Explain how science and Enlightenment values ​​(E-values) produce various types of social engineering in the 20th century, designed to produce a better world . Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original EssayThe values ​​of the Enlightenment espoused by 18th-century philosophers represented a significant change for Western culture and guided individuals and governments to do both good deeds. and bad decisions. The fundamental values ​​of the Enlightenment were based on the liberation of human beings from the old order, or Acien Regime, using reason and the power of the human intellect. Kant's essay “Was ist Aufklarung?” describes the fundamental principle that "Enlightenment is the emergence of man from his... inability to use [his] understanding without the guidance of another... Having the courage to use one's understanding is therefore the motto of the Enlightenment". The idea that living standards and human happiness could improve through greater knowledge and progress fueled Rousseau's argument for a society based on reason and a new civil order based on natural law and science. During this period, politics began to focus more on citizenship and the protection of individual rights through a fair rule of law through a democratic process, demonstrated in documents such as the Declaration of Human Rights and the Declaration of Independence. Such political freedom was difficult to obtain in the feudal system. A proponent of such ideas was John Locke, who advocated democracy, individual liberties, and the eradication of religious authority, all in opposition to the old order of feudalism and religious rule. Locke also proposed an idea that all Enlightenment thinkers could agree on: freedom is impossible without the guarantee of property, which the state must protect. Locke said that “the State…is a society of men constituted for the sole purpose of establishing, preserving, and promoting their civil interests…life, liberty, the possession of external goods, such as money, land, houses, mobile". , and things of that nature. This is based on the idea that only those who own property can defend and take care of the state. Enlightenment thinkers hoped that everyone could own property, a concept impossible in previous centuries where ownership was limited to certain levels. Human progress could occur through better policies and a better use of reason through not only political thought but also science. The “enlightened” saw the potential of science to improve living standards by exploiting nature through industrialization and the liberation of man. Andrew Ure theorized that steam engines not only employed many workers, but also left “thousands of fine arable fields free for the production of food for man, which otherwise would have been devoted to the food of horses.” Through industrialization man could have a better life and consume more. The rise of science and technology through an increasingly literate population has contributed to the fall of religious authority as they have brought tangible benefits in a way controllable by humans, unlike religion. Additionally, the availability of technology has allowed some to gain more wealth from their properties. Science and technology have led to the success of many industries in countries that adopted the values ​​of the Enlightenment. They have been embraced by many “enlightened” politicians and leaders, as they have gained support from improving lives.For some, science was a means to improved technology and a better standard of living, and for others, science was practiced to discover more and advance. reason. Charles Darwin fell into this second general category, and although his work became the basis for evolutionary studies, it was also perverted by those who transformed Darwin's natural evolutionary theory into "social Darwinism." Simply put, Darwin proposed that members of a species who were more suited to an environment and responsive to change would be more likely to succeed and reproduce. Species might evolve through changes in populations, not individuals, and nature cannot determine who is fit and who is not. His ideas contradicted the Lamarckian theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics, according to which an individual's changes due to his environment could be passed on to his offspring. Interestingly, both theories of evolution would be used to justify social engineering in the 20th century. Through the Enlightenment and its accompanying values, Europeans produced new standards for humanity by quantifying the presence of democracy, social mobility and individualism for all. One problem with the Enlightenment and the factors for the future manipulation of its ideas was their Eurocentric nature. People, especially Europeans, could use reason and then use it to transform less perfect societies into utopias. Those who embraced the values ​​of the Enlightenment saw themselves as superior to the “uncivilized” and believed that the triumph of Europeans was due to a natural superiority in their political and financial abilities, which was thought to be rooted in science. Some elites adopted Lamarck's theory of evolution to justify their position, as they believed that acquired cultural skills could be passed on to offspring, marking the beginning of population genetics. Enlightenment values ​​implied that humans could control their own destiny and had a right to the land and its resources. Although nature could not determine who was fit, the appropriate combination of reason and science could identify the fit (Europeans) to protect to produce a superior human being. It was through this thinking that the success of science and technology began to be used to legitimize social systems/policies and ideologies. European superiority in science and technology sparked the creation of empires in Africa and Asia through the mission to “civilize.” The then French Prime Minister, Julien Ferry, supported colonial expansion using Darwinist and Lamarckian social ideas when he declared the mission civilisatrice: “indeed the superior races have a right over the inferior races… because they have the duty… to civilize the inferior races … I believe that European nations fulfill this superior civilizing duty with generosity, grandeur and sincerity.” At the same time, however, the aim was to spread French civilization, and therefore a better life, freedom and ownership of property. This was the beginning of the distorted application of Enlightenment ideas to legitimize superiority abroad and domestically. The beginning of the superiority complexes fueled by the Enlightenment occurred through a mixture of the idea that man could progress through the progress of science and reason, and the idea that only limited things exist resources and properties. When a population runs out of resources and seizes property, competition will ensue and only the best adapted will survive and be entitled to the available property. Through a Darwinian interpretation of evolution, it has been proposed thatall populations have a distribution of characteristics and that some members have exclusive advantages that make them a privileged and elite group, adaptable to change. Once a favored group became so distinct, it could no longer breed with the original group, now considered lesser, and the new group became a superior species. It was through the previously mentioned prejudices and quantifiable characteristics of the Enlightenment (i.e. democracy, reason) that Europeans could identify the superior group and use social policies to promote it. An obvious problem with Enlightenment values ​​was that the emphasis on the celebration of reason led some to classify non-homogeneous belief systems (i.e., indigenous beliefs) as irrational, thus rendering them illegitimate. A divide materialized when some Europeans thought that those inferior to them could be civilized through education or colonialism, while others saw the lack of successful characteristics as a lack of qualification to breed. Herbert Spencer, who coined the term “survival of the fittest” and strongly supported social Darwinism, stated that “the forces which are working out the great project of perfect happiness, without regard to accidental suffering, exterminate those parts of humanity which they find in their own way, with the same severity with which they exterminate beasts of prey and herds of useless ruminants", comparing the inferiors to animals of prey and herds of useless ruminants. From here emerged the principles of Nazi and Soviet social engineering. While the Nazi and Soviet political elite had different opinions on the definition of a perfect society and what the standard of humanity should be, both used social Darwinism and Enlightenment values ​​to justify social planning. and their respective ideology. The NSADP saw value in Social Darwinism and the perversion of Enlightenment values ​​manifested in Nazi ideology as they believed they were applying scientific facts to produce the Übermensch. While the application of the Übermensch in Nazi Germany was racial, Nietzsche's concept of the Übermensch derived from the Enlightenment struggle to liberate the population from the old religious order. Nietzsche himself declared “God is dead. God remains dead,” and “Übermensch will be the meaning of the earth!” Human beings now created new values, as the value system given by the religious order was dead. For the Nazis, politics was simply applying science to further the struggle for Lebensraum, removing “lesser” peoples and repopulating the earth with the Aryan Übermensch. Hitler stated that “this land is a trophy for the industrious man. And this rightly serves natural selection. Those who do not possess the strength to protect their Lebensraum... must step aside and allow stronger peoples to overtake it." The Nazis manipulated science, in this case natural selection, to justify their ideology and programs of racial superiority. From here the Nazi eugenics program was born to select the characteristics favorable to the ideal Aryan and proliferate those, deselecting the unfavorable ones through the extermination of the weakest peoples. Another national program that followed this science was the Lebensborn program, which involved “full-blooded” Aryan women mating with SS officers to give birth to Aryan children and kidnap Aryan-looking children from occupied countries. The Nazis had a vision of the Übermensch and specifically an image of what the master race would be like, and they tried to create it. At the opposite end of the political spectrum, the idea of ​​Soviet man came from the Communist Manifesto, which defined liberation.