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In 1798, an English vicar – what in the United States would likely be called a parish priest – by the name of Thomas Malthus published a book with the gloriously eighteenth-century title of An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers.
The wonderful thing about eighteenth-century book titles, as anyone who has ever had to read Moll Flanders will tell you, is that once you have slogged your way through the entire title you rarely ever have to read the actual book. It’s all pretty much laid out there for you.
Malthus was a relative unknown when he published this book, but the book almost literally made his name. His name actually becomes a word in the English language, one that you will run into now and then if your interests move you in a certain direction. If you ever take a particular kind of biology or political science class, for example, you will run into the phrase “Malthusian logic” or “Malthusian cycle,” phrases that come from “Thomas Malthus” and that come from this book.
The thing about Malthus is that he is one of the early figures in perhaps the most important cultural and intellectual development of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the backlash against the Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment has been the bedrock of Western Civilization since it emerged out of the 17th century Scientific Revolution. While other civilizations have come to adopt pieces of it as it has proven useful to them to do so over the centuries, the Enlightenment nevertheless defines Western Civilization as separate from all other forms of civilization on the planet. Pretty much all of Western Civilization today exists either as an extension of the Enlightenment or as a reaction to it. But any time you have a movement that powerful and pervasive you will get a backlash. That’s just how humans are wired.
While the Enlightenment is a complex and sprawling thing, it can usefully be simplified to three basic points.
First, that human reason is a powerful and effective tool for examining and understanding the universe. How do you know what you know? Not because an authority – living or dead, corporeal, textual or spiritual – told you so, but because you figured it out using only the reason that all humans come with hardwired into their heads. The social and political implications of this are staggering.
Second, that there are such things as natural laws. A natural law is a predictor – it says that if you start with these conditions and you take that action you will get this result, and you will get it every single time. In other words, that the universe is predictable, orderly, and in many ways harmonious. It is not chaotic or random. The universe is a machine, say Enlightenment thinkers, and natural laws are the rules that govern how the machine works. Furthermore, the Enlightenment holds that you can figure out those natural laws simply by using your reason.
Third, that progress is not only possible but also – in the purest form of the Enlightenment thinking – inevitable. Using the tools of the Enlightenment (reason and natural laws) we can tinker with the machinery of the universe and make it work better. This is the purpose of the Enlightenment.
Malthus sits on the leading edge of the Counter-Enlightenment, which comes in two overlapping stages.
First, there are people who accept the tools of the Enlightenment – who agree that reason is a powerful way to examine the universe and that natural laws make the universe predictable and orderly – but who argue that these do not actually lead to the purpose of the Enlightenment, progress. You can use your reason, discover natural laws and end up no better off than you were before, and therefore why bother? Malthus is here. Eventually Darwin will be too, which is not an accident – there’s a lot of Malthus in Darwin. And so on.
Later there will be a second phase of people who reject not only the purpose of the Enlightenment but also the tools. Reason, they say, is not actually an effective or powerful tool for understanding the universe and thus you need to resort to irrational or anti-rational methods such as faith, emotion, or intuition. Also, there are no such things as natural laws – the universe is not orderly or predictable, but is instead random, chaotic, and mysterious. This will get you to Romantics, Transcendentalists, religious fundamentalists, and so on.
Given Malthus’ position at the forefront of this movement, it is interesting to see what he argues and how he does so.
Malthus’ book is not easy reading – he is a highly educated eighteenth-century gentleman writing for an audience of other highly educated eighteenth-century gentlemen, and they did not cut each other any slack. Nor is much of it original to him – you have to go a long way into Malthus to get to the original part, which is part of its effectiveness. By the time he gets to the end and twists the knife with the original bits, you are so far down the path of his argument that it is hard to figure out how to get back out of it.
Malthus starts with three basic propositions, none of which are original to him and all of which you already know.
1. People have sex.
Why yes, yes they do. People have sex. I have heard this. There is evidence of this all around us. People do, in fact, have sex.
2. People eat.
I’m not going too fast for anyone here, am I?
3. These two things are connected.
Now you know this. You know very well that food and sex are connected in a great many ways, most of which I am not going to get into in this space, and you’re welcome. There isn’t enough whiskey in the barrel to get rid of some of those images, after all. But what is a dinner date, after all, but a device designed to get you from the one to the other as quickly as possible? Now, for some people that means starting with dinner and waiting until after marriage, while for others it means starting with dinner and waiting until after dessert – whatever floats your boat, I suppose. I’m not here to tell you how to live your personal lives.
Do wait until after dessert, though, as the waitstaff tends to get a bit annoyed otherwise. Just saying.
But the point is that those two things are connected in ways that are more serious than simply dinner dates because both of those actions – feeding and fornicating – have consequences, consequences that do not play well with each other.
When you have sex, if you have sex often enough – which is a variable quantity – you will ultimately wind up with more people. That’s what sex is for, after all. Whatever social, ethical, moral, or entertainment value sex has, from a purely biological perspective the primary purpose of sex is to create more of whatever’s having it. And it is surprisingly effective at that. Indeed, statistically speaking, the more people there are having sex the more people they will ultimately create.
Kim is a scientist and she says that historians do not use enough charts and graphs. So I will begin using a few schematic graphs here. Remember that they are schematics, though, meant to illustrate a point. I’m going to go back later and put some reality into them, but for right now just bear with me.
So using my schematic graph, the general population line looks like this:
More sex, more people.
Now, all of those people, when they are not having sex (and occasionally even when they are, which, vide supra, will get no further mention here) need to eat. And the more people you have, the more eating needs go happen. So: more sex, more people; more people, more eat.
But this is a problem, because food doesn’t work the way sex does. When you eat, you end up with less food than when you started. You cannot have your cake and eat it too. You start with this much food, you eat dinner, and you’re left with that much food. So your food supply does this:
The general relationship between terms is now as follows: More sex, more people; more people more eat; more eat, less food.
And this is a problem.
Note what is happening on that graph. Where those two lines cross, very bad things happen. Where those two lines cross, what that means is that you no longer have enough food to feed your population, and nothing good can come of that.
Most obviously, when there isn’t enough food to go around you are going to get Famine. People will starve. Starvation is a terrible way to die. The human body evolved under conditions of scarcity, and it is designed to withstand long periods of short rations in order to give you every chance to find more food over the next hill. But when there is no food over the next hill – or the ones after that – all that means is that it is going to take you a very, very long time to die. Furthermore, the body doesn’t just shut down all at once – it goes in pieces, and one of the last things to go when you starve to death is your mind, again because your body wants you to recognize and take advantage of whatever is coming over the next hill. But in this case, all it means is that you know exactly what is happening to you as you starve to death, and worse you know exactly what is happening to your children, your spouse, your neighbors, and your friends.
Fortunately it does take a long time to starve to death, so something else will likely kill you first.
For one thing, if the mind is one of the last things to go as you starve to death, the immune system is one of the first. Diseases, in other words, will take a fearsome toll on hunger-weakened bodies. Things that are not usually a problem will become problems. Things that are usually problems will become epidemics. And new diseases – things that would take a while to build up immunity to even for well-fed bodies – become Plagues.
Further, hungry people are not patient people. If you have food and my children are starving and you are not willing to share your food with them, I will rip off your limbs and beat you to death with them before taking your food and giving it to my children. Those of you who do not have children are right now sitting there pondering the morality of this, debating the pros and cons of my position, while those of you who are parents are nodding your heads and saying to yourself, “Yes, yes, that makes sense.” Multiply that out across a starving population and you get a general breakdown in social order as the have-nots seek to take from those who have in order to survive. If the haves and have-nots are part of the same society you will see food riots, civil conflicts, and mob violence. If they are part of different societies, you will get international conflicts. But all of these are, in one form or another, War.
And when you add all that together, what you get is a whole lot of Death.
Famine. Plague. War. Death. There is a reason why those are listed as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in the Christian Bible. They go together. And when they go together very bad things – apocalyptically bad things – happen.
The thing is that all this has actually happened. This is, for example, the story of the Crisis of the Fourteenth Century, perhaps the most dismal time ever to be alive in European history. Oh, the Black Death gets all the press, of course, and what attention is left over from that inevitably focuses on the warfare of the age – the Hundred Years’ War, the Jacquerie, Wat Tyler’s Revolt, and so on. But people forget that it all started with famine. It all started because in the early 1300s those two lines on the graph crossed, and very bad things happened.
Now the question, of course is can this be prevented? Is there a way to keep those lines from crossing?
Well, there are two lines on the graph. Therefore there should be two avenues of approach we can take. We can attack the population problem, or we can attack the food supply problem.
The problem with attacking the population problem is that, while there are any number of ways to do it, all of them essentially boil down to the same thing: get people to stop having sex. And good luck with that, intrepid social engineers! Really! Good luck! I’ll be over here with my popcorn, watching you as you try to make that happen. Because it’s a stupid plan, that’s why. People are going to have sex – that’s what people do. Malthus, an intelligent and deeply learned man, was well aware that abstinence-only education was a foolhardy idea that only the most ideologically blinkered would even consider, let alone seriously try to adopt. People have sex. We’re wired that way. Telling them to stop is not going to change that.
So that leaves the food supply line.
And when you put it that way, the question rephrases itself. Is there a way to keep the food supply line above the population line?
Because after all, the food supply line does not actually go down the way I drew it on that schematic graph – you knew that, right? No, you can’t have your cake and eat it too, but you can make more cake. Food is a renewable resource, and we have this thing called “agriculture” whose only purpose is to turn that idea into a reality. Can we improve agriculture to keep that food supply line above the population line?
Now if you are an Enlightenment thinker, the answer is, “Of course we can. Using our reason, we can work out the natural laws that govern the food supply and make progress, progress being defined as ‘people not starving in the streets,’ which is as good a definition as any.”
You could work out new and better ways to get more food out of the earth – better seeds, better livestock, better techniques, and so on. You could work out new and better ways to use the food you do get more effectively – new harvesting techniques to cut waste, new preservation techniques to avoid spoilage, new transportation methods to get the food where it needs to go before it rots, and so on. You could even work on the medical end and see if you can get the human body to make more efficient use of the food it gets so as not to need so much. There are all sorts of options for a good Enlightenment figure to answer “yes” to that question.
Malthus, however, says no. Malthus argues that no matter what you do you can never keep that food supply line above the population line. And to see why will require some math.
Neither of those lines from the schematic graphs is accurate, actually. What do they actually look like?
Malthus argued that human population, left unchecked, would increase geometrically – or, as we would say today, exponentially. That is, if you start with 2 people, the increase would then go to 4, then 8, then 16, then 32, 64, 128, 512, 1024, 2048, and so on. Your population line would be an exponential curve, something like this:
This still isn’t the original part of Malthus, by the way. Anyone with access even to the crude demographic statistics of the eighteenth century could have figured this out. Benjamin Franklin worked it out in the 1750s, more or less.
But – and here is the original part – Malthus took a long hard look at the history of European agriculture, at the improvements that had been made over the previous centuries and the effects those improvements had had on the food supply, and based on that information he argued that the best you could hope for when it came to increasing the food supply was that it would increase arithmetically. That is, if you start with 2 food units, the increase would go to 4, then to 6, then to 8, then to 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20, and so on. Your food supply line would be a straight line, like this:
Those of you who have taken algebra are already wincing at this point, because you know very well that it is mathematically impossible for a straight line to remain above an exponential curve no matter how far apart they start. Eventually – it may take a while, but eventually – those two lines will cross and very bad things will happen.
And if you follow the logic through, what you get is called a Malthusian Cycle:
You start out at the top, with Prosperity. Your food supplies are more than adequate to feed the population, and everyone is quite literally fat and happy. Gradually, though, the two lines get closer and closer and things begin to fall apart, and you enter a period of Crisis. Eventually you get famine, war, plague, and death, and everything will Collapse. But the silver lining of famine, war, plague, and death is that the population line plunges below the food supply line again, and so you can begin a Rebuilding period. You then rebuild until you reach Prosperity.
AND THEN THE CYCLE BEGINS AGAIN.
Around and around the cycle you go, in a never-ending pattern of prosperity, crisis, collapse, rebuilding, and prosperity again, each one following the other with unbreakable certainty. This is not Progress! There is no progress on a circle! When drawing a circle, one may begin at any point because eventually you will end up back where you started. That is the point of a circle, after all. Your population will outstrip your food supply, bad things will happen, you will recover, and then it will happen all over again. And there is absolutely nothing you can do about it.
This is a profoundly pessimistic viewpoint, deeply out of step with the more positive outlook of the Enlightenment. This is a viewpoint that does not admit the possibility – let alone the inevitability – of progress.
Yet notice how Malthus arrived at this point. His argument is highly reasoned – every step along the way follows logically or empirically from the one before in a rational chain that is hard to break. He has developed a natural law. Remember what natural laws are – they are predictors. If you have these conditions and you take that action, you will get this result and you will get it every time. The Malthusian Cycle fits that description quite nicely, no matter where you start. Malthus has, in other words, used the tools of the Enlightenment but he has not arrived at the purpose of the Enlightenment. Reason and natural laws do not in this instance lead to progress. In that case, what good are they?
And if the tools of the Enlightenment do not lead to the purpose of the Enlightenment, what does that say about the Enlightenment overall?
This is more than just a philosophical debate. The Enlightenment had some very practical implications that are called into question here. If the Enlightenment is in doubt, then everything that comes out of the Enlightenment is in doubt. Perhaps science isn’t the best tool for examining the mysteries of the universe. Perhaps the optimistic view of human nature that the Enlightenment assumed – that humans are basically good and can take care of themselves and others without authoritarian oversight – is fatally flawed. Maybe humans are depraved and vicious little creatures after all. Maybe reason itself is the problem, and it should be abandoned in favor of irrational or antirational things like faith, emotion, or intuition.
And maybe the Lockean Liberalism that is the political expression of the Enlightenment – the ideology of individual rights and equality of opportunity, the ideology that when spun toward leveling the economic playing field yields laissez-faire capitalism and small government but when spun toward leveling the political playing field yields liberal democracy and active government and thus defines both ends of the American political spectrum even today – maybe that isn’t the way to go either. Maybe humanity needs a government that will monitor its every move, one that will care more about groups than individuals. Eventually this will get you to genuine Conservatism – the kind that really does not exist in the US no matter what right-wingers say – and from there to any number of ideologies devoted to the welfare of the group: Socialism, Nationalism, and so on.
It’s a simple thing to observe that sex and eating have consequences. But getting from there to the Counter-Enlightenment is a feat.
Old business:
ReplyDeleteTom, thanks. And as a slightly more militant than average feminist, I appreciate the failure to 'assume'. I thought, briefly, to append this to the comments on the other post, but, I figure you'll probably see this here, anyway.
David, thanks for remembering.
It also occurs to me that there are many who follow your blog but never actually think to comment - I, myself, rarely have time to do more than read, digest, appreciate and move on. This is a failure on my part - I will endeavor to do better in the future. Also, I hope that you can envision a whole auditorium full of people hanging on your every word, and sixteen cheer leaders up front to boot. I'm in the sixth row back, aisle seat with the red white and blue "GO DAVID GO!!!" sign.
BTW, I feel a little guilty for not restating my thanks and appreciation for the reading list. I figure it may take me a couple of more years to get through half that list … now on to:
New Business:
David: You Rock! [waves "GO DAVID GO!!!" sign enthusiastically!]
Kim is absolutely correct. Your graphs are exactly what you need to add, ah, visual interest, to your presentation. Besides, I always get a kick out of old school transparencies on the overhead projector. Especially when occasionally displayed inverted and upside down. (This is a feature, not a bug.) [made ya look!]
I had a social science instructor that first introduced me to Malthus back in 1971. (I think I just dated myself.) Were rather it had been you, 'cause that instructor never gave us the backstory, never actually bothered to asses his reasoning, and never actually got to the point of connecting the Malthusian Cycle to political ideologies.
Or sex. Probably could have actually held our attention a little longer if she had.
Now, about that whiskey barrel …
Lucy
Lucy, at some point we will have to find a barrel - or at least a bottle - and share a dram. :)
ReplyDeleteIt always seemed to me that the whole reason Malthus was interesting (aside from the sex jokes) was precisely the connections between his argument and political ideologies (and other things that emerged out of the Enlightenment that his reasoning was undermining). It's the connections between things that make history interesting.
I will do my best to envision such an auditorium. It's nice to know people like what I write. Thank you for that.
Loved the piece... except for one bit:
ReplyDeleteYou can use your reason, discover natural laws and end up no better off than you were before, and therefore why bother? Malthus is here. Eventually Darwin will be too, which is not an accident – there’s a lot of Malthus in Darwin. And so on.
There's a lot of Malthus in Darwin in the abstract: Darwin credited Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population with giving him one of the critical insights that led him to Natural Selection. But the implication that Darwin--a humanitarian who was cautious to draw a heavy line between the biological implications and the moral implications of his work (and not, I think, merely to cover his ass from criticism)--was part of the anti-Enlightenment seems a bit much to me.
First, because while Darwin repudiated the idea of biological progress--Natural Selection is a process of diversification, which may result in greater complexity (beetles, say) or less (barnacles, perhaps)--he was undeniably Victorian in his ideas of scientific, philosophical and even moral progress. Why bother? Because while the human being might be no more than another kind of animal from a strictly scientific perspective, he's nevertheless an animal capable of expressing horror and outrage over slavery, of questioning the benefits of a dogmatic belief in Hell, or of expressing his curiosity through treatises on the ecology of earthworms.
And second, because part of the tricky, key way Malthus influenced Darwin was that Darwin instantly saw an out from the Malthusian cycle: you could go sideways, adapting to fill an empty or uncolonized environmental niche. I don't mean to suggest this was a "nice" process, or anything less-bloody than the usual Darwinian competition for survival; but it's not quite a Malthusian vision of cyclical prosperity and suffering, either.
It's not optimism, and so it's not exactly in the mode of Enlightenment philosophy. And yet it's not anti-Enlightenment, either, because it's explicitly proposing that things are always in flux, repudiating the notion that things are always as they have been and as they always will be, or that things are in a constant repeating cycle. Darwin is something else, something proto-modern in his agnosticism about the past and future, his belief that the present is a wobbling blob of contingency that follows decipherable rules but nevertheless has no foreordained outcome.
Hope that made some kind of sense. Thanks for the essay.
(I realize, re-reading, that I contradictorily describe Darwin as "undeniably Victorian" here and "proto-Modern" there; I suppose that tension is what puts the "proto" into the latter bit. But then, Victorian values were themselves in tension between a certain conservatism and a passion for "progress," so... I dunno. It's a paradox, but one I think makes sense when you're reading Darwin, or contemplating the 19th Century overall.)
ReplyDeleteI think you’re taking the Darwin thing beyond where I intended, which is fine. I didn’t mean to say that Darwin is simply an extension of Malthus. I meant that Darwin uses some of Malthus’ key ideas to make his own point. Perhaps I needed to be more clear.
ReplyDeleteWhen I said that there was a lot of Malthus in Darwin I was not really referring to the Malthusian Cycle per se, though you do see it (note the population crash/boom cycle of rabbits, for example). What I meant was that Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection relies in part on Malthusian mechanisms for its operation.
The basic idea behind Malthus’ argument is that resources are scarce (either now or in the future), competition is high, and consequences flow from that. This is also the basic idea behind Natural Selection. There is always competition for scarce resources. Animals within a species have natural variations that, on occasion, give them an advantage in this competition (this is Darwin’s insight, not Malthus’). Those animals tend to breed more, and over time they will differentiate the species toward their variations becoming standard. Over more time those variations add up and you end up with a new species. By now we have come far from Malthus. But the initial starting point is Malthus’ insight regarding the gap between the resources you have (food, in his case) and the resources you need.
I don’t think Darwin repudiated the idea of a biological process – you yourself define it as one, which makes me think that the rest of that sentence got lost somewhere. What Darwin never did was assume that biological processes apply to social situations – that sad leap of causality was left to Herbert Spencer and the other Social Darwinists, who bastardized Darwin’s ideas to their own purposes. You cannot explain social functions by biological processes, not completely. Human society is artificial and exists largely to deny the operations of biology in many respects. In the state of nature one rarely finds clothing, art, medicine, sports, literature, or other social things like that.
Or as one academic put it when reacting to Spencer, When a well-clothed philosopher on a bitter winter's night sits in a warm room well lighted for his purpose and writes on paper with pen and ink in the arbitrary characters of a highly developed language the statement that civilisation is the result of natural laws, and that man's duty is to let nature alone so that untrammeled it may work out a higher civilisation, he simply ignores every circumstance of his own existence and deliberately closes his eyes to every fact within range of his faculties. (Lester Ward)
As for Darwin and the Enlightenment, I think that he does exist in the Counter-Enlightenment mainly because in the physical world of Natural Selection human reason is not all that relevant. It can help or not. But in the main this is a largely a-rational world – not the active rejection of reason that you see with Romantics, for example, but not the embrace of it that the Enlightenment had either, not the powerful tool for understanding all of the universe that, say, Newton argued it was.
I think you’re right in noting that there is no particular sense of “progress” in Darwin. There is change but it’s not directional, simply adaptive. “A wobbling blob of contingency that follows decipherable rules but nevertheless has no foreordained outcome” is clearly not an Enlightenment idea.
I’m not sure that new niches are an out from the Malthusian Cycle so much as an extension of the limit slightly upward. The Agricultural Revolution accomplished much the same – for a long time Western Civilization believed that the Malthusian limits had been broken, but in the 21st century we are discovering that they have merely been raised.
Thanks for the comments – I enjoy these discussions.
And thank you for the thoughtful response as well; I was actually going to let you have the last word but did want to point out that Darwin repudiated the idea of biological progress not process. That is, he correctly realized that evolution is not "directed" and results in creatures that are simply better adapted to their environment whether those adaptions result in greater complexity or less complexity.
ReplyDeleteI also should say (so much for a simple reply!) that while Darwin describes an "arational" world, he gets there through relentless rational means that would have been completely familiar to any natural philosopher of the Enlightenment. He does not merely suggest premises and derive conclusions from them, but spends years of his life relentlessly observing anthills; breeding rabbits; comparing specimens collected on the Beagle expedition; and reading widely on husbandry, geology and the fossil record before publishing The Origin of Species.
It's true there's a random element in the actual history of species as they came into and fell out of existence, but (paradoxically?) the Theory of Natural Selection is itself as mechanistic as Newtonian Gravity or Kepler's Laws of Planetary Motion despite not being reducible to math. And even without math, Darwin makes possible a kind of historical "predictability": while you can't necessarily look at an extant species and say what it will look like in a hundred generations, you can look at the apparent "gaps" in the fossil record and say what kinds of creatures you expect to find signs of in which kinds of epochs, leading to so many of the successes in paleontology since.
So while Reason might bear no more part in Natural Selection than it does in driving the planets around the Sun, it does make Natural Selection as comprehensible as planetary motion, and is derived from applying Reason to the observable universe.
I would agree that Darwin is post-Enlightenment, but I'm not convinced he fits into the counter-Enlightenment; he isn't a reactionary, he's something else. A contingent world, we agree, isn't an Enlightenment idea. But a world that's approachable and comprehensible through observation, experimentation and deduction--the hallmarks of Darwin's life and work--certainly isn't a Romantic idea, either, and the idea that "reason itself is the problem, and it should be abandoned in favor of irrational or antirational things like faith, emotion, or intuition" would have been completely alien to Darwin (he did take pride in his intuition--but he also didn't rely on it, and in any case what he considered his "intuition" couldn't be described as a "gut feeling" but is rather obviously (despite his own self-effacing descriptions) the process of a keen observational mind constantly making and testing connections between data points).
(Sorry if I'm carried away. You may have detected a certain passion for Mr. D. in my replies.)
Ah, “progress” – yes indeed I misread that. Sorry about that! That makes much of what I said redundant, I suppose, but at least we’re on the same page with that notion of Natural Selection being about change rather than progress.
ReplyDeleteAs for your point about Darwin and rationality, yes absolutely – I say that precise thing about Malthus, in fact, as well:
Yet notice how Malthus arrived at this point. His argument is highly reasoned – every step along the way follows logically or empirically from the one before in a rational chain that is hard to break. He has developed a natural law. Remember what natural laws are – they are predictors. If you have these conditions and you take that action, you will get this result and you will get it every time. The Malthusian Cycle fits that description quite nicely, no matter where you start. Malthus has, in other words, used the tools of the Enlightenment but he has not arrived at the purpose of the Enlightenment. Reason and natural laws do not in this instance lead to progress. In that case, what good are they? (emphasis added)
We’re making the same point here as well, only my contention is that this is exactly the Counter-Enlightenment. It is refuting the entire idea of the Enlightenment, because why bother? The whole point of the Enlightenment was to make progress, and if the tools don’t lead to the purpose, then you have to question the whole enterprise. Malthus does this, and it calls into question not only the Enlightenment but everything that comes out of it. Darwin does too, though by that point I suspect the consequences are less severe – Darwin does not undermine science as a methodology, only the more wildly optimistic notions of it. You can have reason – you can in fact embrace it and promote it – without benefiting the Enlightenment much at all, I think.
Whether this counts as post-Enlightenment or Counter-Enlightenment is something I suspect would require a whole lot more thought than I’m going to give it tonight, but perhaps it will lead me to some new places in the future.
I like Darwin too. He makes me think.