Chapter 11            Part D

         It is interesting to note at least once in this book the intricacies of the socio-historical process. Even societies which seems to have reached equilibrium always contain a few individuals who restlessly test their society’s accepted worldview, values, and behavioral morés. These people and their disciples are often the young, which tells us that adolescent revolt plays a vital role in the evolution of society.

   However, what is more important to understand is that many people in the rest of society see these new thinkers and their followers as delinquents, and only a few see them as great men. What is even more important to see is that the numbers involved on each side really don't matter. What does matter is whether the new thinkers’ ideas attract at least a few followers and whether the ideas work, which is to say, whether the followers then live better than the rest of the society.

     A society, like any living thing, needs to be opportunistic, constantly testing and searching for ways to grow, even though many of its citizens may bitterly resent the means by which it does so and may do all within their power to quell the process. Often they can, but not always. For Western society, until the more effective features of its Classical values were integrated with its more respectful, humane Christian ones, Europeans just did not love or support thinkers with ideas and mores that focused on the life of this material world before death. 

    

      Philosophers, scientists, inventors, and entrepreneurs are, by their very nature, eccentric. They don't support the status quo, they threaten it. But the dreamers are the ones who move the rest of us forward in a timely way toward newer, better ways of doing things. They only really flourish in a society that is not just tolerant of, but proud of, its eccentrics. In a truly dynamic society, cleverness is melded with kindness. In short, European culture needed a thousand years to even begin to meld all of its values into a single smoothly functioning whole or as the saying goes to “get its act together".

 A society, to survive, must use resources and grow in the times when it has opportunity to do so or it will lose out later when events in the physical universe grow harsher or when the competition gets fiercer. How do new ways of doing things become established ways of doing things in a society? One means is by war, as has been mentioned, but the peaceful mechanism can work, and it is seen when the people who use the new ways are allowed to do so mostly undisturbed, and then they just live better.

    Then, in a society that values tolerance, other citizens will by their own choice begin to try out and take up the new ways. Gradually, more and more of them will choose not to be left behind in what is obviously becoming a stagnating cultural backwater. This market-driven way is the way of peaceful evolution. Worldwide, we have taken a long time to reach it, but we are, as a species, almost there.

             Renaissance pocket watch 

        Thus, a more tolerant Renaissance society rose out of the new ideas that melded respect for the individual and even exaltation in the creative potential of the human condition with an equal respect for the inherent worth and rights of other citizens. Science requires both if it is to flourish.

   In Renaissance thinking, a man could be patriotic, moral, and independent. The ideas of Greece and Rome and of Christianity could be blended in a way that was not impracticable or inconsistent. The new system of ideas worked, and it was exciting because it was empowering.

replica of Gutenberg's printing press

   Even though the growing focus on the rights of the individual produced some excesses (such as the Thirty Years War, the English Civil War, etc.), these were gradually tamed. When the dust settled, one thing was perfectly clear: there would be no going back to the medieval ways of thinking. The way forward was to live by reason, or more accurately, to live by the most reasonable interpretations of the new, scientific, physical-world-centered world view that people of the new era could articulate. In this frame of mind, the West settled into the era called the “Enlightenment”.

Duc d'Enghien at the Battle of Rocroi, Thirty Years War 

        To most of the people alive at the time, it wasn’t at all obvious that the Church's traditional views were deficient in any way, or that the views of the scientists like Galileo were better ones. But decades of experience in which people who lived by the ways of individualism, science, and inductive reasoning outperformed those who lived by the old ways (based on blind obedience to authorities whose authority came from texts that were not to be analyzed or criticized) gradually won over more of the citizens in every new generation.                               

      William Harvey

       Some of the new beliefs were anathema to medieval types of thinkers – but they worked. They enabled this "enlightened" sub-culture within society to solve problems (e.g. navigate the oceans, cure diseases, predict eclipses, boost production in industry and agriculture, and especially make deadlier and deadlier weapons). This new sub-culture within Europe's nations was therefore able to increase its community of followers and its range of influence at a rate that the old church and aristocracy could not match. As was noted above, Science keeps getting new followers because the miracles of Science can be replicated over and over again; Science works.

Antoine Lavoisier with his wife Marie

  

      This scientific way of thinking was further employed by geniuses like Newton, Harvey, Faraday, Lavoisier, etc. Its gurus piled up successes in the hard market of physical results. Of the people who resisted the new way, some were converted by reason, some went down in military defeats. Some worked out compromises, and some merely got old and died, still resisting the new ways and preaching the old ones to smaller and smaller audiences. The Enlightenment, as it is now called, had taken over.

       Other societies which also operated under world views that portrayed humans as having little ability to control the events of life are to be found in all countries and in all eras of history, but we don’t need to discuss them all. The point is that the advancing worldview by the late nineteenth and earlier twentieth century, around the planet, was the one which we call “scientific”, the Enlightenment view.