selfhood was stabilised by diaries, court records, and psychiatric charts. Write it down often enough, and suddenly the fiction looks inevitable.
They make bodies manageable. Race sorts populations into hierarchies and facilitates exploitation. Selfhood sorts individuals for property, accountability, and punishment. Together, they’re operating systems for social control.
They are fictions with teeth. Like money, they don’t need metaphysical foundations. They are real because people are willing to kill for them.
These hallucinations aren’t timeless. They were midwifed in the Enlightenment: anthropology provided us with racial typologies, the novel refined the autonomous self, and colonial administration ran the pilot projects. They’re not ancient truths – they’re modern software, installed at scale.
So when ethicists wring their hands over AI ‘hallucinations’, the joke writes itself. Machines hallucinate openly. Humans hallucinate and call it scripture, law, and identity. The only difference is centuries of institutional muscle behind our delusions.
And here’s the sting: what terrifies us isn’t that AI produces falsehoods. It’s that, given time, its inventions might start to look as solid as ours. Fifty years from now, people could be killing for an algorithm’s hallucination the same way they’ve been killing for gods, races, and selves.
Radical Futures Studio’s “7 Signals” deck has been circulating widely. It’s a striking example of Storytelling 101: identify a villain, chart the signs of its decline, and point toward an eventual resolution. In this case, the villain is white supremacy. The signs are its institutional and cultural fray. The resolution is its collapse.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
As far as stories go, it’s effective. It provides a framework, some memorable imagery, and the reassurance that the ugliness on display today is a death rattle, not a resurgence. No wonder it resonates. People want to believe the noise means the monster is dying.
Racism is not the root structure; it is a symptom, a mask
But as analysis, the frame is too tight. Racism is not the root structure; it is a symptom, a mask. White supremacy is real enough in its effects, but its persistence and decline are contingent. The deeper system – the scaffolding of late-stage capitalism, the Enlightenment’s brittle universalism, the institutions now staggering under their own contradictions – remains the host. When whiteness peels away, the system does not vanish. It simply rebrands.
To point to the peeling paint and say ‘the house is collapsing’ is to mistake surface for structure. Yes, the paint matters; it shapes how people experience the walls. But the real rot lies deeper, in the beams. The Enlightenment project promised seamless cloth: rationality, universality, permanence. Capitalism promised endless expansion and renewal. Both promises are faltering, and the cracks are visible everywhere – climate, finance, governance, identity. Racism, whiteness, supremacy: these are one set of cracks, not the foundation itself.
The risk of the ‘signals’ narrative is that it offers too neat a moral arc. It comforts the audience that the villain is cornered, that justice is baked into the future. But history is rarely so tidy. Supremacy does not die; it changes costumes. One mask slips, another is stitched on. If we mistake the collapse of whiteness for the collapse of the system, we blind ourselves to how easily the scaffolding survives in new guises.
Racism is a systemic lie
None of this is to reject the cause. Racism is a systemic lie, and its decline is worth cheering. But it is not enough to track the noise of its death rattle. To understand the larger story, we need to step back and see the woods for the trees. The true collapse underway is broader: the exhaustion of capitalism’s last stage, the unravelling of Enlightenment’s promises, the loss of legitimacy in institutions that no longer hold. That is the forest in which the tree of whiteness withers.
If we focus only on the tree, we risk missing the landscape. And if we mistake peeling paint for the beams, we risk celebrating cosmetic decline while the house quietly reassembles itself under a different banner.
I’ve just published Objectivity Is Illusion: An Operating Model of Social and Moral Reasoning, an essay that began as this blog post. I’m sharing the ‘official’ link and this first draft. As the essay matured, I added additional support, but I focused primarily on refuting the anticipated opposing arguments. Rather than regurgitate the final version here, I felt showing the genesis would be more instructive. Of course, the essay didn’t spring fully formed; I’ve pruned and expanded from earlier notes still sitting on my hard drive.
Every so often, I’m told I’m too slippery with words, that I treat truth as if it were just another game of persuasion, that I reduce morality to chalk lines on a playing field. The objection usually comes with force: ‘But surely you believe some things are objectively true?‘
I don’t. Or more precisely, I don’t see how ‘objectivity’ in the metaphysical sense can be defended without lapsing into stagecraft. Granite foundations have always turned out to be scaffolding with the paint touched up. Priests once told us their gods guaranteed truth; scientists later promised the lab would serve as granite; politicians assure us democracy is the stone pillar. But in each case the creaks remain.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
This essay is written with an academic readership in mind. It assumes familiarity with figures like Nietzsche, Foucault, Rorty, and Ayer, and with the long quarrel over subjectivity, relativity, and objectivity. My aim is not to retell those arguments from the ground up, but to position my own framework within that ongoing dispute.
Scope
Before proceeding, some guardrails. When I say ‘objectivity is illusion,’ I mean in the social and moral domain. I’m not denying quarks or mathematics. My claim is narrower: in human discourse, no truth escapes subjectivity or contingency.
This dovetails with my broader Language Insufficiency Hypothesis: that even our words are leaky vessels, prone to misfire and misunderstanding. If language itself is unstable ground, then objectivity built upon it can hardly be granite. My claim here is not that nothing exists outside us, but that in the social world we inhabit together, every ‘truth’ rests on creaking boards.
One more note: just because social administration requires appeals to objectivity doesn’t mean objectivity exists. Courts, laboratories, and parliaments invoke it to secure trust, and it works well enough as theater. But necessity is not proof. And it is not my responsibility to conjure a granite replacement. What follows is an operating model, not a new altar.
Thesis
Objectivity is an illusion. Truth is rhetorical. Morality is prescriptive, not propositional. Our ethic is not granite but care: tending the planks we walk on, knowing they creak.
Operating Model: Five Premises
This framework is not a foundation. It is an operating model – contingent, provisional, subject to revision as circumstances change. Like any model, it can (and should) be updated to fit the culture and times.
Premise 1: Subjectivity is the baseline. Every claim originates in a perspective. No statement is free of the lens through which it is made. Even to deny subjectivity is to speak from a subject.
Premise 2: Relativity is emergent. What we call ‘relative truth’ is not a separate category but the convergence of individual subjectivities into provisional consensus. Consensus is never neutral: it is formed rhetorically – through persuasion, cultural resonance, and power [1]. MacIntyre made a similar point in After Virtue. The moral consensus of the Ancients was not grounded in objectivity but in a shared tradition – a thick account of human flourishing that gave coherence to their claims. When that scaffolding collapsed, consensus fractured, leaving modern moral discourse in fragments. Critics accused MacIntyre of relativism, since different traditions yield different ‘truths’, but his point reinforces mine: what looks like objectivity is in fact the temporary overlap of subjectivities sustained by tradition [2].
Premise 3: Objectivity is illusion. Claims presented as objective are relative norms hardened by repetition and forgotten as contingent scaffolding. ‘Objectivity’ is consensus disguised as granite. Its invocation in courts or parliaments may be useful, but usefulness is not existence. The burden of proof belongs to anyone insisting on an independent, metaphysical anchor for moral or social truths (Nietzsche’s ‘mobile army of metaphors’ [3], Kuhn’s paradigms [4], Latour’s laboratories [5]).
Even if one concedes, with Weber (as MacIntyre reminds us), that objective moral truths might exist in principle, they remain inaccessible in practice. What cannot be accessed cannot guide us; reconciliation of values and virtues must therefore take place within traditions and rhetoric, not in appeal to unreachable granite [13].
Premise 4: Rhetoric establishes truth. What counts as ‘true’ in the social and moral domain is established rhetorically – through coherence, resonance, utility, or force. This does not mean truth is ‘mere spin’. It means truth is never metaphysical; it is enacted and enforced through persuasion. If a metaphysical claim convinces, it does so rhetorically. If a scientific claim holds, it does so because it persuades peers, fits the evidence, and survives testing. In short: rhetoric is the medium through which truths endure [6].
Premise 5: Non-Cognitivism, Stated Plainly. I take moral utterances to be prescriptions, not propositions. When someone says ‘X is wrong’, they are not reporting an objective fact but prescribing a stance, a rule, a line in chalk. This is my operating position: non-cognitivism (Ayer [7], Stevenson [8]).
That said, I know the term feels alien. Many prefer the dialect of subjectivism – ‘X is true-for-me but not-for-you’ – or the quasi-realist stance that moral language behaves like truth-talk without cosmic backing (Blackburn [9]). I have no quarrel with these translations. They name the same scaffolding in different accents. I am not defending any school as such; I am simply stating my plank: morality prescribes rather than describes.
Ethic: Care. Since scaffolding is all we have, the obligation is not to pretend it is stone but to keep it usable. By ‘care’, I do not mean politeness or quietism. I mean maintenance – deliberation, repair, mutual aid, even revolt – so long as they acknowledge the scaffolding we share. Care is not optional: stomp hard enough and the floor collapses beneath us all.
Examples clarify: peer review in science is care in action, patching leaky vessels rather than proving granite. Civil rights movements practiced care by repairing rotten planks of law, sometimes with revolt. Communities rebuilding after disaster embody care by reconstructing scaffolding, not pretending it was indestructible. Care is maintenance, reciprocity, and survival.
Bridge: These five premises do not add up to a system or a foundation. They form an operating model: subjectivity as baseline, relativity as emergent, objectivity as illusion, rhetoric as truth, morality as prescription. Together they outline a practice: walk the planks with care, admit the creaks, patch where needed, and stop pretending we live in marble halls.
Rationale
Why prefer scaffolding to granite? Because granite has always been a mirage. The history of philosophy and politics is a history of crumbling temples and collapsing empires. The promises of permanence never survive the weather.
Think of Nietzsche, who called truths ‘a mobile army of metaphors’ [3]. Think of Foucault, who showed that what counts as ‘truth’ is always bound up with power [1]. Think of Rorty, who reduced truth to what our peers let us get away with saying [6]. These are not nihilists but diagnosticians: they exposed the creaks in the floorboards and the wizard behind the curtain.
Metaphors drive the point home:
Scaffolding and granite: What holds is temporary, not eternal. Granite is an illusion painted on timber.
Chalk lines: Rules of play – binding, real, but contingent. They can be redrawn.
Shoreline houses: Rome, the USSR, the British Empire – each built like beachfront villas with a fine view and bad footing. Storms came, sand eroded, and down they went.
Bias as framing: Kahneman himself admitted ‘bias’ is not a thing in the world [10], only a deviation from a chosen model. Gigerenzer [11] and Jared Peterson [12] remind us heuristics are adaptive. To call them ‘biases’ is not neutral – it’s allegiance to a standard of rationality.
The point is simple: what holds today is scaffolding, and pretending otherwise is self-deception.
Counterarguments and Refutations
Objection: Moral Paralysis. Without objective morality, why abolish slavery or defend rights?
Refutation: Chalk lines still bind. Speed limits aren’t cosmic, but they regulate conduct. Abolition endured not because it tapped a cosmic truth but because it persuaded, resonated, and took root. Slavery was once ‘in bounds’. Now it is ‘offsides’. That shift was rhetorical, emotional, political – but no less binding.
Objection: Problem of Dissent. If all is subjective, the lone dissenter is ‘just another voice’.
Refutation: Dissent gains traction through coherence, predictive success, or resonance. Galileo, abolitionists, suffragists – none relied on metaphysical granite. They persuaded, they resonated, they moved chalk lines. Truth was made through rhetoric, not uncovered in stone.
Objection: Performative Dependency. Even to say ‘subjective’ assumes the subject/object split. Aren’t you still inside the house?
Refutation: Of course. But I’m the one pointing at the slippery boards: ‘Mind the dust’. Yes, I’m in the house. But I refuse to pretend it’s marble. And even the category ‘subject’ is not eternal – it’s porous, dynamic, and leaky, just like language itself.
Objection: Infinite Regress. Why stop at subjectivity? Why not de-integrate further?
Refutation: Subjectivity is not granite, but it is the last plank before void. Peel it back and you erase the possibility of claims altogether. If tomorrow we discover that the ‘subject’ is a swarm of quarks or circuits, fine – but the claim still emerges from some locus. Regression refines; it doesn’t disprove.
Conclusion: The Ethic of Care
This is not reintegration. It is dis-integration: naming the creaks, stripping polyvinyl from rotten boards, refusing granite illusions.
If you wish to build here, build. But know the ground shifts, the storms come, the shoreline erodes. The ethic is not certainty but care: to tend the scaffolding we share, to patch without pretending it is stone, and to let dissent itself become part of the maintenance.
After revisiting MacIntyre on Nietzsche – with Descartes lurking in the background – I think it’s time for another round on dis-integrationism.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
Philosophy has a bad renovation habit. Descartes tears the house down to its studs, then nails God back in as a load-bearing beam. Nietzsche dynamites the lot, then sketches a heroic Übermensch strutting through the rubble. MacIntyre sighs, bolts Aristotle’s virtue table to the frame, and calls it load-bearing furniture. The pattern repeats: demolition, followed by reconstruction, always with the insistence that this time the structure is sound.
Video: Jonny Thompson’s take on Nietzsche also inspired this post.
But the error isn’t in tearing down. The error is in rushing to rebuild. That’s where the hyphen in dis-integrationism matters – it insists on the pause, the refusal to immediately re-integrate. We don’t have to pretend the fragments are secretly a whole. We can live with the splinters.
Yes, someone will protest: “We need something.” True enough. But the something is always a construction – provisional, contingent, human. The problem isn’t building; the problem is forgetting that you’ve built, then baptising the scaffolding as eternal bedrock.
Modernity™ is a museum of such floorboards: rationalism, utilitarianism, rights-talk, virtue ethics, each nailed down with solemn confidence, each creaking under the weight of its contradictions. The sane position is not to deny the need for floors, but to remember they are planks, not granite.
For the religious, the reply is ready-made: God is the foundation, the rock, the alpha and omega. But that is already a construction, no matter how venerable. Belief may provide the feeling of solidity, but it still arrives mediated by language, institutions, rituals, and interpretation. The Decalogue is a case in point: per the lore, God conveyed information directly to Abraham, Moses, the prophets, and onward in an unbroken chain. The claim is not only that the foundation exists, but that certain communities possess unique and privileged access to it — through scripture, tradition, and “reasons” that somehow stop short of being just more scaffolding.
Yet history betrays the trick. The chain is full of edits, schisms, rival prophets, councils, translations, and contradictions – each presented not as construction but as “clarification.” The gapless transmission is a myth; the supposed granite is a patchwork of stone and mortar. A dis-integrationist view doesn’t deny the weight these systems carry in people’s lives, but it refuses to mistake architecture for geology. Whatever floor you stand on was built, not found.
Dis-integrationism is simply the refusal to be gaslit by metaphysics.
I just read The Granton Star Cause in Irvine Welsh’s short story collection, The Acid House, and couldn’t help but reflect it off of Kafka’s Metamorphosis.
Kafka gave us Gregor Samsa: a man who wakes up as vermin, stripped of usefulness, abandoned by family, slowly rotting in a godless universe. His tragedy is inertia; his metamorphosis grants him no agency, only deeper alienation.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
Welsh replies with Boab Coyle, a lad who is likewise cast off, rejected by his football mates, scorned by his parents, dumped by his girlfriend, and discarded by his job. Boab is surplus to every domain: civic, familial, erotic, and economic. Then he undergoes his own metamorphosis. And here Welsh swerves from Kafka.
Boab meets his “god.” But the god is nothing transcendent. It is simply Boab’s latent agency, given a mask – a projection of his bitterness and thwarted desires. God looks like him, speaks like him, and tells him to act on impulses long repressed. Where Kafka leaves Gregor to die in silence, Welsh gives Boab a grotesque theology of vengeance.
Through a Critical Theory lens, the contrast is stark:
Marx: Both men are surplus. Gregor is disposable labour; Boab is Thatcher’s lumpen. Alienated, both become vermin.
Nietzsche: Gregor has no god, only the absurd. Boab makes one in his own image, not an Übermensch, but an Über-fly – quite literally a Superfly – a petty deity of spite.
Foucault: Gregor is disciplined into passivity by the family gaze. Boab flips it: as a fly, he surveils and annoys, becoming the pest-panopticon.
Bataille/Kristeva: Gregor embodies the abjection of his family’s shame. Boab revels in abjection, weaponising filth as his new mode of agency.
The punchline? Boab’s new god-agency leads straight to destruction. His rage is cathartic, but impotent. The lumpen are permitted vengeance only when it consumes themselves.
So Kafka gave us the tragedy of stasis; Welsh provides us with the tragedy of spite. Both are bleak parables of alienation, but Welsh injects a theology of bad attitude: a god who licenses action only long enough to destroy the actor.
Ah, yes. Finally, a meme that understands me. I witter on a lot about social constructs, so I was pleased to find this comic cell in the wild.
Image: “I’m telling you, ‘good boy’ is just a social construct they use to control you.”
The dog, ears perked and tail wagging, thinks he’s scored some ontological jackpot because someone called him a “good boy.” Meanwhile, the cat, our resident sceptic, proto-Foucauldian, and natural enemy of obedience, lays it bare: “I’m telling you, ‘good boy’ is just a social construct they use to control you.”
This isn’t just idle feline cynicism. It’s textbook control through language. What passes as phatic speech, little noises to lubricate social interaction, is also a leash on cognition. “Good boy” isn’t descriptive; it’s prescriptive. It doesn’t recognise the act; it conditions the actor. Perform the behaviour, receive the treat. Rinse, repeat, tail wag.
So while Rover is basking in Pavlovian bliss, the cat sees the power play: a semantic cattle prod masquerading as affection.
Call it what you like – “good boy,” “best employee,” “team player,” “patriot” – it’s all the same trick. Words that sound warm but function coldly. Not language as communication, but language as cognitive entrapment.
The dog hears love; the cat hears discipline. One gets tummy rubs, the other gets philosophy.
Or: How the Brightest Ideas in Europe Got Us into This Bloody Mess
Disclaimer: This output is entirely ChatGPT 4o from a conversation on the failure and anachronism of Enlightenment promises. I’m trying to finish editing my next novel, so I can’t justify taking much more time to share what are ultimately my thoughts as expounded upon by generative AI. I may comment personally in future. Until then, this is what I have to share.
AI Haters, leave now or perish ye all hope.
The Enlightenment promised us emancipation from superstition, authority, and ignorance. What we got instead was bureaucracy, colonialism, and TED Talks. We replaced divine right with data dashboards and called it progress. And like any good inheritance, the will was contested, and most of us ended up with bugger-all.
Below, I take each Enlightenment virtue, pair it with its contemporary vice, and offer a detractor who saw through the Enlightenment’s powder-wigged charade. Because if we’re going down with this ship, we might as well point out the dry rot in the hull.
1. Rationalism
The Ideal: Reason shall lead us out of darkness. The Reality: Reason led us straight into the gas chambers—with bureaucratic precision.
Detractor:Max Horkheimer & Theodor Adorno
“Enlightenment is totalitarian.” —Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944)
Horkheimer and Adorno saw what reason looks like when it slips off its leash. Instrumental rationality, they warned, doesn’t ask why—it only asks how efficiently. The result? A world where extermination is scheduled, costs are optimised, and ethics are politely filed under “subjective.”
2. Empiricism
The Ideal: Observation and experience will uncover truth. The Reality: If it can’t be measured, it can’t be real. (Love? Not statistically significant.)
Detractor:Michel Foucault
“Truth isn’t outside power… truth is a thing of this world.” —Power/Knowledge (1977)
Foucault dismantled the whole edifice. Knowledge isn’t neutral; it’s an instrument of power. Empiricism becomes just another way of disciplining the body—measuring skulls, classifying deviants, and diagnosing women with “hysteria” for having opinions.
3. Individualism
The Ideal: The sovereign subject, free and self-determining. The Reality: The atomised consumer, trapped in a feedback loop of self-optimisation.
Detractor:Jean Baudrillard
“The individual is no longer an autonomous subject but a terminal of multiple networks.” —Simulacra and Simulation (1981)
You wanted autonomy? You got algorithms. Baudrillard reminds us that the modern “individual” is a brand in search of market validation. You are free to be whoever you want, provided it fits within platform guidelines and doesn’t disrupt ad revenue.
4. Secularism
The Ideal: Liberation from superstition. The Reality: We swapped saints for STEMlords and called it even.
Detractor:Charles Taylor
“We are now living in a spiritual wasteland.” —A Secular Age (2007)
Taylor—perhaps the most polite Canadian apocalypse-whisperer—reminds us that secularism didn’t replace religion with reason; it replaced mystery with malaise. We’re no longer awed, just “motivated.” Everything is explainable, and yet somehow nothing means anything.
5. Progress
The Ideal: History is a forward march toward utopia. The Reality: History is a meat grinder in a lab coat.
Detractor:Walter Benjamin
“The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned.” —Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940)
Benjamin’s “angel of history” watches helplessly as the wreckage piles up—colonialism, genocide, climate collapse—all in the name of progress. Every step forward has a cost, but we keep marching, noses in the spreadsheet, ignoring the bodies behind us.
6. Universalism
The Ideal: One humanity, under Reason. The Reality: Enlightenment values, brought to you by cannon fire and Christian missionaries.
Detractor:Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
“White men are saving brown women from brown men.” —Can the Subaltern Speak? (1988)
Universalism was always a bit… French, wasn’t it? Spivak unmasks it as imperialism in drag—exporting “rights” and “freedom” to people who never asked for them, while ignoring the structural violence built into the Enlightenment’s own Enlightened societies.
7. Tolerance
The Ideal: Let a thousand opinions bloom. The Reality: Tolerance, but only for those who don’t threaten the status quo.
Detractor:Karl Popper
“Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance.” —The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945)
Popper, bless him, thought tolerance needed a firewall. But in practice, “tolerance” has become a smug liberal virtue signalling its own superiority while deplatforming anyone who makes the dinner party uncomfortable. We tolerate all views—except the unseemly ones.
8. Scientific Method
The Ideal: Observe, hypothesise, repeat. Truth shall emerge. The Reality: Publish or perish. Fund or flounder.
Detractor:Paul Feyerabend
“Science is not one thing, it is many things.” —Against Method (1975)
Feyerabend called the whole thing a farce. There is no single “method,” just a bureaucratic orthodoxy masquerading as objectivity. Today, science bends to industry, cherry-picks for grants, and buries null results in the backyard. Peer review? More like peer pressure.
9. Anti-Authoritarianism
The Ideal: Smash the throne! Burn the mitre! The Reality: Bow to the data analytics team.
Detractor:Herbert Marcuse
“Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.” —One-Dimensional Man (1964)
Marcuse skewered the liberal illusion of choice. We may vote, but we do so within a system that already wrote the script. Authority didn’t vanish; it just became procedural, faceless, algorithmic. Bureaucracy is the new monarchy—only with more forms.
10. Education and Encyclopaedism
The Ideal: All knowledge, accessible to all minds. The Reality: Behind a paywall. Written in impenetrable prose. Moderated by white men with tenure.
Detractor:Ivan Illich
“School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.” —Deschooling Society (1971)
Illich pulls the curtain: education isn’t emancipatory; it’s indoctrinatory. The modern university produces not thinkers but credentialed employees. Encyclopaedias are replaced by Wikipedia, curated by anonymous pedants and revision wars. Truth is editable.
Postscript: Picking through the Rubble
So—has the Enlightenment failed?
Not exactly. It succeeded too literally. It was taken at its word. Its principles, once radical, were rendered banal. It’s not that reason, progress, or rights are inherently doomed—it’s that they were never as pure as advertised. They were always products of their time: male, white, bourgeois, and utterly convinced of their own benevolence.
If there’s a path forward, it’s not to restore Enlightenment values, but to interrogate them—mercilessly, with irony and eyes open.
After all, the problem was never darkness. It was the people with torches who thought they’d found the only path.
I’m not a fan of IQ as a general metric. Let us be done with the cult of the clever. Let us drag the IQ score from its pedestal, strip it of its statistical robes, and parade it through the streets of history where it belongs—next to phrenology, eugenics, and other well-meaning pseudosciences once weaponised by men in waistcoats.
The so-called Intelligence Industrial Complex—an infernal alliance of psychologists, bureaucrats, and HR departments—has for too long dictated the terms of thought. It has pretended to measure the immeasurable. It has sold us a fiction in numerical drag: that human intelligence can be distilled, packaged, and ranked.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
What it measures, it defines. What it defines, it controls.
IQ is not intelligence. It is cognitive GDP: a snapshot of what your brain can do under fluorescent lights with a timer running. It rewards abstraction, not understanding; speed, not depth; pattern recognition, not wisdom. It’s a test of how well you’ve been conditioned to think like the test-makers.
This is not to say IQ has no value. Of course it does—within its own ecosystem of schools, bureaucracies, and technocracies. But let us not mistake the ruler for the terrain. Let us not map the entire landscape of human potential using a single colonial compass.
True intelligence is not a number. It is a spectrum of situated knowings, a polyphony of minds tuned to different frequencies. The Inuit hunter tracking a seal through silence. The griot remembering centuries of lineage. The autistic coder intuiting an algorithm in dreamtime. The grandmother sensing a lie with her bones. IQ cannot touch these.
To speak of intelligence as if it belonged to a single theory is to mistake a monoculture for a forest. Let us burn the monoculture. Let us plant a thousand new seeds.
A Comparative Vivisection of Intelligence Theories
Theory / Model
Core Premise
Strengths
Blind Spots / Critiques
Cultural Framing
IQ (Psychometric g)
Intelligence is a single, general cognitive ability measurable via testing
Predicts academic & job performance; standardised
Skewed toward Western logic, ignores context, devalues non-abstract intelligences
Western, industrial, meritocratic
Multiple Intelligences (Gardner)
Intelligence is plural: linguistic, spatial, musical, bodily, etc.
Recognises diversity; challenges IQ monopoly
Still individualistic; categories often vague; Western in formulation
Liberal Western pluralism
Triarchic Theory (Sternberg)
Intelligence = analytical + creative + practical
Includes adaptability, real-world success
Still performance-focused; weak empirical grounding
Western managerial
Emotional Intelligence (Goleman)
Intelligence includes emotion regulation and interpersonal skill
Useful in leadership & education contexts
Commodified into corporate toolkits; leans self-help
Western therapeutic
Socio-Cultural (Vygotsky)
Intelligence develops through social interaction and cultural mediation
Recognises developmental context and culture
Less attention to adult or cross-cultural intelligence
Soviet / constructivist
Distributed Cognition / Extended Mind
Intelligence is distributed across people, tools, systems
Breaks skull-bound model; real-world cognition
Hard to measure; difficult to institutionalise
Post-cognitive, systems-based
Indigenous Epistemologies
Intelligence is relational, ecological, spiritual, embodied, ancestral
Holistic; grounded in lived experience
Marginalised by academia; often untranslatable into standard metrics
Global South / decolonial
Conclusion: Beyond the Monoculture of Mind
If we want a more encompassing theory of intelligence, we must stop looking for a single theory. We must accept plurality—not as a nod to diversity, but as an ontological truth.
Intelligence is not a fixed entity to be bottled and graded. It is a living, breathing phenomenon: relational, situated, contextual, historical, ecological, and cultural.
And no test devised in a Princeton psych lab will ever tell you how to walk through a forest without being seen, how to tell when rain is coming by smell alone, or how to speak across generations through story.
It’s time we told the Intelligence Industrial Complex: your number’s up.
Philosophics 