This is intended to be more like a value-generating discussion. Investigating which percentage of people are holding which of two narrow default historic views is kind of a silly nitpick, and it didn't occur to me that some anti-enlightenment fringe might be over represented or growing to a near majority in recent years, although it's not as if I neglected to mention them. Few of the several terms you've used for the movement are really very appropriate, cynical and nostalgic perhaps, but I think any relationship between a "supreme crown" and enlightenment values are going to be more fraught and continuous than the binary that you've perhaps imagined here. This rhetoric of binaries should instead underline the main purpose of the essay, the two sides of this same coin are a dead end for the imagination and a strange fixation of our time only.

I'm not arguing that those of us who are well off should not be thankful, but rather that we should not let that overly influence the way in which we view others through time. A person in the future might perceive the privilege of receiving life saving chemotherapy almost surely as a totally nasty and brutish treatment, for example, and we just don't want to see these type of things about ourselves because it takes all that conceit and superiority away from us irrevocably. They may nonetheless applaud our quick technological developments but wonder about other things, concepts and values we don't yet have and fail miserably at.

As for the inevitability of narrative, it is perfectly plausible to consider training data interpolation reconstructing or rather generating a fairly statistically accurate global record of all lost documents, even ending with a full-on physics simulation of key events. This god's eye view of history would, like Borge's Aleph, be a grotesque horror to face. Every internal and external personal detail of every person's life immortalized for eternity. What is fruitful and useful beyond narrative is play, that is, the portion that even in such a future remains flexible, the parts of the story that still are left to be interpreted even when all the data is available.

New mental models are resisted with the most extreme passion, even by those who know better.

For example, there is a conceit among most folks alive today that the present is quite a lot better, more progressed, more humane than the distant, "dark" past. The facts of history show this idea to be in many ways  false and in others misleading. Most of what we associate with ancient or medieval irrationality and stupidity, particularly persecutions like the witch craze, indeed begin to ramp up during the early modern period and continue to do so into the absolutely horrific persecutions of the more "enlightened" industrial era, which by all measures make the past look quite innocent. The same can be said just as easily regarding warfare. I have found that few will consider or accept those facts in conversation without bogus equivocations, special pleading and outright zealotry, often to the point of rage. I think that is a good sign not of the vitality of the belief but of its hollowness. Most people know better, but stick with what they were taught in elementary school history class because it just feels so good to believe we're the better people, and it's not easy to hear that irrational religious people with little understanding of science generally behaved better towards one another.

While you are pushing back against this mental model valorizing short term technological progress at all costs, I think you are still heavily subscribing to modernity's true devil, survival of the fittest. The idea that what survives and thrives best is indeed "optimal" should be questioned vigorously, and I agree it is not sufficient to just extend the scope of our concern for survival. We must again, as in the dark irrational past, become concerned with powers greater than ourselves which we cannot ever fully understand.

What you are describing as the "aristocratic system," I think better called the Feudal arrangements, continued later into the industrial period most famously in the American South, where large estates were becoming increasingly economically viable with the combination of slave labor and mechanized processing of cotton. Some old world cultural expressions of medieval chivalry not only had persisted there but were becoming more popular, with a craze for dueling, a deadly menace mentioned repeatedly in the press. In spite of the aristocratic cultural vigor and highly militarized aristocracy, the Confederacy never had much of a chance against the industrial, logistical and numerical advantage of the Union, and indeed, the superior communication lines available by telegraph.

During the period discussed in your post the British were not significantly culturally different from other European competitors for me to put great faith in the argument that this gave them more success at sea, at least against other Europeans. Throughout the age of sail the British generally maintained a significantly larger and more effective fleet than the French or indeed any of their competitors and so always benefited from making more aggressive action. When you have all the chips at the table that's just how the game goes. Additionally, the British held a few key technological advantages in the velocity of their artillery projectiles and in the chronometer, an extremely sophisticated device which was designed to keep navigationally accurate track of time while in the heaviest seas and through earth's varying gravity. Arguably the chronometer was the greatest advantage the British ever obtained, considering knowledge of one's longitude is important to exercising sea power. Indeed, this is the era in which communication and navigation has already become quite reliable.

On the one hand it's true that relevant information and communication gives powerful force-multiplying advantages. On the other hand, it's not true that a warrior culture with some equivalent to the Articles of War is in itself advantaged in any way from more desultory strategies.

There's no need to strain a metaphor beyond its good use. The intuition pump as a surprise taste test could be more, a moral allegory as you've had it, but that's the very kind of narrative thread-weaving which I wanted to warn against.

What I want to emphasize most of all, and I'll be more direct and less clever now, is playfulness over minmaxing. Making and stockpiling increasing amounts of bows, ever more effective weapons, is not so much a metaphor for a game as it is the most immediate and serious existential threat to humanity, even moreso than the climate. If we're at all wise to the world, similar existential consequences from AI are still quite beyond the horizon. Serious to be sure, but these tenuous long strands of allegory, metaphor, and tapestries of analogy, the very substance of Rationalism and logic, are basically unfalsifiable and therefore closer to the mythological. 

OP is onto something in pointing to playfulness, taking the way of Gandalf rather than Saruman. Saruman's way is precisely what Anthropic is doing, playing a defeatist game of ring-making, orc-breeding, and forest-burning.

Agents which do not care even instrumentally about effecting the wider world probably will not predominate. They will probably be bystanders and NPCs - and by their own lights, this is fine.

I would point your attention to Rucker's character Sta-Hi Mooney, from the Ware series. An inattentive reader of Software might consider this character a bland hedonist, and in the first sense he is. But through the novel it is revealed that he is very engaged in a Dionysian manner, the disruption of rationality provided by drugs gives him an awareness that is not available to "NPCs," mere bystanders, or even the hyper-rational inventor of AI, Cobb Anderson. We see a Dionysian kind of character also in Fear And Loathing, where only Raul Duke can actually discern the mad American Dream. In a sense these characters are destructive, tearing down common illusions that we all take for granted, and in the case of Sta-Hi, we have it double in his destruction of the Big Boppers.

Rationalism or Apollonian thought is less capable of "play," and I do not mean that in the sense that rational people aren't enjoying themselves. Rather, play in the sense of Derrida where we are stressing the seemingly unlimited permutations within a limited system. This working out of a minmaxing strategy for making sense of the world leads to a very narrow and deterministic style, Narrative.

Apollonian thought is insidious, one may not even notice its narrative building blocks. This hunch that a Rationalist is better prepared for "instrumentally effecting the wider world" cannot be true, as the whole affair is bent towards the crystallization of ideas into more beautiful, solid, or eloquent terms. This is the opposite of transformative action. Ultimately, the destructive impulse of the Dionysian is a perhaps final reflection upon a thought and not a destruction as it poses, and what was once their new paradigm instantly begins to itself crystallize as rules of how to best play the newly-altered game arise. So its destructive mandate is not an end in itself, but a new beginning.

This dynamic is very evident in a lot of popular fiction, as well. When one finds oneself in a lose-lose situation, I think the slightly crazy and compulsive Captain Kirk is in order over rationalist Spock, the Vulcan most often convinced of his own narratives and a total defeatist. Contrast Gandalf with Saruman, the wandering unserious wizard who quite irrationally let the world's fate hang in the hands of a few very hedonistic hobbits rather than the very logical Saruman who wished to build up his own power to betray Sauron.

This is not some "Noble Savage" view, as the Greeks were indeed an example of relative high civilization compared to their contemporaries, and I have applied none of the typical virtues that are associated with such a narrative. The Noble Savage trope is largely praising the imagined warlike and masculine qualities of populations that are seen as less civilized. The Noble Savage is innocent only of the effeminate quality of civilization.

This talk about efficiency might lead somewhere fruitful, even if your argument is confused and pointless: We just have stronger weapons / swords and nukes are equally efficient. I have no idea what you even mean, but let's think about this more. A nuclear bomb is in fact far less efficient than a sword as it requires vast amounts of industrial development, mining, and energy to create and deliver with any effect. The same can be said about a rifle, it requires far more energy and labor to manufacture than a machete, and requires a constant supply of ammunition to function. The immediate conclusion upon a moment reflecting on the efficiency of weaponry is that we're investing much more energy into increasingly less efficient weapon systems, as if it is a race to spend more and more resources to gain tactical advantage. That is, kill at increasing distances. Look at the current conflict in Ukraine. The largest proportion of infantry kills are taking place by remote controlled suicide drone, something that is wildly inefficient. A lot of these drones are now even being controlled via fiber optics to prevent signal jamming, and so you see the trees in no man's land just draped with miles and miles of wasted fiber optics.

If what you claim is indeed true, and warfare is always equally brutal across all eras (or this parallel view, that the past was indeed more brutal), then the added inefficiency of modern weaponry seems to show that in terms of wealth and resources, we are nonetheless committing more resources than ever to weaponry. I cannot think of a single ancient empire which stockpiled weapons and bombs with even a fraction of the commitment of modern nation states.

So, I see you've been looking into Wikipedia and beginning some interest in history. I'm glad you've taken some of your first steps into a deeper understanding of the topic. There are a few warnings, though. When we see numbers in ancient texts such as Plutarch's reference to "thirty thousand," these need to be framed with extreme caution and understanding that ancients simply did not keep accurate records, such as birth certificates, and what evidence we do have shows the numbers to be always exaggerated. We must consider also that Thucydides' history is colored by a critical bias against Athens, with his overarching narrative presented in the Peloponnesian War. All of the speeches and quotations given in Thucydides are meant to create an impression, and are misrepresented when interpreted as if they were a journalistic source.

Now, it's good to hold these ancient atrocities in one hand, but they are not themselves showing a more cruel world of the past. We must compare them with the modern wars if they are to give us some meaningful contrast. Let's take World War 1, for example. We are just going to breeze by each battle and give a death count.

The battle of the Marne, over 500,000 died. 700,000 in the battle of Verdun. Over a million in the first battle of the Somme. 800,000 some in the second battle of the Somme. Kolubara, around half a million. Gallipoli, another half million. Galicia, over 600,000. Third battle of Ypres, exceeding 800,000. A million and a half in the Spring Offensive. Around 1.8 million in the Hundred Days Offensive. 2.3 million in the Busliov Offensive. Estimates have around 16.5 million soldiers as casualties of the first world war.

World War 2 saw some decline in military casualties but also the tragic and steep increase in civilian casualties, with somewhere around 40 million dying as a result of the war. This is due in large part to citizens becoming valid military targets, something that was only hinted at in the first world war. Curtis LeMay, the American commander who organized the systematic firebombing of Japanese civilians said, "If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals."

Now perhaps this brutal form of war is more kind, you are thinking, because there is no capture or sale of enemy soldiers or citizens as slaves, but I think that is utterly facile and mistaken. The Geneva conventions explicitly allow compelling prisoners of war to labor, so long as they aren't officers. The US and Soviets forced German prisoners of war into labor. The Germans captured and enslaved the people of Europe on a scale that was unprecedented in history, with fifteen million people enslaved. 

Last century is often called the "Age of Genocide" and we can make a list here, too. The Armenians of Turkey, Jewish people of Germany, Bosnians, Mayans of Guatemala, Tutsis of Rwanda, the earlier examples of Tasmania's complete genocide, the genocide of Native Americans, all represent a rising global trend that is very decidedly current and recent, with genocide by no means a universal feature that is continuous through history.

There are currently around two million people in the American prison system, of these around 800,000 do everyday labor like the rest of us, paid in rates best measured by pennies per hour. The trend of mass incarceration in the US is one that has massively increased over the past generation.

With a less biased view of the last century, as well as the present, it is clear that these events of the past were not "terrifically violent" by the standards of the modern era.

Those hardly count as cherrypicked examples when they're so incredibly vague. You did not name a single historian, Greek city state, solitary event, or personality from history which could be counted as an example supporting any thesis. These are only vague mischaracterizations and not data points. I have explained to you in great detail how Whiggish history was and is a politically-interested style of writing history that has gone out of fashion for nearly all experts in the field. There are plenty of tribal controversies in the interpretation of history, but this isn't really one that historians currently care too much about at all.

The argument here is incredibly unconvincing and utterly puzzling. Moses is a mythological figure