CHAPTER THREE: Louis XIV Knows Weeds

continued from 11/06/05

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto speaks of the "retreat from truth" that unfolds in the eighteenth century. Certainly many conservatives in the United States today rail against what they call the cult of relativism. Other critics have referred to the "totalitarian tendencies lurking in the Enlightenment." Of course the established order in the eighteenth century also leveled harsh criticism against the philosophes as well.

The philosophes, a French word but used to refer to all the European intellectuals who called for a "new" perception, wanted to shake up society. They declared that science was the way to understand the natural world; man did not need paternal authority or control. It was time they declared that humanity think for itself. They advocated freedom of speech, the press, and above all, personal liberty. They pushed for judicial and prison reform. Their dislike of organized religion ranged from mocking amusement to outright loathing. This was the intellectual stew of the eighteenth century, which set in motion the ideas, the political beliefs, and the actions of the nineteenth and twenty century.

Fernandez-Armesto cites Rene Descartes, although living in the seventeenth century, as the likely starting point for the mortal wounding of truth. Descartes of I think, therefore I am fame unintentionally, according to Armesto, ended up not locating truth but creating a sort of religion of the individual.

From there, the philosophers of the eighteenth century proved the existence of themselves and little more. This worked well enough for a while, i.e. striving toward perfection and progress and pursuing happiness, but it came to a bloody and violent end in the streets of Paris during the French revolution, and made it virtually impossible for the United States to remain aloof from the outside world.

The views of Felipe Fernandez-Armesto and others can be debated and discussed among historians, philosophers, and anyone interested in ideas, but one point he makes is worth keeping in mind for later on: It is that without some notion of truth people are more easily responsive and likely accepting of lies.


Science was placed on a pedestal in the eighteenth century by many of its most enthusiastic supporters; unfairly as they eventually discovered. But for a short while it was probably one of the most open and receptive periods in history for scientific endeavors.

If we consider the inventions related to agriculture alone, the list is impressive. In addition to Jethro Tull's seed drilling machine, mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, there was beet sugar extraction, the threshing machine, the cotton gin, the winnowing machine, and the steam pump.

In 1749 David Hartley published Observations on Man, His frame, His Duty, and His Expectations. This was the beginning of modern psychology. Names like Voltaire, Hume, Adam Smith, Montesquieu appeared in this century, contributing to the modern beginnings of sociology, economics, political philosophy, and social criticism. And of course there was Jeremy Bentham, the founder of Utilitarianism.

The greatest good for the greatest number ended up being the common motto of Utilitarianism, a movement that captures the spirit of the eighteenth century as well as any other. Bentham was interested in the perfectibility of both man and society, but he had little interest in vague ideas or concepts that seemed to arrive from nowhere. He was never a big supporter of Rousseau. His accomplishments are too many to list here, but through his efforts improvements were made in the prison system, the legal system (getting rid of usury laws and imprisonment for debt), public health, education and others.

Science meant freeing the mind from what was thought of as religious superstition. The view from the pulpit, divine inspiration, revelation, the "truth" of the book were now placed separate and apart from what was referred to as science. The response that "God works in mysterious ways" was simply not enough. This is not to suggest that all people who believed in science in the eighteenth century were also atheists or agnostics, only that they were untroubled about keeping the two kingdoms separate.

Although part of the late seventeenth century, a man like Isaac Newton was the personification of what a scientist was supposed to be about. (Newton was also devoutly religious and a believer in alchemy.) It was Newton who said the universe could be understood by careful analysis, observation and, most importantly, through mathematics. There was a certain logic therefore that Deism would establish itself and become popular among many of the educated in both Europe and America.

Deism was a religious philosophy; it accepted God as the creator of a remarkable universe, who set the workings of earth in motion like a "clockmaker," to use a common metaphor of the period. Religious truth could be discovered by the powers of reason many deists believed. The deists tended to downplay the "miracles" in the bible as well as literal interpretations. Both Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin subscribed to the ideas of the deists.

The late nineteenth century retreated from a lot of the curiosity and the interst expressed in the eighteenth century about other cultures and civilizations. The West developed a general belief that the rest of the world had contributed virtually nothing to scientific knowledge and was incapable of conducting scientific research, at least by the standards thought acceptable in Europe and America. It was the "uniqueness" of ancient Greece that made the West "superior" claimed these same people--and made science possible.

Today, it sometimes seems that the pendulum may have swung back to another extreme. I recall reading somewhere, for example, that Greece had supposedly "stolen" Egypt's culture! Did the Egyptians have it hidden in a pyramid? Idiocy is idiocy is idiocy.

The West should be forever grateful that during Europe's Dark Age the Arabs preserved the ideas and discoveries of antiquity and went beyond many of them. The Chinese invented, among other things, the magnetic compass, gunpowder, as well as paper and printmaking. The Indians may have had a good idea that the orbit of planets was elliptical possibly a thousand years before Kepler. Perhaps even more significant the Indians might be the ones who discovered zero, no minor achievement in human history. The Mayans in Central America had a sophisticated understanding of the movement of the stars and the planets. And Babylon had some remarkable mathematical achievements long before the Greeks contributed anything. There are numerous examples throughout history.

The science writer Dick Teresi has stated that discovery, investigation, and science were occurring in a number of countries well before Greece ever appeared on the scene; it continued well after classical civilization collapsed in the West in the fifth century A.D. He also believes that science is still science, regardless of the motivations or reasons for pursuing it. In this he is responding to those western critics who say non-western science was not "pure." While much of science was pursued for religious purposes or to assure an emperor or a pharaoh that all was right with his or her place in the universe, it still resulted in some remarkable discoveries and achievements.

However, what happened in Europe, and America, in the eighteenth century was--if not unique--extraordinary, in my opinion. What the West did have was an idea, which they could call upon. This was an underpinning that allowed science to move ahead and withstand assault from those who regarded it with unmistakable hostility. And this idea, as far as I can tell, came from only one country, Greece. Whether or not you choose to call Greece part of the West, a Mediterranean culture, or place it in the North Africa sphere, it is where something quite unusual occurred.
to be continued....