May 23, 2020 • 40 mins
The Enlightenment stands as the moment the West withdrew from superstition and found its faith in reason. Did it shift too far? In this classic episode, learn about this massive shift in thinking which we are still sorting through and coming to understand today.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey there everyone, it's me Josh, and for this week's
s Y s K Selects, I've chosen How the Enlightenment Works.
And the reason we named it works rather than worked,
just because we realized during this episode that this battle
between rationalism and superstition is still going on today. The
Enlightenment is still going on today. And I've chosen it
(00:21):
this week because I feel like it explains a lot
a lot of the division in the world today, not
just in the United States, not just in the West,
but all over the world where there's a dividing line
that is separating people. That this gulf, this wedge is
getting deeper and deeper, and I think that this is
the basis of the whole thing. See if you agree,
(00:43):
If not, it's fine. It's still an interesting episode either way.
I hope you enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know,
a production of My Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles
(01:03):
w Chuck Bryant and Jerry are So this is Stuff
you should Know. The Enlightened Ones exactly, the 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
(01:24):
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. So this
is this is stuff. There's 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
(01:48):
literally several thousand pages of it and it's considered an
obscure text. Yeah, he probably doesn't even think that he
covered it in full. No, Betty doesn't. Although he's for
flame 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
(02:11):
it's done, that it's not finished is actually a pretty
standard view of the Enlightenment. Like during research for this,
I realized that there are tons of intellectual arguments going
on right now, like the Bill Maher thing. Bill Maher
and Islam. He's been accused of being like a just
(02:31):
a complete racist, xenophobic dude. Um because of his recent
statements on Islam. Did you see him and Ben Ben uh?
Did you see them get into it? Okay, that argument
is an Enlightenment argument. Yeah, it's like it provided the
Enlightenment was so massive that the ripple effects are still
(02:55):
being felt on a daily basis because it was such
an enormous change in the way humans think that we're
still trying to sit there and analyze what the heck happened,
And that is one manifestation of it. Yeah, is is
like what Bill Maher is saying is, well, you know,
Islam is a religion or whatever, and therefore it's um
(03:17):
an athetical to progress and culture and like real thought
and rationalism. And Ben Ben yeah, Ben 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
(03:42):
researching this article seriously, I tied together probably ten different
things that I didn't realize We're connected. Yeah, I love
it when stuff like that happened. 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, a new value system, UH, philosophical, scientific, cultural, intellectual,
(04:07):
basically saying reason over this previous long held belief that
just strict religious dogma is all you need to worry about,
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. But
(04:30):
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 value system basically. But there was another
aspect of the Enlightenment, the domination of UM, the will
(04:50):
of the people over the monarchy, UM, economic economic change, UM,
huge economic changes. Think. 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
(05:13):
is that you can't just call it the Enlightenment. It
happened in 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
(05:34):
distilled into separate compartments. Now, yeah, I mean separate compartments
somewhere divergent and contradictory. Uh. Occurred nearly simultaneously in the
eighteenth century in France, Great Britain, Germany, Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Portugal,
American colonies all over the place. Um. I like to
(05:55):
say it's the period of time where the world started
waking up, pulled their heads from their rear ends. Right 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
(06:17):
the Enlightenment was great. Where the American experiment proof positive
the Enlightenment was great. 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
(06:39):
that's still going on today, like, yes, the Enlightenment changed everything,
but did it go too far? 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
(07:01):
basis for this this change in thinking. Yeah, I think
Kristen did a great job of distilling a 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
(07:23):
falling on his head, which makes a great story. He
told a lot of people that I don't know 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
(07:45):
explained because that apple doesn't fall up. Something's keeping us
all rooted 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. Yeah,
and him was one of the proponents, were not proponents,
but uh he was active in the Age of Enlightenment.
(08:07):
Another thing that really laid the groundwork was 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 first time. Yeah, it was.
There was a huge change. So what you just described, Chuck,
(08:29):
is a the foundation for the intellectual 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, as a citizen,
(08:50):
your allegiance is not split between church and state. Your
allegiances first and foremost to the state. 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
(09:11):
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 and more important than
God's law. That's straight out of the Thirty Years War
that changed everything. Have very 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
(09:34):
the characters was this kid with down syndrome and he
murdered his parents because he found out that they were
brother and sister and he was super religious. They were
going to execute him. Yeah, when they execute I think
he was like the last martyr. Man. I'll have to
check that out again. Yeah, tell me more. Uh So,
Conger points out even further back about the Dark Ages,
(09:56):
sort of laying the groundwork which the Dark Ages were
dark for many reasons. It 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. It was not encouraged.
(10:21):
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,
they say, these are the Dark Ages. That was back
when the Church controlled everything, when everybody was just an ignoramus.
(10:41):
Once the Enlightenment came along, we emerged from the Dark Ages. Technically,
once the Renaissance came along, we emerged 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 a just kind of
existed between this important age and this important age. We
just call those the Middle Ages. But it's better than
the Dark Ages, like dark Ages. But that's a that's
(11:04):
a um an argument or a label that a disparaging
label that UM humanists use. Yeah, 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
(11:24):
is basically the idea that you can understand God even
more and be even more pure and divine yourself by
studying nature. Yeah. Roger Bacon was another monk who as
a proponent of that, and I think, um, that allowed
them and don't I don't think that's the reason they
did it, but that allowed them to pursue the scientific
(11:45):
avenues because it was still tied to God. Another 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 Gutenberg
came along in fourteen thirty eight and says, you know what,
everyone should be able to read, start printing stuff in
(12:07):
your native tongue. Uh. And that led directly to people
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 Bruney, they didn't necessarily come up
with their ideas on their own there was some this
(12:27):
really seminal thing that happened back in the mid UH
century 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
(12:48):
ideas were suddenly available to the West for the first time.
And it just so happened that some people started paying
attention to these things. Leonardo Bruney read Petrarch and revived
the idea of humanism, which was a huge sea change,
because humanism says humans are pretty awesome and the fruit
of our labors, the fruit of our intellect, the fruit
(13:10):
of everything that we do comes from human ability, not
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, and let's figure out how you did it.
That's humanism. And this is what the Renaissance started to
(13:32):
revive and was a huge change, like, maybe we should
start paying attention to ourselves a little more exactly, let's
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 spears, and beyond the tenth sphere that
(13:54):
was Heaven and God. Uh. Copernicus um Shah pretty said no,
that's not true. The universe is infinite. Uh. And he
was pretty alone in that thinking. Early on, he faced
a lot of criticism from like every every religion, Protestants
and Catholics. Yep, it was a They thought it was
(14:16):
a dangerous way of thinking because he didn't make room
for God in the cosmos. And it definitely 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 and yeah, starting to
(14:37):
to look at the the universe around us and finding
even like symbolic stuff like, um, who was it? Kepler,
he was an assistant to Tycho Brahe and Kepler figured
out that the planets uh revolve around the Sun in
an ellipse. Yeah. Well, the Church, the Holy Roman Church,
(14:58):
said that the circle was a symbol of perfection. So
of course everything revolves around the Earth in a circle.
Not only did things not revolve around the Earth, it
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
(15:19):
starting to prove to smell like bs. And the church
is losing its power left and right, both politically and intellectually.
It's losing 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,
(15:39):
He's like, but just make sure my manuscripts survive. So
we were talking about Bacon. He is a creator of
the scientific method, and he says, you know what, we
should use experiments to actually try and explain things, and
so it's I think it's high time we have a
method for doing so. So that was its is Bacon. Yes,
(16:01):
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 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, because I don't remember. I
took one class. We'd studied Descartes um a lot. I've
(16:21):
grown to be a little more interested in it, but
I like them more. I like like existential crisis philosophy,
like Nick Bostrom stuff, and I don't know what that is,
just basically how the world's gonna end. Okay, this stuff is.
I think like Descartes is interesting, but I'm not like
a I'm not. It doesn't light my fire. Yeah, it
(16:42):
was all 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
dey Cart was saying is our experience is not It's
not what you thought. Like mind and matter are two
(17:03):
different things, and of the human experience as a subjective
experience and the mind, what the mind produces is different
than what is reality and really kind of um that
changed things tremendously too, So You've 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
(17:24):
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
and social contract. There was Hobbes Lock and later on
Rousso and others contribute to this idea that humans are
born with natural rights. You're born free, I'm born free,
(17:46):
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 and 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.
(18:10):
You go to the state and say that guy killed
my family member, triumph convictim, and kill him on my
behalf because there's a state monopoly on violence. So that's
a natural right 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
(18:31):
because humans gave them rights. Um. That was a big
basis of enlightenment thinking that would be added to later
on too. Yeah. And Locke also was one of the
first champions of uh, what would kind of become nurture
over nature his idea of the tabu larassa that when
humans are born, their minds are clean slate and they
are shaped by experience and education and not some preordained
(18:55):
thing that you're born with. And uh, this French intellect
gobbled that stuff up. As name was Francois Marie Arouette,
and he went by a name you might know, Voltaire,
and he really loved this stuff and went back to
France with all these ideals and said, we got to
get on this and let's uh, you know, we can't
go out in the streets right now and talk about
(19:16):
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 and um, in
this new way of thinking in the privacy of homes
for those that are willing to host it. So he chuck,
(19:51):
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 into the ideas of lock of apparently Descartes as well.
He he basically got turned onto rationalism and he was
(20:13):
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
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 that right, Yeah, getting
(20:36):
better at that. Uh he he was pretty hard on
to try. He didn't like that kind of talk. It
threatened him for a good reason. Uh well, yeah, I
mean the reason why. It's 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
(20:58):
should rule ourselves, or at least a leed 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, like the 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
(21:21):
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 and the United States,
and I think, like 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, like maybe the nineteen eighties where they're the seventies,
(21:42):
remember Disco, like a dumbing down of things. Yeah, just
people not caring or whatever. Yeah, it's weird and cyclical.
I've read I read this article um called Things Fall Apart,
How social Media leads to a less stable world. It
was by a guy named Curtis Howland, H. L and
DY and it's on Knowledge at War there like the
Warton Business School website, and it was basically saying it
(22:04):
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 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
(22:26):
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 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
(22:47):
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
very unstable and things are much more dangerous streaming 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
(23:10):
that we're in a like right now, possibly on the
cusp of a period of tremendous fundamental change in the world.
I see that every day Yeah, 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
(23:33):
of spasms of violence or um upheaval, like just where
nobody's 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,
(23:57):
the Salons, the members were known. There was a group
of people 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
(24:17):
critics of not everything, but the establishment of government or
the way government was at the time, especially the church.
Hated the church. Yeah, like Voltaire especially hated the church
in the very fact that it even existed. And a
lot of the enlightened Uh ones were deists um and
(24:39):
deism basically, I like the way Conger put it, um
in a big picture way. 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 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
(25:02):
the religious establishment. Yeah. So 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.
(25:23):
Like Monascu for example. Uh wrote in seventy eight 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 of a sudden, it's
like separation of power. What are you talking about? No,
you've got a monarch and what the monarch says is right.
(25:43):
And as a result of this kind of thinking, the
seeds of democracy are planted, 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
or formerly Christopher Hitchens. Um. All of this started coming
out of the French salons. Yeah, um, all right, after
(26:05):
this message, we're going to talk a little bit about
how the Age of Enlightenment manifested itself in different parts
of the world. So we've mainly been in Europe this
(26:28):
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 Adam Smith at
the beginning, Uh, Scottish man and night Uh some ninety
six in seventeen seventy six wrote his Wealth of Nations,
(26:48):
which basically said the government should not interfere with matters
of finance and economics. There should be uh, the invisible
hand guiding all these principles. Yeah. 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 Rousseau saying, you know, the the it's this is
(27:11):
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 is the government is legitimate,
and so we'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
(27:33):
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 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
(27:54):
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, that that was
seventeen hours long or something. And then also in Scotland,
um was David Hume, who's like my favorite philosopher of
all time, just because he's like a 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
(28:15):
me of the Enlightenment philosophers. And Hume was this meat
and potatoes dude who basically said, like, show me the proof. Yeah,
he was a skeptic. He was an empiricist. Like he said,
you basically can't believe anything that you can't see with
your own eyes. My belief in his philosophy has been
eroded with the idea that, like consciousness is a subjective experience,
(28:38):
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 like billiards as an example,
where you hit a ball like you're playing a ball,
you hit like the eight ball with the Q ball,
Like you can predict where that's gonna go, like where
(28:59):
the 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 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
(29:19):
eight ball go in a certain direction ahead of time.
And so therefore we've come up with this thing called
cause and effect, which basically serves as a stop gap
between what we think 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
(29:41):
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 come up tomorrow. It's
what human is 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.
(30:05):
And we mentioned earlier that most of the establishment was
pretty threatened by most of 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
(30:28):
was one of those who had a lot of dealings
with the philosophs, and Frederick the Great of Prussia even
had Voltaire over and said, you know what, don't 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 proval that's way better. Uh.
(30:53):
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
(31:15):
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
(31:36):
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. That's the
argument that's that one of the arguments that's playing out
right now in the intellectual world. I just think that's
fascinating to it totally is uh So, what does this
(31:56):
all lead to? Eventually, it's going to lead to warm
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
(32:16):
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
(32:37):
that took power during the French Revolution, robes Pierre was
a follower of Rousseau. Remember, Rousseau 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 well. And so rose Pierre took that to mean
that the people stormed the best deal and overthrew the monarchy.
And so it was his job as the head of
(32:58):
the Jacobin Party, which is now a power 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 pay attention to
(33:19):
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 Revolution because the
(33:42):
chaos and violence that erupted, uh 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,
(34:03):
so it was ergo poisoning. And basically we're tripping on acid.
On July fourteen s nine when they decided to storm
the best deal. That was one of the explanations for
the sale and witchcraft trials. Ye, 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 I said, some people
(34:25):
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 were going on before. Well, it was the Romanticism
was the first time people questioned the idea on a
(34:46):
large scale that maybe the rationalism of and 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 to too much power, but we
swung way over here, and just rationalism had this idea too,
(35:06):
and it became dogmatic in and of its own right.
And so this is we still never really 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
(35:29):
rational thought, and that any culture that's not there 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.
(35:52):
That was a huge that's people are arguing about that
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 Kussen. It's on Prospect magazine. Awesome, awesome
article about this that's just he basically reviews a couple
(36:15):
of books, one one by Jonathan Israel who I mentioned earlier,
where he basically says, like, forget the philosophics, you got
to 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
(36:36):
governments now, or that there wouldn't be any religion whatsoever.
He came 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
(36:57):
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 pretty interesting to discuss it. What's it
called democratic Enlightenment. I think he's the one who wrote
that several thousand page trilogy. And then there's another guy
in a Storian named Anthony Pageant. He believes um that
(37:18):
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 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
(37:39):
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, huge time of change. And
also go read The Dark Age myth and Atheist Reviews
God's Philosophers by Tim O'Neil and Strange Oceans dot Com
(38:00):
Tip 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
by typing that in the search part How stuff works.
And now it's time for listening mail. I'm gonna call
this mad cow theory from Seattle. Hey, guys, just listen
(38:24):
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 sit down and write my first email.
For years, I've had a theory about prion disease and
mad cow and specific years ago, I was watching a
program on Egyptian mummies. They talked about how mummification may
(38:46):
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 crips
of these early mom is 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,
(39:08):
I wondered, could ground up mummies have been used to
fertilize the field? Then a cow comes along and eats
grass that has been contaminated with prions, leading to mad
cow disease. Human eats the mad cow's brain. Its courts
felt yakops. Uh. So I've always wondered it. Could never
figure out if you could prove it or disprove it.
If CFJ it was a real mummy's curse of desecrated
(39:31):
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 Gray. Is um nice going, Darren? Yeah? Uh,
if you have anything to say about that, anybody else
(39:53):
we would like to hear from you. Can you prove
or disprove that Chris to Field 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 can send us
an email which seems appropriate to stuff podcast at how
stuff Works dot com and join us at home on
(40:16):
the web. Stuff you Should Know dot com. Stuff you
Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works.
For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Hey there everyone, it's me Josh, and for this week's
s Y s K Selects, I've chosen How the Enlightenment Works.
And the reason we named it works rather than worked,
just because we realized during this episode that this battle
between rationalism and superstition is still going on today. The
Enlightenment is still going on today. And I've chosen it
(00:21):
this week because I feel like it explains a lot
a lot of the division in the world today, not
just in the United States, not just in the West,
but all over the world where there's a dividing line
that is separating people. That this gulf, this wedge is
getting deeper and deeper, and I think that this is
the basis of the whole thing. See if you agree,
(00:43):
If not, it's fine. It's still an interesting episode either way.
I hope you enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know,
a production of My Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles
(01:03):
w Chuck Bryant and Jerry are So this is Stuff
you should Know. The Enlightened Ones exactly, the 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
(01:24):
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. So this
is this is stuff. There's 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
(01:48):
literally several thousand pages of it and it's considered an
obscure text. Yeah, he probably doesn't even think that he
covered it in full. No, Betty doesn't. Although he's for
flame 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
(02:11):
it's done, that it's not finished is actually a pretty
standard view of the Enlightenment. Like during research for this,
I realized that there are tons of intellectual arguments going
on right now, like the Bill Maher thing. Bill Maher
and Islam. He's been accused of being like a just
(02:31):
a complete racist, xenophobic dude. Um because of his recent
statements on Islam. Did you see him and Ben Ben uh?
Did you see them get into it? Okay, that argument
is an Enlightenment argument. Yeah, it's like it provided the
Enlightenment was so massive that the ripple effects are still
(02:55):
being felt on a daily basis because it was such
an enormous change in the way humans think that we're
still trying to sit there and analyze what the heck happened,
And that is one manifestation of it. Yeah, is is
like what Bill Maher is saying is, well, you know,
Islam is a religion or whatever, and therefore it's um
(03:17):
an athetical to progress and culture and like real thought
and rationalism. And Ben Ben yeah, Ben 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
(03:42):
researching this article seriously, I tied together probably ten different
things that I didn't realize We're connected. Yeah, I love
it when stuff like that happened. 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, a new value system, UH, philosophical, scientific, cultural, intellectual,
(04:07):
basically saying reason over this previous long held belief that
just strict religious dogma is all you need to worry about,
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. But
(04:30):
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 value system basically. But there was another
aspect of the Enlightenment, the domination of UM, the will
(04:50):
of the people over the monarchy, UM, economic economic change, UM,
huge economic changes. Think. 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
(05:13):
is that you can't just call it the Enlightenment. It
happened in 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
(05:34):
distilled into separate compartments. Now, yeah, I mean separate compartments
somewhere divergent and contradictory. Uh. Occurred nearly simultaneously in the
eighteenth century in France, Great Britain, Germany, Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Portugal,
American colonies all over the place. Um. I like to
(05:55):
say it's the period of time where the world started
waking up, pulled their heads from their rear ends. Right 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
(06:17):
the Enlightenment was great. Where the American experiment proof positive
the Enlightenment was great. 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
(06:39):
that's still going on today, like, yes, the Enlightenment changed everything,
but did it go too far? 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
(07:01):
basis for this this change in thinking. Yeah, I think
Kristen did a great job of distilling a 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
(07:23):
falling on his head, which makes a great story. He
told a lot of people that I don't know 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
(07:45):
explained because that apple doesn't fall up. Something's keeping us
all rooted 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. Yeah,
and him was one of the proponents, were not proponents,
but uh he was active in the Age of Enlightenment.
(08:07):
Another thing that really laid the groundwork was 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 first time. Yeah, it was.
There was a huge change. So what you just described, Chuck,
(08:29):
is a the foundation for the intellectual 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, as a citizen,
(08:50):
your allegiance is not split between church and state. Your
allegiances first and foremost to the state. 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
(09:11):
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 and more important than
God's law. That's straight out of the Thirty Years War
that changed everything. Have very 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
(09:34):
the characters was this kid with down syndrome and he
murdered his parents because he found out that they were
brother and sister and he was super religious. They were
going to execute him. Yeah, when they execute I think
he was like the last martyr. Man. I'll have to
check that out again. Yeah, tell me more. Uh So,
Conger points out even further back about the Dark Ages,
(09:56):
sort of laying the groundwork which the Dark Ages were
dark for many reasons. It 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. It was not encouraged.
(10:21):
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,
they say, these are the Dark Ages. That was back
when the Church controlled everything, when everybody was just an ignoramus.
(10:41):
Once the Enlightenment came along, we emerged from the Dark Ages. Technically,
once the Renaissance came along, we emerged 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 a just kind of
existed between this important age and this important age. We
just call those the Middle Ages. But it's better than
the Dark Ages, like dark Ages. But that's a that's
(11:04):
a um an argument or a label that a disparaging
label that UM humanists use. Yeah, 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
(11:24):
is basically the idea that you can understand God even
more and be even more pure and divine yourself by
studying nature. Yeah. Roger Bacon was another monk who as
a proponent of that, and I think, um, that allowed
them and don't I don't think that's the reason they
did it, but that allowed them to pursue the scientific
(11:45):
avenues because it was still tied to God. Another 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 Gutenberg
came along in fourteen thirty eight and says, you know what,
everyone should be able to read, start printing stuff in
(12:07):
your native tongue. Uh. And that led directly to people
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 Bruney, they didn't necessarily come up
with their ideas on their own there was some this
(12:27):
really seminal thing that happened back in the mid UH
century 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
(12:48):
ideas were suddenly available to the West for the first time.
And it just so happened that some people started paying
attention to these things. Leonardo Bruney read Petrarch and revived
the idea of humanism, which was a huge sea change,
because humanism says humans are pretty awesome and the fruit
of our labors, the fruit of our intellect, the fruit
(13:10):
of everything that we do comes from human ability, not
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, and let's figure out how you did it.
That's humanism. And this is what the Renaissance started to
(13:32):
revive and was a huge change, like, maybe we should
start paying attention to ourselves a little more exactly, let's
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 spears, and beyond the tenth sphere that
(13:54):
was Heaven and God. Uh. Copernicus um Shah pretty said no,
that's not true. The universe is infinite. Uh. And he
was pretty alone in that thinking. Early on, he faced
a lot of criticism from like every every religion, Protestants
and Catholics. Yep, it was a They thought it was
(14:16):
a dangerous way of thinking because he didn't make room
for God in the cosmos. And it definitely 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 and yeah, starting to
(14:37):
to look at the the universe around us and finding
even like symbolic stuff like, um, who was it? Kepler,
he was an assistant to Tycho Brahe and Kepler figured
out that the planets uh revolve around the Sun in
an ellipse. Yeah. Well, the Church, the Holy Roman Church,
(14:58):
said that the circle was a symbol of perfection. So
of course everything revolves around the Earth in a circle.
Not only did things not revolve around the Earth, it
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
(15:19):
starting to prove to smell like bs. And the church
is losing its power left and right, both politically and intellectually.
It's losing 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,
(15:39):
He's like, but just make sure my manuscripts survive. So
we were talking about Bacon. He is a creator of
the scientific method, and he says, you know what, we
should use experiments to actually try and explain things, and
so it's I think it's high time we have a
method for doing so. So that was its is Bacon. Yes,
(16:01):
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 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, because I don't remember. I
took one class. We'd studied Descartes um a lot. I've
(16:21):
grown to be a little more interested in it, but
I like them more. I like like existential crisis philosophy,
like Nick Bostrom stuff, and I don't know what that is,
just basically how the world's gonna end. Okay, this stuff is.
I think like Descartes is interesting, but I'm not like
a I'm not. It doesn't light my fire. Yeah, it
(16:42):
was all 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
dey Cart was saying is our experience is not It's
not what you thought. Like mind and matter are two
(17:03):
different things, and of the human experience as a subjective
experience and the mind, what the mind produces is different
than what is reality and really kind of um that
changed things tremendously too, So You've 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
(17:24):
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
and social contract. There was Hobbes Lock and later on
Rousso and others contribute to this idea that humans are
born with natural rights. You're born free, I'm born free,
(17:46):
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 and 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.
(18:10):
You go to the state and say that guy killed
my family member, triumph convictim, and kill him on my
behalf because there's a state monopoly on violence. So that's
a natural right 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
(18:31):
because humans gave them rights. Um. That was a big
basis of enlightenment thinking that would be added to later
on too. Yeah. And Locke also was one of the
first champions of uh, what would kind of become nurture
over nature his idea of the tabu larassa that when
humans are born, their minds are clean slate and they
are shaped by experience and education and not some preordained
(18:55):
thing that you're born with. And uh, this French intellect
gobbled that stuff up. As name was Francois Marie Arouette,
and he went by a name you might know, Voltaire,
and he really loved this stuff and went back to
France with all these ideals and said, we got to
get on this and let's uh, you know, we can't
go out in the streets right now and talk about
(19:16):
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 and um, in
this new way of thinking in the privacy of homes
for those that are willing to host it. So he chuck,
(19:51):
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 into the ideas of lock of apparently Descartes as well.
He he basically got turned onto rationalism and he was
(20:13):
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
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 that right, Yeah, getting
(20:36):
better at that. Uh he he was pretty hard on
to try. He didn't like that kind of talk. It
threatened him for a good reason. Uh well, yeah, I
mean the reason why. It's 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
(20:58):
should rule ourselves, or at least a leed 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, like the 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
(21:21):
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 and the United States,
and I think, like 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, like maybe the nineteen eighties where they're the seventies,
(21:42):
remember Disco, like a dumbing down of things. Yeah, just
people not caring or whatever. Yeah, it's weird and cyclical.
I've read I read this article um called Things Fall Apart,
How social Media leads to a less stable world. It
was by a guy named Curtis Howland, H. L and
DY and it's on Knowledge at War there like the
Warton Business School website, and it was basically saying it
(22:04):
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 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
(22:26):
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 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
(22:47):
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
very unstable and things are much more dangerous streaming 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
(23:10):
that we're in a like right now, possibly on the
cusp of a period of tremendous fundamental change in the world.
I see that every day Yeah, 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
(23:33):
of spasms of violence or um upheaval, like just where
nobody's 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,
(23:57):
the Salons, the members were known. There was a group
of people 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
(24:17):
critics of not everything, but the establishment of government or
the way government was at the time, especially the church.
Hated the church. Yeah, like Voltaire especially hated the church
in the very fact that it even existed. And a
lot of the enlightened Uh ones were deists um and
(24:39):
deism basically, I like the way Conger put it, um
in a big picture way. 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 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
(25:02):
the religious establishment. Yeah. So 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.
(25:23):
Like Monascu for example. Uh wrote in seventy eight 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 of a sudden, it's
like separation of power. What are you talking about? No,
you've got a monarch and what the monarch says is right.
(25:43):
And as a result of this kind of thinking, the
seeds of democracy are planted, 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
or formerly Christopher Hitchens. Um. All of this started coming
out of the French salons. Yeah, um, all right, after
(26:05):
this message, we're going to talk a little bit about
how the Age of Enlightenment manifested itself in different parts
of the world. So we've mainly been in Europe this
(26:28):
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 Adam Smith at
the beginning, Uh, Scottish man and night Uh some ninety
six in seventeen seventy six wrote his Wealth of Nations,
(26:48):
which basically said the government should not interfere with matters
of finance and economics. There should be uh, the invisible
hand guiding all these principles. Yeah. 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 Rousseau saying, you know, the the it's this is
(27:11):
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 is the government is legitimate,
and so we'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
(27:33):
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 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
(27:54):
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, that that was
seventeen hours long or something. And then also in Scotland,
um was David Hume, who's like my favorite philosopher of
all time, just because he's like a 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
(28:15):
me of the Enlightenment philosophers. And Hume was this meat
and potatoes dude who basically said, like, show me the proof. Yeah,
he was a skeptic. He was an empiricist. Like he said,
you basically can't believe anything that you can't see with
your own eyes. My belief in his philosophy has been
eroded with the idea that, like consciousness is a subjective experience,
(28:38):
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 like billiards as an example,
where you hit a ball like you're playing a ball,
you hit like the eight ball with the Q ball,
Like you can predict where that's gonna go, like where
(28:59):
the 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 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
(29:19):
eight ball go in a certain direction ahead of time.
And so therefore we've come up with this thing called
cause and effect, which basically serves as a stop gap
between what we think 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
(29:41):
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 come up tomorrow. It's
what human is 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.
(30:05):
And we mentioned earlier that most of the establishment was
pretty threatened by most of 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
(30:28):
was one of those who had a lot of dealings
with the philosophs, and Frederick the Great of Prussia even
had Voltaire over and said, you know what, don't 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 proval that's way better. Uh.
(30:53):
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
(31:15):
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
(31:36):
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. That's the
argument that's that one of the arguments that's playing out
right now in the intellectual world. I just think that's
fascinating to it totally is uh So, what does this
(31:56):
all lead to? Eventually, it's going to lead to warm
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
(32:16):
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
(32:37):
that took power during the French Revolution, robes Pierre was
a follower of Rousseau. Remember, Rousseau 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 well. And so rose Pierre took that to mean
that the people stormed the best deal and overthrew the monarchy.
And so it was his job as the head of
(32:58):
the Jacobin Party, which is now a power 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 pay attention to
(33:19):
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 Revolution because the
(33:42):
chaos and violence that erupted, uh 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,
(34:03):
so it was ergo poisoning. And basically we're tripping on acid.
On July fourteen s nine when they decided to storm
the best deal. That was one of the explanations for
the sale and witchcraft trials. Ye, 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 I said, some people
(34:25):
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 were going on before. Well, it was the Romanticism
was the first time people questioned the idea on a
(34:46):
large scale that maybe the rationalism of and 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 to too much power, but we
swung way over here, and just rationalism had this idea too,
(35:06):
and it became dogmatic in and of its own right.
And so this is we still never really 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
(35:29):
rational thought, and that any culture that's not there 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.
(35:52):
That was a huge that's people are arguing about that
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 Kussen. It's on Prospect magazine. Awesome, awesome
article about this that's just he basically reviews a couple
(36:15):
of books, one one by Jonathan Israel who I mentioned earlier,
where he basically says, like, forget the philosophics, you got
to 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
(36:36):
governments now, or that there wouldn't be any religion whatsoever.
He came 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
(36:57):
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 pretty interesting to discuss it. What's it
called democratic Enlightenment. I think he's the one who wrote
that several thousand page trilogy. And then there's another guy
in a Storian named Anthony Pageant. He believes um that
(37:18):
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 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
(37:39):
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, huge time of change. And
also go read The Dark Age myth and Atheist Reviews
God's Philosophers by Tim O'Neil and Strange Oceans dot Com
(38:00):
Tip 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
by typing that in the search part How stuff works.
And now it's time for listening mail. I'm gonna call
this mad cow theory from Seattle. Hey, guys, just listen
(38:24):
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 sit down and write my first email.
For years, I've had a theory about prion disease and
mad cow and specific years ago, I was watching a
program on Egyptian mummies. They talked about how mummification may
(38:46):
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 crips
of these early mom is 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,
(39:08):
I wondered, could ground up mummies have been used to
fertilize the field? Then a cow comes along and eats
grass that has been contaminated with prions, leading to mad
cow disease. Human eats the mad cow's brain. Its courts
felt yakops. Uh. So I've always wondered it. Could never
figure out if you could prove it or disprove it.
If CFJ it was a real mummy's curse of desecrated
(39:31):
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 Gray. Is um nice going, Darren? Yeah? Uh,
if you have anything to say about that, anybody else
(39:53):
we would like to hear from you. Can you prove
or disprove that Chris to Field 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 can send us
an email which seems appropriate to stuff podcast at how
stuff Works dot com and join us at home on
(40:16):
the web. Stuff you Should Know dot com. Stuff you
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