Apologies to /u/queerbees if I’m hijacking this title format.

Rationalists pride themselves on being on the cutting edge of technology and intellectualism. As Scott Alexander writes in a blog post, “We’re almost certainly still making horrendous mistakes that people thirty years from now will rightly criticize us for. But they’re new mistakes. They’re original and exciting mistakes….”

This is the diametric opposite of reality. They have not, intellectually speaking, made any fundamental advances past perhaps Victorian thought at best.

Here is a brief history on the early modern origins of “Rationalism.” Rationalism is fundamentally based on the concepts of capital-P Progress, rational planning, and legibility, which are all conjoined. During the early, as well as the late, modern era, the teleological concept of history embedded within Christianity was secularized (or only partially in the case of Hegel’s heretical Christianity) and transposed onto political economy and technology. This ultimately reached its logical conclusion in Whig history and its anthropological counterpart, cultural evolutionism. Dispensations were altered to “stages” of history, which was driven by some kind of teleological or orthogenetic force, from Adam Smith’s schema (Hunting -> Shepherding -> Agriculture -> Commerce) to Auguste Comte (magic -> religion -> science) to LH Morgan (savagery -> -> barbarism -> civilization) and many others. The rationalist bolts on transhumanist ideas about a new stage, or dispensation of history, culminating in the Singularity, the end of history. Hence all the pronouncements of communism AGI in 20 years.

Of the various sorts of Progress posited by modern thinkers, some believed that the teleology was not necessarily fixed, but could be brought under the control of humans through rational planning and scientific management. This began as an ideology referred to as “Improvement.” The Scottish Enlightenment emphasized that a core element of human nature was the innate drive toward improvement. “Improvement Trusts” were established across Britain to speed up the evolutionary process of the nation. Rational planning was introduced across various domains: Roads, urban planning, agricultural techniques, etc. Much effort was devoted to creating “Improved” persons. This was in part accomplished through the specialization of institutions into specialized spaces – jails, asylums, workhouses, etc. It also became a fixation among the proto-entrepreneurs of the “middling sort,” culminating in the self-help genre initiated by Samuel Smiles, as well as Benthamite hedonic calculus, culminating in neo-classical economics. The phenomena of self-“optimization” and “life hacks” beloved by Silicon Valley are Smiles for the 21st century. The failure of rational planning can be explained away as a failure of the individual spirit, i.e. plebs who have not self-optimized to a proper level of rationality. The true horrors of the ideology of Improvement, however, came about with the advent of eugenics (relabeled as “HBD” by rationalists), in which humanity would re-engineer its own biology to propel itself into the next stage of history and become true ubermenschen. This is laid out in biologist and eugenicist Julian Huxley’s coinage of the term transhumanism.

The tool to make this happen is legibility. For rational planning to operate, the world must be legible. Thus, anything outside of legibility must be reshaped. Even before Improvement had been formulated as an ideology, the early demographer and political economist William Petty had set a blueprint for its rhetoric and political machinations. Petty had been commissioned by Oliver Cromwell to survey Ireland in order to enclose and parcel out conquered territory. Petty blamed Ireland for its lack of development, essentially casting them as barbarians. This attitude would be reproduced as well in the doctrine of terra nullius, reproduced in colonial projects across the globe. Legibility was also central to improvement. Surveillance of the undesirables was key to turning them into Improved persons or removing them as necessary. Returning to Bentham (and Foucault), a society-wide Panopticon was necessary. Outside of institutionalization, there was a fixation with “rookeries,” or slums in urban planning. One of the reasons was that the back alleys and illegible design of rookeries created a breeding ground for illegal activity, a criminal miasma. On the personal side, there was the drive to make the self legible, which can be seen at least as early in Ben Franklin’s moral accounting of his own virtues and vices in a literal ledger. The legible self was an Improvable self. We see this playing out again in the neo-liberal era of international “development” projects, Effective Altruism, and gentrification. The irrational plebs are not legible to the rationalist and can only be made so through some bastardized forms of bio-psychology. Expulsion of the proles from city centers via gentrification is actually a good thing because it Improves the city and cleans out our 21st c. rookeries. Charity is only useful insofar as its results are legible in a utilitarian framework, hence EA.

This does not even cover all the ways in which “Rationalism” is merely a repetition of musty tomes of the past, merely a broad outline.

Further sneering:

Wes Forsythe, On the Edge of Improvement: Rathlin Island and the Modern World

Foucault, pretty much all the shit

John Gray, Black Mass

Julian Huxley, Transhumanism

James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State

Sarah Tarlow, The Archaeology of Improvement in Great Britain, 1750-1850