Antoine Lavoisier with his wife, Marie

This scientific way of thinking was further employed by geniuses like Isaac Newton, William Harvey, Michael Faraday, Antoine Lavoisier, and others. Its gurus piled up successes in the hard market of physical results. Of those who resisted the new way, some were converted by reason, some went down in military defeats, some worked out compromises, and some just 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 that operated under world views in which humans were thought to have little ability to control the events of life are to be found in all countries and 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 early twentieth centuries, around the planet, was the one we call scientific, the Enlightenment view.

The one significant interruption in the spread of the Enlightenment’s values is the period called the Romantic Age. The meaning of this time is still being debated, but in my model, which sees a kind of cultural evolution in the record of human history, there are only a couple of interesting points to note about the Romantic Age (roughly, the mid-1700s to the mid-1800s).

  

                            Abbey in an Oak Forest (Friedrich); passion and imagination of Romantic Age

First, it reaffirmed and expanded the value of the individual when the Enlightenment had gone too far and made duty—to the family, the group, or the state—seem like the only “reasonable” value, the one that should motivate all humans as they chose their actions. Romanticism asserted forcefully and passionately that the individual had an even greater duty to his own soul. I have dreams, ideas, and feelings that are uniquely mine, and I have a right to them. Paradoxically, this philosophy of individualism can be very useful for a whole society when it is spread over millions of citizens and over decades and generations. This is because even though most of the dreamers produce little that is of any practical use to the larger community and some even become criminals, a few create beautiful, brilliant things that pay huge material, political, and artistic dividends.

 

                                            Drawing of guillotining during the French Revolution

In the second place, however, we should note that as a political philosophy, Romanticism produced some painful excesses. In France, for example, the citizens were indeed passionate about their ideals of liberty, equality, and brotherhood, but once they had overthrown the hereditary kings and nobles and set up an idealistic people’s republic, they didn’t know how to administer a large, populous state. In a short while, they fell into disorder and simply traded one autocrat for another (Louis XVI for Napoleon). Their struggle to reach an enlightened view of the deepest nature of humans, and to understand how a system of government that resonates with humans’ deepest nature might be instituted, took longer than one generation to evolve. But the French did begin evolving resolutely toward it. After Napoleon’s fall, a new Bourbon dynasty was instituted, but the powers of the monarchs were now severely limited, and after some more turmoil, the new Bourbon gang were also ousted. Democracy evolved – in erratic ways and by pain, but it evolved and grew strong, and is still evolving in France, as is the case in all modern states.