Chapter 15          Worldviews Since the Renaissance

                     

   

   Renaissance-era watch (credit: Melanchthon's watch, Wikimedia Commons)

Renaissance society rose out of the ideas that melded respect for the individual, and even exaltation in her/his creative potential, with an equal respect for social order. Science requires both if it is to flourish.

In the Renaissance view, a person could be pious, moral, and contemplative while also being creative, practical, and original at the same time. They called such a person a "Renaissance man”.  The ideas of Greece, Rome, and Christianity blended in a way that was coherent and effective. The new ideas worked. They got results. As the new printing presses made books affordable, the ideas began to spread across Europe.

                                                               

The growing Renaissance focus on the rights of the individual produced some excesses (e.g. the Thirty Years’ War) as those who longed for change fought those who did not. But the excesses were gradually tamed. The melding of ideas and morés reached equilibrium. When the dust settled, one thing was clear: there would be no going back to Medieval ways of thinking. The way forward was to live by Reason, or more accurately, the best insights of Reason’s darling child, Science, and Science’s materialistic worldview. Practical acts done well can glorify God. In this frame of mind, the West settled into the Enlightenment.

   

                                         Battle of Rocroi, Thirty Years War

                      (credit: Augusto Ferrer-Dalmau, via Wikimedia Commons)

To most of the people alive at the time, it wasn’t at all obvious that the Church’s traditional views were deficient, or that the views of scientists like Galileo were better. But experiences in which people who lived by the new ways of Science and Reason outperformed those who lived by the old ways of obedience to authority gradually won over more people in each new generation.

                                      

                 

                                     English scientist/physician William Harvey

                               (credit: Daniel Mytens, via Wikimedia Commons)

Some of the new beliefs were infuriating to Medieval thinkers – but the new beliefs worked. They enabled an “enlightened” subculture within society to navigate oceans, cure diseases, predict eclipses, boost production in industry and agriculture, and make deadlier weapons. This new subculture was able to increase its followers at a rate the old aristocracy and Church couldn’t match, mainly because the miracles of Science can be replicated. Science works, and you can do real-world experiments that prove it works over and over again.

                            

                                                                  

                    Marie and Antoine Lavoisier (credit: J. L. David, via Wikipedia)

This scientific way of thinking was the way of geniuses like Newton, Harvey, Faraday, Lavoisier, and others. They piled up successes in the hard market of practical results. Of those who resisted the new way, some were converted, some went down in military defeats, some worked out compromises, and some simply got old and died, still resisting the new ways and still preaching the old ones to smaller and smaller audiences.

The Enlightenment, as it is now called, had taken over.

Other societies that operated under similar world views can be found in all eras of history and all nations, but we don’t need to discuss them all. The point is that the advancing worldview by the late nineteenth century, everywhere on Earth, was the Enlightenment view. Mainly, built on the ways we call scientific. They believed, with time and rational debate, human minds can solve anything. Reason will keep producing new waves of progress. A Golden Age surely must be coming.

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. I see it as a period of adjustment, of fine tuning a new balance. In the cultural evolution of our species, values and the ways of life they enable keep society evolving into more vigorous versions of itself all the time. The Romantic Age was a period of finding a new balance between values that freed individuals and values that created stability in societies. But there are a couple of especially interesting points to note about the Romantic Age (late 1700s to the mid-1800s).

                           

                        

     “Wanderer Above A Sea Of Fog” (Friedrich)  (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

First, Romanticism affirmed and enhanced the value of the individual when the Enlightenment had gone too far toward the value of duty. Some prominent Enlightenment thinkers (Kant especially) had made duty – to one’s family, city, or state – seem like the prime value, the one that should guide all humans as they chose their actions. Romanticism asserted passionately that the individual had a greater duty to her/his own soul. I have dreams, ideas, and feelings that are uniquely mine, and I have a right to feel, pursue, and develop them.

Note also that, paradoxically, this individualist view can be useful for a whole society when it is spread over millions of citizens and multiple generations. This is because even though most dreamers create little that is of practical use to the larger community, and some even become criminals, a few create brilliant things that pay huge material, political, and artistic dividends. (Steam engines, vaccines, universal suffrage, Impressionism, etc.)

   

                        

                       Engraving of guillotining during the French Revolution 

                           (credit: G. H. Sieveking, via Wikimedia Commons)

Second, however, we should note that as a political philosophy, Romanticism produced 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 a people’s republic, they didn’t know how to administer a large, populous state. In a short while, they fell into disorder and internal wrangling. Then, as their state began to unravel, they simply traded one autocrat for another (Louis XVI for Napoleon). In the moral realist view, their struggle to understand how a system of government that balanced the most profound traits in human nature – the yearning for freedom and the yearning for security – could be created took longer than one generation to evolve.

But the French did begin evolving resolutely toward it. After Napoleon’s fall, a new Bourbon dynasty got control, but the powers of the monarchs were now much more limited, and after more turmoil, the Bourbon gang was ousted altogether. Democracy evolved – in erratic ways and by pain, but it did evolve and get strong; it’s still evolving in France, as is the case in all democratic states.

   

               

                                      Aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg, 1863 

                         (credit: Timothy H. O'Sullivan, via Wikimedia Commons)

In the United States, the idealism of the American version of the Romantic revolt attempted to integrate the Enlightenment ideals of reason and order with Romantic ideals that asserted the value of the individual. The struggle produced excesses in America as well: the genocide of the native people, enslavement of millions of Africans, and, one of History’s worst horrors, the US Civil War.

The example of the indigenous peoples of the "New World" and how they were viewed by Europeans is instructive. For Enlightenment thinkers, Europeans had built superior societies. They were giving “civilization” to the other "races” of the world. Therefore, short-term excesses by European traders or priests or armies could be overlooked. The long-term effect would be for the "primitive” tribes’ benefit. That made it acceptable in the “Enlightened” view. 

                          

            

                                                   Stu-mick-o-sucks, Blood tribe chief

                                       (credit: George Catlin, via Wikimedia Commons)     

But for Romantic thinkers (Rousseau is famous for this idea), the native people of the "New World" were "noble savages", morally superior to the Europeans who were exploiting them. Rousseau argued that Europeans should be seeking to live more like them, close to nature, not trying to make them like Europeans. Both of these views were extremes that lacked nuance and commitment to looking at evidence in the real world. Neither offered any ideas that eased the actual interfacing of the native and European cultures much at all. 

For example, North American native peoples needed vaccines long before they began to get them. European diseases were ravaging their tribes, killing as much as 90% in a generation. Smallpox, especially, was preventable by vaccine from 1796 on, but epidemics continued to occur long after the vaccine had been discovered. Neither Romantic values nor Enlightenment ones moved white leaders toward mass vaccination of the native peoples of the New World until generations after the time when it first could have been done. Enlightenment gurus believed the natives must first come into the white people’s towns and accept the enlightened way of life, farming, learning trades, etc. Romantics wanted to leave them as they were on lands of their own which whites didn’t violate. In practice, neither view helped real people much. Native people didn’t want to adopt the white people’s ways, and yet they kept coming into contact with them, sometimes due to the whites’ movements and sometimes their own. The results were neither rational/Enlightened nor compassionate/Romantic.  

On the other hand, as we are finding out now, the indigenous people really were superior to whites in some ways. For example, the Innu in Alaska knew that when beaver get too plentiful, their dams block salmon from spawning, and then beluga whales that feed on the salmon drop in numbers In other words, ecology was a kind of knowledge known to indigenous people long before Euro-based people ever thought of such a field of knowledge. It was an area in which the indigenous people's wisdom might have helped European fishers, farmers, and ranchers - if they had been willing to listen.¹

The sensible view would have told us that each society had things to learn from the other. That would be the moral realist view. But if it is any consolation, we are beginning to see now that every society that has made it this far in human history has valuable parts in its cultural code, parts that other societies may learn from and profit by.   

America had to undergo some difficult adjustments before it began to integrate the Christian belief in the worth of every individual with the respect for the law that enables individuals to live together in peace. But the slaves were freed, and the government began to compensate the native tribes and take them into the American mainstream. Or rather, to be more accurate, America began moving toward these more balanced ideals with more determination and continues to do so into this era, as do all modern democracies.

Thus, in the larger picture of all these events, the Romantic Age imprinted into the Western value system a deeper respect for the ways of compromise. The “better angels of our natures” that Lincoln spoke of. The result was modern, representative democracy. Its values guide people toward balancing progress with order. They keep democratic countries from devolving into chaos. Our best hope for creating institutions by which people use reason/debate instead of war to find balance in each generation between security-loving conservatism and the passions of the reformers is democracy.

Lesser sideshows in the swirls of human history happen. These are analogous to similar sideshows that have happened in the biological history of this planet. Species and subspecies of animals and plants meet, compete, mingle, and then thrive or die off. So do species of societies. But the largest trends are still clearly discernible. The dinosaurs are long gone, and so are many obsolete societies. New species of societies keep emerging. It is also worth noting that events of this age prove that war is not the only path by which this process can work. During this era, for example, Britain ended slavery in her Empire – without a war.

In a compromise, two opposing parties each give up a bit of what they want in order to get a bit more of what they need. But what happened during the Romantic Age was a melding of two very different ways of life. As conditions changed and old cultural ways became obsolete, a new species of society arose: representative democracy with universal suffrage. And it proved vigorous.

The idea of democracy evolved until real democratic states formed, ones that were built around constitutions and universal suffrage, not titles or traditions. The constitutions stated explicitly that protecting the rights of every citizen is the most important reason for democracy’s existence. This change came about by the hybridization of Christian respect for the value of every human being, Roman respect for order and discipline, and Greek love of abstract thinking: thinking that questions all the forces that be, even those in the physical world.

Representative democracy based on universal suffrage was the goal of the Renaissance and Enlightenment world views when they were applied by human societies to themselves. The Romantic Age simply showed that the adjusting and fine-tuning takes a while. A state that says it values human rights must deliver them. Or die.  

In the meantime, as Romanticism raged on, what of the Enlightenment world view? Inside the realms of Science and Industry, the Enlightenment was still in place and getting stronger. The Romantic revolt left it changed, but invigorated. Science came to be envisioned, by scientists, as the best way to fix society’s flaws. Industry could be managed so that it made plentiful goods in humane ways.

Under the Enlightenment world view, the one of Newton and Laplace, all events were seen as results of previous events that had been their causes. Every single event became, in an inescapable way, like a link in a chain that went back to the start of the universe. The universe was ticking down in a mechanical way, like a giant clock.

While the Romantic revolt ran its radical course, governments, businesses, industries, armies, schools, and nearly all society’s other institutions were still quietly being organized along lines suggested by the Enlightenment world view. The more workable of the Romantic ideals (e.g. relief for the poor, protection of children) were absorbed into a new worldview that kept spreading till it reigned, first in the West, then, gradually, in the world.

   

   

       Crewe locomotive works, England, c. 1890 (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

At this point, it is important to stress that whether or not political correctness approves of the conclusion we are heading toward, it is there to be drawn and therefore should be stated explicitly. The Enlightenment worldview and the social system it spawned got results like no other ever had. European societies that operated under it kept increasing their populations, their economic output, and, more tellingly, their control of the physical resources of the Earth. A steam shovel could outwork a thousand human shovelers.  

But it is also important to stress that the Westernizing process was not just. Western domination of this planet did happen, but in the twenty-first century, in the West, most of us will admit that while it has had good consequences, it has had many evil ones as well.   

   

                                                               

                             Naval gun being installed, New York Navy Yard, 1906

                                               (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

The conclusion to be drawn from all this is that the Enlightenment worldview, with the moral code that attends it, is no longer an adequate code for us to live by. It is ready for an update. In the midst of its successes, it has also produced huge problems such as the oppression of women and minorities, class inequities, wars, colonialism, the proliferation of nuclear arms, and pollution levels that will destroy the Earth’s ecosystems if they’re allowed to continue unchecked. Some problems are out of control. Even more frightening, the Enlightenment worldview appears to have run out of ideas for ways to solve them.

The larger point of this long discussion of the rise of the West is that world views give rise to value systems and value systems give rise to morés. The morés then cluster to form a culture or way of life that has a survival index in the real world. Furthermore, some morés and habits of living, when they come to be believed and practiced by the majority of a society’s citizens, increase that society’s survival odds more than others do. By our morés, and the patterns of behavior they foster, we interface with reality. Then, if the values and morés are tuned to reality in its current form, we thrive.

But I stress again that the world views, values, morés, and behavior patterns that we humans live by do not all, as cultural relativism claims, have equal survival indexes. They also are not part of our way of life because of random events in the world or random impulses in us. In the moral realist view, human values are not shaped by forces humans can’t influence. Instead, we can shape our own values and way of life. In the past, we have not done so very well. But we can learn to do better. To re-write the code that drives our way of life.  

The point of my last two chapters has not been to show that the ways of the West are always the best. What my last two chapters have shown is that, first, beliefs have consequences in the physical world for the folk who live by those beliefs and second, some belief systems produce better results than others.

We needed to understand the mechanism of human cultural evolution in order to move on with our project. We’ve now done that. We’ve shown that human history does have a system to it, and second, that we can intervene in that system and maybe, if we act together with a coherent vision, that of Modern Science, we can learn to direct that system toward maximum health for us all.  

The new worldview Science is offering and the values and morés it fosters are so different from the one out of which the success of the West grew that cultures of the West, as they try to adjust, seem to be verging on self-destruction. The obsolete parts of the Western worldview will be replaced. History says that about every civilization. The difference in our era is that if we work hard to ensure that they are not replaced by others that lead to new forms of injustice, we may move on without causing another Dark Age or worse: our extinction.

With the problems and hazards that we have before us now, there is little hope for our species if we don’t learn to manage us.

Discussing the moral implications of the worldview offered by Science will be the business of my next two chapters. I will present a moral code, and a case for it, that is not as all-encompassing as Hegel’s, but is more useful. The theory of morality presented in this book offers firm principles by which we can design a new society.

   

                 

                                              Karl Popper with Cyril Hoschl (1994)

                                  (credit: Arnošt Pasler, via Wikimedia Commons)

This new theory will not satisfy the demands of the most exacting philosophers, such as, for example, Karl Popper and his disciples.² Popper loved the physical sciences and considered them to be models of what Science should be, but he found Biology disappointing because he felt its foundational theory, the Theory of Evolution, could not be tested in neat, clear ways to see whether it could be falsified. Then, he wrote off the social sciences pretty much completely.

Popper argued only theories that can be tested in ways that risk their being falsified can be called Science. For example, he was deeply impressed by the Theory of Relativity, because it could be tested definitively. If it had failed to predict Eddington’s observations of the stars visible during a solar eclipse, the theory would have been viewed as a failure. But it succeeded brilliantly, and Einstein’s international reputation soared.

Biology is not that neat. The Theory of Evolution can be tested only in ways that make it seem more likely to be true. Bayesian kinds of proofs. In his early work, Popper did not even want to call Biology a science. But gradually, over years, he conceded that some theories which only make probabilistic, Bayesian kinds of predictions, rather than neat, causally-linked ones, can be rigorous enough to qualify as Science. The psychological theories of Adler and the historical ones of Marx were not Science, in his view. But he saw the Theory of Evolution was.³ 

The model of human cultural evolution offered in this book is a corollary of the Theory of Evolution. It can describe for us generally how we should proceed socially if we wish to maximize our odds of surviving. But it can't tell us exactly where we will be in a hundred years. We will have to adjust our best path into the future as the challenges arise. It has always been so.

 
We accept now that the history of life does not proceed by a chain of cause-and-effect steps. Instead, life proceeds forward across time like a river, with many branches and tributaries connecting to the main channel. The difference is that, over time, life flows uphill. It flows against entropy, opportunistically searching for new niches in which new species may take root, adapt, and flourish. Life flows up and into branches, not down and away from them. This is a better metaphor for describing how life works.

Whether a given species will still be around further on in the history of the world is dependent on many factors such as changing climates, mutation rates of other species (especially those that are its predators), its competition, and its food). But an unrelenting drive to live, grow, adapt, and spread is the trait which makes a living thing "alive".

Like all living things, human societies, driven by their cultural codes, also press forward, seeking and exploiting opportunities to grow. A human society's future path can't be neatly predicted in the way that the path of a planet can.

But the general, energetic forward push of life is a given for all life forms. Living things push out into the space about them, adapt, and flourish – or else die out. We humans, with our culture-driven way of evolving, therefore, are destined for space travel and colonizing new planets. It's what we're programmed for, and there is no compelling reason why we can’t do it if we come together as a species.

The entire living community of our planet keeps working relentlessly to expand, as is shown by the fact that the biomass on our planet has been increasing since life began here over three billion years ago. The human branch of this system will be the one that takes our form of carbon-based, oxygen-using life to other worlds -- if we can solve us. If we evolve past our inclination toward war. 

Now let's return to our main project. The model of human cultural evolution presented in the rest of this book won’t meet Popper’s most rigorous demands, but it will do what we need it to do. This model will let us see the outlines of a new Science-based cultural code, a code that would maximize our survival odds.

I will combine the insights of three fields of study to build this new code of right and wrong: the physical sciences, the life sciences, and a new model of human cultural evolution. My goal is to provide an outline of a new moral code that all reasonable people can commit to simply because they can see that it is consistent with all we currently know of our universe and our life in it.

If we are to persuade humanity to move past war, first we must make sense.

Notes

1. Huntington, Henry,“Traditional Ecological Knowledge And Beluga Whales”

Cultural Survival Quarterly Magazine, September, 1998.

2. Karl Popper, “Science: Conjectures and Refutations,” in Martin Curd and J.A. Cover, Philosophy of Science: The Central Issues (New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Co., 1998).

3. Mark Isaak, ed., Index to Creationist Claims, The Talk Origins Archive, 2005.http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CA/CA211_1.html.