Since Enlightenment cultural assumptions and expectations seem to have collapsed in our society and been replaced by distant simulacra, I have been looking into the circumstances that caused the modern European Enlightenment in the first place, in the hopes that - combined with an understanding of the causes of the collapse - this might lead to an idea how to reproduce the phenomenon.

One striking thing to be explained is that in a fairly short period of time, a few apparently quite different changes happened in Europe, in something more like a sudden explosion than a gradual accretion of know-how. A presumption of the value of censorship was replaced with free speech. Joint stock companies suddenly sent ships across vast oceans on highly profitable commercial ventures. Physics was no longer a talky subject of effectively useless speculation, but a science with mathematical precision comparable to engineering which quickly yielded practically useful results. Medicine and biology wasn't mathematized, but also quickly developed from a way to show care for the sick by bothering them in speciously systematized ways that frequently did more harm than good, to a body of reproducible knowledge that formed the basis for new technologies.

17th Century England and the Dutch Republic seem like important focal sites for the emergence of Enlightenment civilization, and I've just finished reading through Jonathan Healey's book The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, which gives a good overview of the English civil war, which turned a censorious and deeply corrupting monarchy into a republic with freedom of speech, which lasted for decades and only collapsed after Oliver Cromwell died of old age.

One thing in the book that struck me as puzzling and potentially important was the importance of Calvinism in the process by which the republican party found itself, and the immediate recognition by everyone involved that Arminianism was a complicit, Royalist theology.

I'm used to thinking of the Enlightenment as more philosophical than religious; figures like Galileo, Newton, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Smith, and Voltaire seem central to the story; theologians do not, with the notable exception of the Quakers.

Even among religious theories, Calvinism in particular had previously not seemed to me like a plausible a priori candidate for a liberatory theology, since the idea that God has predetermined who is a member of the Elect, will be saved, and will repent of their sins, and who on the other hand is permanently damned, seems disempowering. Arminianism is basically free-will Prostestantism, which would seem on the face of it more consistent with Enlightenment values - anyone can freely choose to be good. Reflecting on the roles played by Arminianism and Calvinism in the English civil war, and the context within which those roles emerged, led me to a very different conclusion.

"No One Will Believe You" as Taxation Mechanism

Protestantism emerged as a challenge to the rule of the Roman Catholic Church in Western Europe. Catholic rule involved suppressing alternative modes of trust. The story is that everyone is inherently sinful by nature (original sin), and the Roman Catholic Church has a metaphysically fixed monopoly on the capacity to save you from the consequences of that inevitable sin.

Under neutral conditions, a person could represent themselves as trustworthy based on their intent and disposition, inferrable from their track record. Membership in the Roman Catholic Church requires acceptance of an ideology in which you cannot so represent yourself, because you are assumed to have a bad track record and unreliable intent. The church then offers itself, within this ideology, as the institution that uniquely, unreproducibly allows you to be forgiven if you continually submit to it. So fellow members of the church can trust each other on the basis of submission to a shared authority that can judge between them and thus resolve conflicts. This need to continually submit to the church allows the church to maximize the rate at which it can collect taxes.

You have to be permanently, continually helpless to behave well on your own, because otherwise you could avoid paying taxes by establishing an alternative basis for trust via reputation. The church's intervention cannot be reproducible by outsiders, because otherwise imitators could drive tax rates down through competition. This requires a self-image as wicked, among participants. Vice, hypocrisy, abuse of power, and betrayal of trust are simply the way of the world, but the continual intervention of a bureaucracy sponsored by a supernatural force can rescue you from your own bad decisions, and the power that bureaucracy has over its members allows it to compel relatively trustworthy behavior.

This sort of trust does not allow sufficiently high-fidelity interactions to do things like physics, medical science, or joint stock corporations, but it does provide a functional coarser-grained simulacrum of trust that can be used to e.g. deescalate conflicts among rival warlords. This made it seem like a good deal to people like the Franks, whose culture already embedded a high degree of conflict. If you're in a sufficiently low-trust circumstance, accepting a third-party guarantor can seem like an improvement, even if they tax you and the type of trust they can provide is limited; it's still more than you had before, which can easily provide more value than the taxes collected - at least, initially.

England is an instructive example. After the Norman conquest, from time to time feudal lords subordinate to the king would rebel against him when he imposed higher taxes than they were willing to accept. Sometimes if they won, they compelled him to sign a treaty guaranteeing limits to his conduct and powers, and establishing rights for his subjects against arbitrary taxation or punishment. The Magna Carta is the most famous example, and arbitration was nominally delegated to the Roman Catholic Church. In practice, the Church was not willing to enforce the Magna Carta as written, but the gradual accumulation of precedential evidence that the king's vassals were willing to defend their rights as they perceived them eventually resulted in the establishment of Parliament, a formal assembly of the king's subjects or their representatives. The king's vassals established empirically that they would generally not tolerate the imposition of taxes without the formal consent of a Parliament, and likewise were willing to challenge punishments like death or imprisonment without what they understood to be proper legal procedure.

While the clergy and Roman Church did not actually adjudicate this arrangement per se, the idea that it might seems to have been part of the circumstances within which the arrangement was thinkable, and therefore could eventually be established by trial and error. The Church likely also provided some legal adjudication services for civil and criminal cases that provided a basis for comparison when assessing whether someone had been imprisoned or executed without a proper trial.

The Roman clerical bureaucracy was not adequate to manage agriculture, so they had to tolerate pagan (literally, peasant) modes of coordination that were implicitly higher-trust. Specifically, they frequently organized around positive representations of something pleasant or useful rather than around threats of violence or invalidation. Sometimes, the Roman church syncretistically endorsed and coopted such local pagan cults as parts of Christianity, and thus tolerated relatively high-trust cultures as long as they didn't try to become canonical and thus threaten the church's intermediation. Many professed Christians still celebrate a springtime holiday celebrating symbols of fertility such as rabbits and eggs, and a winter holiday ritual where, during months when they're less likely to spend leisure time outside, they bring a nice fragrant evergreen tree indoors. More localized examples include the traditional blessing of the asparagus at Worcester cathedral, the worship of local saints, and the holy wells of Ireland.

Analogously, sometimes feudal lords without the administrative capacity to govern economically valuable cities simply granted the city a charter to govern itself as a vassal, tolerating self-government that was frequently of a republican nature. London was an example; William the Conqueror, instead of ruling the city directly, built three separate fortresses to threaten and contain it, including the Tower of London, implying that he expected it to maintain considerable functional independence as a political and potentially a military unit.

The Roman church also used mandatory participation in centralized ritual to conspicuously display its wealth, as a correlate of power. Some stories indicate that Vladimir I of Kiev decided to commit to the Byzantine church because his emissaries were dazzled by the wealth on display in the Hagia Sophia. Wealth can be acquired through (and thus constitute evidence of) prior military capacity, and can be used to acquire future military capacity by paying mercenaries or otherwise mobilizing and equipping armies.

Peasants were taxed and controlled through relatively explicit threats of violence, usually by their lords. But lords and peasants alike were taxed (e.g. tithes and indulgences) or otherwise controlled through threats of invalidation; the Church was the guarantor of legitimacy, so it could credibly threaten to delegitimize a temporal lord who was causing enough trouble, and thus make that lord a target for expropriation by their rivals. The Church's unbounded perpetual intermediation meant that feudal lords couldn't coordinate an alternative basis for trust and rebel.

For the same reason that the church of Rome had to suppress coordination on the basis of individual track records, it had to suppress alternative third-party guarantors. Both of these were reasons to suppress heresy: heresies were necessarily attempts to establish alternative bases for trust.

My impression from reading Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, is that it's usually not the case that the Roman Catholic Church had some well-specified theological opinion which heretics happened to disagree with, such that happening to make an error in theology was ipso facto grounds for violent suppression. Rather, for things like the metaphysical nature of Christ or the trinity, any well-specified philosophical construal was considered a heresy. If you reasoned from the premise that Jesus Christ was divine, you were a heretic. If you reasoned from the premise that Jesus Christ was human, you were a heretic. If you reasoned from the premise of any specific hypothesis about the nature of the relationship between Jesus Christ and the divine, you were a heretic. The only non-heretical behavior was to say the exact words prescribed by the church, without drawing strong inferences on the basis of those words or insisting that they mean something specific. It's a mystery! Civil Law and Political Drama covers a related power dynamic, particularly the Point Deer Make Horse story.

To provide a simulacrum of a canonical theory of metaphysics that people paying more attention and with a higher need for abstraction could think within - and from which heresies could be evaluated - the Church of Rome maintained its own theologians, within its relatively tightly controlled and surveilled clerical and monastic orders. The more canonical your ideas became, and the more strongly they impinged on the holy mysteries, the more scrutiny they would invite.

Since obviously people outside that system were supposed to at least be under the impression that they literally believed this stuff, the Church had to tolerate "errors" in theology just as much as other sorts of sins: what would have been heretical opinions were forgiven, so long as the person who had professed them was willing to submit to "instruction"; heresy was functionally defined not by deviations from a canonical opinion meant literally, but by the open expectation that you can make sense of doctrine on your own, i.e. by reasoning openly from your own perspective, which implies that you think someone might believe you.

For other views on heresy, see Nassim Taleb's Religion, Violence, Tolerance & Progress: Nothing to do with Theology, and Dark Star by Robert Wolfe.

Calvinism Disintermediates Trust

Shortly after the invention of the movable type printing press made it much cheaper for people to compare notes, Lutheranism emerged as a straightforward alternative basis for trust, competing on price. Around the same time, the king of England formally broke from the Church of Rome, subordinating the local church to himself. The newly formed Church of England retained many of the same practices (and personnel), which were thus repurposed to help the king control and tax the people of England.

Calvinism, on the other hand, offered a basis by which people who have grown up participating in a wicked canonical power structure might come to trust each other relatively directly.

If you grow up participating in a wicked power structure, you have to be complicit in wickedness to advance your interests. This involves taking on commitments to wickedness, establishing loyalty to a conspiracy (See The Inner Ring, On Commitments to Anti-Normativity, and Guilt, Shame, and Depravity.). So the puzzle is, how can one break from your old loyalties without thus acquiring a track record as disloyal?

Wickedness involves a self-reinforcing pattern of evasion. If you grew up under overwhelming pressure to become complicit, you weren't exactly making a mistake, but you also weren't exactly making a free choice to become wicked. If your entire social scene is like that, it's going to look very much like people must all be born complicit in sin. People who are wicked in this way have broken agency. They are not evaluating the consequences of wicked or righteous behavior, and then choosing wickedness. Rather, their wickedness consists of a commitment not to process some information. This commitment may originally have been a strategic response to social threat, but the nature of the commitment prevents these threats from being rationally reevaluated. Thus, the unsaved do not have the power, on their own, to decide to become saved.

Wickedness is not a perfect psychological defense mechanism. Sometimes, people who were committed to wickedness receive the right information at the right time to cause them to explicitly evaluate wickedness as a life strategy, compare it with righteousness, notice that wickedness is the worse deal, and adjust their behavior accordingly.

This explains the discreteness of the event. Being saved is something like a cascade of updates towards processing information you had been motivatedly ignoring. So we might expect it to happen relatively suddenly rather than gradually.

It also requires a deterministic perspective. If earlier, you were not capable of evaluating yourself and your situation honestly and making decisions on that basis, and later, you were, that cannot have been your informed decision. The cause of your agency has to be outside of your agency.

Calvinism thus tells a story where your new agency isn't the same as your old agency, because of a one-time unique narrative break. It's not that you were making one choice, and then the same you made different choices later. It's that you were helplessly stuck in a wicked attractor, and then some external factor outside your locus of control nudged you into the good attractor. So you, as an agent, are not responsible for your capacity to be responsible, or the destruction of your commitments to wickedness - it just kinda happened to you - but now that you're, by the grace of God, effectively reborn as a responsible agent, you can be expected to keep your commitments, as one outward sign of grace.

Incidentally, by the standard with which our society increasingly accepts self-reports of subjective metaphysical conditions such as maleness or femaleness, we should have to say that some people really were saved by the irresistible grace of God, based on their self-reports, so that for at least some people, by contemporary progressive standards of evidence, Calvinism is literally true. As for my own opinion, there’s clearly a real and important event being described, but Calvinist theory mistakenly generalizes contingent features of life under Roman Catholic domination into metaphysical axioms. Inappropriate generalization from a traumatic context is a well documented symptom of CPTSD. The Frankfurt School calls this sort of metaphysical projection of circumstantial problems jargon. See Palantir Goes to the Frankfurt School, Jargon and Attachment, and The Order of the Soul.

This story of receiving irresistible grace allows people who've transitioned to righteousness a way to construe themselves not as choosing to break a bunch of commitments they made to wickedness, but instead as having been altered such that now they can make unironic explicit commitments for the first time. Predetermined, irresistible grace also means that they can use their own discernment to recognize each other as trustworthy, instead of needing to outsource that to the Roman Church. This breaks the cartel, and allows people capable of high-trust relationships to assemble themselves into a network of exchange, and potentially a powerful political faction.

The Trust Explosion

Here's a rough explanatory model for why modern joint stock ventures, physical science, and medical science all seem to suddenly explode in the Calvinist areas.

The Roman church held onto power on the basis of suppressing trust, and selling a simulacrum of trust. Under this regime, know-how and the sorts of relationships that formed the basis for mundane trust among the middle class gradually accumulated. A great number of smallholders became moderately wealthy by prudent management of their property and reputation-based trade. This gradually increased the potential returns to higher-trust relationships, until the printing press allowed a sufficient group of people to coordinate to jump to a higher-trust regime, suddenly breaking the latent tension.

Calvinism was developed in republican Switzerland, and soon became popular in the Dutch Republic situated between the Latin Catholic and Germanic Lutheran spheres of influence.

When England broke from the Church of Rome, it took many economic holdings but kept much of the clerical apparatus including the censorship regime, now subordinated to the King. People aligned with the king tended to be engaged in the same sorts of trust-suppression tactics characteristic of the Roman church: pinning dissenters down to one heretical position or another, and then torturing them to death as an example.

The King needed clergy willing to legitimate his break with Rome, without siding with the Lutherans. The main clergy willing to do this at first were those who were secretly Calvinist or sympathetic to Calvinism, an available nearby theology that did not commit England to submission to Rome or alliance with the Lutheran powers - in other words, it permitted relative freedom of action for the king. So King Henry VIII found himself ironically promoting the implicitly republican Calvinist clergy in order to organize a Church of England no longer loyal to the Church of Rome.

After the break, some relatively Royalist clergy openly opposed Calvinism where it seemed to threaten the king's or his church's prerogatives, and were promoted for this, but there was not a clear standard non-Calvinist theology for them to organize around. Of the Calvinists, some were relatively complicit high-church Calvinists in favor of the king's power, rule by dazzle and invalidation etc, while others were tacitly republican, called by their enemies Puritans, suspicious of church pomp, royal prerogatives, and central endorsement or open tolerance of apparently sinful practice. In this way, while the King was politically dominant, and the church was not officially Calvinist, Calvinism was theologically dominant by default, for lack of a coherently expressed alternative.

Prior to the English Civil War, republicanism was likewise mostly latent among high-trust elites in England. Adam Nicolson's book God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible provides a detailed description of the character of Lancelot Andrewes, one of the non-Calvinist Royalist clergy who presided over an important part of the writing and editing of the King James Bible, and was otherwise clearly loyal to the older, trust-suppressing regime. He actively participated in imprisoning, prosecuting, and condemning to death people who were thought to be too independent-minded. His diary includes extensive confessions of how bad, miserable, and sinful a person he feels he is. All of this is perfectly consistent with the regime of wickedness described above, and forms an interesting contrast to the diary entries of Puritan Calvinists I've seen, where - when they confess sins - it's generally specific transgressions, held up against a relatively clear image of what good behavior would be, so that one gets the impression that the diarist is falling short of their own expectations for themselves, rather than wallowing in their own badness like Andrewes. (Another popular detailed but fictionalized account of the persecutory regime of the transitional England of Henry VIII is Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall.)

The King James Bible itself was a political project to placate established Puritans who objected to dishonestly Royalist translations of the Bible, by assembling a large committee of experts to compile the most honest and precise possible translation consistent with Royalist commitments to institutional and ritual continuity. This and other tactics by King James I successfully deferred the conflict between Royalists and Puritans by driving a wedge between relatively moderate Puritans to whom the result was acceptable, and the more radical ones.

But other commitments required by traditional Royalist governance made the deferral temporary. For instance, one way the king maintained loyalty among his supporters was to give gifts to his favorites, which made it enviable among the nobility to be liked by the king. The competition for royal favors, and jobs that would allow one to embezzle from crown finances, was intense enough to compel aspiring nobles to go deeply into debt in the hope of being bailed out by the king. This all resulted in a level of expenditure on patronage high enough that a majority of Parliament - whose consent was traditionally required to raise taxes- was committed to saying no. Parliament was increasingly dominated by financially independent smallholders to whom taxation was a cost but patronage was not a benefit. Such people tended not to be in debt they could not pay back on their own, and relatedly, tended not to be deeply ashamed. Relatedly, they tended to constitute the Puritan party.

The king responded to Parliament's refusal by attempting to raise funds without Parliament, thus challenging Parliament's traditional authority. This was one factor that precipitated the civil war.

Another precipitating factor was that the king started to nominate Arminians to bishoprics. Puritans in Parliament were unable to accept this; it was immediately seen as a threat to the latently dissident faction. To be sure, in practice Arminians did tend to support Royalist practices such as the pomp of high church ritual. But why, and what did this have to do with their theology?

Arminianism is free-will Protestantism; Arminius claimed that anyone could choose salvation at any time.

If by salvation we mean something with clear preconditions and consequences like the Calvinists version, then this is makes no sense. Calvinist salvation is something like becoming an agent capable of making autonomous decisions. You cannot autonomously decide to be the sort of thing that makes decisions. If you're deciding, you've already become the sort of thing that makes decisions. On the other hand, if anyone at any time can freely choose salvation, then salvation has no reliable precedents. And unless salvation destroys this free will, you can withdraw that will at any time, it has no reliable consequences either. So no one has valid evidence that anyone else is saved. Functionally, this is equivalent to a denial of the possibility of Calvinist salvation.

This implicitly justifies - and in practice Arminian-identifying clergy were seen to support - continued intervention and rule-by-dazzling-ritual by the High Church. If there's no principled way to recognize even yourself as discretely Saved, even probabilistically, and everyone's been wicked in the past, then we still need a privileged intermediary in order to trust each other.

One thing potentially confusing about this is that the Arminian free-will position was not always and everywhere complicity. Quakers were dissenters who may have believed in free will but rarely seem to have been complicit in abuse of power. Your philosophy doesn't have to be quite as coherent if you don't seek out positions of power over others. Likewise in the Dutch Republic, the established relatively tolerant regime, with relative freedom of speech, meant that republicans didn't have to self-organize through indirect latent means like Calvinism, but could just say they were for more republicanism, so the republican party felt it was safe to tolerate Arminians. Their leaders were sometimes pro-tolerance Calvinists and sometimes even Arminians. And Spinoza, a Dutch philosopher less concerned with the assembly of a political faction than the cultivation of personal freedom, focused in his Ethics more on the gradual process by a person might investigate their own nature and thus become more free and capable of making decisions in more contexts, than on a discrete revelation event that would move someone from one side of a binary distinction to the other.

Specifically in the deeply censored, wickedness-dominant pre-Revolutionary England where dissent from the official church narrative was energetically investigated and violently suppressed, the latent faction in favor of honest self-control (both individual as the practice of an austere virtue and collective as free-speech republicanism) depended on a Calvinist established church to begin to recognize and assemble itself. But this situation changed almost immediately once open war began.

At the beginning of the war, both sides put together armies led by feckless aristocrats. Like the South in the American Civil War, the King's party had more aristocrats to choose from, so it started out with better generals. But once the revolutionary army seized London, the situation changed. Parliament authorized the creation of the New Model Army, not quite the sort of mass mobilization seen in the 18th century, but a mobilization at scale of the new middle class who were already coordinating at a higher level of tacit trust than the old elites. Eventually, the most effective middle class military leaders were promoted to lead the New Model Army. Oliver Cromwell was one of those leaders.

Pretty much as soon as the Parliamentary party took over London, the citizens of London effectively enjoyed freedom of speech. There was an explosion of news and opinion periodicals - suddenly, the citizenry were having an open conversation with each other about what's going on and how they would like to be governed. In this context, people such as Roger Williams were able to openly argue for freedom of speech. Freedom of speech was not the result of a slow dialectic between arguments within the existing bounds of inquiry, and gradual expansion of permitted speech. Rather, a higher-trust faction formed latently within the old regime, and then the moment they seized power, they tried to do the right thing, where it's just obvious that arguing about what the right thing to do is is part of doing the right thing. This stuff isn't just obvious in hindsight - it's so obvious that allowing arguments is the right thing to do, that they got the right answer before having any arguments.

Concurrently, there were arguments within the New Model Army about institution design, within which likewise openly expressing radical viewpoints was now permitted. People started arguing for universal suffrage, and openly doubting that kings are ever legitimate.

Meanwhile the Cavaliers remained committed to their preexisting hierarchies, and behaved so badly due to their commitment to vice-signaling (picking fights with each other, drunkenness, sexual aggression, blatant irreligiosity) that they frequently alienated the towns where they were quartered, and failed to learn from military experience as fast as the New Model Army did. So they lost the war, and King Charles I was captured by the republicans. The republicans tried to negotiate with King Charles to retain him as a constitutional monarch with formally limited authority, but he insisted so strongly on negotiating in bad faith that eventually they gave up and killed him.

After this, enough people felt that there was an urgent need for a stable, well-specified government, that the army quickly settled on a compromise arrangement. Oliver Cromwell used his power as head of the New Model Army to force a new constitution on the country, with a somewhat rationalized process of electing members of Parliament, but Cromwell as effectively dictator for life, constrained to negotiate with Parliament mainly by a perceived need for legitimacy. This seems to have taken a lot of life out of the political debate, but did not actually reinstall an antinormative regime, so while plenty of dissenters such as Quakers still faced some persecution (more by Parliament than by Cromwell), they were now merely oppressed rather than tyrannized.

Unfortunately, the process of faction-formation through opposing identities seems to have caused the Calvinists to oppose not only post-Catholic Royalist corruption, but the pagan life-affirming feasts and fun that the high church had coopted. This made Puritan rule unpopular, which limited the extent to which Cromwell could accept more radical governance proposals like large expansions of the franchise.

Once Oliver Cromwell died, there was a succession crisis. The Royalists were the most coherent faction active, possibly because in the absence of an unambiguous threat, what used to be the pronormative faction was no longer unified, so Charles II was installed as king. Almost immediately, the whole discussion became deeply dishonest again. This was called the Restoration.d

At first, republicans in Parliament tried to pick off some of the King's inner circle by prosecuting them - in blatantly bad faith - for conspiring to assassinate Charles I in order to install his openly Catholic brother James as king. Then eventually the Royalists started to take organized action to create a power base. They used the London press to fight a popular propaganda war, and started rewriting city charters to stack Parliament with Royalists. Charles promised tolerance, but even the most inoffensive open dissenters like Quakers were prosecuted and thrown in prison. Eventually, after the crown passed to the openly Catholic James II, the anti-Royalist pronormative faction got its act together enough to invite William of Orange (who was the chief executive of the Dutch Republic and also in the English line of succession) to depose James II. This was called the Glorious Revolution.

It's not exactly true that the Puritans/Calvinists/Parliament are the Good Guys, it's a bit more complex - the Royal Society, the nucleus of modern natural science, emerged in the Restoration, for instance, even though the sort of inquiry it engages in became much more possible during the republican era - but it really does seem like there was a serious albeit deeply confused effort on the republican side to create the conditions for having a conversation about how they'd like to be governed - as a natural part of their broader agenda to achieve a higher justified level of trust.