February 15, 2026
Philosophy fight club meets atrocity bingo
The Dark Side of the Enlightenment
From Age of Progress to Age of Killing — comments are raging
TLDR: A historian rebrands modernity as the “Mortecene,” an age defined by mass killing, but critics say the book skips communist and Holocaust atrocities. Comments erupted over whether Enlightenment ideals caused empire or if conquest was just routine, with memes, receipts, and philosophical zingers fueling the fire.
Clifton Crais’s new book says forget the Anthropocene — welcome to the Mortecene, an Age of Death where state power, capitalism, and fossil fuels turned people and nature into commodities. A review claps back: the index skips the French Revolution, the Holocaust, Holodomor, and Soviet and Mao-era famines, calling the take Anglocentric and cherry-picked. Pinker’s optimism gets roasted, Adam Smith gets side-eye, and Marx’s ecological disasters get largely ignored.
Commenters dove in like it was finals week. One dropped the archive link like receipts. Another argued that blaming “Enlightenment values” for empire is lazy — “conquering people and taking their stuff was just normal,” full stop. Philosophers showed up with brain-bending lines like “rationality won… over superrationality,” cue galaxy-brain GIFs. The thread split into camps: “Crais is right to expose capitalist atrocities” versus “this is selective outrage that dodges communist mass killings.” Memes dubbed Mortecene a death-metal album, Pinker stans battled Mortecene goths, and someone asked for an atrocity bingo card. In short: history nerds, political firebrands, and meme-lords united to fight over whether modern progress is a fairy tale or a horror franchise — and whose chapters got deliberately left out. Tempers flared, receipts dropped, and history got spicy.
Key Points
- •Clifton Crais’s The Killing Age proposes the “Mortecene” as a better descriptor of the modern era than the Anthropocene, emphasizing mass killing tied to state power, capitalism, and environmental destruction.
- •Crais links the Industrial Revolution in England and the United States to slavery in the Americas and landscape transformations, arguing Enlightenment liberalism legitimized violence and exploitation.
- •The reviewer critiques the book’s Anglocentric focus centered on Adam Smith and notes that Enlightenment-linked atrocities under Marxist regimes in the former Soviet Union are not addressed.
- •Significant omissions cited include the French Revolution, Robespierre, the Holocaust, the Holodomor in Soviet Ukraine, and Mao-era disasters such as the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
- •The article argues these omissions reflect a political choice to center extractive violence under market capitalism while excluding other major cases; contemporary figures like Trump appear, but Putin and Xi do not.