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truly indefinite,” Condorcet claimed—meaning that “truth alone will obtain a lasting victory.”
    Granted, there would be some setbacks along the way. In Condorcet’s narrative, the enemies of progress are always the same two baddies: dictators and priests—and especially Christianity. He didn’t call his much despised strongmen and holy men “conservatives”—but of course, that’s who they often were.
    The good guys in the story, meanwhile, are science and its heroes—Copernicus, Galileo, and so on; let us call them the “liberals”—and a series of great innovations: the alphabet, the printing press, global trade and the 16th- and 17th-century voyages of discovery. And they, ultimately, are the winners of the grand pageant of history.
    In Condorcet’s account, free inquiry and critical thinking—“that spirit of doubt which submits facts and proofs to severe rational scrutiny”—must prove unstoppable. It’s virtually a law of nature. In the long run, our better faculties will enable not only the expansion of human reason, but the creation of political systems based upon universal human rights, social contracts, majority rule, and so on—precisely the sort of constitution Condorcet tried to enshrine in France as the terror descended.
    But how would Condorcet’s future society handle lies, delusions, and politicized misinformation? How would it handle a Conservapedia ? How would it handle anti-evolutionists, or global warming deniers?
    In Condorcet’s vision, such nonsense is stamped out by the widespread dissemination of reasoned arguments—aided by one key technology, the printing press. For Condorcet, this machine is the savior of mankind. It ensures that “no science will ever fall below the point it has reached”—because once knowledge can be recorded, stored, and widely disseminated, it’s impossible to suppress.
    And the enlightenment imparted by printed arguments isn’t just for the elites, Condorcet explained, but for the masses. “Any new mistake is criticized as soon as it is made,” he wrote, “and often attacked even before it has been propagated; and so it has no time to take root in men’s minds.” Before long, he forecast, every individual would be equipped “to defend himself against prejudice by the strength of his reason alone; and finally, to escape the deceits of charlatans who would lay snares for his fortune, his health, his freedom of thought and his conscience under the pretext of granting him health, wealth, and salvation.”
    In Condorcet’s future, there would be no fortune tellers, no lotteries or casinos, and no convincing the public that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was working with Al-Qaeda. People would see through it all, and run the hucksters out of town.

    Condorcet really believed that if you put the facts out there, the best arguments will prevail and people will become more enlightened and reasonable. True to form, that’s exactly what he did when he signed his death warrant by publicly criticizing the Jacobin constitution. But that’s what he had to do: Reasoned argument was, for him, the core mechanism driving the “progress of the human mind.”
    He wasn’t just consistent—he was heroic in that consistency.
    Although they might not state it quite so frankly, today many liberals and scientists would appear to agree with Condorcet. They love to argue, and strive to disseminate reason as widely as they can. This is the modus operandi of our universities, our think tanks and foundations, our media and publications. In a sense, we’re all Condorcets now—or at least we act like it.
    Yet if we return to the master, we find that Condorcet’s account of the “progress of the human mind” contains little account of the workings of the human mind. Modern psychology and