November 18, 2014 • 39 mins
The Enlightenment stands as the moment the West withdrew from superstition and found its faith in reason. Did it shift too far? Learn about this massive shift in thinking which we are still sorting through and coming to understand today.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to you Stuff you Should Know from House Stuffworks
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and Jerry Are. So this
is stuff you should know. The Enlightened Ones exactly, the
(00:22):
three of us, no one else, No, we're the Enlightened Ones.
I am gonna go ahead and preface this what what
I just said off the air. This is a very
tough subject to distill in a thirty to forty five
minute podcast because volumes of books can be written on
the Age of Enlightenment and have been and have been.
(00:43):
So this is this is stuff. There is gonna be
a very bird's eye view. Yeah, there's a dude named
Jonathan Israel who just came out with I think this
third volume of a three volume set on the Enlightenment
and he wrote literally several thousand and pages of it
and it's considered an obscure text. Yeah, he probably doesn't
(01:06):
even think that he covered it in full. No, but
he doesn't, although he's coming right. I think he does
have another one coming. So maybe it was a second
but um he uh that that the idea that um
he doesn't think that it's done, that it's not finished
is actually a pretty standard view of the Enlightenment. Like,
(01:27):
during research for this, I realized that there are tons
of intellectual arguments going on right now, like the Bill
Maher thing. Bill Maher in Islam. He's been accused of
being like a just a complete racist, xenophobic dude um
because of his recent statements on Islam. Did you see
(01:51):
him and Ben ben uh? Did you see them get
into it? Okay, that argument is an Enlightenment argument. It's
like it provided the Enlightenment was so massive that the
ripple effects are still being felt on a daily basis
because it was such an enormous change in the way
(02:12):
humans think that we're still trying to sit there and
analyze what the heck happened. And that is one manifestation
of it. Is is like what Bill Maher is saying is, well,
you know, Islam is a religion or whatever, and therefore
it's um an athetical to progress and culture and like
real thought and rationalism, and Ben a Ben yeah, Ben
(02:35):
Affleck is saying, like, you can't say that about a culture,
Like each culture is its own thing. So what we're
seeing there is the idea of moral absolutism arguing with
moral relativism, and that is like textbook Enlightenment argument. Pretty interesting. Sure.
Like researching this article seriously, I tied together probably ten
(02:56):
different things that I didn't realize we're connected. Well, yeah,
I love it when stuff like that. It was the
start of and you know, the age of Enlightenment quote
unquote started and ended, but it was the birth of
just a new kind of thought and a new value system, uh, philosophical, scientific, cultural, intellectual,
(03:18):
basically saying reason over this previous long held belief that
just strict religious dogma is all you need to worry about.
You don't question anything, don't try and think about science
and nature and things like that other than just this
is God's creation and what does it mean in terms
of religion exactly. So, of course it's still going on.
(03:40):
But it wasn't. It wasn't just that. It was definitely
Enlightenment was the If you're an Enlightenment UM fan, you
would say Enlightenment was the domination of reason over religion
or faith. It was a it was a value system basically.
But there was another aspect of the Enlightenment, the domination
of um the will of the people over the monarchy. UM.
(04:04):
Economic there was economic change, UM, huge economic changes thanks
to Adam Smith. There were a lot of like huge
monumental changes in the way people thought. UM. So much
so that modern historians who are trying to unpack the
Enlightenment still one of the schools of thought is that
you can't just call it the Enlightenment. It happened in
(04:27):
too many different places under different circumstances. Um. And then
the again, like the the different aspects of it, the
fact that one part of it dealt with governmental change,
one part of it dealt with religious change, another part
that with economic change. That they it's been kind of
distilled into separate compartments. Now, yeah, I mean separate compartments
(04:49):
somewhere divergent and contradictory. Uh. It occurred nearly simultaneously in
the eighteenth century in France, Great Britain, Germany and other
in at least Bain, Portugal, American colonies all over the place. UM.
I like to say, it's the period of time where
the world started waking up and pulled their heads from
(05:11):
their rear ends. Basically, well, the the the question now,
I mean, if you're a religious type, you're probably happy
about the fruits of the Enlightenment. Like everybody points at
the Industrial Revolution is proof positive the Enlightenment was great,
or the American experiment proof positive the Enlightenment was great.
(05:32):
But you probably don't like the fact that the world
completely turned its back on religion or not completely but
largely did. If you're a pro Enlightenment type, you're probably
saying this was for the best, like we were backwards,
we emerged from the dark Ages thanks to the Enlightenment. Um,
And this is the argument that's still going on today, Like, yes,
the Enlightenment changed everything, but did it go too far?
(05:55):
So that's we'll get into all that. But Conger, who
wrote this article, I think did a very good job
of taking the whole thing back further than the eighteenth
century out of the French salons and set the stage
for what created the basis for this this change in thinking. Yeah,
I think Kristen did a great job of distilling a
(06:16):
complex topic down to like an eight page article, but
she does take it back to Um, there were a
couple of things that sort of laid the groundwork. Um, well,
a lot of things, but a couple of them are
Mr Sir Isaac Newton and the famous story of the
apple falling on his head, which makes a great story.
He told a lot of people that I don't know
(06:38):
how uh factually exactly true that is, but it makes
for a great story. But either way you want to
look at it. Isaac Newton looked at the space at
some point between that apple in the ground and said,
there's something going on in that empty space that should
be explained, because that apple doesn't fall up. Something's keeping
(06:59):
us all did here on the ground, and I want
to look into that. Although if you were a fan
of David Humes, you would say, uh, well, actually it
could consumably fall up, because we've never proven it won't
fall up. And him was one of the proponents, well
not proponents, but uh he was active in the Age
of Enlightenment. Another thing that really laid the groundwork was
(07:19):
the Thirty Years of War from six eighteen to sixty eight,
which pretty much paved the way for Protestant Reformation and
the Roman Catholic Church took a lot of the teeth
away from the Roman Catholic Church. Huge first time, Yeah,
it was. There was a huge change. So what you
just described, Chuck, is a the foundation for the intellectual
(07:43):
branch of of the Enlightenment thinking usurping the power from
theological thinking. And then with the Thirty Year War, the
political power was taken away from the church because for
the first time now the precedent has been set that
you was a citizen. Your allegiance is not split between
church and state. Your allegiances first and foremost to the state.
(08:07):
And we see that still today. Like if somebody uh
kills their um, their parents or whatever because it's the
Seventh Sign and Demi Moore's running around and they it
turns out that they were brother and sister, so you
kill them because it's the will of God. State says,
I don't care if it's the will of God, you
can't kill your parents. The state's law is more powerful
(08:29):
and more important than God's law. That's straight out of
the Thirty Years War that changed everything. Have you ever
seen the Seventh Sign? Man? I saw that, like when
it came out. I don't remember anything about it. I
just remember like one of the characters was this kid
with down syndrome and he murdered his parents because he
(08:49):
found out that they were brother and sister and he
was super religious and they were going to execute him. Yeah,
when they execute. I think he was like the last martyr. Man,
I'll have to check it out again. Yeah more. Uh man,
she just keeps getting better looking, don't she. How didn't
do that? Yeah, like you look at um. Blame it
on Rio seeing that. Yeah, she's kind of dooey and
(09:13):
not tubby, but just round. And then she got all chiseled. Man,
they remained chiseled. That was Michael Kine. Wasn't it great movie? Yeah?
But I mean she was a kid back then. Everyone
was Dowie back then when they were kids. Blaming Rio.
It was really good movie. So Conger points out even
further back about the Dark Ages, sort of laying the groundwork,
(09:34):
which the Dark Ages were dark for many reasons, but
one of the big ones was that the Roman Catholic
Church basically ruled everything. Uh. Latin was the language, the
center of life and academia where monasteries and abbeys. You
weren't encouraged to get educated outside of uh theological uh realms.
(09:56):
It was not encouraged. Do you have to actually, I
want to say, you have to be carefully using the
term Dark Ages because uh apparently it is a disparaging
label that people on the pro Enlightenment side of the argument.
The humanists, they say, these are the Dark Ages. That
was back when the Church controlled everything, when everybody was
just an ignoramus. Once the Enlightenment came along, we emerge
(10:20):
from the Dark Ages. Technically, once the Renaissance came along,
we emerge from the Dark Ages. So if you're in
a Storian, you call it the Middle Ages. But even
the Middle Ages are kind of sad because it just
says these ay just kind of existed between this important
age and this important age. We just call this the
Middle Ages. But it's better than the Dark Ages. But
that's a that's a um an argument or a label
(10:43):
that a disparaging label that humanists use unfairly, because there
were scientists working and laying the groundwork for future science
in the Dark Ages, and Congret even mentions them in
this article, like Thomas Aquinas came up with scholasticism, Yeah,
and scholasticism is basically the idea that you can understand
(11:05):
God even more and be even more pure and divine
yourself by studying nature. Yeah. Roger Bacon was another monk
who was a proponent of that. And I think um
that allowed them and I don't think that's the reason
they did it. But that allowed them to pursue these
scientific avenues because it was still tied to God. Another
(11:26):
big change was Uh. Like I said before, in the
not so dark Ages, perhaps Latin was the language, and
they didn't have something called the printing press until Johann
Guttenberg came along in fourty eight and says, you know what,
everyone should be able to read. Start printing stuff in
your native tongue. Uh. And that led directly to people
(11:48):
starting to educate themselves. It was the democratization of education
right exactly. And all of this didn't happen like out
of the blue, like Roger Bacon and Thomas Aquinas and
a guy named Leonardo Brunei. They didn't necessarily come up
with their ideas on their own. There was some this
really seminal thing that happened back in the mid century
(12:09):
where somebody, I don't know who did, somebody translated um
Aristotle I believe his works into Latin, and all of
a sudden, the Greek rational thinkers of antiquity, their ideas
were suddenly available to the West for the first time.
(12:29):
And it just so happened that some people started paying
attention to these things. Leonardo Bruni read Petrarch and revived
the idea of humanism, which is a huge sea change
because humanism says humans are pretty awesome and the fruit
of our labors, the fruit of our intellect, the fruit
of everything that we do comes from human ability, not
(12:51):
God Like, We're not just vessels for God's brilliance to
be shown through. If you create something, you come up
with a work of art because God did that. You
did that, but let's figure out how you did it, right.
That's humanism. And this is what the Renaissance started to
revive and was a huge change, Like, maybe we should
start paying attention to ourselves a little more exactly, let's
(13:14):
explore the human condition. Yeah. Um. Aristotle was not a
heretic because he tied his geocentric universe ideas to God
as well. Um. He thought the universe was composed of
ten separate crystal spheres, and beyond the tenth sphere that
was heaven and God. Uh. Copernicus, Um, she uh pretty
(13:36):
much said no, that's not true. The universe is infinite. Uh.
And he was pretty alone in that thinking. Early on,
I faced a lot of criticism from like every every
religion Protestants and Catholics. Yep, it was a They thought
it was a dangerous way of thinking because he didn't
make room for God in the cosmos, And it definitely
(13:58):
was a dangerous way of thinking to the church, Like
the Protestant Reformation was going on, you had the Thirty
Years War coming down the pike, you had Copernicus um
thanks to this revival of interest in astronomy, like yeah,
starting to to look at the universe around us and
finding even like symbolic stuff like um, who was it? Kepler?
(14:22):
He was an assistant to Tycho Brahe and Kepler figured
out that the planets uh revolve around the Sun in
an ellipse. Well, the church, the Holy Roman Church, said
that the circle was a symbol of perfection. So of
course everything revolved around the earth in a circle. Not
(14:42):
only did things not revolve around the Earth, revolved around
the sun. And they didn't even do that in a circle,
they did an ellipse. So the church is just losing
its mind because all these people are coming forward saying
everything that you're saying over here is starting to prove
to smell like bs and the church is losing its
power left and right. Both politically and intellectually. It's losing
(15:03):
its authority. Yeah. Galileo even recanted, uh, because he was
accused of heresy for his theory that the Earth rotates
on its axis. So he said, I'll take it all back.
I didn't mean that. Please don't kill me. He's like,
but just make sure my manuscripts survive. So we were
talking about Bacon. He is the creator of the scientific method,
(15:25):
and he says, you know what, we should use experiments
to actually try and explain things. And so it's six.
I think it's high time we have a method for
doing so. So that was Francis Bacon. Yes, I wonder
if he was related to Roger Bacon. I don't know.
They were separated by a few centuries, but they could
have been fam sure, I think so. Uh. And he
(15:47):
was did you ever take philosophy in college? No? Um,
I think I might have. I didn't get much out
of it. If I did, I don't remember. That's like
one class we studied descartes um a lot. I've grown
to be a little more interest it in it, but
I like the more I like like existential crisis philosophy,
like Nick Bostrom stuff, And I don't know what that is,
(16:09):
just basically how the world's gonna end. Okay, this stuff
is I think, like de Cartes is interesting, but I'm
not like a I'm not. It doesn't light my fire. Yeah,
it was right. I think I made an a in
that class actually because it interested me at the time.
But I never took a follow up class. It just
took the intro. So it clearly didn't mean that much
to me. But I get it. Well. Yeah, And what
(16:30):
they cart was saying is our experience is not It's
not what you thought. Like mind and matter are two
different things, and the human experiences a subjective experience and
the mind, what the mind produces is different than what
is reality and really kind of um that changed things
(16:52):
tremendously too. So you got all these people like contributing
to this. We haven't even reached the eighteenth century yet,
Like the groundwork is definitely being late and it's still
being laid. Um as far as the like the government goes.
John locke Um was one of the people who contributed
to the idea of the social contract. The social contract
(17:13):
there was Hobbes Lock and later on Rousso and others
contributed this idea that humans are born with natural rights.
You're born free. I'm born free, even Jerry's born free,
look at her. And to form a society, you give
up some of these natural rights. For example, one one
thing that you give up is your right to kill
(17:35):
in retribution. Uh. Any society typically demands a state monopoly
on violence, which means that if somebody kills your family member,
you don't go kill that person. You go to the
state and say that guy killed my family member, triumph,
convict him and kill him on my behalf because there's
a state monopoly on violence. So that's a natural right
(17:55):
that you give up. I think appropriately so and for
the better, but as part of the social contract and
so Uh. The idea that that humans had these rights
and that society in turn had rights because humans gave
them rights. Um, that was a big basis of enlightenment thinking.
That would be added to later on too. Yeah. And
(18:16):
Locke also was one of the first champions of what
would kind of become nurture over nature. His idea of
the Tabu larassa that when humans are born, their minds
are a clean slate and they are shaped by experience
and education and not some preordained thing that you're born
with and uh, this French intellect gobbled that stuff up.
His name was Francois Marie Arouette, and he went by
(18:40):
a name you might know, Voltaire, and he really loved
this stuff and went back to France with all these
ideals and said, we gotta get on this and let's uh,
you know, we can't go out in the streets right
now and talk about the stuff, but we can meet
in private and homes like a Tupperware party, and we'll
call them salons and we'll we'll talk about these radical
ideas is in um in this new way of thinking,
(19:03):
in the privacy of homes for those that are willing
to host it. Yeah, and we'll talk more about Voltaire
and what he did right after this. So, Chuck, Voltaire
has been lit up. He was in England from seventeen
twenty nine, living in exile because he was already critical
of the French monarchy. While he was there he ran
(19:25):
into the ideas of lock of apparently Descartes as well.
He he basically got turned onto rationalism and he was
primed and ready for it, Like this guy was just
waiting for these ideas to pour into him. And when
they did. He became a lightning rod for what we
think of as the Enlightenment. Like Voltaire was the main
(19:47):
dude to start from what I understand. Yeah, and um,
like we mentioned the salons, they had to do this
in private because Louis the four Yeah that right, Yeah,
get better at that. He was pretty hard on to try.
He didn't like that kind of talk. It threatened him
for good reason. Uh well, yeah, I mean the reason
(20:10):
why is like the power was taken from the church
in place more in the monarchy. But in very short order,
people said, you know, we're not really that fond of
the monarchy either. We think we should rule ourselves or
at least elect people to rule ourselves. To this divine
right of kings. Things seems kind of hinky now that
we think about it. So the monarchies were threatened as
well by the Enlightenment. So yeah, the monarchy liked the
(20:32):
dumb masses that stayed under their thumb and any kind
of like radical thought or original thought was super dangerous.
It sounds familiar exactly. It is interesting how you talked about.
I think there are periods of time where things like
the Age of Enlightenment keep popping up that's like the
nineteen sixties in the United States, and I think, like
(20:53):
you said, we're in one right now. I think we're
in probably more than even the sixties right now. Yeah,
And I think there are periods where that lulls it
like maybe the nineteen eighties, the seventies, remember Disco, like
a dumbing down of things. Yeah, just people not caring
or whatever. It's weird and cyclical. I read I read
this article um called things Fall Apart How social media
(21:14):
leads to a less stable world. It was by a
guy named Curtis Howland h G. H. L Andy and
it's on Knowledge at Wharton there, like the Wharton Business
School website, and it was basically saying it wasn't I
thought it was condemning social media, and this guy was
just basically stating, matter of factly that social media erodes
the state and that now we have ways to connect
(21:38):
with other people in ways that are more important to
us than, say, our allegiance to the state. So you
may feel, um, you may feel more connected to somebody
over Hello Kitty and your fondness for Hello Kitty, more
than you would identify yourself as saying American, and with
social media you're able to connect with other people who
(21:59):
feel the same way, and so you form on social
media basically bodies that supersede the state in your opinion,
no boundaries exactly. And as this happens, more and more
of the states, what's called sovereignty erodes more and more
and more um and it becomes a less and less
stable world. The guy's point was that, yes, while it's
(22:19):
very unstable and things are much more dangerous during periods
like this, it's it's basically just a period of upheaval
and change, and then eventually things stabilize again. But what
this guy was saying, using this as an example, is
that we're in a like right now, possibly on the
cusp of a period of tremendous fundamental change in the world.
(22:40):
I see that every day. It's pretty interesting time to
be alive. Yeah, a little scary to me. Yeah, well,
I mean it's like the guy said, it's it's more
dangerous than your average time because change frequently comes out
of spasms of violence or um upheaval, just where nobody's
(23:01):
in charge, because there's a power struggle going on, or
our normal structures are being eroded. It's interesting, it's super interesting. Uh.
So back to the salons. We're back to the age
of enlightenment, the traditional age of enlightenment. Uh, the Salons,
the members were known. There was a group of people
(23:22):
known as the philosophics. Uh. We've mentioned a few of them. Rousseau,
did Hero Voltaire. Um, how do you pronounce that? Is
that it's not montgue is it Montesquieu Montesquieu? Um. And
they were They're kind of skeptics and critics of not
everything but the establishment of government or the way government
(23:45):
was at the time, especially the church. Hated the church,
like Voltaire especially hated the church and the very fact
that it even existed. And a lot of the enlightened
Uh ones were deists um and daism Basically, I like
the way Conger put it um in a big picture way.
(24:05):
They believe in a clockmaker God, which means maybe God
created everything and set things in motion. But then I
was like, all right, that's it. I'm out right, I'm
not uh getting my fingers and all the pies of everyone.
And it's you have free will basically after you're born um,
which again was pretty dangerous to the religious establishment. Yeah,
(24:26):
so you you've got the basis you've got the foundation
of um, the Holy Roman Empire in the West losing
tons of power and and um political and intellectually, you've
got the monarchy now being assaulted by the French salons
who are planning the seeds of democracy. Like Monascu for example,
(24:47):
Uh wrote in se the Spirit of the Laws, and
he basically proposed the idea of a separation of powers.
He's like the first guy to do that. He's the
French lawyer who was in the salon scene. And um,
all the sen it's like separation of power. What are
you talking about? No, you've got a monarch and what
the monarch says is right. And as a result of
this kind of thinking, the seeds of democracy are planted.
(25:09):
And then a hostility toward religion, um of almost any
kind that you still see today, like in the form
of like Bill Maher or Richard Dawkins are formerly Christopher Hitchens. Um.
All of this started coming out of the French salons. Yeah,
all right, after this message, we're going to talk a
little bit about how the Age of Enlightenment manifested itself
(25:32):
in different parts of the world. So we've mainly been
in Europe this whole time. UH. In France there was
an emphasis on the arts. UH. In England they had
a more emphasis on UM science and economics. You mentioned
(25:56):
Adam Smith at the beginning UH Scottish Man and Night
some nineteen seventy six. In seventeen seventy six wrote his
Wealth of Nations, which basically said the government should not
interfere with UH matters of finance and economics. Yeah, there
should be UH, the invisible hand guiding all these principles. Yeah.
(26:18):
I read this article and by this guy who's explaining
that change and thought, like before that, it was that
whole social contract thing, like Russa saying, you know, the
the it's this is an interplay between citizens and citizens
and citizens and their government, and the government's role is
to protect UM the rights of people. What Hume said
(26:39):
is the government is legitimate and so they're not human.
But Smith, it's the government's legitimate and so far as
it steps out of people's affairs and let's free trade
take place, which that might sound familiar if you UM
subscribe to republican or conservative or libertarian ideology. You know,
like the whole laz A fair attitude of government is
(27:00):
what's what legitimizes government, and the government that medals in
someone's affairs is an illegitimate government as far as classical
economic thought goes. Yeah, and we talked about that in
our stuff you should know Guide to the Economy, Yeah,
which we got an email someone bought that the other day. Yeah,
they thought was seventeen hours long or something. And then
(27:21):
also in Scotland, um was David Hume, who's like my
favorite philosopher of all time, just because he's like he's
the only when he studied, he's a meeting. Now he's
a meeting, but he's the only one who's ever really
spoken to me of the Enlightenment philosophers. And Hume was
this meat and potatoes dude who basically said, like, show
me the proof. He was a skeptic, he was an empiricist,
(27:43):
Like he said, you basically can't believe anything that you
can't see with you or not. My belief in his
philosophy has been eroded with the idea that like consciousness
is a subjective experience, like just totally subjective basically. But
I like his his idea and it was like the
the cause and effect right, like I think he used
(28:05):
like Billiards as an example, where you hit a ball
like you're playing eight ball, and you hit like the
eight ball with the cue ball, like you can predict
where that's gonna go, like where the eight ball is
gonna go based on how you hit it with the
cue ball. But the Humes point is is you can't
say for certain that that's what's going to happen. You're
(28:25):
basing that strictly on previous experience rather than proof that
this is what will happen. So we can't prove that
hitting that cue ball will make this eight ball go
in a certain direction ahead of time. And so therefore
we've come up with this thing called causing effect, which
basically serves as a stop gap between what we think
(28:46):
will happen and the phenomenon we've already observed. Like in
other words, you can't say for certain the sun is
gonna come up tomorrow just because it's already come up
so many days before. And the reason why it's because
we don't have empirical proof. And I liked him for that.
So you don't think the sun will come up tomorrow necessarily.
That's it's not the point that I think it won't
(29:06):
come up tomorrow It's what human was saying, is we
we we can't prove that it will. We we you
can't prove that it will just based on previous experience. Well,
Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were on board that train
to a certain degree. Uh. And we mentioned earlier that
most of the establishment was pretty threatened by most of
(29:27):
these ideas and the people in power, but not everybody. Uh.
Some people wanted to get on the Enlightenment train because
I think it was progressive and maybe made them seem
um open to ideas and modern perhaps um. Empress of Russia,
Catherine the Great was one of those who had a
(29:47):
lot of dealings with the philosophs, and Frederick the Great
of Prussia even had Voltaire over and said, you know what,
once you come and live here, and he did, yeah,
he said for free, and he said for free. He said, okay,
I'm just trying to think of Prussian money, but I
have no idea. The prawlers the approval that's but way better. Uh.
(30:10):
It was also happening in Germany, um all over the
world with Emmanuel Kant. He was one of the first
champions of freedom of the of the press, and his
motto is one that I love dare to know. And
again he was just challenging people go out there and
learn about something and don't just accept, uh what these
(30:32):
religious leaders are telling you you have to accept. And actually, um,
he came up with this idea called the categorical imperative. Basically,
can't gave the world the idea that there is such
a thing as moral absolutes right. And I guess he
didn't give the world that because the Judeo Christian ethic
and most religious ethics say that there is such a
(30:53):
thing as right or wrong. And today you have that
argument of is there such a thing as moral absolutism
or is moral or cultural relativism a thing? Right? That's
the argument. That's that one of the arguments that's playing
out right now in the intellectual world. Yeah. I just
think that's fascinating to it totally is Uh So, what
(31:13):
does this all lead to? Eventually, It's gonna lead to war, um,
because any time there is well not any time, but
a lot of times when there's a uprising of radical thought,
people are gonna want to take action. And it happened
in the United States by way of the American Revolution
and in France by way of the French Revolution, and
(31:33):
they had different results, to say the least, they were
both experimentations in this new idea of democracy. Yeah, pretty much, um,
And yeah, the American one worked out pretty well. Some
would say the French one not so much, because apparently
robes Pierre, who was the head of the Jacobin party
(31:54):
that took power during the French Revolution, robes Pierre was
a follower of Rousseau, I remember, was so contributed to
the social contract by saying, um, the people will something
and then it's up to the people in charge to
carry out that will. And so rose Pierre took that
to mean that the people stormed the best steal and
overthrew the monarchy. And so it was his job as
(32:15):
the head of the joke Coben party, which is now
empowered to kill everybody who wasn't down with the revolution.
And so thousands and thousands of French people lost their
lives at the guillotine um as a result during this
reign of terror. So some people would say, America, uh,
founded itself based on democratic principles, and um, let's not
(32:36):
pay attention to some of these darker spots over here
and just pay attention to the democratic experiment and it
worked out great, and then the French one, there's a revolution.
They tried to install democratic ideals and thousands of people
had their heads chopped off, so it didn't work quite
as well well. And some people say that effectively killed
the Age of Enlightenment as we know it. The French
(32:57):
Revolution because the chaos and violence erupted was in certain
circles blamed on the Enlightenment and proof that we can't
self govern and these are radical ideas and that's why
we got stomped on. Um. Have you ever heard the
theory that the French Revolution was due to moldy bread? No? Uh,
there's one theory that people got ahold of bad bread
(33:21):
poisoning and basically we're tripping on acid. On July fourteen nine,
when they decided to storm the Best Deal, that was
one of the explanations for the sale and witchcraft childs crazy.
I hadn't heard that, so they were like, let's it's
go time, so let's get this party started. But like
(33:41):
I said, some people say that ended the Age of
Enlightenment as we know it. Uh. Romanticism was soon ushered
in and was way more appealing to the common folk,
um than this weird radical thoughts that we're going on before, well,
it was Romanticism was the first time people questioned the
idea on a large scale that maybe the rationalism of
(34:08):
the humanism of the Enlightenment went too far in the
other direction, Like sure, maybe we were way too religious
and the religious organizations had way too much power, but
we swung way over here, and just rationalism had this
idea too, and it became dogmatic in and of its
own right. And so this is we still never really
(34:28):
figured out if how to how to fine tune it enough,
and that's what we're still figuring out right now. A
lot of people say, um, the Enlightenment the idea that
you're that the course of humanity is always towards civilization
and rational thought, and that any culture that's not there
(34:49):
is inferior to a culture that does think rationally. So
that means that colonialism and imperialism was supported by Enlightenment thought,
which is a huge Like the Enlightenment it's not supposed
to be about that's supposed to be about good things
and freedom and all that, but it also uh supported colonialism.
That was a huge that's people are arguing about that
(35:12):
right now too. Yeah, let's go conquer these people and
make them modern and bring them into today's world exactly.
So there there's another article I want to recommend. It's
called um the Trouble with the Enlightenment. It's by a
guy named Ali Cussin. It's on Prospect magazine. Awesome, awesome
article about this that's just he basically reviews a couple
of books, one one by Jonathan Israel, who I mentioned earlier,
(35:35):
where he basically says, like, forget the philosophics, you gotta
look at um Baruch Spinoza, who was a Dutch philosopher
from I think the seventeenth century. He was the one
who came up with the Enlightenment ideas, and had we
followed his Enlightenment ideas, there wouldn't have been any governments now,
or that there wouldn't be any religion whatsoever. He came
(35:57):
up with the real revolutionary Enlightenment, and what we got,
what we think of as the Enlightenment, was a watered down,
moderate version that was changed. Sure, there was tons of change,
but it was still palatable to the elite that the
people could still be governed easily even in these new
democratic experiments and stuff like that. There's a lot of
people who take issue with his book, but it's um
(36:20):
pretty interesting to discuss it Democratic Enlightenment. I think he's
the one who wrote that several thousand page trilogy. And
then there's another guy in a historian named Anthony Pageant.
He believes um that the Enlightenment project is still going
on and basically that as long as there's religion in
the world, the Enlightenment won't be fulfilled entirely, which is
(36:44):
again it's it's like this this idea that rationalism has
become dogmatic, and if you don't, if you're not just
strictly rational, if you hold any kind of what could
be considered irrational or superstitious belief, you're acting irrationally. You're
not thinking correctly, and therefore you have to be converted,
which is just as dogmatic. Yeah, lots going on right now,
(37:08):
huge time of change. And also go read The Dark
Age myth and Atheist Reviews God's Philosophers by Tim O'Neil
on Strange Notions dot com. Tip O'Neil, Tim O'Neal, And uh,
I think that's about it. Huh, that is it for me?
If you want to learn more about the Enlightnment, go
check out those three articles, or check out and check
out how the Enlightenment worked, and by typing that in
(37:31):
the search part, how stuff works. And now it's time
for listener mail. I'm gonna call this mad Cow theory
from Seattle. Hey, guys, just listen to your podcast on
fatal familial insomnia. In it, you mentioned the late eighteenth
century cases in Venice and then wondered about the unrelated
cases and what they were eating. This made me finally
(37:52):
sit down and write my first email. For years, I've
had a theory about prion disease and matt cow and
specific years ago, I was watching a program on Egyptian mummies.
They talked about how mummification may have started out with
the Pharaoh, but the practice eventually made it down to
uh call it budget mummification. They talked about how in
the late eighteenth nineteen century crypts of these early mummies
(38:17):
they would be ground up and sold as fertilizer, specifically
in England. Sometime later, when I learned about prions and
how nearly indestructible they were, I wondered, could ground up
mummies have been used to fertilize the field. Then a
cow comes along and eats grass but has been contaminated
with prions, leading to mad cow disease. The human eats
the mad cow's brain gets quit spelt yakups. Uh. So
(38:41):
I've always wondered it, could never figure out if you
could prove it or disprove it. If see if j
was a real mummy's curse of desecrated Egyptian corpses, and
that is Darren Gray in Seattle, and man, I just
like that kind of speaking of radical thought. I had
not heard that one. Darren's having it. Well, it's Darren's own. Uh,
(39:04):
nice going, Darren, Yeah. Uh, if you have anything to
say about that, anybody else we would like to hear
from you. Can you prove or disprove that Kritchfield yakubs
disease is a mommy's curse. You can tweet to us
at s Y s K podcast. You can join us
on Facebook dot com slash stuff you Should Know. You
(39:26):
can send us an email which seems appropriate to stuff
podcast at how Stuff Works dot com and join us
at at home on the web Stuff you Should Know
dot com for more on this and thousands of other
topics Is that how stuff works? Dot com
Welcome to you Stuff you Should Know from House Stuffworks
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and Jerry Are. So this
is stuff you should know. The Enlightened Ones exactly, the
(00:22):
three of us, no one else, No, we're the Enlightened Ones.
I am gonna go ahead and preface this what what
I just said off the air. This is a very
tough subject to distill in a thirty to forty five
minute podcast because volumes of books can be written on
the Age of Enlightenment and have been and have been.
(00:43):
So this is this is stuff. There is gonna be
a very bird's eye view. Yeah, there's a dude named
Jonathan Israel who just came out with I think this
third volume of a three volume set on the Enlightenment
and he wrote literally several thousand and pages of it
and it's considered an obscure text. Yeah, he probably doesn't
(01:06):
even think that he covered it in full. No, but
he doesn't, although he's coming right. I think he does
have another one coming. So maybe it was a second
but um he uh that that the idea that um
he doesn't think that it's done, that it's not finished
is actually a pretty standard view of the Enlightenment. Like,
(01:27):
during research for this, I realized that there are tons
of intellectual arguments going on right now, like the Bill
Maher thing. Bill Maher in Islam. He's been accused of
being like a just a complete racist, xenophobic dude um
because of his recent statements on Islam. Did you see
(01:51):
him and Ben ben uh? Did you see them get
into it? Okay, that argument is an Enlightenment argument. It's
like it provided the Enlightenment was so massive that the
ripple effects are still being felt on a daily basis
because it was such an enormous change in the way
(02:12):
humans think that we're still trying to sit there and
analyze what the heck happened. And that is one manifestation
of it. Is is like what Bill Maher is saying is, well,
you know, Islam is a religion or whatever, and therefore
it's um an athetical to progress and culture and like
real thought and rationalism, and Ben a Ben yeah, Ben
(02:35):
Affleck is saying, like, you can't say that about a culture,
Like each culture is its own thing. So what we're
seeing there is the idea of moral absolutism arguing with
moral relativism, and that is like textbook Enlightenment argument. Pretty interesting. Sure.
Like researching this article seriously, I tied together probably ten
(02:56):
different things that I didn't realize we're connected. Well, yeah,
I love it when stuff like that. It was the
start of and you know, the age of Enlightenment quote
unquote started and ended, but it was the birth of
just a new kind of thought and a new value system, uh, philosophical, scientific, cultural, intellectual,
(03:18):
basically saying reason over this previous long held belief that
just strict religious dogma is all you need to worry about.
You don't question anything, don't try and think about science
and nature and things like that other than just this
is God's creation and what does it mean in terms
of religion exactly. So, of course it's still going on.
(03:40):
But it wasn't. It wasn't just that. It was definitely
Enlightenment was the If you're an Enlightenment UM fan, you
would say Enlightenment was the domination of reason over religion
or faith. It was a it was a value system basically.
But there was another aspect of the Enlightenment, the domination
of um the will of the people over the monarchy. UM.
(04:04):
Economic there was economic change, UM, huge economic changes thanks
to Adam Smith. There were a lot of like huge
monumental changes in the way people thought. UM. So much
so that modern historians who are trying to unpack the
Enlightenment still one of the schools of thought is that
you can't just call it the Enlightenment. It happened in
(04:27):
too many different places under different circumstances. Um. And then
the again, like the the different aspects of it, the
fact that one part of it dealt with governmental change,
one part of it dealt with religious change, another part
that with economic change. That they it's been kind of
distilled into separate compartments. Now, yeah, I mean separate compartments
(04:49):
somewhere divergent and contradictory. Uh. It occurred nearly simultaneously in
the eighteenth century in France, Great Britain, Germany and other
in at least Bain, Portugal, American colonies all over the place. UM.
I like to say, it's the period of time where
the world started waking up and pulled their heads from
(05:11):
their rear ends. Basically, well, the the the question now,
I mean, if you're a religious type, you're probably happy
about the fruits of the Enlightenment. Like everybody points at
the Industrial Revolution is proof positive the Enlightenment was great,
or the American experiment proof positive the Enlightenment was great.
(05:32):
But you probably don't like the fact that the world
completely turned its back on religion or not completely but
largely did. If you're a pro Enlightenment type, you're probably
saying this was for the best, like we were backwards,
we emerged from the dark Ages thanks to the Enlightenment. Um,
And this is the argument that's still going on today, Like, yes,
the Enlightenment changed everything, but did it go too far?
(05:55):
So that's we'll get into all that. But Conger, who
wrote this article, I think did a very good job
of taking the whole thing back further than the eighteenth
century out of the French salons and set the stage
for what created the basis for this this change in thinking. Yeah,
I think Kristen did a great job of distilling a
(06:16):
complex topic down to like an eight page article, but
she does take it back to Um, there were a
couple of things that sort of laid the groundwork. Um, well,
a lot of things, but a couple of them are
Mr Sir Isaac Newton and the famous story of the
apple falling on his head, which makes a great story.
He told a lot of people that I don't know
(06:38):
how uh factually exactly true that is, but it makes
for a great story. But either way you want to
look at it. Isaac Newton looked at the space at
some point between that apple in the ground and said,
there's something going on in that empty space that should
be explained, because that apple doesn't fall up. Something's keeping
(06:59):
us all did here on the ground, and I want
to look into that. Although if you were a fan
of David Humes, you would say, uh, well, actually it
could consumably fall up, because we've never proven it won't
fall up. And him was one of the proponents, well
not proponents, but uh he was active in the Age
of Enlightenment. Another thing that really laid the groundwork was
(07:19):
the Thirty Years of War from six eighteen to sixty eight,
which pretty much paved the way for Protestant Reformation and
the Roman Catholic Church took a lot of the teeth
away from the Roman Catholic Church. Huge first time, Yeah,
it was. There was a huge change. So what you
just described, Chuck, is a the foundation for the intellectual
(07:43):
branch of of the Enlightenment thinking usurping the power from
theological thinking. And then with the Thirty Year War, the
political power was taken away from the church because for
the first time now the precedent has been set that
you was a citizen. Your allegiance is not split between
church and state. Your allegiances first and foremost to the state.
(08:07):
And we see that still today. Like if somebody uh
kills their um, their parents or whatever because it's the
Seventh Sign and Demi Moore's running around and they it
turns out that they were brother and sister, so you
kill them because it's the will of God. State says,
I don't care if it's the will of God, you
can't kill your parents. The state's law is more powerful
(08:29):
and more important than God's law. That's straight out of
the Thirty Years War that changed everything. Have you ever
seen the Seventh Sign? Man? I saw that, like when
it came out. I don't remember anything about it. I
just remember like one of the characters was this kid
with down syndrome and he murdered his parents because he
(08:49):
found out that they were brother and sister and he
was super religious and they were going to execute him. Yeah,
when they execute. I think he was like the last martyr. Man,
I'll have to check it out again. Yeah more. Uh man,
she just keeps getting better looking, don't she. How didn't
do that? Yeah, like you look at um. Blame it
on Rio seeing that. Yeah, she's kind of dooey and
(09:13):
not tubby, but just round. And then she got all chiseled. Man,
they remained chiseled. That was Michael Kine. Wasn't it great movie? Yeah?
But I mean she was a kid back then. Everyone
was Dowie back then when they were kids. Blaming Rio.
It was really good movie. So Conger points out even
further back about the Dark Ages, sort of laying the groundwork,
(09:34):
which the Dark Ages were dark for many reasons, but
one of the big ones was that the Roman Catholic
Church basically ruled everything. Uh. Latin was the language, the
center of life and academia where monasteries and abbeys. You
weren't encouraged to get educated outside of uh theological uh realms.
(09:56):
It was not encouraged. Do you have to actually, I
want to say, you have to be carefully using the
term Dark Ages because uh apparently it is a disparaging
label that people on the pro Enlightenment side of the argument.
The humanists, they say, these are the Dark Ages. That
was back when the Church controlled everything, when everybody was
just an ignoramus. Once the Enlightenment came along, we emerge
(10:20):
from the Dark Ages. Technically, once the Renaissance came along,
we emerge from the Dark Ages. So if you're in
a Storian, you call it the Middle Ages. But even
the Middle Ages are kind of sad because it just
says these ay just kind of existed between this important
age and this important age. We just call this the
Middle Ages. But it's better than the Dark Ages. But
that's a that's a um an argument or a label
(10:43):
that a disparaging label that humanists use unfairly, because there
were scientists working and laying the groundwork for future science
in the Dark Ages, and Congret even mentions them in
this article, like Thomas Aquinas came up with scholasticism, Yeah,
and scholasticism is basically the idea that you can understand
(11:05):
God even more and be even more pure and divine
yourself by studying nature. Yeah. Roger Bacon was another monk
who was a proponent of that. And I think um
that allowed them and I don't think that's the reason
they did it. But that allowed them to pursue these
scientific avenues because it was still tied to God. Another
(11:26):
big change was Uh. Like I said before, in the
not so dark Ages, perhaps Latin was the language, and
they didn't have something called the printing press until Johann
Guttenberg came along in fourty eight and says, you know what,
everyone should be able to read. Start printing stuff in
your native tongue. Uh. And that led directly to people
(11:48):
starting to educate themselves. It was the democratization of education
right exactly. And all of this didn't happen like out
of the blue, like Roger Bacon and Thomas Aquinas and
a guy named Leonardo Brunei. They didn't necessarily come up
with their ideas on their own. There was some this
really seminal thing that happened back in the mid century
(12:09):
where somebody, I don't know who did, somebody translated um
Aristotle I believe his works into Latin, and all of
a sudden, the Greek rational thinkers of antiquity, their ideas
were suddenly available to the West for the first time.
(12:29):
And it just so happened that some people started paying
attention to these things. Leonardo Bruni read Petrarch and revived
the idea of humanism, which is a huge sea change
because humanism says humans are pretty awesome and the fruit
of our labors, the fruit of our intellect, the fruit
of everything that we do comes from human ability, not
(12:51):
God Like, We're not just vessels for God's brilliance to
be shown through. If you create something, you come up
with a work of art because God did that. You
did that, but let's figure out how you did it, right.
That's humanism. And this is what the Renaissance started to
revive and was a huge change, Like, maybe we should
start paying attention to ourselves a little more exactly, let's
(13:14):
explore the human condition. Yeah. Um. Aristotle was not a
heretic because he tied his geocentric universe ideas to God
as well. Um. He thought the universe was composed of
ten separate crystal spheres, and beyond the tenth sphere that
was heaven and God. Uh. Copernicus, Um, she uh pretty
(13:36):
much said no, that's not true. The universe is infinite. Uh.
And he was pretty alone in that thinking. Early on,
I faced a lot of criticism from like every every
religion Protestants and Catholics. Yep, it was a They thought
it was a dangerous way of thinking because he didn't
make room for God in the cosmos, And it definitely
(13:58):
was a dangerous way of thinking to the church, Like
the Protestant Reformation was going on, you had the Thirty
Years War coming down the pike, you had Copernicus um
thanks to this revival of interest in astronomy, like yeah,
starting to to look at the universe around us and
finding even like symbolic stuff like um, who was it? Kepler?
(14:22):
He was an assistant to Tycho Brahe and Kepler figured
out that the planets uh revolve around the Sun in
an ellipse. Well, the church, the Holy Roman Church, said
that the circle was a symbol of perfection. So of
course everything revolved around the earth in a circle. Not
(14:42):
only did things not revolve around the Earth, revolved around
the sun. And they didn't even do that in a circle,
they did an ellipse. So the church is just losing
its mind because all these people are coming forward saying
everything that you're saying over here is starting to prove
to smell like bs and the church is losing its
power left and right. Both politically and intellectually. It's losing
(15:03):
its authority. Yeah. Galileo even recanted, uh, because he was
accused of heresy for his theory that the Earth rotates
on its axis. So he said, I'll take it all back.
I didn't mean that. Please don't kill me. He's like,
but just make sure my manuscripts survive. So we were
talking about Bacon. He is the creator of the scientific method,
(15:25):
and he says, you know what, we should use experiments
to actually try and explain things. And so it's six.
I think it's high time we have a method for
doing so. So that was Francis Bacon. Yes, I wonder
if he was related to Roger Bacon. I don't know.
They were separated by a few centuries, but they could
have been fam sure, I think so. Uh. And he
(15:47):
was did you ever take philosophy in college? No? Um,
I think I might have. I didn't get much out
of it. If I did, I don't remember. That's like
one class we studied descartes um a lot. I've grown
to be a little more interest it in it, but
I like the more I like like existential crisis philosophy,
like Nick Bostrom stuff, And I don't know what that is,
(16:09):
just basically how the world's gonna end. Okay, this stuff
is I think, like de Cartes is interesting, but I'm
not like a I'm not. It doesn't light my fire. Yeah,
it was right. I think I made an a in
that class actually because it interested me at the time.
But I never took a follow up class. It just
took the intro. So it clearly didn't mean that much
to me. But I get it. Well. Yeah, And what
(16:30):
they cart was saying is our experience is not It's
not what you thought. Like mind and matter are two
different things, and the human experiences a subjective experience and
the mind, what the mind produces is different than what
is reality and really kind of um that changed things
(16:52):
tremendously too. So you got all these people like contributing
to this. We haven't even reached the eighteenth century yet,
Like the groundwork is definitely being late and it's still
being laid. Um as far as the like the government goes.
John locke Um was one of the people who contributed
to the idea of the social contract. The social contract
(17:13):
there was Hobbes Lock and later on Rousso and others
contributed this idea that humans are born with natural rights.
You're born free. I'm born free, even Jerry's born free,
look at her. And to form a society, you give
up some of these natural rights. For example, one one
thing that you give up is your right to kill
(17:35):
in retribution. Uh. Any society typically demands a state monopoly
on violence, which means that if somebody kills your family member,
you don't go kill that person. You go to the
state and say that guy killed my family member, triumph,
convict him and kill him on my behalf because there's
a state monopoly on violence. So that's a natural right
(17:55):
that you give up. I think appropriately so and for
the better, but as part of the social contract and
so Uh. The idea that that humans had these rights
and that society in turn had rights because humans gave
them rights. Um, that was a big basis of enlightenment thinking.
That would be added to later on too. Yeah. And
(18:16):
Locke also was one of the first champions of what
would kind of become nurture over nature. His idea of
the Tabu larassa that when humans are born, their minds
are a clean slate and they are shaped by experience
and education and not some preordained thing that you're born
with and uh, this French intellect gobbled that stuff up.
His name was Francois Marie Arouette, and he went by
(18:40):
a name you might know, Voltaire, and he really loved
this stuff and went back to France with all these
ideals and said, we gotta get on this and let's uh,
you know, we can't go out in the streets right
now and talk about the stuff, but we can meet
in private and homes like a Tupperware party, and we'll
call them salons and we'll we'll talk about these radical
ideas is in um in this new way of thinking,
(19:03):
in the privacy of homes for those that are willing
to host it. Yeah, and we'll talk more about Voltaire
and what he did right after this. So, Chuck, Voltaire
has been lit up. He was in England from seventeen
twenty nine, living in exile because he was already critical
of the French monarchy. While he was there he ran
(19:25):
into the ideas of lock of apparently Descartes as well.
He he basically got turned onto rationalism and he was
primed and ready for it, Like this guy was just
waiting for these ideas to pour into him. And when
they did. He became a lightning rod for what we
think of as the Enlightenment. Like Voltaire was the main
(19:47):
dude to start from what I understand. Yeah, and um,
like we mentioned the salons, they had to do this
in private because Louis the four Yeah that right, Yeah,
get better at that. He was pretty hard on to try.
He didn't like that kind of talk. It threatened him
for good reason. Uh well, yeah, I mean the reason
(20:10):
why is like the power was taken from the church
in place more in the monarchy. But in very short order,
people said, you know, we're not really that fond of
the monarchy either. We think we should rule ourselves or
at least elect people to rule ourselves. To this divine
right of kings. Things seems kind of hinky now that
we think about it. So the monarchies were threatened as
well by the Enlightenment. So yeah, the monarchy liked the
(20:32):
dumb masses that stayed under their thumb and any kind
of like radical thought or original thought was super dangerous.
It sounds familiar exactly. It is interesting how you talked about.
I think there are periods of time where things like
the Age of Enlightenment keep popping up that's like the
nineteen sixties in the United States, and I think, like
(20:53):
you said, we're in one right now. I think we're
in probably more than even the sixties right now. Yeah,
And I think there are periods where that lulls it
like maybe the nineteen eighties, the seventies, remember Disco, like
a dumbing down of things. Yeah, just people not caring
or whatever. It's weird and cyclical. I read I read
this article um called things Fall Apart How social media
(21:14):
leads to a less stable world. It was by a
guy named Curtis Howland h G. H. L Andy and
it's on Knowledge at Wharton there, like the Wharton Business
School website, and it was basically saying it wasn't I
thought it was condemning social media, and this guy was
just basically stating, matter of factly that social media erodes
the state and that now we have ways to connect
(21:38):
with other people in ways that are more important to
us than, say, our allegiance to the state. So you
may feel, um, you may feel more connected to somebody
over Hello Kitty and your fondness for Hello Kitty, more
than you would identify yourself as saying American, and with
social media you're able to connect with other people who
(21:59):
feel the same way, and so you form on social
media basically bodies that supersede the state in your opinion,
no boundaries exactly. And as this happens, more and more
of the states, what's called sovereignty erodes more and more
and more um and it becomes a less and less
stable world. The guy's point was that, yes, while it's
(22:19):
very unstable and things are much more dangerous during periods
like this, it's it's basically just a period of upheaval
and change, and then eventually things stabilize again. But what
this guy was saying, using this as an example, is
that we're in a like right now, possibly on the
cusp of a period of tremendous fundamental change in the world.
(22:40):
I see that every day. It's pretty interesting time to
be alive. Yeah, a little scary to me. Yeah, well,
I mean it's like the guy said, it's it's more
dangerous than your average time because change frequently comes out
of spasms of violence or um upheaval, just where nobody's
(23:01):
in charge, because there's a power struggle going on, or
our normal structures are being eroded. It's interesting, it's super interesting. Uh.
So back to the salons. We're back to the age
of enlightenment, the traditional age of enlightenment. Uh, the Salons,
the members were known. There was a group of people
(23:22):
known as the philosophics. Uh. We've mentioned a few of them. Rousseau,
did Hero Voltaire. Um, how do you pronounce that? Is
that it's not montgue is it Montesquieu Montesquieu? Um. And
they were They're kind of skeptics and critics of not
everything but the establishment of government or the way government
(23:45):
was at the time, especially the church. Hated the church,
like Voltaire especially hated the church and the very fact
that it even existed. And a lot of the enlightened
Uh ones were deists um and daism Basically, I like
the way Conger put it um in a big picture way.
(24:05):
They believe in a clockmaker God, which means maybe God
created everything and set things in motion. But then I
was like, all right, that's it. I'm out right, I'm
not uh getting my fingers and all the pies of everyone.
And it's you have free will basically after you're born um,
which again was pretty dangerous to the religious establishment. Yeah,
(24:26):
so you you've got the basis you've got the foundation
of um, the Holy Roman Empire in the West losing
tons of power and and um political and intellectually, you've
got the monarchy now being assaulted by the French salons
who are planning the seeds of democracy. Like Monascu for example,
(24:47):
Uh wrote in se the Spirit of the Laws, and
he basically proposed the idea of a separation of powers.
He's like the first guy to do that. He's the
French lawyer who was in the salon scene. And um,
all the sen it's like separation of power. What are
you talking about? No, you've got a monarch and what
the monarch says is right. And as a result of
this kind of thinking, the seeds of democracy are planted.
(25:09):
And then a hostility toward religion, um of almost any
kind that you still see today, like in the form
of like Bill Maher or Richard Dawkins are formerly Christopher Hitchens. Um.
All of this started coming out of the French salons. Yeah,
all right, after this message, we're going to talk a
little bit about how the Age of Enlightenment manifested itself
(25:32):
in different parts of the world. So we've mainly been
in Europe this whole time. UH. In France there was
an emphasis on the arts. UH. In England they had
a more emphasis on UM science and economics. You mentioned
(25:56):
Adam Smith at the beginning UH Scottish Man and Night
some nineteen seventy six. In seventeen seventy six wrote his
Wealth of Nations, which basically said the government should not
interfere with UH matters of finance and economics. Yeah, there
should be UH, the invisible hand guiding all these principles. Yeah.
(26:18):
I read this article and by this guy who's explaining
that change and thought, like before that, it was that
whole social contract thing, like Russa saying, you know, the
the it's this is an interplay between citizens and citizens
and citizens and their government, and the government's role is
to protect UM the rights of people. What Hume said
(26:39):
is the government is legitimate and so they're not human.
But Smith, it's the government's legitimate and so far as
it steps out of people's affairs and let's free trade
take place, which that might sound familiar if you UM
subscribe to republican or conservative or libertarian ideology. You know,
like the whole laz A fair attitude of government is
(27:00):
what's what legitimizes government, and the government that medals in
someone's affairs is an illegitimate government as far as classical
economic thought goes. Yeah, and we talked about that in
our stuff you should know Guide to the Economy, Yeah,
which we got an email someone bought that the other day. Yeah,
they thought was seventeen hours long or something. And then
(27:21):
also in Scotland, um was David Hume, who's like my
favorite philosopher of all time, just because he's like he's
the only when he studied, he's a meeting. Now he's
a meeting, but he's the only one who's ever really
spoken to me of the Enlightenment philosophers. And Hume was
this meat and potatoes dude who basically said, like, show
me the proof. He was a skeptic, he was an empiricist,
(27:43):
Like he said, you basically can't believe anything that you
can't see with you or not. My belief in his
philosophy has been eroded with the idea that like consciousness
is a subjective experience, like just totally subjective basically. But
I like his his idea and it was like the
the cause and effect right, like I think he used
(28:05):
like Billiards as an example, where you hit a ball
like you're playing eight ball, and you hit like the
eight ball with the cue ball, like you can predict
where that's gonna go, like where the eight ball is
gonna go based on how you hit it with the
cue ball. But the Humes point is is you can't
say for certain that that's what's going to happen. You're
(28:25):
basing that strictly on previous experience rather than proof that
this is what will happen. So we can't prove that
hitting that cue ball will make this eight ball go
in a certain direction ahead of time. And so therefore
we've come up with this thing called causing effect, which
basically serves as a stop gap between what we think
(28:46):
will happen and the phenomenon we've already observed. Like in
other words, you can't say for certain the sun is
gonna come up tomorrow just because it's already come up
so many days before. And the reason why it's because
we don't have empirical proof. And I liked him for that.
So you don't think the sun will come up tomorrow necessarily.
That's it's not the point that I think it won't
(29:06):
come up tomorrow It's what human was saying, is we
we we can't prove that it will. We we you
can't prove that it will just based on previous experience. Well,
Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were on board that train
to a certain degree. Uh. And we mentioned earlier that
most of the establishment was pretty threatened by most of
(29:27):
these ideas and the people in power, but not everybody. Uh.
Some people wanted to get on the Enlightenment train because
I think it was progressive and maybe made them seem
um open to ideas and modern perhaps um. Empress of Russia,
Catherine the Great was one of those who had a
(29:47):
lot of dealings with the philosophs, and Frederick the Great
of Prussia even had Voltaire over and said, you know what,
once you come and live here, and he did, yeah,
he said for free, and he said for free. He said, okay,
I'm just trying to think of Prussian money, but I
have no idea. The prawlers the approval that's but way better. Uh.
(30:10):
It was also happening in Germany, um all over the
world with Emmanuel Kant. He was one of the first
champions of freedom of the of the press, and his
motto is one that I love dare to know. And
again he was just challenging people go out there and
learn about something and don't just accept, uh what these
(30:32):
religious leaders are telling you you have to accept. And actually, um,
he came up with this idea called the categorical imperative. Basically,
can't gave the world the idea that there is such
a thing as moral absolutes right. And I guess he
didn't give the world that because the Judeo Christian ethic
and most religious ethics say that there is such a
(30:53):
thing as right or wrong. And today you have that
argument of is there such a thing as moral absolutism
or is moral or cultural relativism a thing? Right? That's
the argument. That's that one of the arguments that's playing
out right now in the intellectual world. Yeah. I just
think that's fascinating to it totally is Uh So, what
(31:13):
does this all lead to? Eventually, It's gonna lead to war, um,
because any time there is well not any time, but
a lot of times when there's a uprising of radical thought,
people are gonna want to take action. And it happened
in the United States by way of the American Revolution
and in France by way of the French Revolution, and
(31:33):
they had different results, to say the least, they were
both experimentations in this new idea of democracy. Yeah, pretty much, um,
And yeah, the American one worked out pretty well. Some
would say the French one not so much, because apparently
robes Pierre, who was the head of the Jacobin party
(31:54):
that took power during the French Revolution, robes Pierre was
a follower of Rousseau, I remember, was so contributed to
the social contract by saying, um, the people will something
and then it's up to the people in charge to
carry out that will. And so rose Pierre took that
to mean that the people stormed the best steal and
overthrew the monarchy. And so it was his job as
(32:15):
the head of the joke Coben party, which is now
empowered to kill everybody who wasn't down with the revolution.
And so thousands and thousands of French people lost their
lives at the guillotine um as a result during this
reign of terror. So some people would say, America, uh,
founded itself based on democratic principles, and um, let's not
(32:36):
pay attention to some of these darker spots over here
and just pay attention to the democratic experiment and it
worked out great, and then the French one, there's a revolution.
They tried to install democratic ideals and thousands of people
had their heads chopped off, so it didn't work quite
as well well. And some people say that effectively killed
the Age of Enlightenment as we know it. The French
(32:57):
Revolution because the chaos and violence erupted was in certain
circles blamed on the Enlightenment and proof that we can't
self govern and these are radical ideas and that's why
we got stomped on. Um. Have you ever heard the
theory that the French Revolution was due to moldy bread? No? Uh,
there's one theory that people got ahold of bad bread
(33:21):
poisoning and basically we're tripping on acid. On July fourteen nine,
when they decided to storm the Best Deal, that was
one of the explanations for the sale and witchcraft childs crazy.
I hadn't heard that, so they were like, let's it's
go time, so let's get this party started. But like
(33:41):
I said, some people say that ended the Age of
Enlightenment as we know it. Uh. Romanticism was soon ushered
in and was way more appealing to the common folk,
um than this weird radical thoughts that we're going on before, well,
it was Romanticism was the first time people questioned the
idea on a large scale that maybe the rationalism of
(34:08):
the humanism of the Enlightenment went too far in the
other direction, Like sure, maybe we were way too religious
and the religious organizations had way too much power, but
we swung way over here, and just rationalism had this
idea too, and it became dogmatic in and of its
own right. And so this is we still never really
(34:28):
figured out if how to how to fine tune it enough,
and that's what we're still figuring out right now. A
lot of people say, um, the Enlightenment the idea that
you're that the course of humanity is always towards civilization
and rational thought, and that any culture that's not there
(34:49):
is inferior to a culture that does think rationally. So
that means that colonialism and imperialism was supported by Enlightenment thought,
which is a huge Like the Enlightenment it's not supposed
to be about that's supposed to be about good things
and freedom and all that, but it also uh supported colonialism.
That was a huge that's people are arguing about that
(35:12):
right now too. Yeah, let's go conquer these people and
make them modern and bring them into today's world exactly.
So there there's another article I want to recommend. It's
called um the Trouble with the Enlightenment. It's by a
guy named Ali Cussin. It's on Prospect magazine. Awesome, awesome
article about this that's just he basically reviews a couple
of books, one one by Jonathan Israel, who I mentioned earlier,
(35:35):
where he basically says, like, forget the philosophics, you gotta
look at um Baruch Spinoza, who was a Dutch philosopher
from I think the seventeenth century. He was the one
who came up with the Enlightenment ideas, and had we
followed his Enlightenment ideas, there wouldn't have been any governments now,
or that there wouldn't be any religion whatsoever. He came
(35:57):
up with the real revolutionary Enlightenment, and what we got,
what we think of as the Enlightenment, was a watered down,
moderate version that was changed. Sure, there was tons of change,
but it was still palatable to the elite that the
people could still be governed easily even in these new
democratic experiments and stuff like that. There's a lot of
people who take issue with his book, but it's um
(36:20):
pretty interesting to discuss it Democratic Enlightenment. I think he's
the one who wrote that several thousand page trilogy. And
then there's another guy in a historian named Anthony Pageant.
He believes um that the Enlightenment project is still going
on and basically that as long as there's religion in
the world, the Enlightenment won't be fulfilled entirely, which is
(36:44):
again it's it's like this this idea that rationalism has
become dogmatic, and if you don't, if you're not just
strictly rational, if you hold any kind of what could
be considered irrational or superstitious belief, you're acting irrationally. You're
not thinking correctly, and therefore you have to be converted,
which is just as dogmatic. Yeah, lots going on right now,
(37:08):
huge time of change. And also go read The Dark
Age myth and Atheist Reviews God's Philosophers by Tim O'Neil
on Strange Notions dot com. Tip O'Neil, Tim O'Neal, And uh,
I think that's about it. Huh, that is it for me?
If you want to learn more about the Enlightnment, go
check out those three articles, or check out and check
out how the Enlightenment worked, and by typing that in
(37:31):
the search part, how stuff works. And now it's time
for listener mail. I'm gonna call this mad Cow theory
from Seattle. Hey, guys, just listen to your podcast on
fatal familial insomnia. In it, you mentioned the late eighteenth
century cases in Venice and then wondered about the unrelated
cases and what they were eating. This made me finally
(37:52):
sit down and write my first email. For years, I've
had a theory about prion disease and matt cow and
specific years ago, I was watching a program on Egyptian mummies.
They talked about how mummification may have started out with
the Pharaoh, but the practice eventually made it down to
uh call it budget mummification. They talked about how in
the late eighteenth nineteen century crypts of these early mummies
(38:17):
they would be ground up and sold as fertilizer, specifically
in England. Sometime later, when I learned about prions and
how nearly indestructible they were, I wondered, could ground up
mummies have been used to fertilize the field. Then a
cow comes along and eats grass but has been contaminated
with prions, leading to mad cow disease. The human eats
the mad cow's brain gets quit spelt yakups. Uh. So
(38:41):
I've always wondered it, could never figure out if you
could prove it or disprove it. If see if j
was a real mummy's curse of desecrated Egyptian corpses, and
that is Darren Gray in Seattle, and man, I just
like that kind of speaking of radical thought. I had
not heard that one. Darren's having it. Well, it's Darren's own. Uh,
(39:04):
nice going, Darren, Yeah. Uh, if you have anything to
say about that, anybody else we would like to hear
from you. Can you prove or disprove that Kritchfield yakubs
disease is a mommy's curse. You can tweet to us
at s Y s K podcast. You can join us
on Facebook dot com slash stuff you Should Know. You
(39:26):
can send us an email which seems appropriate to stuff
podcast at how Stuff Works dot com and join us
at at home on the web Stuff you Should Know
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