Chapter 16          Worldviews Since The Renaissance

 

                     

   

                                                  Renaissance-era watch

                            (credit: Melanchthon's watch, Wikimedia Commons)

 

Renaissance society arose out of ideas that melded respect for the individual and exaltation in his creative potential with respect for abstract thinking and respect for practical results. Science requires all these if it is to flourish.

The resulting hybrid, Renaissance culture, valued people who could be pious, moral, and contemplative while also being creative, practical, and original all at the same time. They called such a person a "Renaissance man”.  The ideas of Greece, Rome, and Christianity had blended in a way that was coherent and effective. The new worldview worked. It got results. New printing presses made books affordable, and Renaissance 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 sought change fought those who sought stability. 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 works of Reason’s darling child, Science. 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 didn’t seem that the Church’s old, 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 outperformed those who lived in the old way 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 belief systems 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. The new subculture was able to increase its followers at a rate the old aristocracy and Church could neither match nor quell, 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. These made the new model very persuasive.

 

                                                                  

                    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. 

By the mid-1600s, the Enlightenment, as it is now called, had taken over.

Other societies that operated under similar world views can be found in all eras and all nations, but we don’t need to discuss them all. The point is that by the late nineteenth century, the memes and technologies of the Enlightenment worldview had spread to every corner of the Earth. This view was mainly built on the ways of thinking we call scientific. People even came to believe that, with time and Reason, humans could solve anything; Reason would keep producing waves of progress, and thus, 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, a new social ecosystem. 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 reaffirmed and enhanced the value of the individual when the Enlightenment had gone too far toward the value of duty. When it wandered too far away from Christian values, the Enlightenment sought to be a Greek kind of reasonable and Roman kind of practical. Some Enlightenment thinkers (especially Kant) had made duty – to one’s family or state – into a prime value, one that should guide all human actions. Romanticism asserted passionately that the individual had a greater duty to his own soul and his own feelings: I have dreams, ideas, and feelings that are uniquely mine, and I have a right to feel, pursue, and develop them. (The symbols are clearly seen in Les Misérables, in which Jean Valjean is clearly a Romantic hero and Javert embodies duty.)

Also note 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 individualists 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. They had many intellectual and artistic skills, but very few Roman practical skills. In a short while, the revolution fell into increasing disorder and internal wrangling. Then, as their state began to unravel, they simply traded one autocrat for another, the Bourbons for Napoleon.  He knew how to organize, delegate, and get things done. In the view of cultural evolution, their struggle to evolve a system of government that could balance the most profound traits in human nature – the yearning for freedom and the yearning for security – just took a while. Much longer than one generation. 

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 royalty idea was ousted for good. Democracy evolved – erratically and by pain, but it did arrive 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 also, Romanticism attempted to integrate Enlightenment ideals of reason and order with Romantic ideals that asserted the value of every 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. Even Enlightenment thinkers assumed Europeans had built superior societies. They were “bringing civilization” to the other "races” of the world. It was obvious to Reason. Therefore, short-term excesses by European traders, priests, or armies could be overlooked. The long-term effect would be for the "primitive” tribes’ benefit. Thus, colonialism was completely acceptable in the “Enlightened” view. 

 

                          

           

                                                   Stu-mick-o-sucks, Blood tribe chief

                                       (credit: George Catlin, via Wikimedia Commons)     

 

But for Romantic thinkers (Rousseau), 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 views were extremes that lacked nuance and/or commitment to looking at evidence in the real world. Neither offered many ideas that eased the actual interfacing of native and European cultures, and the subsequent suffering of the natives.

For example, North American native peoples needed the smallpox vaccine long before they began to get it. Smallpox was ravaging their tribes, killing as much as 90% in one generation. Smallpox was preventable from 1796 on, but among native tribes epidemics continued to occur long after the vaccine had been found. Neither Romantic nor Enlightenment values moved white leaders toward vaccination of native people until generations after 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, trades, etc. Romantics wanted to leave them as they were on their own lands 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, yet they kept coming into contact with them, sometimes due to the whites’ movements, sometimes their own. The results were neither Enlightened nor Romantic, i.e. neither efficient nor compassionate.   

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, ecological concepts were known to indigenous people long before Euro-based people began to grasp them. It was an area in which the indigenous people's wisdom might have helped European fishers, farmers (who should not shoot hawks and owls, for example), and ranchers – if they’d been willing to listen.¹

The sensible, moral realist view would have told us that each society had things to learn from the other. 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 can learn from and profit by.