Endarkment

"Dare to know. Have the courage to use your own understanding."

Immanuel Kant

The Middle Ages lasted, roughly speaking, about a thousand years—from the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 to the fall of Constantinople in 1453. When darkness falls properly, the night can be very long. It's no surprise that humanity needed some time to get back on its feet. First came the Renaissance, and with it da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio. Without art and artists, we might have waited much longer for a rebirth after five centuries of darkness.

The next great civilizational milestone came at the end of the 18th century, when Isaac Newton, with Principia Mathematica, and John Locke, with An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, laid the scientific and philosophical foundations of the Enlightenment. Its essence is best captured in the quote above from Kant—originally from Horace: "Dare to know." The Enlightenment marked humanity's leap from a mass that merely believes into a civilization that dares and wants to understand.

Where we are today, as a society, 230 years later, is aptly illustrated by a recent statement from Donald Trump, who said during a discussion on coronavirus that the solution lay in "herd mentality." He likely meant herd immunity, but this Freudian slip says a lot about his views on social order. A herd believes but does not think. A herd doesn't know, dares not, and doesn’t want to know. A herd follows and doesn't question.

In this time of very serious global challenges—from climate change to the COVID-19 pandemic—we’re witnessing increasingly widespread attacks on knowledge, expertise, science, and facts. This phenomenon is often attributed to the rise of fake news, driven by the internet and social media. That’s true—to a point. Conspiracy theories have long fuelled and fertilized a variety of reactionary ideas and ideologies, long before the internet. But it’s certainly true that the internet has created the perfect ecosystem for producing and distributing them.

Still, the dynamics of the marketplace of lies are shaped not just by supply—but also by demand.

The rejection of knowledge is not merely a result of ignorance or lack of access to facts. People often choose to believe lies. Many want to believe that the Earth is flat, that the virus is a conspiracy orchestrated by Big Pharma and the deep state, secretly run by Soros’s agents and cultural Marxists. Kant and Horace get reinterpreted—courage alone is enough to "know"; facts, knowledge, and reason are just obstacles.

The appeal of lies is that they speak to frustrations and fears that truth does not resolve—or even deepens. The motivation for turning away from reason is psychological, born of anger, disappointment, feelings of humiliation, or fear. Rebellion against reason is often framed as rebellion against the elites. It's a hit of adrenaline—momentarily empowering, even if self-destructive. During the Brexit debate, when a respected British economist spoke about the GDP losses Brexit would bring, angry shouts rang out from the audience, suggesting where he could shove his "hoity-toity, expert GDP." Far from being blameless, elites do bear responsibility—but bidding farewell to reason isn’t the best way to fix injustices.

The Brexit knot—and similar dilemmas—won’t be untangled without rational and comprehensive approaches to the social, economic, and other conditions that gave people the "courage" to forget reason and jump, often with legitimate grievances, headfirst into an empty pool.

"Hatred is always strongest and most violent where there is the least culture."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

If knowledge is in trouble, culture is doing even worse. Today, many people understand culture in ways far removed from Goethe’s idea. We are nowhere close from the ideas of Michelangelo, da Vinci, and Petrarch. Far from the kind of culture the 1954 European Cultural Convention envisioned—as a tool for unity, mutual understanding, and shared values.

Today, for many, culture means something else entirely. In the discourse of nationalist populism, culture is not Goethe’s shield against hatred, but quite the opposite: a bundle of prejudice, intolerance, and myths—something for the half-literate defenders of the nation to wear as a uniform and wield as a weapon against those who are different. A “culture” defended with hate and hostility. A culture without art or artists. Culture as a tool for cultural warfare. Culture for a cultural revolution.

“We find ourselves in a dark place, and a little more knowledge might light our way."

Yoda

About a year ago, Gerfried Stocker, longtime director of Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria, gave the opening address at a conference of European education ministers in Paris. The theme was education for the digital society. Many of the ministers were surprised not just by his wrinkled shirt and ponytail.

In Stocker’s view, preparing for a high-tech future rests on four pillars:

1. Understanding the digital world’s basic structures—essential for making sense of technology.

2. Social skills, emotional intelligence, and humanistic values—so we can contribute meaningfully to society.

3. Knowledge and critical thinking—as shields against manipulation.

4. Creativity—nurtured especially through art, which fuels imagination, innovation, economic success, competitiveness, and social progress.

At first glance, it’s clear we’re not preparing for the future very well. We all depend on black-box technologies we don’t understand. Instead of people controlling technology, technology is increasingly used to control people.

An ethic of moral relativism—and the doctrine that all opinions are equally valid, regardless of substance—has led the public to equate basic democratic and civilizational values with their opposites. As a society, we are rejecting openness and solidarity, and building our future on intolerance and selfishness.

Critical thinking, which should act as an immune system against lies and manipulation, has been replaced by herd mentality. Knowledge annoys us. We prefer conspiracy theories over reason.

Art—an expression and engine of creativity, inventiveness, self-reflection, critique, courage, exploration, and freedom—has become an inconvenience. To many who claim to worry about Europe’s civilization and national culture being under threat, culture is a waste of money. Artists, they argue, should go compete on the market for attention and survival, alongside soap operas and pop celebrities.

According to the Slovenian Wikipedia—so you don’t say I’m making this up—Enlightenment thinkers advocated freedom of expression, religious criticism, a progressive society, and emphasized reason, science, and the value of human life. More than two centuries later, it seems we’ve grown tired of the light. The values on which modern civilization was built are increasingly annoying us. We are swapping Yoda with his dark nemesis.

Welcome to the new era of endarkment. And don’t forget: once the darkness falls completely, the night can last a very long time.