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How the Enlightenment Works · Stuff You Should Know

0:00
Speaker 1: Welcome to you Stuff you Should Know from House Stuffworks
0:04
Speaker 1: dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
0:13
Speaker 1: There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and Jerry Are. So this
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Speaker 1: is stuff you should know. The Enlightened Ones exactly, the
0:22
Speaker 1: three of us, no one else, No, we're the Enlightened Ones.
0:28
Speaker 1: I am gonna go ahead and preface this what what
0:31
Speaker 1: I just said off the air. This is a very
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Speaker 1: tough subject to distill in a thirty to forty five
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Speaker 1: minute podcast because volumes of books can be written on
0:41
Speaker 1: the Age of Enlightenment and have been and have been.
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Speaker 1: So this is this is stuff. There is gonna be
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Speaker 1: a very bird's eye view. Yeah, there's a dude named
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Speaker 1: Jonathan Israel who just came out with I think this
0:52
Speaker 1: third volume of a three volume set on the Enlightenment
0:58
Speaker 1: and he wrote literally several thousand and pages of it
1:01
Speaker 1: and it's considered an obscure text. Yeah, he probably doesn't
1:06
Speaker 1: even think that he covered it in full. No, but
1:08
Speaker 1: he doesn't, although he's coming right. I think he does
1:12
Speaker 1: have another one coming. So maybe it was a second
1:15
Speaker 1: but um he uh that that the idea that um
1:21
Speaker 1: he doesn't think that it's done, that it's not finished
1:23
Speaker 1: is actually a pretty standard view of the Enlightenment. Like,
1:27
Speaker 1: during research for this, I realized that there are tons
1:32
Speaker 1: of intellectual arguments going on right now, like the Bill
1:37
Speaker 1: Maher thing. Bill Maher in Islam. He's been accused of
1:41
Speaker 1: being like a just a complete racist, xenophobic dude um
1:46
Speaker 1: because of his recent statements on Islam. Did you see
1:51
Speaker 1: him and Ben ben uh? Did you see them get
1:54
Speaker 1: into it? Okay, that argument is an Enlightenment argument. It's
2:00
Speaker 1: like it provided the Enlightenment was so massive that the
2:04
Speaker 1: ripple effects are still being felt on a daily basis
2:08
Speaker 1: because it was such an enormous change in the way
2:12
Speaker 1: humans think that we're still trying to sit there and
2:14
Speaker 1: analyze what the heck happened. And that is one manifestation
2:19
Speaker 1: of it. Is is like what Bill Maher is saying is, well,
2:23
Speaker 1: you know, Islam is a religion or whatever, and therefore
2:26
Speaker 1: it's um an athetical to progress and culture and like
2:30
Speaker 1: real thought and rationalism, and Ben a Ben yeah, Ben
2:35
Speaker 1: Affleck is saying, like, you can't say that about a culture,
2:38
Speaker 1: Like each culture is its own thing. So what we're
2:40
Speaker 1: seeing there is the idea of moral absolutism arguing with
2:44
Speaker 1: moral relativism, and that is like textbook Enlightenment argument. Pretty interesting. Sure.
2:52
Speaker 1: Like researching this article seriously, I tied together probably ten
2:56
Speaker 1: different things that I didn't realize we're connected. Well, yeah,
2:59
Speaker 1: I love it when stuff like that. It was the
3:01
Speaker 1: start of and you know, the age of Enlightenment quote
3:05
Speaker 1: unquote started and ended, but it was the birth of
3:09
Speaker 1: just a new kind of thought and a new value system, uh, philosophical, scientific, cultural, intellectual,
3:18
Speaker 1: basically saying reason over this previous long held belief that
3:24
Speaker 1: just strict religious dogma is all you need to worry about.
3:27
Speaker 1: You don't question anything, don't try and think about science
3:31
Speaker 1: and nature and things like that other than just this
3:34
Speaker 1: is God's creation and what does it mean in terms
3:37
Speaker 1: of religion exactly. So, of course it's still going on.
3:40
Speaker 1: But it wasn't. It wasn't just that. It was definitely
3:42
Speaker 1: Enlightenment was the If you're an Enlightenment UM fan, you
3:48
Speaker 1: would say Enlightenment was the domination of reason over religion
3:52
Speaker 1: or faith. It was a it was a value system basically.
3:54
Speaker 1: But there was another aspect of the Enlightenment, the domination
3:58
Speaker 1: of um the will of the people over the monarchy. UM.
4:04
Speaker 1: Economic there was economic change, UM, huge economic changes thanks
4:10
Speaker 1: to Adam Smith. There were a lot of like huge
4:13
Speaker 1: monumental changes in the way people thought. UM. So much
4:17
Speaker 1: so that modern historians who are trying to unpack the
4:20
Speaker 1: Enlightenment still one of the schools of thought is that
4:24
Speaker 1: you can't just call it the Enlightenment. It happened in
4:27
Speaker 1: too many different places under different circumstances. Um. And then
4:32
Speaker 1: the again, like the the different aspects of it, the
4:35
Speaker 1: fact that one part of it dealt with governmental change,
4:38
Speaker 1: one part of it dealt with religious change, another part
4:40
Speaker 1: that with economic change. That they it's been kind of
4:45
Speaker 1: distilled into separate compartments. Now, yeah, I mean separate compartments
4:49
Speaker 1: somewhere divergent and contradictory. Uh. It occurred nearly simultaneously in
4:56
Speaker 1: the eighteenth century in France, Great Britain, Germany and other
5:00
Speaker 1: in at least Bain, Portugal, American colonies all over the place. UM.
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Speaker 1: I like to say, it's the period of time where
5:07
Speaker 1: the world started waking up and pulled their heads from
5:11
Speaker 1: their rear ends. Basically, well, the the the question now,
5:16
Speaker 1: I mean, if you're a religious type, you're probably happy
5:22
Speaker 1: about the fruits of the Enlightenment. Like everybody points at
5:25
Speaker 1: the Industrial Revolution is proof positive the Enlightenment was great,
5:29
Speaker 1: or the American experiment proof positive the Enlightenment was great.
5:32
Speaker 1: But you probably don't like the fact that the world
5:35
Speaker 1: completely turned its back on religion or not completely but
5:38
Speaker 1: largely did. If you're a pro Enlightenment type, you're probably
5:42
Speaker 1: saying this was for the best, like we were backwards,
5:45
Speaker 1: we emerged from the dark Ages thanks to the Enlightenment. Um,
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Speaker 1: And this is the argument that's still going on today, Like, yes,
5:52
Speaker 1: the Enlightenment changed everything, but did it go too far?
5:55
Speaker 1: So that's we'll get into all that. But Conger, who
5:58
Speaker 1: wrote this article, I think did a very good job
6:01
Speaker 1: of taking the whole thing back further than the eighteenth
6:05
Speaker 1: century out of the French salons and set the stage
6:09
Speaker 1: for what created the basis for this this change in thinking. Yeah,
6:14
Speaker 1: I think Kristen did a great job of distilling a
6:16
Speaker 1: complex topic down to like an eight page article, but
6:20
Speaker 1: she does take it back to Um, there were a
6:22
Speaker 1: couple of things that sort of laid the groundwork. Um, well,
6:26
Speaker 1: a lot of things, but a couple of them are
6:28
Speaker 1: Mr Sir Isaac Newton and the famous story of the
6:33
Speaker 1: apple falling on his head, which makes a great story.
6:36
Speaker 1: He told a lot of people that I don't know
6:38
Speaker 1: how uh factually exactly true that is, but it makes
6:42
Speaker 1: for a great story. But either way you want to
6:45
Speaker 1: look at it. Isaac Newton looked at the space at
6:48
Speaker 1: some point between that apple in the ground and said,
6:52
Speaker 1: there's something going on in that empty space that should
6:55
Speaker 1: be explained, because that apple doesn't fall up. Something's keeping
6:59
Speaker 1: us all did here on the ground, and I want
7:01
Speaker 1: to look into that. Although if you were a fan
7:03
Speaker 1: of David Humes, you would say, uh, well, actually it
7:06
Speaker 1: could consumably fall up, because we've never proven it won't
7:08
Speaker 1: fall up. And him was one of the proponents, well
7:12
Speaker 1: not proponents, but uh he was active in the Age
7:15
Speaker 1: of Enlightenment. Another thing that really laid the groundwork was
7:19
Speaker 1: the Thirty Years of War from six eighteen to sixty eight,
7:23
Speaker 1: which pretty much paved the way for Protestant Reformation and
7:30
Speaker 1: the Roman Catholic Church took a lot of the teeth
7:32
Speaker 1: away from the Roman Catholic Church. Huge first time, Yeah,
7:36
Speaker 1: it was. There was a huge change. So what you
7:38
Speaker 1: just described, Chuck, is a the foundation for the intellectual
7:43
Speaker 1: branch of of the Enlightenment thinking usurping the power from
7:49
Speaker 1: theological thinking. And then with the Thirty Year War, the
7:53
Speaker 1: political power was taken away from the church because for
7:56
Speaker 1: the first time now the precedent has been set that
7:59
Speaker 1: you was a citizen. Your allegiance is not split between
8:03
Speaker 1: church and state. Your allegiances first and foremost to the state.
8:07
Speaker 1: And we see that still today. Like if somebody uh
8:10
Speaker 1: kills their um, their parents or whatever because it's the
8:15
Speaker 1: Seventh Sign and Demi Moore's running around and they it
8:19
Speaker 1: turns out that they were brother and sister, so you
8:21
Speaker 1: kill them because it's the will of God. State says,
8:24
Speaker 1: I don't care if it's the will of God, you
8:25
Speaker 1: can't kill your parents. The state's law is more powerful
8:29
Speaker 1: and more important than God's law. That's straight out of
8:32
Speaker 1: the Thirty Years War that changed everything. Have you ever
8:36
Speaker 1: seen the Seventh Sign? Man? I saw that, like when
8:40
Speaker 1: it came out. I don't remember anything about it. I
8:43
Speaker 1: just remember like one of the characters was this kid
8:46
Speaker 1: with down syndrome and he murdered his parents because he
8:49
Speaker 1: found out that they were brother and sister and he
8:51
Speaker 1: was super religious and they were going to execute him. Yeah,
8:55
Speaker 1: when they execute. I think he was like the last martyr. Man,
8:59
Speaker 1: I'll have to check it out again. Yeah more. Uh man,
9:02
Speaker 1: she just keeps getting better looking, don't she. How didn't
9:05
Speaker 1: do that? Yeah, like you look at um. Blame it
9:08
Speaker 1: on Rio seeing that. Yeah, she's kind of dooey and
9:13
Speaker 1: not tubby, but just round. And then she got all chiseled. Man,
9:17
Speaker 1: they remained chiseled. That was Michael Kine. Wasn't it great movie? Yeah?
9:23
Speaker 1: But I mean she was a kid back then. Everyone
9:25
Speaker 1: was Dowie back then when they were kids. Blaming Rio.
9:27
Speaker 1: It was really good movie. So Conger points out even
9:30
Speaker 1: further back about the Dark Ages, sort of laying the groundwork,
9:34
Speaker 1: which the Dark Ages were dark for many reasons, but
9:37
Speaker 1: one of the big ones was that the Roman Catholic
9:40
Speaker 1: Church basically ruled everything. Uh. Latin was the language, the
9:45
Speaker 1: center of life and academia where monasteries and abbeys. You
9:48
Speaker 1: weren't encouraged to get educated outside of uh theological uh realms.
9:56
Speaker 1: It was not encouraged. Do you have to actually, I
9:59
Speaker 1: want to say, you have to be carefully using the
10:01
Speaker 1: term Dark Ages because uh apparently it is a disparaging
10:06
Speaker 1: label that people on the pro Enlightenment side of the argument.
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Speaker 1: The humanists, they say, these are the Dark Ages. That
10:13
Speaker 1: was back when the Church controlled everything, when everybody was
10:15
Speaker 1: just an ignoramus. Once the Enlightenment came along, we emerge
10:20
Speaker 1: from the Dark Ages. Technically, once the Renaissance came along,
10:23
Speaker 1: we emerge from the Dark Ages. So if you're in
10:24
Speaker 1: a Storian, you call it the Middle Ages. But even
10:27
Speaker 1: the Middle Ages are kind of sad because it just
10:30
Speaker 1: says these ay just kind of existed between this important
10:33
Speaker 1: age and this important age. We just call this the
10:36
Speaker 1: Middle Ages. But it's better than the Dark Ages. But
10:39
Speaker 1: that's a that's a um an argument or a label
10:43
Speaker 1: that a disparaging label that humanists use unfairly, because there
10:50
Speaker 1: were scientists working and laying the groundwork for future science
10:53
Speaker 1: in the Dark Ages, and Congret even mentions them in
10:55
Speaker 1: this article, like Thomas Aquinas came up with scholasticism, Yeah,
11:00
Speaker 1: and scholasticism is basically the idea that you can understand
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Speaker 1: God even more and be even more pure and divine
11:08
Speaker 1: yourself by studying nature. Yeah. Roger Bacon was another monk
11:13
Speaker 1: who was a proponent of that. And I think um
11:17
Speaker 1: that allowed them and I don't think that's the reason
11:19
Speaker 1: they did it. But that allowed them to pursue these
11:21
Speaker 1: scientific avenues because it was still tied to God. Another
11:26
Speaker 1: big change was Uh. Like I said before, in the
11:31
Speaker 1: not so dark Ages, perhaps Latin was the language, and
11:34
Speaker 1: they didn't have something called the printing press until Johann
11:38
Speaker 1: Guttenberg came along in fourty eight and says, you know what,
11:41
Speaker 1: everyone should be able to read. Start printing stuff in
11:44
Speaker 1: your native tongue. Uh. And that led directly to people
11:48
Speaker 1: starting to educate themselves. It was the democratization of education
11:52
Speaker 1: right exactly. And all of this didn't happen like out
11:55
Speaker 1: of the blue, like Roger Bacon and Thomas Aquinas and
11:58
Speaker 1: a guy named Leonardo Brunei. They didn't necessarily come up
12:01
Speaker 1: with their ideas on their own. There was some this
12:04
Speaker 1: really seminal thing that happened back in the mid century
12:09
Speaker 1: where somebody, I don't know who did, somebody translated um
12:13
Speaker 1: Aristotle I believe his works into Latin, and all of
12:18
Speaker 1: a sudden, the Greek rational thinkers of antiquity, their ideas
12:25
Speaker 1: were suddenly available to the West for the first time.
12:29
Speaker 1: And it just so happened that some people started paying
12:32
Speaker 1: attention to these things. Leonardo Bruni read Petrarch and revived
12:37
Speaker 1: the idea of humanism, which is a huge sea change
12:40
Speaker 1: because humanism says humans are pretty awesome and the fruit
12:44
Speaker 1: of our labors, the fruit of our intellect, the fruit
12:47
Speaker 1: of everything that we do comes from human ability, not
12:51
Speaker 1: God Like, We're not just vessels for God's brilliance to
12:55
Speaker 1: be shown through. If you create something, you come up
12:58
Speaker 1: with a work of art because God did that. You
13:02
Speaker 1: did that, but let's figure out how you did it, right.
13:05
Speaker 1: That's humanism. And this is what the Renaissance started to
13:09
Speaker 1: revive and was a huge change, Like, maybe we should
13:11
Speaker 1: start paying attention to ourselves a little more exactly, let's
13:14
Speaker 1: explore the human condition. Yeah. Um. Aristotle was not a
13:18
Speaker 1: heretic because he tied his geocentric universe ideas to God
13:24
Speaker 1: as well. Um. He thought the universe was composed of
13:27
Speaker 1: ten separate crystal spheres, and beyond the tenth sphere that
13:31
Speaker 1: was heaven and God. Uh. Copernicus, Um, she uh pretty
13:36
Speaker 1: much said no, that's not true. The universe is infinite. Uh.
13:41
Speaker 1: And he was pretty alone in that thinking. Early on,
13:46
Speaker 1: I faced a lot of criticism from like every every
13:49
Speaker 1: religion Protestants and Catholics. Yep, it was a They thought
13:53
Speaker 1: it was a dangerous way of thinking because he didn't
13:55
Speaker 1: make room for God in the cosmos, And it definitely
13:58
Speaker 1: was a dangerous way of thinking to the church, Like
14:00
Speaker 1: the Protestant Reformation was going on, you had the Thirty
14:03
Speaker 1: Years War coming down the pike, you had Copernicus um
14:08
Speaker 1: thanks to this revival of interest in astronomy, like yeah,
14:13
Speaker 1: starting to to look at the universe around us and
14:16
Speaker 1: finding even like symbolic stuff like um, who was it? Kepler?
14:22
Speaker 1: He was an assistant to Tycho Brahe and Kepler figured
14:26
Speaker 1: out that the planets uh revolve around the Sun in
14:31
Speaker 1: an ellipse. Well, the church, the Holy Roman Church, said
14:36
Speaker 1: that the circle was a symbol of perfection. So of
14:38
Speaker 1: course everything revolved around the earth in a circle. Not
14:42
Speaker 1: only did things not revolve around the Earth, revolved around
14:45
Speaker 1: the sun. And they didn't even do that in a circle,
14:47
Speaker 1: they did an ellipse. So the church is just losing
14:49
Speaker 1: its mind because all these people are coming forward saying
14:53
Speaker 1: everything that you're saying over here is starting to prove
14:57
Speaker 1: to smell like bs and the church is losing its
15:00
Speaker 1: power left and right. Both politically and intellectually. It's losing
15:03
Speaker 1: its authority. Yeah. Galileo even recanted, uh, because he was
15:07
Speaker 1: accused of heresy for his theory that the Earth rotates
15:10
Speaker 1: on its axis. So he said, I'll take it all back.
15:14
Speaker 1: I didn't mean that. Please don't kill me. He's like,
15:16
Speaker 1: but just make sure my manuscripts survive. So we were
15:20
Speaker 1: talking about Bacon. He is the creator of the scientific method,
15:25
Speaker 1: and he says, you know what, we should use experiments
15:29
Speaker 1: to actually try and explain things. And so it's six.
15:33
Speaker 1: I think it's high time we have a method for
15:35
Speaker 1: doing so. So that was Francis Bacon. Yes, I wonder
15:38
Speaker 1: if he was related to Roger Bacon. I don't know.
15:41
Speaker 1: They were separated by a few centuries, but they could
15:43
Speaker 1: have been fam sure, I think so. Uh. And he
15:47
Speaker 1: was did you ever take philosophy in college? No? Um,
15:50
Speaker 1: I think I might have. I didn't get much out
15:52
Speaker 1: of it. If I did, I don't remember. That's like
15:54
Speaker 1: one class we studied descartes um a lot. I've grown
15:58
Speaker 1: to be a little more interest it in it, but
16:01
Speaker 1: I like the more I like like existential crisis philosophy,
16:06
Speaker 1: like Nick Bostrom stuff, And I don't know what that is,
16:09
Speaker 1: just basically how the world's gonna end. Okay, this stuff
16:13
Speaker 1: is I think, like de Cartes is interesting, but I'm
16:15
Speaker 1: not like a I'm not. It doesn't light my fire. Yeah,
16:18
Speaker 1: it was right. I think I made an a in
16:20
Speaker 1: that class actually because it interested me at the time.
16:22
Speaker 1: But I never took a follow up class. It just
16:25
Speaker 1: took the intro. So it clearly didn't mean that much
16:27
Speaker 1: to me. But I get it. Well. Yeah, And what
16:30
Speaker 1: they cart was saying is our experience is not It's
16:37
Speaker 1: not what you thought. Like mind and matter are two
16:40
Speaker 1: different things, and the human experiences a subjective experience and
16:44
Speaker 1: the mind, what the mind produces is different than what
16:48
Speaker 1: is reality and really kind of um that changed things
16:52
Speaker 1: tremendously too. So you got all these people like contributing
16:55
Speaker 1: to this. We haven't even reached the eighteenth century yet,
16:58
Speaker 1: Like the groundwork is definitely being late and it's still
17:01
Speaker 1: being laid. Um as far as the like the government goes.
17:06
Speaker 1: John locke Um was one of the people who contributed
17:09
Speaker 1: to the idea of the social contract. The social contract
17:13
Speaker 1: there was Hobbes Lock and later on Rousso and others
17:18
Speaker 1: contributed this idea that humans are born with natural rights.
17:21
Speaker 1: You're born free. I'm born free, even Jerry's born free,
17:25
Speaker 1: look at her. And to form a society, you give
17:29
Speaker 1: up some of these natural rights. For example, one one
17:33
Speaker 1: thing that you give up is your right to kill
17:35
Speaker 1: in retribution. Uh. Any society typically demands a state monopoly
17:41
Speaker 1: on violence, which means that if somebody kills your family member,
17:45
Speaker 1: you don't go kill that person. You go to the
17:47
Speaker 1: state and say that guy killed my family member, triumph,
17:51
Speaker 1: convict him and kill him on my behalf because there's
17:53
Speaker 1: a state monopoly on violence. So that's a natural right
17:55
Speaker 1: that you give up. I think appropriately so and for
17:58
Speaker 1: the better, but as part of the social contract and
18:02
Speaker 1: so Uh. The idea that that humans had these rights
18:05
Speaker 1: and that society in turn had rights because humans gave
18:09
Speaker 1: them rights. Um, that was a big basis of enlightenment thinking.
18:14
Speaker 1: That would be added to later on too. Yeah. And
18:16
Speaker 1: Locke also was one of the first champions of what
18:20
Speaker 1: would kind of become nurture over nature. His idea of
18:23
Speaker 1: the Tabu larassa that when humans are born, their minds
18:26
Speaker 1: are a clean slate and they are shaped by experience
18:29
Speaker 1: and education and not some preordained thing that you're born
18:32
Speaker 1: with and uh, this French intellect gobbled that stuff up.
18:36
Speaker 1: His name was Francois Marie Arouette, and he went by
18:40
Speaker 1: a name you might know, Voltaire, and he really loved
18:43
Speaker 1: this stuff and went back to France with all these
18:46
Speaker 1: ideals and said, we gotta get on this and let's uh,
18:50
Speaker 1: you know, we can't go out in the streets right
18:52
Speaker 1: now and talk about the stuff, but we can meet
18:54
Speaker 1: in private and homes like a Tupperware party, and we'll
18:56
Speaker 1: call them salons and we'll we'll talk about these radical
18:59
Speaker 1: ideas is in um in this new way of thinking,
19:03
Speaker 1: in the privacy of homes for those that are willing
19:05
Speaker 1: to host it. Yeah, and we'll talk more about Voltaire
19:08
Speaker 1: and what he did right after this. So, Chuck, Voltaire
19:14
Speaker 1: has been lit up. He was in England from seventeen
19:19
Speaker 1: twenty nine, living in exile because he was already critical
19:23
Speaker 1: of the French monarchy. While he was there he ran
19:25
Speaker 1: into the ideas of lock of apparently Descartes as well.
19:30
Speaker 1: He he basically got turned onto rationalism and he was
19:35
Speaker 1: primed and ready for it, Like this guy was just
19:37
Speaker 1: waiting for these ideas to pour into him. And when
19:40
Speaker 1: they did. He became a lightning rod for what we
19:43
Speaker 1: think of as the Enlightenment. Like Voltaire was the main
19:47
Speaker 1: dude to start from what I understand. Yeah, and um,
19:51
Speaker 1: like we mentioned the salons, they had to do this
19:53
Speaker 1: in private because Louis the four Yeah that right, Yeah,
19:58
Speaker 1: get better at that. He was pretty hard on to try.
20:04
Speaker 1: He didn't like that kind of talk. It threatened him
20:07
Speaker 1: for good reason. Uh well, yeah, I mean the reason
20:10
Speaker 1: why is like the power was taken from the church
20:14
Speaker 1: in place more in the monarchy. But in very short order,
20:16
Speaker 1: people said, you know, we're not really that fond of
20:18
Speaker 1: the monarchy either. We think we should rule ourselves or
20:21
Speaker 1: at least elect people to rule ourselves. To this divine
20:24
Speaker 1: right of kings. Things seems kind of hinky now that
20:26
Speaker 1: we think about it. So the monarchies were threatened as
20:29
Speaker 1: well by the Enlightenment. So yeah, the monarchy liked the
20:32
Speaker 1: dumb masses that stayed under their thumb and any kind
20:36
Speaker 1: of like radical thought or original thought was super dangerous.
20:40
Speaker 1: It sounds familiar exactly. It is interesting how you talked about.
20:45
Speaker 1: I think there are periods of time where things like
20:47
Speaker 1: the Age of Enlightenment keep popping up that's like the
20:50
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties in the United States, and I think, like
20:53
Speaker 1: you said, we're in one right now. I think we're
20:54
Speaker 1: in probably more than even the sixties right now. Yeah,
20:57
Speaker 1: And I think there are periods where that lulls it
21:00
Speaker 1: like maybe the nineteen eighties, the seventies, remember Disco, like
21:05
Speaker 1: a dumbing down of things. Yeah, just people not caring
21:08
Speaker 1: or whatever. It's weird and cyclical. I read I read
21:11
Speaker 1: this article um called things Fall Apart How social media
21:14
Speaker 1: leads to a less stable world. It was by a
21:17
Speaker 1: guy named Curtis Howland h G. H. L Andy and
21:20
Speaker 1: it's on Knowledge at Wharton there, like the Wharton Business
21:23
Speaker 1: School website, and it was basically saying it wasn't I
21:26
Speaker 1: thought it was condemning social media, and this guy was
21:28
Speaker 1: just basically stating, matter of factly that social media erodes
21:33
Speaker 1: the state and that now we have ways to connect
21:38
Speaker 1: with other people in ways that are more important to
21:41
Speaker 1: us than, say, our allegiance to the state. So you
21:44
Speaker 1: may feel, um, you may feel more connected to somebody
21:48
Speaker 1: over Hello Kitty and your fondness for Hello Kitty, more
21:53
Speaker 1: than you would identify yourself as saying American, and with
21:56
Speaker 1: social media you're able to connect with other people who
21:59
Speaker 1: feel the same way, and so you form on social
22:01
Speaker 1: media basically bodies that supersede the state in your opinion,
22:06
Speaker 1: no boundaries exactly. And as this happens, more and more
22:09
Speaker 1: of the states, what's called sovereignty erodes more and more
22:13
Speaker 1: and more um and it becomes a less and less
22:16
Speaker 1: stable world. The guy's point was that, yes, while it's
22:19
Speaker 1: very unstable and things are much more dangerous during periods
22:22
Speaker 1: like this, it's it's basically just a period of upheaval
22:26
Speaker 1: and change, and then eventually things stabilize again. But what
22:29
Speaker 1: this guy was saying, using this as an example, is
22:32
Speaker 1: that we're in a like right now, possibly on the
22:35
Speaker 1: cusp of a period of tremendous fundamental change in the world.
22:40
Speaker 1: I see that every day. It's pretty interesting time to
22:44
Speaker 1: be alive. Yeah, a little scary to me. Yeah, well,
22:48
Speaker 1: I mean it's like the guy said, it's it's more
22:50
Speaker 1: dangerous than your average time because change frequently comes out
22:55
Speaker 1: of spasms of violence or um upheaval, just where nobody's
23:01
Speaker 1: in charge, because there's a power struggle going on, or
23:04
Speaker 1: our normal structures are being eroded. It's interesting, it's super interesting. Uh.
23:11
Speaker 1: So back to the salons. We're back to the age
23:14
Speaker 1: of enlightenment, the traditional age of enlightenment. Uh, the Salons,
23:19
Speaker 1: the members were known. There was a group of people
23:22
Speaker 1: known as the philosophics. Uh. We've mentioned a few of them. Rousseau,
23:26
Speaker 1: did Hero Voltaire. Um, how do you pronounce that? Is
23:29
Speaker 1: that it's not montgue is it Montesquieu Montesquieu? Um. And
23:35
Speaker 1: they were They're kind of skeptics and critics of not
23:40
Speaker 1: everything but the establishment of government or the way government
23:45
Speaker 1: was at the time, especially the church. Hated the church,
23:49
Speaker 1: like Voltaire especially hated the church and the very fact
23:53
Speaker 1: that it even existed. And a lot of the enlightened
23:56
Speaker 1: Uh ones were deists um and daism Basically, I like
24:02
Speaker 1: the way Conger put it um in a big picture way.
24:05
Speaker 1: They believe in a clockmaker God, which means maybe God
24:08
Speaker 1: created everything and set things in motion. But then I
24:11
Speaker 1: was like, all right, that's it. I'm out right, I'm
24:13
Speaker 1: not uh getting my fingers and all the pies of everyone.
24:17
Speaker 1: And it's you have free will basically after you're born um,
24:22
Speaker 1: which again was pretty dangerous to the religious establishment. Yeah,
24:26
Speaker 1: so you you've got the basis you've got the foundation
24:29
Speaker 1: of um, the Holy Roman Empire in the West losing
24:33
Speaker 1: tons of power and and um political and intellectually, you've
24:39
Speaker 1: got the monarchy now being assaulted by the French salons
24:41
Speaker 1: who are planning the seeds of democracy. Like Monascu for example,
24:47
Speaker 1: Uh wrote in se the Spirit of the Laws, and
24:50
Speaker 1: he basically proposed the idea of a separation of powers.
24:54
Speaker 1: He's like the first guy to do that. He's the
24:56
Speaker 1: French lawyer who was in the salon scene. And um,
24:59
Speaker 1: all the sen it's like separation of power. What are
25:01
Speaker 1: you talking about? No, you've got a monarch and what
25:03
Speaker 1: the monarch says is right. And as a result of
25:06
Speaker 1: this kind of thinking, the seeds of democracy are planted.
25:09
Speaker 1: And then a hostility toward religion, um of almost any
25:13
Speaker 1: kind that you still see today, like in the form
25:16
Speaker 1: of like Bill Maher or Richard Dawkins are formerly Christopher Hitchens. Um.
25:23
Speaker 1: All of this started coming out of the French salons. Yeah,
25:27
Speaker 1: all right, after this message, we're going to talk a
25:29
Speaker 1: little bit about how the Age of Enlightenment manifested itself
25:32
Speaker 1: in different parts of the world. So we've mainly been
25:44
Speaker 1: in Europe this whole time. UH. In France there was
25:49
Speaker 1: an emphasis on the arts. UH. In England they had
25:52
Speaker 1: a more emphasis on UM science and economics. You mentioned
25:56
Speaker 1: Adam Smith at the beginning UH Scottish Man and Night
26:00
Speaker 1: some nineteen seventy six. In seventeen seventy six wrote his
26:04
Speaker 1: Wealth of Nations, which basically said the government should not
26:08
Speaker 1: interfere with UH matters of finance and economics. Yeah, there
26:14
Speaker 1: should be UH, the invisible hand guiding all these principles. Yeah.
26:18
Speaker 1: I read this article and by this guy who's explaining
26:20
Speaker 1: that change and thought, like before that, it was that
26:24
Speaker 1: whole social contract thing, like Russa saying, you know, the
26:27
Speaker 1: the it's this is an interplay between citizens and citizens
26:30
Speaker 1: and citizens and their government, and the government's role is
26:33
Speaker 1: to protect UM the rights of people. What Hume said
26:39
Speaker 1: is the government is legitimate and so they're not human.
26:42
Speaker 1: But Smith, it's the government's legitimate and so far as
26:45
Speaker 1: it steps out of people's affairs and let's free trade
26:48
Speaker 1: take place, which that might sound familiar if you UM
26:52
Speaker 1: subscribe to republican or conservative or libertarian ideology. You know,
26:57
Speaker 1: like the whole laz A fair attitude of government is
27:00
Speaker 1: what's what legitimizes government, and the government that medals in
27:04
Speaker 1: someone's affairs is an illegitimate government as far as classical
27:09
Speaker 1: economic thought goes. Yeah, and we talked about that in
27:13
Speaker 1: our stuff you should know Guide to the Economy, Yeah,
27:15
Speaker 1: which we got an email someone bought that the other day. Yeah,
27:18
Speaker 1: they thought was seventeen hours long or something. And then
27:21
Speaker 1: also in Scotland, um was David Hume, who's like my
27:25
Speaker 1: favorite philosopher of all time, just because he's like he's
27:28
Speaker 1: the only when he studied, he's a meeting. Now he's
27:30
Speaker 1: a meeting, but he's the only one who's ever really
27:32
Speaker 1: spoken to me of the Enlightenment philosophers. And Hume was
27:36
Speaker 1: this meat and potatoes dude who basically said, like, show
27:40
Speaker 1: me the proof. He was a skeptic, he was an empiricist,
27:43
Speaker 1: Like he said, you basically can't believe anything that you
27:46
Speaker 1: can't see with you or not. My belief in his
27:49
Speaker 1: philosophy has been eroded with the idea that like consciousness
27:53
Speaker 1: is a subjective experience, like just totally subjective basically. But
27:58
Speaker 1: I like his his idea and it was like the
28:02
Speaker 1: the cause and effect right, like I think he used
28:05
Speaker 1: like Billiards as an example, where you hit a ball
28:08
Speaker 1: like you're playing eight ball, and you hit like the
28:11
Speaker 1: eight ball with the cue ball, like you can predict
28:14
Speaker 1: where that's gonna go, like where the eight ball is
28:17
Speaker 1: gonna go based on how you hit it with the
28:18
Speaker 1: cue ball. But the Humes point is is you can't
28:22
Speaker 1: say for certain that that's what's going to happen. You're
28:25
Speaker 1: basing that strictly on previous experience rather than proof that
28:30
Speaker 1: this is what will happen. So we can't prove that
28:34
Speaker 1: hitting that cue ball will make this eight ball go
28:37
Speaker 1: in a certain direction ahead of time. And so therefore
28:39
Speaker 1: we've come up with this thing called causing effect, which
28:42
Speaker 1: basically serves as a stop gap between what we think
28:46
Speaker 1: will happen and the phenomenon we've already observed. Like in
28:49
Speaker 1: other words, you can't say for certain the sun is
28:51
Speaker 1: gonna come up tomorrow just because it's already come up
28:54
Speaker 1: so many days before. And the reason why it's because
28:57
Speaker 1: we don't have empirical proof. And I liked him for that.
29:00
Speaker 1: So you don't think the sun will come up tomorrow necessarily.
29:02
Speaker 1: That's it's not the point that I think it won't
29:06
Speaker 1: come up tomorrow It's what human was saying, is we
29:09
Speaker 1: we we can't prove that it will. We we you
29:12
Speaker 1: can't prove that it will just based on previous experience. Well,
29:17
Speaker 1: Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were on board that train
29:20
Speaker 1: to a certain degree. Uh. And we mentioned earlier that
29:23
Speaker 1: most of the establishment was pretty threatened by most of
29:27
Speaker 1: these ideas and the people in power, but not everybody. Uh.
29:30
Speaker 1: Some people wanted to get on the Enlightenment train because
29:34
Speaker 1: I think it was progressive and maybe made them seem
29:39
Speaker 1: um open to ideas and modern perhaps um. Empress of Russia,
29:44
Speaker 1: Catherine the Great was one of those who had a
29:47
Speaker 1: lot of dealings with the philosophs, and Frederick the Great
29:51
Speaker 1: of Prussia even had Voltaire over and said, you know what,
29:54
Speaker 1: once you come and live here, and he did, yeah,
29:57
Speaker 1: he said for free, and he said for free. He said, okay,
30:02
Speaker 1: I'm just trying to think of Prussian money, but I
30:04
Speaker 1: have no idea. The prawlers the approval that's but way better. Uh.
30:10
Speaker 1: It was also happening in Germany, um all over the
30:13
Speaker 1: world with Emmanuel Kant. He was one of the first
30:17
Speaker 1: champions of freedom of the of the press, and his
30:21
Speaker 1: motto is one that I love dare to know. And
30:25
Speaker 1: again he was just challenging people go out there and
30:28
Speaker 1: learn about something and don't just accept, uh what these
30:32
Speaker 1: religious leaders are telling you you have to accept. And actually, um,
30:37
Speaker 1: he came up with this idea called the categorical imperative. Basically,
30:41
Speaker 1: can't gave the world the idea that there is such
30:43
Speaker 1: a thing as moral absolutes right. And I guess he
30:47
Speaker 1: didn't give the world that because the Judeo Christian ethic
30:50
Speaker 1: and most religious ethics say that there is such a
30:53
Speaker 1: thing as right or wrong. And today you have that
30:56
Speaker 1: argument of is there such a thing as moral absolutism
30:59
Speaker 1: or is moral or cultural relativism a thing? Right? That's
31:02
Speaker 1: the argument. That's that one of the arguments that's playing
31:05
Speaker 1: out right now in the intellectual world. Yeah. I just
31:09
Speaker 1: think that's fascinating to it totally is Uh So, what
31:13
Speaker 1: does this all lead to? Eventually, It's gonna lead to war, um,
31:17
Speaker 1: because any time there is well not any time, but
31:20
Speaker 1: a lot of times when there's a uprising of radical thought,
31:24
Speaker 1: people are gonna want to take action. And it happened
31:27
Speaker 1: in the United States by way of the American Revolution
31:30
Speaker 1: and in France by way of the French Revolution, and
31:33
Speaker 1: they had different results, to say the least, they were
31:37
Speaker 1: both experimentations in this new idea of democracy. Yeah, pretty much, um,
31:43
Speaker 1: And yeah, the American one worked out pretty well. Some
31:46
Speaker 1: would say the French one not so much, because apparently
31:50
Speaker 1: robes Pierre, who was the head of the Jacobin party
31:54
Speaker 1: that took power during the French Revolution, robes Pierre was
31:58
Speaker 1: a follower of Rousseau, I remember, was so contributed to
32:01
Speaker 1: the social contract by saying, um, the people will something
32:05
Speaker 1: and then it's up to the people in charge to
32:07
Speaker 1: carry out that will. And so rose Pierre took that
32:09
Speaker 1: to mean that the people stormed the best steal and
32:12
Speaker 1: overthrew the monarchy. And so it was his job as
32:15
Speaker 1: the head of the joke Coben party, which is now
32:16
Speaker 1: empowered to kill everybody who wasn't down with the revolution.
32:21
Speaker 1: And so thousands and thousands of French people lost their
32:24
Speaker 1: lives at the guillotine um as a result during this
32:27
Speaker 1: reign of terror. So some people would say, America, uh,
32:31
Speaker 1: founded itself based on democratic principles, and um, let's not
32:36
Speaker 1: pay attention to some of these darker spots over here
32:39
Speaker 1: and just pay attention to the democratic experiment and it
32:41
Speaker 1: worked out great, and then the French one, there's a revolution.
32:45
Speaker 1: They tried to install democratic ideals and thousands of people
32:49
Speaker 1: had their heads chopped off, so it didn't work quite
32:52
Speaker 1: as well well. And some people say that effectively killed
32:55
Speaker 1: the Age of Enlightenment as we know it. The French
32:57
Speaker 1: Revolution because the chaos and violence erupted was in certain
33:03
Speaker 1: circles blamed on the Enlightenment and proof that we can't
33:05
Speaker 1: self govern and these are radical ideas and that's why
33:08
Speaker 1: we got stomped on. Um. Have you ever heard the
33:11
Speaker 1: theory that the French Revolution was due to moldy bread? No? Uh,
33:16
Speaker 1: there's one theory that people got ahold of bad bread
33:21
Speaker 1: poisoning and basically we're tripping on acid. On July fourteen nine,
33:26
Speaker 1: when they decided to storm the Best Deal, that was
33:29
Speaker 1: one of the explanations for the sale and witchcraft childs crazy.
33:33
Speaker 1: I hadn't heard that, so they were like, let's it's
33:36
Speaker 1: go time, so let's get this party started. But like
33:41
Speaker 1: I said, some people say that ended the Age of
33:43
Speaker 1: Enlightenment as we know it. Uh. Romanticism was soon ushered
33:47
Speaker 1: in and was way more appealing to the common folk,
33:52
Speaker 1: um than this weird radical thoughts that we're going on before, well,
33:57
Speaker 1: it was Romanticism was the first time people questioned the
34:01
Speaker 1: idea on a large scale that maybe the rationalism of
34:08
Speaker 1: the humanism of the Enlightenment went too far in the
34:11
Speaker 1: other direction, Like sure, maybe we were way too religious
34:15
Speaker 1: and the religious organizations had way too much power, but
34:18
Speaker 1: we swung way over here, and just rationalism had this
34:22
Speaker 1: idea too, and it became dogmatic in and of its
34:25
Speaker 1: own right. And so this is we still never really
34:28
Speaker 1: figured out if how to how to fine tune it enough,
34:32
Speaker 1: and that's what we're still figuring out right now. A
34:35
Speaker 1: lot of people say, um, the Enlightenment the idea that
34:41
Speaker 1: you're that the course of humanity is always towards civilization
34:46
Speaker 1: and rational thought, and that any culture that's not there
34:49
Speaker 1: is inferior to a culture that does think rationally. So
34:54
Speaker 1: that means that colonialism and imperialism was supported by Enlightenment thought,
34:59
Speaker 1: which is a huge Like the Enlightenment it's not supposed
35:02
Speaker 1: to be about that's supposed to be about good things
35:04
Speaker 1: and freedom and all that, but it also uh supported colonialism.
35:09
Speaker 1: That was a huge that's people are arguing about that
35:12
Speaker 1: right now too. Yeah, let's go conquer these people and
35:14
Speaker 1: make them modern and bring them into today's world exactly.
35:18
Speaker 1: So there there's another article I want to recommend. It's
35:21
Speaker 1: called um the Trouble with the Enlightenment. It's by a
35:24
Speaker 1: guy named Ali Cussin. It's on Prospect magazine. Awesome, awesome
35:28
Speaker 1: article about this that's just he basically reviews a couple
35:31
Speaker 1: of books, one one by Jonathan Israel, who I mentioned earlier,
35:35
Speaker 1: where he basically says, like, forget the philosophics, you gotta
35:41
Speaker 1: look at um Baruch Spinoza, who was a Dutch philosopher
35:45
Speaker 1: from I think the seventeenth century. He was the one
35:47
Speaker 1: who came up with the Enlightenment ideas, and had we
35:50
Speaker 1: followed his Enlightenment ideas, there wouldn't have been any governments now,
35:54
Speaker 1: or that there wouldn't be any religion whatsoever. He came
35:57
Speaker 1: up with the real revolutionary Enlightenment, and what we got,
36:01
Speaker 1: what we think of as the Enlightenment, was a watered down,
36:03
Speaker 1: moderate version that was changed. Sure, there was tons of change,
36:07
Speaker 1: but it was still palatable to the elite that the
36:11
Speaker 1: people could still be governed easily even in these new
36:14
Speaker 1: democratic experiments and stuff like that. There's a lot of
36:17
Speaker 1: people who take issue with his book, but it's um
36:20
Speaker 1: pretty interesting to discuss it Democratic Enlightenment. I think he's
36:27
Speaker 1: the one who wrote that several thousand page trilogy. And
36:31
Speaker 1: then there's another guy in a historian named Anthony Pageant.
36:34
Speaker 1: He believes um that the Enlightenment project is still going
36:37
Speaker 1: on and basically that as long as there's religion in
36:39
Speaker 1: the world, the Enlightenment won't be fulfilled entirely, which is
36:44
Speaker 1: again it's it's like this this idea that rationalism has
36:49
Speaker 1: become dogmatic, and if you don't, if you're not just
36:52
Speaker 1: strictly rational, if you hold any kind of what could
36:55
Speaker 1: be considered irrational or superstitious belief, you're acting irrationally. You're
36:59
Speaker 1: not thinking correctly, and therefore you have to be converted,
37:03
Speaker 1: which is just as dogmatic. Yeah, lots going on right now,
37:08
Speaker 1: huge time of change. And also go read The Dark
37:11
Speaker 1: Age myth and Atheist Reviews God's Philosophers by Tim O'Neil
37:16
Speaker 1: on Strange Notions dot com. Tip O'Neil, Tim O'Neal, And uh,
37:21
Speaker 1: I think that's about it. Huh, that is it for me?
37:23
Speaker 1: If you want to learn more about the Enlightnment, go
37:25
Speaker 1: check out those three articles, or check out and check
37:28
Speaker 1: out how the Enlightenment worked, and by typing that in
37:31
Speaker 1: the search part, how stuff works. And now it's time
37:34
Speaker 1: for listener mail. I'm gonna call this mad Cow theory
37:39
Speaker 1: from Seattle. Hey, guys, just listen to your podcast on
37:42
Speaker 1: fatal familial insomnia. In it, you mentioned the late eighteenth
37:45
Speaker 1: century cases in Venice and then wondered about the unrelated
37:49
Speaker 1: cases and what they were eating. This made me finally
37:52
Speaker 1: sit down and write my first email. For years, I've
37:54
Speaker 1: had a theory about prion disease and matt cow and
37:57
Speaker 1: specific years ago, I was watching a program on Egyptian mummies.
38:01
Speaker 1: They talked about how mummification may have started out with
38:04
Speaker 1: the Pharaoh, but the practice eventually made it down to
38:09
Speaker 1: uh call it budget mummification. They talked about how in
38:12
Speaker 1: the late eighteenth nineteen century crypts of these early mummies
38:17
Speaker 1: they would be ground up and sold as fertilizer, specifically
38:20
Speaker 1: in England. Sometime later, when I learned about prions and
38:23
Speaker 1: how nearly indestructible they were, I wondered, could ground up
38:27
Speaker 1: mummies have been used to fertilize the field. Then a
38:30
Speaker 1: cow comes along and eats grass but has been contaminated
38:33
Speaker 1: with prions, leading to mad cow disease. The human eats
38:36
Speaker 1: the mad cow's brain gets quit spelt yakups. Uh. So
38:41
Speaker 1: I've always wondered it, could never figure out if you
38:43
Speaker 1: could prove it or disprove it. If see if j
38:45
Speaker 1: was a real mummy's curse of desecrated Egyptian corpses, and
38:51
Speaker 1: that is Darren Gray in Seattle, and man, I just
38:54
Speaker 1: like that kind of speaking of radical thought. I had
38:59
Speaker 1: not heard that one. Darren's having it. Well, it's Darren's own. Uh,
39:04
Speaker 1: nice going, Darren, Yeah. Uh, if you have anything to
39:09
Speaker 1: say about that, anybody else we would like to hear
39:11
Speaker 1: from you. Can you prove or disprove that Kritchfield yakubs
39:18
Speaker 1: disease is a mommy's curse. You can tweet to us
39:21
Speaker 1: at s Y s K podcast. You can join us
39:23
Speaker 1: on Facebook dot com slash stuff you Should Know. You
39:26
Speaker 1: can send us an email which seems appropriate to stuff
39:29
Speaker 1: podcast at how Stuff Works dot com and join us
39:32
Speaker 1: at at home on the web Stuff you Should Know
39:34
Speaker 1: dot com for more on this and thousands of other
39:42
Speaker 1: topics Is that how stuff works? Dot com