The Evolution of Thought

For countless millennia humankind lived in a mythological world.  We thought about the origins of things with a mixture of dream and fantasy.  Shamanism, the most primitive religion, was invented as a means of gaining some influence over the forces of a mysterious and frightening world.  When different shamans or, later, different religions came into conflict, the winner was the one whose advocates won the physical battle, because that victory supposedly demonstrated their power to influence real events.  That’s how Christianity came to rule the Roman Empire. 



Copernicus



Afterward, the European Mind languished in the Christian torpor for over twelve hundred years.  Then, suddenly, the roof fell in.  Less than half a millennium ago, in 1548, arguably the most important year in human history so far, an amazing thing happened.  A couple of men somehow gained the courage to think about the nature of themselves and the world in a more disciplined way.  Without preconception, they tried to look at the physical evidence and draw rational conclusions from it.  These men were Nicolaus Copernicus and Andreas Vesalius.  Their books, respectively, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres and On the Fabric of the Human Body, kicked off the Scientific Revolution.  They were followed by other fearless warriors of truth like Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), and Isaac Newton (1642-1727), who all carried forward the torch of empiricism against Christian opposition.  Descartes (1596-1650), the first philosopher since ancient times to not be a theologian, established skepticism as the intellectual starting point, and the scientific method in his Discourse on the Method (1637).

This thought revolution was epochal and continues to be a traumatic psychological event as the successive blast waves from it have shaken the Western Mind to its foundations.  It undermined and challenged everything that had been held true to that point. 



Diderot



The Enlightenment is the name we give to the period in the 18^th century when this change in perspective began to percolate through the non-scientific intellectual community in Europe.  By then science had already displayed far more success at predicting the future than religion ever had, and had begun the relentless process of technological innovation that would enable us to manipulate the physical world to an unprecedented degree, and consequently there arose an eagerness to apply it to every aspect of life, including the social, the moral, and the political.  That was largely Denis Diderot’s (1713-1764) project in his Encyclopedia. 

I’ve been reading about the best minds of the Enlightenment.  The more radical members of this movement, those at the cutting edge (Diderot, Baron d’Holbach, Claude Adrien Helvetius, David Hume, Julien Offray de La Mettrie), drew out the scientific approach to its logical conclusions.  Even though they didn’t have the greatest immediate impact, because they were too far ahead of their time, they are the ones who now seem most akin to us.  Better known figures like Rousseau or Voltaire, who had the bigger initial impact, now seem dated, even antiquated.  The radicals saw human beings as basically hedonistic: pursuing pleasure, avoiding pain.  Dismissing metaphysics, they were empirical and utilitarian, and believed in applying reason to the evidence of their senses.  They were pragmatic materialists, proto-evolutionists.  They viewed mind and body as two aspects of the same entity, and death as the end of consciousness.  They were atheists, even though in their day its open profession was a capital offence.  



Holbach



Patterns of thought are parts of culture that take a long time to percolate through the population.  An idea starts with an individual and slowly spreads.  Given the tremendous intervening success of science, one might have expected that in the 250 years since these intrepid thinkers blazed the trail, the ideas they pioneered would have permeated society and become the dominant way of thinking.  But that hasn’t happened, at least not in the United States, not yet, because against this progressive line of thought a powerful regressive pressure has arisen.  In the Enlightenment these people were excited about the triumphs of science and rushed to apply the scientific method to all aspects of life.  Now it is the reverse.  Many people are shell-shocked and frightened by the pace of technological change and seek to limit the scope of science as much as possible, and pull the wool of antique mythologies and superstitions over their heads.  We might call this the Benightenment, the flight from the light that illumines too much. 

Technology has advanced by leaps and bounds since the time of the philosophes, but opposed to it we have the blowback of fundamentalism, the resentment of its relentless pressure on the solace of the superstitious.  Many people are still having great difficulty making the transition to the new way of thinking, even though the process of waking up from the old way began 463 years ago, because in terms of the grand tides of culture, this is a relatively short time, less than 7 lifetimes.  Most people are still living in a pre-Cartesian, mythological mental world.  Ordinary people accept the boons of science as if they were magically generated, rejecting the materialist worldview that makes them possible.  The most likely to be atheists are the highly educated, who have studied the intellectual history of the past few centuries and, of course, scientists, who have had their whole lives to get used to the idea.  Meanwhile most people (some polls say as many as 90% in the US) still have their heads buried in the sand, their fingers in their ears, and are singing “La la la la la la!” as loudly as they can.  How curious that people can drive cars, fly in planes, talk on phones, watch TV, surf the internet, get their MRIs or CT scans, accept all these fruits of a materialist world view, and yet continue to profess belief in a preposterous, primitive mythology without a shred of evidence to support it.  But it just goes to show how slowly some things change, and how reluctant people are to give up old sources of comfort.



Mettrie



A kindly grandfather running the show, the survival of the ego after death, these are comforts people desperately wish to be true.  But as my mother used to say, “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.”  Wishing doesn’t make it so and, indeed, our longing for the truth of any proposition ought to make us extra-suspicious of it.  The afterlife is a bill of goods the church has sold to buy worldly power, a power it doesn’t deserve.  This snake oil is not going to cure our mortality.  Science tells us that nothing lasts forever.  Stars (including our own sun), galaxies, even the universe itself all have finite life spans, are all mortal.  Chances are our little bodily egos are no exception.  Isn’t it better to accommodate ourselves to the truth, rather than shut our eyes and live in the darkness of a lie?  The sooner we forsake rhis fictitious immortality, the sooner we can fully focus on the practical matter of trying to lengthen our life spans as much as possible.  We're not going back to the dark dream of the Middle Ages, so the regressives' foot-dragging is just wasting time.