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SYSK Selects: How The Enlightenment Works · Stuff You Should Know

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