If this [the Mysterium
cosmographicum] is published, others will perhaps make discoveries I might have
reserved for myself. But we are all ephemeral creatures (and none more so than
I). I have, therefore, for the Glory of God, who wants to be recognized from
the book of Nature, that these things may be published as quickly as possible.
The more others build on my work the happier I shall be.
I am goingto get into the problems of 4th century Christianity and other dark
periods, but first I want to talk about the problems of the Enlightenment.
These are less often discussed. I don’t mean that the Enlightenment was a
problem or that it is at the root of “our” problems today, but there were
aspects of it left incomplete and some of its reasoning was misused. We have
not corrected for these errors and we can’t if we remain unaware of them.
To be clear,
I think this was one of the most significant phases of human development. From
the time of the Buddha and Socrates until into the 15th century if a
person who had absorbed all the knowledge of their day could time travel
throughout those centuries and sit down for a discussion about the universe and
how it works, they would be able to understand each other. Barriers of language
aside. By the end of the 16th century so much had changed that parents
would have trouble conversing with their children. Anyone who didn’t have a
cell phone when they were a child knows this feeling.
Douglas
Adams calls these the first two ages of sand. We took sand and molded it into
lenses and looked out at the stars and realized they weren’t what we thought
they were. We looked closer at everything with microscopes and began to
deconstruct how things were made. We applied first principles and built on what
we could demonstrate to be true. These concepts had been incubating since the
dawn of human tribes but now they were seen not just as tools but as a
philosophy. This new philosophy said we could experiment with everything around
us and learn from it. We could read the book of nature. The concepts and
discoveries from people like Newton led to the third age of sand, the silicon
chip. Formulas developed at that time were used to put us on the moon and
theorize how the universe began.
But I’m
getting lost in the arc of progress and wonders of science and that is perhaps
one of the mistakes I said I was going to talk about. There was an overwhelming
faith in the ideas coming out of the Enlightenment. I’ll leave the
philosophical discussions of what is good or bad about scientific progress for
now and look at the problems created by this shift to rational thinking.
Rationality
was not invented 500 years ago. Even if you are trying to figure out if your
neighbor is a witch, you will use a certain degree of investigative thinking. Once
you accept that there are witches, and come up with some basic ideas about what
they are, the process of working out the logic is very much like that used in a
laboratory. If the experiment you devise involves dunking in water, because
witches float, this could work out bad for the person being tested, so when we
talk about rationality today, we mean a much larger context, one that involves
not just a single test, but proven techniques, repeated trials, and the ethics
of the test as well. But still, the idea of performing an experiment was always
there.
This era
that led us away from burning witches and produced so much of what we now
considered the modern world, also has an end. The effect of it never ended, but
the movements and the people who can be said to be part of it, ended. As Martin
Luther King Jr. said, “the arc of history bends toward justice”, but it is an
arc, not a straight line. What began as a reaction to a bloody 30 years of war
(1618 to 1648) ended with more war and more conquering by people like Napoleon.
One of the last, perhaps the last, philosopher of this age was MarieJean-Antoine-Nicolas
Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet.
Condorcet
was a contemporary of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His philosophies, like the
“general will” were the inspiration for revolutions against despotic rulers
with slogans like “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”. A century before the
abolition of slavery in the United States, Condorcet founded the Society of the
Friends of the Blacks. But these ideas, no matter how noble, still had
detractors and they required enforcement. Other men, like Robespierre did not
have the patience for them to permeate into the world peacefully. The king was
replaced by the assembly and anyone who deviated from what the assembly
determined was the general will would be subject to its force.
This new
idea of laws coming from nature was an early Enlightenment idea put forth by
the likes of Francis Bacon. He felt that our destiny was in our hands and if we
deny that dream we will return to barbarism. But perhaps we didn’t spend enough
time understanding our nature before some decided to start enforcing its laws.
In his final work Sketch for a Historical
Picture of the Progress of the Human
Mind, Condorcet applied to ethics and morality the idea that there are laws
of physics that are consistent throughout time and space and that principle can
extend to how we operate in the world. But even as he wrote this, the dream
seemed to be dying.
Robspierre
and the Jacobins were in the process of arresting some 300,000 and killing
nearly 17,000, eventually this included Condorcet. These numbers sound terrible
and they are in fact called The Reign of Terror, but as with all such state
sponsored terrorism, they were justified by the political climate. France was
surrounded by monarchies and they were prepared to join forces and restore
Louis XVI. To preserve the newly formed country, they needed to ensure the
loyalty of all of its citizens. A prime focus of this was religious authority
and its ties to the aristocracy. While America was forming around states
founded by religious groups seeking a place to practice their faith freely,
France was stripping power from the Church and killing priests. Religious ideas
that many Americans say their country was founded upon were considered barriers
to the new government of France.
People who
have faith in gods or spirits or anything non-material will criticize
proponents of scientific methods by saying they put their faith in reason. The
above brief look at the history of the movement toward science and reason
demonstrates there is some validity to that sentiment. Much more could be said
about the advancements in our ability to feed and heal the ills of human race,
and that again could be countered by the ills that have been wrought by our own
hands. This is the conversation in which we are currently stuck. The work of
science is not likely to stop any time soon. The answers it provides lead to
more questions and they provide the impetus to keep looking for answers. Faith
is not likely to disappear any time soon. The answers it provides often
resonate with us in a way we can’t necessarily articulate and scientific explanations
for those feelings are not coming quickly.
Religion
spends a lot of time addressing the big questions of meaning. Books like The Purpose Driven Life have been wildly
successful while books by 17th century philosophers continue to
collect dust. This could be more a matter of public relations rather than
actual content. People say they get something from going to church, people who
read philosophy might also say so but not in a way that is terribly
inspirational. Philosophers of course have something to offer in that market, but
they also have detractors and they argue amongst themselves. Comparing and
contrasting philosophers is part of how you do philosophy. Some people shop for
a church, but most go on the advice of someone close to them, and once they
find one they are comfortable with, they don’t keep comparing.
Enlightenment
philosophy and the movements that came with it took power away from the church.
This had the appearance of taking away a moral anchor for society. Friedrich
Nietzsche said, “God is dead”. He on went to say that it was we who killed him
and to note that there was a great danger to this. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra he portrays a man who seeks only his own
comfort, unaware of what he has been given by previous generations. Men like
that are subject to those who understand and use their will-to-power.
Interpretations of these characters are endless, but there is definitely a
shift to seeking human will rather than the will of any gods. Eventually, these
philosophies came to be blamed for everything from slavery to Nazis.
Without
going off into a long history lesson, slavery was not invented by Columbus or
plantation owners in the Southern United States. It may have been one of the
longest running and most brutal forms of institutionalized human trafficking, but
the idea of people owning people was around before written language. The oldest
decipherable writing of significant length is the Hammurabi code, a code of
laws that includes slavery. Empires conquered smaller tribes and brutal dictators reigned back in Biblical Times. Separating this warring nature
of ours from our higher aspirations is one of the promises of the Enlightenment
that has been left unfulfilled.
The modern
world can be blamed in part for these ills. Certainly it has provided new and
improved tools for warfare. Strong militaries have always included protecting
trade as part of their mission. The Golden Triangle of tobacco and sugar to
Europe, manufactured goods to Africa, and slaves to America is no exception. But
there are no simpler idyllic times to return to. The Romans had the Pax Romana.
Pax means peace, but what it meant was criminals who interfered with trade
along their roads were strung up to set an example for others who might
consider anything similar. Many examples can be found in between. Any culture
carries with it the baggage of our baser instincts, making it difficult to sell
its ideology as more progressive than any other.
This list of
problems with the Enlightenment is not exhaustive, but I’ll end with the
bogeyman; postmodernism. Whatever you think about religion and its ability to
deliver on a meaning for life, it’s hard to argue its ability to claim that it is
doing just that. The early Enlightenment thinkers made similar claims, but then
didn’t deliver. Philosophers today might be coming together around something
called Moral Realism but of course it has its detractors and it mostly suffers
from a century of more esoteric moral arguments that led to ideas about nothing
having any meaning. And morality isn’t necessarily a reason for being anyway. As
the world has shrunk, cultures have come into constant contact and although you
could say it is progress that we are living next to each other without killing
each other, we are also having trouble figuring what strange behaviors we
should accept in our neighbors and what we should consider just plain wrong.
It didn’t
help that around this time Einstein came up with his theory of the physical
world and the phrase, “it’s all relative” became popular. His theory involves
travel at very high speeds and calculations that only come into play if you are
trying to land a probe on Mars, but no matter. In the past, the realization
that Muslims were enslaving Christians was used as an argument for why
Christians should not be enslaving Africans. Either owning another person is
wrong or it is not. Now, a justification based on a tradition can be dismissed
because it is a tradition in a certain part of the world. It might be wrong to discriminate
against women and not educate them according to people who live in the
Midwestern United States but it is okay in Afghanistan because it has always
been that way. This is not a way of determining what is ethical that can be
traced to any particular Enlightenment thinker or writing, but many consider it
an effect of that movement.
I can’t
summarize the centuries that it took to develop this strange way of thinking,
but it probably has something to do with the sudden unmooring of that anchor of
morality, the Catholic Church. Once that curtain was pulled back, and the
arbiter of all that is good in the world was accused of perpetrating evil, it
could not be covered up again. Once the constant fighting stopped, when we
realized one religion was not going to win out over the others without killing
us all in the process, we had to figure out how we could live together. We’re
still working on that.
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