The cycles of darkness and light

A recent post on Cas d'Intérêt, citing a letter by Albert Camus during the Nazi occupation of France, posed the question: "Camus was able to write with such confidence about Germany's inevitable defeat. In recent times, lies have proven to be so maddeningly productive. Is the effectiveness of violence and falsehood ultimately doomed to failure?"

I believe it is, in the long run.  But the long run can sometimes be very long indeed.  After the great Greco-Roman civilization fell in the fifth century, enlightenment eventually won out again in the Middle Eastern revival of the ninth to early twelfth centuries; after that civilization was strangled by the triumph of Islamic fundamentalism, there was the European Renaissance hundreds of years later.  If the Nazis had won and dragged the entire Western world back into a new Dark Age, I think humane and enlightened civilization would have risen again eventually, but it would likely have taken several centuries before that happened, and no one alive in Camus's time would have lived to see it.

Petr Beckmann said that the thugs always win, but the thinkers always outlast them.  Galileo was forced to recant heliocentrism and spent the last nine years of his life under strict house arrest, his books banned, apparently defeated.  Yet today everybody knows who he was, while the name of the pope who threatened and silenced him is forgotten except among specialist historians.

I think, too, that those cycles of darkness and light are over -- the risk of another collapse is fading.  Yes, one or a few individual countries could conceivably slip back into the darkness, but not civilization as a whole, and it's becoming increasingly difficult to imagine a plausible scenario where it could happen even in one major country at the front rank of development.  Literacy and education are far more widespread than in the fifth-century Roman Empire or the twelfth-century Islamic world.  National power and a modern standard of living are totally dependent on technology, and technological progress in turn depends on science, free inquiry, and the free flow of information which non-democratic regimes cannot tolerate.  The gangster-states of today are essentially hangers-on, parasites battening on the achievements of the free societies whose ideas ultimately threaten the very survival of their regimes.  (Even in World War II this pattern was emerging -- the US built the atom bomb and the UK built the first radar-based national air-defense system and the first real computers, while the Nazis never really grasped the potential of radar or nuclear fission; see also the later Soviet embrace of Lysenkoist pseudo-science.)  Modernity is a complete package, and any nation which turns away from it will ultimately end up marginalized and irrelevant to the future.

The few remaining existential threats are quite different in character -- global warming, a giant meteor impact, a future super-pandemic -- and only advanced technology will be able to fend them off.

So, to those odd types (yes, they exist) who oppose the values of the Enlightenment and want a return to the Dark Ages -- sorry, but the Nazis were your last chance, and they failed.  It took time, but finally, Galileo has won.  Hypatia has won.  We have won.