It's perhaps more accurate to say that their history begins in the 18th century- call it "real history" or "the beginning of progress"- casting all centuries prior as "interesting fantasy settings" that were, in reality, nothing but a grand farce of irrationality.
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The funny thing is that they do not know that their tradition ultimately stems from weirdos during the renaissance who got greek translated arab texts full of math & black magic from a collapsing Byzantium- & that these people were considered irrational loons by the majority.
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I mean really- isn't it much more rational from a perspective lacking advanced optics & mathematics- that the sun goes around the Earth? It's not as if this is readily available information deducible from common experience & sensation. It is very "occult."
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Scientific innovations have nearly always come from extremely neuro-atypical individuals- their worldview is not translatable to a "public"- for whom such questions are entirely irrelevant. This supposed "progress" exists *only* as a mythology bolstered by charts- it isn't *real*
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Pinker's function is to serve as a missionary for a class that he does not truly belong to- he is not a scientist, nor would he have been one if transported back to his "enlightenment ideal"- he is merely a court propagandist for the prevailing prejudices of the time.
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Consider Pinker running into some podunk local political representative who happens to have taken a shine to the contemporary "Flat Earth" cult- would Pinker not throw a fit? Would he suggest that this man be stripped of his authority, for being so "irrational"?
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He nearly throws a hitchensian fit as it is, over the fact that people more widely revere Mother Theresa over Bill Gates- because *rationally* of course, Gates has produced more widgets of "human flourishing"- here, I'll grab the graphs, & you will agree with me or else!
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What Pinker stands for is the Rule of the University- the theocracy of the secular scientific research university- an ideal found in the works of people like Bacon (The New Atlantis). To question the efficacy of this rule is to become an outcasted "irrationalist."
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I'm sure it would really SHOCK Pinker to realize that the instantiation of this ideal in America thru institutions like Harvard, stemmed from the dream of an Edenic return via PANSOPHISTIC ALCHEMY- something I'm sure such a rational mind as his would find damnably superstitious.
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Then again- does he not also believe that we are incrementally restoring the edenic state of man thru the machinations of obscure scientific processes? Perhaps his shock would be more akin to a self-recognition.
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a great takedown of le "rationalist skeptics", one thing I have noticed about them and new atheism in general is how terribly unoriginal and nonthreatening their weakling political ideas are, you could boil it down to utilitarian scientism with hedonistic libertarianism on top.
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