Did the Enlightenment cause a global decline in violence?

4. The dark side of the Enlightenment.

The one true sleight-of-hand practiced by Steven Pinker in his account of the decline of violence (which, as I have said, has a lot of truth) is that he tries to erase the inherently modern phenomenon of totalitarianism from the legacy of the Enlightenment, so that they don’t get put on the Enlightenment’s balance sheet.

But totalitarianism is an inherently modern phenomenon that would have been impossible without the Enlightenment. Late 18th century French society got squeamish about the public torture of Jean-François Damiens — and just a few decades later, they used the hygienic innovation of the guillotine to murder people in the name of Enlightenment values on a scale that would have been unthinkable in the Ancien Régime. Communism was inherently a modern phenomenon: atheistic, pseudo-scientific, and pseudo-rationalistic, driven by a post-Christian and “squeamish” concern for the fates of the working poor, universal in scope and ambition. And while Nazism got mileage out of reactionary rhetoric, it is also inseparable from roots in the movements of “scientific racism” and eugenics which argued for treating human genetics as a kind of technology and fixing it (with the power of the state if need be).

I make this point because I am a person who believes the Enlightenment is a very good thing, but that it also has its dark side. The modern age included a laudable squeamishness against tyranny, but it also included a nice dose of utopian hubris, and the special horrors of the modern age are incomprehensible without this Enlightenment idea. The Enlightenment is a glorious thing, but it is also a dangerous thing — it must always be rescued from itself. The first way to do it is to refuse to whitewash its true legacy.