Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Age of Enlightenment

Starting point is 00:00:00 For centuries, political authority, religious doctrine, and inherited tradition shaped how most Europeans understood the world. Then a generation of writers, scientists, and philosophers began insisting that every institution, belief, and law should be subjected to reason and evidence. Their ideas challenged kings, churches, and ancient social hierarchies, helping inspire revolutions, and reshape modern government, science, and human rights. Learn more about the Enlightenment. and the age of reason on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. This episode is sponsored by What Could Go Right. The news has a way of making it feel like everything is getting worse, but what if that isn't the whole story?

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Starting point is 00:02:44 And this is a very difficult subject to pack into an episode because the Enlightenment was a very broad intellectual movement spanning more than a century, from the late 17th century to the end of the 18th century. And those dates are fuzzy. The French Revolution is usually given as the event that ended the Enlightenment, but things certainly did continue outside of France. The Enlightenment was not a single philosophy or organized movement. Its leading figures frequently disagreed about religion, government, economic,

Starting point is 00:03:14 morality, and human nature. Some supported constitutional monarchies, while others favored republicanism. Some Enlightenment thinkers were Christians, some were deists, some were skeptics, and a small number were actually atheists. But what united them was less a common program than a shared belief that institutions and ideas should be examined rather than accepted merely because they were ancient or authoritative. Historians often subdivide the Enlightenment by country, Scotland, England, France, and Germany all had their own movements and thinkers. It grew out of several earlier developments. The Renaissance had revived interest in classical learning and human achievement.

Starting point is 00:03:56 The Protestant Reformation weakened the religious unity of Western Europe and encouraged debate over conscious and authority. The Thirty Years' War shook continental Europe to its core and showed a desperate need for political change. The scientific revolution demonstrated that observation, mathematics, and experimentation could overturn traditional explanations of the natural world. The Enlightenment, therefore, did not suddenly appear. It emerged from a long process in which Europeans became increasingly willing to question whether inherited authorities had the final word on nature, religion, politics, or morality. One of the focal points of the

Starting point is 00:04:37 development of Enlightenment ideas occurred in the salons of France. These salons were aristocrat aristocratic living rooms where wealthy elites hosted prominent thinkers to muse on the key issues of the day. The absolute monarchs of the time, whose authority rested on the principle of the divine right of kings, were highly intolerant of the publication of criticism of the institutions under their control. Salons provided a space for Enlightenment thinkers to engage in discussion and intellectual inquiry away from the prying eyes of the state. One such Frenchman who chose to challenge institutions head on was Francois Marie Arouet, better known to history as Voltaire. In his early years as a social critic, Voltaire suffered arrest, imprisonment, and exile.

Starting point is 00:05:24 His conflicts with religious and political authorities in France led him to venerate the English system, which he had visited in the 1720s. In 1733, he wrote a series of essays called Letters Concerning the English Nation. In this, Voltaire praised England for tolerating religious descent, including deist ideas. Deism was the belief that God had created the natural universe according to a series of laws that humans could discover. Deas compared God to a watchmaker who created the universe, set its natural laws in motion, and then allowed it to operate without further divine intervention. Religious tolerance was an essential component of the Enlightenment, as the movement fundamentally changed how European intellectuals viewed the relationship

Starting point is 00:06:10 with faith. Voltaire also admired the British political system which divided power between the Crown and Parliament. Some of Voltaire's most powerful words were reserved for two British intellectual giants, Isaac Newton and John Locke. On Newton's significance, Voltaire wrote, quote, Not long ago, a distinguished company were discussing the trite and frivolous question, who was the greatest man, Caesar, Alexander, Tamer Lane, or Cromwell. Someone answered that, without doubt it was Isaac Newton. And rightly, for it is to him who masters our minds by the force of truth, and not those who enslave them by violence, that we owe our reverence." End quote. Voltaire and other philosophers of the time believe that what Newton had really discovered

Starting point is 00:06:56 was a worldview that emphasized the pursuit of truth through reason. Before the scientific revolution, calamities like natural disasters, droughts and plagues had ravaged Europe for centuries, and for generations, religious orthodoxy explained these crises away, leaving no room for dissent. By encouraging skepticism, Newton's emphasis on reason directly threatened that absolutist order. While Newton was not a political philosopher, other thinkers who studied and admired his work were focused on politics. One such philosopher, deeply admired again by Voltaire, was the English philosopher John Locke. Locke rejected any defense of absolutist authority, or the divine right of kings,

Starting point is 00:07:39 instead offering a new approach in his landmark work to treatises of government. In it, Locke insisted that government's only purpose was the protection of life, liberty, and property. According to Locke, authority and a state rested in the will of the people, and governments were established to protect

Starting point is 00:07:57 the people's natural rights. Locke's ideas were a revolution in political thought, disrupting the conventions of the day and challenging the expansive powers that Europeans' monarchs had seized in the wake of the Reformation and the Thirty Years' War. Locke's ideas served as an inspiration to Enlightenment thinkers in North America, who used his theories as a justification for the American Revolution. And the correlation between the two is obvious in the Revolution's foundational document,

Starting point is 00:08:27 the Declaration of Independence, which mirrors John Locke's writings. One of the philosophers' most profoundly influenced by Locke was the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau believed that the freedom touted by Locke had not been achieved, as he noted, quote, man is born free and everywhere he is in chains. Rousseau built on Locke's foundation by reimagining how individual rights should be protected. Fearing that isolated individual rights were too difficult to maintain and that the rights of a wealthy few would inevitably gain precedent over everyone else, Rousseau advocated for what he called the general will.

Starting point is 00:09:07 He argued that instead of holding on to those rights individually, citizens should surrender them to the entire community. In doing so, the community would live under laws to which they all consented, thereby making them free and equal. Under the framework of the general will, law and political processes would be established for the good of the community. Other Enlightenment philosophers aim to reform the political centralization of Europe's powerful monarchies. Baron de Montesquieu, a French political theorist, proposed

Starting point is 00:09:37 radical idea of separating the political powers governing a state into distinct branches of government. Montesquieu offered a solution to the growing power of kings by advocating that their grip on absolute power should be broken into separate political bodies, a legislature to make laws, an executive to enforce them, and a court system to interpret them. The system would only work if each branch had the power to use checks and balances to limit the others. skepticism about whether laws were being applied equally to all was also common among Enlightenment philosophers. In France, before the French Revolution, the legal system was an amalgamation of competing legal traditions that provided protections for the wealthy

Starting point is 00:10:21 and denied them to members of the French lower class, known as the third estate. These legal inequalities were not unique to France. In Italy, Chesire-Bekaria offered a solution to the legal challenges of the era. Becker Rea's book, On Crimes and Punishment, offered a simple truth. The legal system should not benefit certain people differently than others. It should be uniform and based on the principles laid forth by Locke and Rousseau. He claimed it is impossible to maintain a social contract,

Starting point is 00:10:52 inalienable rights, or a general will, if legal protections are applied inconsistently and vary based on the social class of the person they're applied to. As a solution, Zechariah advocated rewriting legal codes from Latin into more common languages that were understandable and applicable to all, regardless of class. He also proposed eliminating the death penalty and torture as a means of punishment, while also advocating for punishments that were proportionate to the crime committed. The Enlightenment was not just about changing political systems.

Starting point is 00:11:25 The philosophers of the Enlightenment were also largely advocates of the abolition of slavery. Following the publication of former slave Ulaude Aquiano's autobiography in 1789, the brutal reality of the global slave trade was shown to a wide audience. His vivid descriptions expose not only the systematic abuse on Caribbean and American plantations, but also the horrors of the middle passage between Africa and the Western Hemisphere. Armed with this powerful testimony, Enlightenment philosophers like the Marquis de Condorcet began calling for an immediate end to slavery. arguing that the institution was a violation of human rights and a crime. He wrote, quote, reducing a man to slavery, buying him, selling him, keeping him in servitude, these are truly crimes and crimes worse than theft, end quote.

Starting point is 00:12:15 The focus on equality didn't end with the institution of slavery. Mary Wallstone-Craft and Olaunt de Grouge emerged as powerful voices advocating for the extension of human rights to women. women had long been relegated to the private sphere, and their rights in the public domain were severely limited compared to men. Wollstonecraft merely argued for equality, as she noted, I don't wish for them to have power over men, but over themselves. The philosophers of the Enlightenment also offered goals for overhauling education and improving

Starting point is 00:12:47 human understanding. John Locke, in his landmark essay concerning human understanding, argued that human beings are born tabula rasa, or abe. blank slate. In Locke's view, filling this blank slate with rational experiences and a robust education was absolutely vital for the success and progress of any community. Locke and others condemned the traditional educational experiences of the 17th and 18th centuries. At the time, traditional schools catered exclusively to the socially privileged. Those lucky enough to attend were tasked with rope memorization of Latin texts, thereby impeding curiosity and reason.

Starting point is 00:13:26 Not surprisingly, Locke and others advocated for an educational system founded on the cultivation of reason. One path to cultivating reason was to expose people to as much knowledge as possible. Denis Diderot composed a comprehensive catalog of human understanding in a volume he called The Encyclopedia, a topic that I covered in a previous episode. Diderot's goals in gathering all this knowledge were quite clear. He wrote, quote, Indeed, the purpose of an encyclopedia is to close. collect knowledge disseminated around the globe, to set forth its general system to the men with whom

Starting point is 00:14:01 we live, and to transmit it to those who will come after us, so that the work of preceding centuries will not become useless to the centuries to come, and so that our offspring, becoming better instructed, will at the same time become more virtuous and happy, and that we should not die without having rendered a service to the human race in the future years to come." End quote. De Deereau's purpose in publishing the encyclopedia was to implement Locke's vision of education. An education should not be based on learning in ancient language, but rather on exposing students to ideas and curiosities that enable them to reason and understand.

Starting point is 00:14:39 The Age of Enlightenment was a powerful, continent-wide movement in which Europeans built on the principles of science and reason to achieve greatness across all areas of human endeavor. Most of the modern world we live in today is due to the Enlightenment. Almost every country is either built on Enlightenment principles or at least gives lip service to it. Our technical world is based on the scientific revolution that came out of the Enlightenment. And in fact, this podcast can be considered a result of the Enlightenment, since Curiosity really wasn't much of a virtue before then. And that makes you and me the grandchildren of an intellectual,

Starting point is 00:15:21 movement that started over 300 years ago. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Austin Otkin and Cameron Kiefer. Research in writing for this episode was provided by Joel Hermanson. My big thanks go to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon. Your support helps make this podcast possible. I also want to remind everyone about the community groups on Facebook and Discord, as this is where everything happens outside of the podcast.

Starting point is 00:15:51 As always, if you leave a review on any of the major podcast apps, you too can have it run in the show.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Age of Enlightenment

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