We possess more information than any society in history. Increasingly, however, we receive it through systems designed to provoke reaction rather than improve understanding.
Source: Banque de France
The modern crisis of knowledge is not one of scarcity. Facts, arguments, archives, and expert opinion are available in such abundance that our grandparents’ generation would have found such a wonder inconceivable. The difficulty lies in how we encounter them. Information now reaches us through commercial systems that reward immediacy, certainty, conflict, and emotional intensity. What attracts attention is not necessarily what deserves belief.
René Descartes approached knowledge from the opposite direction. His Cogito, ergo sum emerged from a method of systematic doubt, an attempt to separate what could be demonstrated from what had merely been inherited, repeated, or assumed. He was not doubting for the pleasure of skepticism. He wanted to discover what remained reliable once unsupported certainty had been stripped away.
Blaise Pascal, another formidable mathematician and writer, supplied the necessary complication. “The heart has its reasons which reason does not know,” he observed. Pascal was not dismissing logic or inviting us to substitute feeling for evidence. He understood that human judgment also involves intuition, experience, moral perception, and forms of understanding that cannot always be reduced to calculation.
Descartes and Pascal wrote in the seventeenth century, before the Enlightenment acquired its familiar name and form. They nevertheless helped define the intellectual tension it would inherit: the search for knowledge through disciplined reason, tempered by an understanding that human beings are not creatures of reason alone.
The Enlightenment was by no stretch of the imagination free of prejudice, propaganda, vanity, or fury. Its hallmark was not just rational conduct, but the elevation of reason as an ideal against which public claims could be judged. Evidence could be examined; authority challenged. Arguments were expected to survive contradiction. Sincerity did not make a proposition true, and confidence did not relieve it of the need for proof.
In 2021 Marten Scheffer and his colleagues published “The rise and fall of rationality in language“, a study examining millions of books published between 1850 and 2019. They found that words associated with rationality, science, systems, and quantification generally gained ground until around 1980, while language associated with feeling, belief, intuition, and personal experience declined. The direction then reversed. Rationality-related vocabulary began losing ground, while emotional and intuitive language rose. The shift accelerated around 2007 and was accompanied by a movement from collective language toward the individual, visible in the increased use of “I” over “we” and “my” over “our.”
This does not mean that people became less intelligent or lost the capacity to reason. Word frequency is not a scan of the human mind. A culture may use the word “data” constantly and still reason badly. It may use the word “feel” while making an entirely defensible argument. Publishing practices, economics, declining institutional trust, cultural individualism, and technological change may all have influenced the pattern.
Language nevertheless reveals what a culture increasingly chooses to emphasize. Demonstration has lost some ground to personal conviction. Analysis competes with emotional authenticity. Public arguments are judged not only by whether they are supported, but by whether they affirm an identity, express a grievance, or place the speaker on the correct side.
We may be living through an age of Dis-Enlightenment.
Science has not ceased to function, nor has modern society abandoned mathematics. Satellites still circle the globe, medicines are tested, and financial systems continue to depend upon advanced calculations. The change lies in the cultural authority of reason. The Enlightenment asked whether a claim could be supported. The Dis-Enlightenment increasingly asks how the claim makes us feel, what believing it says about us, and whose side we are on.
Modern media did not invent emotional persuasion. Political pamphlets, propaganda, sensational newspapers, and partisan broadcasters have long been heralds of outrage and fear. What changed was the ability to turn emotional reaction into a continuous and viable commercial product.
Roger Ailes did not create that appetite, but he recognized and perfected a powerful way of serving it. Fox News offered viewers more than conservative reporting. It provided identity, belonging, and a continuing explanation of who was responsible for their frustration. Criticism from rival outlets reinforced the network’s claim that a hostile establishment was aligned against it. Criticism became corroboration. Viewers were no longer simply receiving information. They were joining a side.
The model spread well beyond Fox. Cable news learned that indignation, personality, and conflict could retain an audience more effectively than qualification or uncertainty. Social media then made emotional reaction visible, measurable, and commercially useful. Research has found that moral-emotional language travels more widely through online political networks, while expressions of outrage can be reinforced through social feedback.
Anger produced comments. Fear retained attention. Moral certainty encouraged sharing. Algorithms did not need to determine whether a claim was true. They needed only to predict whether it would keep us looking.
Pascal understood that the heart had reasons of its own. The attention economy discovered that those reasons could be measured, stimulated, and sold.
The Enlightenment asked whether a claim could be supported.
The Dis-Enlightenment increasingly asks how the claim makes us feel.
Social media did not create the emotional turn. It industrialized it.
Rationality, however, should not be confused with certainty. Its defining quality is not that it always produces the correct answer. It is that it contains a mechanism for identifying and correcting error. A rational conclusion remains open to revision when better evidence, improved observation, or a more useful definition becomes available.
The British television program QI captured this principle with unusual wit in its 2013 episode “Knowledge.” After ten seasons devoted to correcting widely accepted misconceptions, the program turned its skepticism upon itself. Host Stephen Fry displayed a graph titled “The Decay of QI So-Called Facts” and acknowledged that information previously presented in good faith had since been superseded.
The program’s recurring question about the number of moons associated with Earth provided the best example. An early series had answered two. A later series revised this to either one or five. The “Knowledge” episode offered roughly 18,000 by counting small, temporarily captured objects as “mini-moons.” The progression reflected both improved observation and a changing definition of what qualified as a moon. To be clear: the solar system had not reorganized itself to accommodate the BBC production schedule.
QI then recalculated points previously deducted for answers that might, in retrospect, have been correct. Alan Davies received an extraordinary 737.66 points in retrospective compensation, while even the studio audience was awarded 23.24. The figures brought a smile, but the intellectual gesture was serious. The program applied its skepticism to its own authority.
Reality does not revise itself to accommodate our confidence. Our descriptions, classifications, and best-supported conclusions do. Rational inquiry advances because it permits a claim to be challenged without concluding that truth itself is meaningless. An acknowledged error is not necessarily a failure of reason. It may be reason doing what’s it’s supposed to.
This distinction matters because modern public life frequently treats revision as weakness. Some politicians defend yesterday’s position after contrary evidence has emerged today. Commentators fear that admitting error will damage their authority. Online archives preserve every previous statement as potential proof of inconsistency. Intellectual integrity requires the opposite instinct. A person who changes a conclusion in response to better evidence has not betrayed rationality but demonstrated it.
Artificial intelligence now makes that capacity more important. Generative AI can spit out an answer that is immediate, articulate, and apparently authoritative. None of these qualities guarantees gleeked accuracy. The National Institute of Standards and Technology uses the term “confabulation” for instances in which generative AI confidently presents erroneous or false content.
The greater danger is not merely that AI may give us the wrong answer, but that it may present the answer we already wanted on a silver platter, expressed with enough fluency to discourage further inquiry. Our cognitive biases do not disappear when a machine enters the conversation. They can be served more efficiently.
The older search for knowledge contained friction. It required locating the book, finding the passage, comparing authorities, and sitting with contradiction. AI can collapse that process into a polished paragraph delivered in seconds. Convenience is its genius, but also its epistemic danger.
Rational thinking must therefore be accompanied by a renewed desire to confirm, challenge, and verify what is presented to us. Where did the information originate? What evidence supports it? What has been omitted? Can it be independently confirmed? Which evidence might cause us to revise our conclusion?
Rationality is not the suppression of emotion. It is the discipline that prevents emotional intensity from becoming evidence and confidence from becoming truth. The heart will continue to have reasons of its own. It should be heard, recognized, and acknowledged. It deserves a seat at the table, but it should not make the decision alone.
The Enlightenment taught that knowledge begins with questioning. In the attention economy, certainty has more currency than doubt. The age of AI will test whether we still possess the patience to distinguish a persuasive answer from an established truth, and the courage to revise our conclusions when the evidence demands it.
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