The Enlightenment sought to submit traditional verities to a liberated, analytic human reason.

From How the Enlightenment Ends by Henry A. Kissinger.  The subheading is Philosophically, intellectually—in every way—human society is unprepared for the rise of artificial intelligence.

This is from seemingly long ago 2018.

Heretofore, the technological advance that most altered the course of modern history was the invention of the printing press in the 15th century, which allowed the search for empirical knowledge to supplant liturgical doctrine, and the Age of Reason to gradually supersede the Age of Religion. Individual insight and scientific knowledge replaced faith as the principal criterion of human consciousness. Information was stored and systematized in expanding libraries. The Age of Reason originated the thoughts and actions that shaped the contemporary world order.

But that order is now in upheaval amid a new, even more sweeping technological revolution whose consequences we have failed to fully reckon with, and whose culmination may be a world relying on machines powered by data and algorithms and ungoverned by ethical or philosophical norms.

The internet age in which we already live prefigures some of the questions and issues that AI will only make more acute. The Enlightenment sought to submit traditional verities to a liberated, analytic human reason. The internet’s purpose is to ratify knowledge through the accumulation and manipulation of ever expanding data. Human cognition loses its personal character. Individuals turn into data, and data become regnant.

Users of the internet emphasize retrieving and manipulating information over contextualizing or conceptualizing its meaning. They rarely interrogate history or philosophy; as a rule, they demand information relevant to their immediate practical needs. In the process, search-engine algorithms acquire the capacity to predict the preferences of individual clients, enabling the algorithms to personalize results and make them available to other parties for political or commercial purposes. Truth becomes relative. Information threatens to overwhelm wisdom.

Inundated via social media with the opinions of multitudes, users are diverted from introspection; in truth many technophiles use the internet to avoid the solitude they dread. All of these pressures weaken the fortitude required to develop and sustain convictions that can be implemented only by traveling a lonely road, which is the essence of creativity.

The impact of internet technology on politics is particularly pronounced. The ability to target micro-groups has broken up the previous consensus on priorities by permitting a focus on specialized purposes or grievances. Political leaders, overwhelmed by niche pressures, are deprived of time to think or reflect on context, contracting the space available for them to develop vision.

The digital world’s emphasis on speed inhibits reflection; its incentive empowers the radical over the thoughtful; its values are shaped by subgroup consensus, not by introspection. For all its achievements, it runs the risk of turning on itself as its impositions overwhelm its conveniences.

Indeed.  Our current prosperity and well being are the product of a perhaps unique combination and fusion of Christian world view, Age of Enlightenment reasoning, Classical Liberalism (Hume, Smith, Ferguson, Mills, Kant), and the philosophy of Classical writers, especially the Stoics.  

It is easy to focus on the threats to our modern Age of Enlightenment Classical Liberalism as being merely the antagonism of Marxism, Maoism, Totalitarian States (China), Racism (Critical Race Theory), Social Justice Theory, etc.  All forms of authoritarian disempowerment and intellectual regressivism and revanchism.

And that is certainly tactically true.

But I wonder whether the current threats to the Age of Enlightenment Classical Liberal world is perhaps most threatened by the fact that we have not tended the roots of that world.  Christianity has succeeded in cultivating human universalism (we are all gods children), charity (I am my brother's keeper), mercy and redemption, etc. to such a degree that those central tenants of Christianity are now secular nostrums.  They are accepted without examination and cultivation.

Similarly, the Stoics (and on down to the Founding Fathers) set great store on moral self-improvement.  You cannot reliably improve the world but you can improve yourself. Happiness arises from self-mastery.  All the benefits of the Age of Enlightenment Classical Liberal world very much depend on the ongoing cultivation of strong agency.  It was once accepted de facto that self-improvement was a personal responsibility requiring cultivation.  But the very success of such behaviors created the prosperity that allowed the otherwise untenable believes of universal victimhood.

The Classical Liberal world view (rule of law, equality before the law, due process, natural rights, personal autonomy, etc.) married with its near sibling Age of Enlightenment empiricism and rationalism are embedded everywhere and drive prosperity and individual well-being.  But again, these beliefs and convictions are not natural.  They emerge from history and experience and have to be cultivated and passed on.  In all our prosperity and security, it is easy to lose sight of our dependence on these world views and how the hard work of cultivating the seed ground has to be done on a continuing basis.

To secure our happy future, we must return to the active cultivation of the values, beliefs and behaviors arising from Christianity, Stoicism, Age of Enlightenment rationalism/empiricism, and Classical Liberalism.  We have lapsed into the lazy condition of assuming that those beliefs and values are self-generating when the reality is that we can't simply and idly wait to receive them.  We have to cultivate them and build them as on everlasting project.