Interview: Ted McCormick on Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment
My latest guest on the History for Atheists video channel is Associate Professor Ted McCormick. Ted is a specialist in intellectual history and the history of science at Concordia University in Canada. He examines the intersections between science, technology, economy and empire in the early modern era.
Recently, he has taken an interest in how the concept of “the Enlightenment” has been taken up as something of an ideological cause by some popular writers. In particular he has critiqued the way the Enlightenment has been portrayed by Steven Pinker in his books The Better Angels of Our Nature and, particularly, his more recent work Enlightenment Now which Pinker has subtitled “The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress”. As a historian of the Enlightenment, Ted has serious problems with the way Pinker – a non-historian – characterizes the Enlightenment and the rhetorical purposes to which he puts his version of history.
For those who prefer the audio version, the Podcast edition is now up on Buzzsprout or available on most podcast platforms. Or you can listen to it on the History for Atheists podcast page.
Ted has also been kind enough to provide us with a selected reading list on the Enlightenment:
“The best current overview that combines accessibility with discussions of academic historiography is Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment , 4th ed. (Cambridge, 2019).
A readable synthesis emphasizing the role of sociability and the transnational nature of Enlightenment is Margaret C. Jacob, The Secular Enlightenment (Princeton, 2019).
A learned discussion of some of the ambiguities of the Enlightenment as an object of study and commentary from Kant’s day to the present is Vincenzo Ferrone (trans. Elisabetta Tarantino), The Enlightenment: History of an Idea – Updated Edition (Princeton, 2015).
Judith Zinsser’s Emilie Du Chatelet: Daring Genius of the Enlightenment (Penguin, 2006) is an engaging biography of a key figure that illuminates the status and gender politics of the philosophes’ world.
Jessica Riskin’s Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (Chicago, 2002) does a great deal to undermine the idea of a simple scientific rationalism, while David Sorkin’s The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna (Princeton, 2008) complicates the idea of Enlightenment as a secularizing movement.”
23 thoughts on “Interview: Ted McCormick on Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment”
Why do you think these academics don’t come across the good stuff on these topics?
They’re readily available, are they not?
I can understand the non-academics running to the popular stuff that is inaccurate, but surely those immersed in the academic world would have some inkling as to what sources to trust and might at least ask the expert on their faculty which books would be best to read on a topic when they venture out of their field of expertise?
If you’re talking about Pinker, the issue is not his access to relevant good scholarship or even his capacity to research (though perhaps a bit of the latter) – it’s his biases. If you start with your conclusions and then go looking for material to back it up, the result will usually be bad.
Tim
I thought this might interest you. Pinker is to be on the faculty of “A new university devotes itself to seeking truth.” https://www.city-journal.org/university-of-austin-takes-on-higher-ed
Yes, and it’s getting mercilessly lampooned on Twitter.
Not sure which is getting lampooned pinker or the school. I don’t use Twitter.
To be charitable, any new school has an uphill battle some of which will only be realized if its graduates are high caliberand if it can convince ppl that it will still exist to graduate students and so on. This puts any school in a bind for faculty and students
Unfortunately, I’m unfamiliar with some of the names listed and only passingly familiar with the others. I only really know Pinker from your discussion. He strikes me as a bit of a risk for a school that would need to establish a
solid reputation. Here’s to hoping he wont be teaching the Enlightenment!
Either way it’s too early to tell if it will become a Liberty University or something truly stellar.
The lampooning is over the fact that this fledgling university is being billed as free from the stifling political biases that supposedly cripple “free thought” at other universities, yet is being established as an overtly political exercise by people who have some very clear political biases of their own.
> these academics don’t come across the good stuff on these topics?
They might. But then you will probably never hear about them! Public intellectuals have plenty of bad incentives.
TGGP listed a couple of them: https://scholars-stage.org/public-intellectuals-have-short-shelf-lives-but-why/
I really enjoyed this interview. Have you read Jonathan Israel’s books Radical Enlightenment and The Enlightenment that Failed? If so, do you recommend them? I’ve taken a look at the reviews on Amazon and it seems that the latter book begins with the “rediscovery” of Lucretius DRN, which led scientists to think that God didn’t oversee every natural phenomena and there existed immanent natural laws and therefore they could do without any deity. Ofc late medieval natural philosophers did exactly that (methodological naturalism without philosophical naturalism) and focused on secondary causes leaving primary causes to theologians (often the same people). Newton’s idea that God had to regularly and periodically “fix” his clock was pretty weird and therefore criticized by Leibniz. Anyway, I got the impression that Israel considers the decisive factors that led to Enlightenment, science unrestrained by religion dogmatism and radical anti-theism. Ofc the Amazon reviews can be misleading like that on Gingerich’s book on Copernicus. So, if you’ve read Israel, what are your opinions on his books?
As I made clear in the video, I haven’t done much reeding specifically on the Enlightenment, which is why I invited Ted to discuss Pinker’s book. So no, I haven’t read Israel’s book. If what you say reflects his argument though, it sounds highly implausible. There is no evidence that the rediscovery of Lucretius’ had the effect described. And there is extensive evidence, dating to centuries before the Enlightenment, that it was the idea that God worked through natural laws which could be discoverable by rational inquiry that underpinned the scientific revolution. This is why, well into the nineteenth century, most early scientists were religious people or even clergy. Science didn’t begin decouple from theological perspectives until centuries after the Enlightenment. So if that’s a summary of his book, it sounds like he is wrong.
“until centuries after the Enlightenment”
It looks like Enlightenment has become as vague a term as Renaissance. Back in the daysI learned that the Enlightenment peaked in the second half of the 18th Century and ended in the first half of the 19th. “Centuries” being plural it refers to two and usually more. So this expression is a logical impossibility right now – October 2021 is just slightly more than two centuries after the end of it.
Decoupling science from theology actually began before Enlightenment, the unfairly unknown Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens being an example. Of course he was a christian (so IDiots claim him to be one of them) but it’s more accurate to say that his theological beliefs were compatible with his scientific conclusions. And why shouldn’t they in the 17th Century.
It should be noted that most proponents of the 18th Century Enlightenment were christians. They are largely responsible for the decoupling you mentioned. So the entire idea of setting up Enlightenment against christianity is nothing but modern (New Atheist) propaganda.
Tim is probably right in considering changes in say cultural, science beliefs, to be, often, slightly more incremental than many have thought. As some note, science had long been granted some independence from theology, for many centuries before the Enlightenment. God works through Nature say; though in ways not perfectly clear.
But if there are continuities, there are probably still some abrupt changes.
Particularly, astronomy and geology and biology and so forth, eventually began to rather obviously conflict with, or to supplant, Biblical accounts of particularly, the origin and age of the universe; and the things in our universe. And it could be argued that the at-times anti-Biblical Enlightenment, had allowed moderns, to consider these rather radical possibilities, more freely.
As with punctuated equilibrium in paleontology, it depends on what you mean by ‘abrupt’. Plus, geology, biology and astronomy were not in lock step. Geologists came up with a very, very old Earth before Darwin began his exploration of evolution which was built on his understanding the Earth was very old. Astronomy, AFAIK, only came on the scene after the discovery of radiation supplied a means by which the Earth could be hundreds of millions of years old or older without having cooled into stasis. Astronomy only seems to have come into it with Hubble’s discovery that the Universe is running away from us.
M
Hi Tim, as I had some spare time in the last few days after a busy period, out of curiosity I took a look at Israel’s books previews on Google books, to ascertain whether he really claims that the rediscovery of Lucretius led to the Enlightenment as I’ve read on those reviews. Since his books are extremely long the previews are substantial as well. So, in “The Enlightenment that Failed”, chapter 3 “From Radical Renaissance [a label I admittedly had never heard about before] to Radical Enlightenment”, Israel writes about the rediscovery of the DRN by Poggio Bracciolini and the debate “about Epicurus’ worldview and moral system that gradually developed into a wider intellectual ferment of profound significance for the Renaissance era”. Then there were some statements that made me raise my eyebrows. He writes : “… in 1473, for the first time, [the DRN] was printed. Incospicuous to begin with, this Epicurean underground showed signs of spreading and becoming more entrenched during the late fifteenth century, prompting the Church’s ban on the Epicurean and Averroistic philosophies for denying the immortality of the soul and postulating the immortality of the world, in 1513. From 1515, De Rerum Natura ceased to be printed in Italy. In 1517, a papal synod condemned Lucretius as profoundly dangerous and contrary to Christian teaching and faith, and from then on, *though not officially placed on the papal Index until 1559*, the text’s use was strictly forbidden in Florentine schools”. Now, I didn’t know about the 1513 ban and the 1517 I think refers to the conclusion of the Latheran council under Leo X. Amongst other things, the council condemned the denying of the immortality of the soul and the affirmation of the Averroistic unity of intellect: but after a brief searching, I found the text of the condemnation and it says that school teachers can talk about these philosophical ideas to their pupils, provived they give a confutation of them. It didn’t mention Lucretius at all. I really don’t understand why the DRN stopped being printed in Italy and not in the other Catholic countries – in 1515 the Reformation had yet to begin. And also the reason why it was forbidden in Florentine schools… this implies that in other Italian schools this prohibition wasn’t even enforced, doesn’t it? Why… it isn’t explained. They seem just statements put together and are confusing. I’m not doubting them: but the reader is left confused. The really strange statement is that the DNR was not placed on the papal Index until 1559, which implies that it was placed on it in that year. But the 1559 Index (the Pauline Index) was the first papal Index of Prohibited books, so that *until* doesn’t make sense. That’s what I thought before I remembered that there had been a previous Roman index (the indexes of Venice, Milan, Parma and universities excluded): the 1557 Index. This one, though, was never published or at least not promulgated (correct me if I’m wrong), or in any case was totally replaced by the Pauline Index. Unfortunately, I was incapable to find the 1559 index, which is weird since I remember it was available online. Anyway, I managed to find the 1569 edition of the Tridentine Index, which had replaced the Pauline for good. There’s no trace of Lucretius there. I was willing to give the benefit of the doubt and suppose that either *until* or *1559* (instead of, say, 1595 – the Clementine Index) is a typo in the Google books preview. But I read the 1596 edition of the Clementine Index, and still no trace of the DNR. So, in the worst scenario, Lucretius remained on the Index for ten years (1559-1569). Actually, in 1718, for what I think the first time, Lucretius was kinda placed there- I say kinda because it was an Italian vulgarization by materialist physician and poet Alessandro Marchetti. The second and last appearance (Dec 1779) is in a work of Abbot Raffaele Pastore “La filosofia naturale di Tito Lucrezio Caro e confutazione del suo deismo e materialismo etc” (The natural philosophy of Titus Lucretius Carus and a confutation of his deism and materialism) – an Anti-Lucretian work! These two works remained in the Index until 1900. So, this leads me to think that Israel is wrong. Obviously, I can also be wrong. Anyway, aside from the banning question, Israel surely thinks that the recovery of Lucretius, together with other Greek authors (Lucian, Sextus Empiricus, Diogenes Laertius – which apparently for some reason hadn’t had any intellectual impact on the Byzantines) was a fundamental factor that led to the Enlightenment. (The sentence “Lucretius built a bridge between Hellenistic Greece and the eighteenth century that materially contributed to overturning the premises of the ancien régime” is pretty clear on that.) Israel though acknowledges that it was not enough: Epicureanism was elitist and didn’t have that “republican activism” of the Spinozism; and Epicureans lacked the curiosity to find the scientific truth, eg whether the Sun was big as the astronomers said or broad as a thumb as it appeared – they contented themselves with knowing it was not divine. Hence the “random multiple explanations” thing that was ridiculed by their ancient opponents and by the late Abraham Wasserstein. So Israel talks about the Radical Reformation (Socinians and anti-trinitarians in general) and then the political and socio-economic condition of the Dutch Republic. He does this because he had previously been criticized for presenting Spinoza coming out with radical Enlightenment ideas out of a vacuum (see Margaret C. Jacob’s 2003 review of Radical Enlightenment, in The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 75, No.2, pp: 387-89). In another book of the series Israel writes about the possible causes of the Enlightenment in these terms: “There were two categories of causes that can be usefully classified as intellectual-scientific, on the one hand, and socio-cultural on the other. The first group were essentially factors of destabilization undermining long-accepted scientific, theological and philosophical premisses. An obvious strand here was Copernicus’ heliocentrism and the researches of Galileo rejecting all previously accepted notions about *the relationship of the earth to the sun and other planets* and changing the ways nature itself was conceived and science pursued.” Now I certainly accept that the Scientific revolution must have had some significant influence on the Enlightenment; but the statement about “the relationship of the earth to the sun and other planets” makes me think that Israel believes to the myth that geocentrism represented an exaltation of the place of the man in the universe, and that heliocentrism was the first blow to man’s ego, (Freudianally speaking). I mean, I don’t know what else could Israel mean by that, even if he’s not explicit. Thony once wrote an article in his blog about the Copernican shock, judiciously concluding that… there was no shock. Galileo is also the only scientist before Descartes that Israel mentions in the pages of the previews (together with Copernicus above), so Thony can be happy also about this. Israel continues: “But there were other major destabilizing initiatives such as the Renaissance’s recovery of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, especially the rediscovery of ancient scepticism which eventually introduced systematic doubt in every area of argument and belief…”. “Another strand was the tension between philosophical reason and theology associated with the advance of Western Averroism in the later Middle Ages and the inability of Aquinas’ powerful synthesis of reason and faith to effect a fully satisfactory reconciliation”. There was indeed an epistemological debate in the XIV cent., but I don’t see how it could’ve been a cause of tension between reason and faith, not even Ockhamism. A personal opinion though. Israel also puts the rise of the literary movement of “libertinage érudit” as both a cause and symptom in the intellectual-scientific category. Israel then writes: “Among the socio-cultural and political causes of the Enlightenment the most crucial was the stalemate that ended the Wars of Religion and untidy compromises embodied in the Peace of Westphalia… God must be on one side or the other, men assumed, so how could the outcome of the struggle be absolute deadlock and inconclusive? The psychological shock of such a result was tremendous…”. While this could seem reasonable, it’s just an assumption of Israel’s. It’s unsourced, and until I read some writings of the period supporting this, I’m not going to be convinced. However, the necessity to accommodate for pluralism of religion and to (relatively) tolerate this right (the Roi Soleil excluded) appears reasonable. Israel puts also the “unprecedented expansion of the urban contexts” in this second category. If a reviewer, Johnson Kent Wright, is to be trusted, “That is the last we hear of any of these [factors].” There are also two other things I read that I didn’t like. The first one: “If philosophy itself was as old as pre-classical Greece- or older- it had assuredly been marginal to the life of society since the advent of the Christian empire, from the time of Constantine the Great onwards.” Now I had the same reaction to this as that of Carrier to Ehrman’s inaccurate reference to Pliny’s letters to Trajan in his “Did Jesus exist?”. Now, certainly not in the Eastern part of the empire. Then I realised that Israel must have been referring to the West where the Enlightenment later happened. In this case, though, the time of Constantine would be even late: I can’t literally think to any non-Christian philosopher of Roman traditional culture and born in the Pars Occidentalis after 200 AD (except for Julian, and maybe Macrobius if he was pagan). But I really doubt Christianity has anything to do with this (how many Christians were there in the West around Cyprian’s death?); more with the fact the in the 3rd cent. Western higher education focused almost exclusively on subjects for political and administrative careers, leaving aside literature and philosophy. Note that Israel puts also science under the label “philosophy”, and stresses the modesty of the “hadmaiden” metaphor. I agree that philosophy of law, politics and economics had certainly to take into account religious and ethical concern, to a higher or lesser degree (how much theology is there in Oresme’s De moneta?), but that wouldn’t be the case for natural philosophy (except when dealing with conterfactuals, after 1277). As you know much better than me, in his debate with Andrew Cunningham, Grant examined 310 medieval scientific quaestiones and found out that 71% of them didn’t mention God, faith or religion at all. Grant arrived to affirm: “We may rightly conclude that whereas theology was dependent on natural philosophy, natural philosophy was largely independent of theology.” The last of Israel’s statements I’m going to criticize is that the new science and philosophy were bound to stifle religiousity in scientists. He gives three examples: Nicholas Steno “eventually concluded that faith and science cannot be easily or satisfactorily reconciled and abandoned completely the latter to champion the former”; Lorenzo Magalotti, who “was not less tormented… despite every effort to keep up his Catholic allegiance, deep down the new [scientific] ideas had stifled his faith…”; and Pascal, who resolved his internal struggle by “separating reality into totally separate compartments”, and reproached Descartes for having God “merely press a button ‘pour mettre le monde en mouvement; après cela, il n’a plus que faire de Dieu'”. Wait, but wasn’t the idea of a geometer-clock maker God that put the world on movement with a slap to the planets, devising secondary causes for natural phenomena so that he didn’t have to interve every time, an exquisitely medieval idea? It maybe reached far back in time to Philoponus (I’ll call Richard Sorabji for a confirm /s). So why didn’t this lead philosophers to consider “God’s hypothesis” superfluous already back then? Plus, Israel implies that these three personal experiences are exemplary for all the post- 1600 period. He could’ve also thrown in Swedenborg (well, he was total nuts though). Scientists like van Swammerdam and van Leeuwenhoek, in the same period of Pascal and Magalotti, vibrantly offered their microscopical discoveries to the Lord, and thought that the contrivance of such minuscule creatures was enough a proof of design to make those infidels shut up their mouths. I could also cite John Ray, Euler, Gauss, Faraday, Boscovic… and these are not minor figures at all. As for philosophy, Bernard Bolzano would be a little known but great example. Israel also vehemently rejects the notion of a plurality of national Enlightenments, proposing instead a binary division in Radical Enlightenment and moderate enlightenment. So Ted McCormick wouldn’t agree with him on this. It’s certainly very bold to make judgements about Israel’s mammoth series from only 40 pages, but I think I’ll keep away from it (thinking about it, I would’ve loved if Ted made a comment on Israel in the interview). I’ll read Sorkin instead. Sorry for the incredibly long ramble, just thought it could be useful if anyone came here wondering about Israel’s thesis like I did (I also saw a comment under the yt video referring to Israel).
“Galileo is also the only scientist before Descartes that Israel mentions in the pages of the previews”
That’s woefully inadequate and not only because Israel neglects Brahe, Stevin and Kepler. Physics was not the only branche of science practised in the 16th Century.
And not because one may dispute that Descartes was an important scientist either. Disputing that math is a science will be for another time. Instead I’ll give just two examples (there are many more): Italian mathematicians found out how to solve cubic and quartic equations – quite a breakthrough.
“the stalemate that ended the Wars of Religion and untidy compromises embodied in the Peace of Westphalia”
What this has to do with Enlightenment escapes me. Israel knows a few things about the Dutch Republic, so he must be aware of the Dutch-English naval wars and the Dutch-French land wars of the 17th Century. I don’t even get what he means with “stalemate”.
“how could the outcome of the struggle be absolute deadlock and inconclusive?”
Asking the wrong questions never leads to correct answers. Stadholder Willem III (in England of WIlliam and Mary fame) and king Louis XIV clearly thought otherwise.
“the new science and philosophy were bound to stifle religiousity in scientists”
On this one Israel is correct in the end, but it would take a few centuries – in fact it only took off seriously after Enlightenment ended. Those three examples (I could add the Dutch 17th Century philosopher Adriaan Koerbagh) were exceptions. The rule is that scientists even during Enlightenment had no problem combining christianity with their work at all.
Many scientists did not. But the rationalist philosophers or philosophes, were a different story.
And surely rationality and Reason ultimately have some relation to science; the same as Math ?
In the philosophes, we begin to see a rather abrupt and confrontational break beginning.
I’d like to clarify the point about Galileo. What had struck me of the passage that I quoted (in the list of causes of the Enlightenment) was the *relationship of the earth to the sun and other planets* thing, that made me think that Israel believes in the myth of “heliocentrism demoting men’s place in the universe and dealing a first blow to their egotism etc” (among the scholars that have recently debunked this persistent myth I can mention Rémi Brague, Jean-François Stoffel and Dennis Danielson, but see also Arthur O. Lovejoy, C. S. Lewis and others). I said that Galileo with Copernicus was the only scientist mentioned in the pages of the Google preview, but I should’ve said the preview of *that* book (if I’m correct, Democratic Enlightenment), while in the first book of Israel’s series (Radical Enlightenment) there is a chapter (Spinoza, Science and the Scientists) that I could read where other scientists were mentioned. The chapters deals entirely Spinoza’s views on science and with the relationship between Spinoza and other scientists that he knew personally or by correspondence (Oldenburg, De Volder, Hudde, Tschirnaus). It doesn’t go into technical details, it doesn’t talk about seventeenth century science. Just Spinoza’s epistemology and the different views on scientific methodology between him and Huygens and then Boyle. If I had to criticize something in this chapter, I’d choose two statements. “[Spinoza] provides the first germ of the idea that the creation and evolution of living and inanimate bodies is a natural process inherent in the properties of nature itself”. First my boot (except maybe for the “evolution” part). Tim has many times mentioned William of Conches naturalistic or however semi-naturalistic, and generally speaking the so-called “Chartrian” cosmology/gony (Thierry of Chartres another prominent one, even if still in the “Genesis framework,” of hexamerical literature); and others followed in their footsteps without people like Bernard of Clairvaux or William of St. Thierry opposing them. Rational seeds, potentiality or “the natures with which He endowed His creatures” (and the whole creation), -more or less “natural process inherent in the properties of nature”- certainly preceded Spinoza. Kircher proposed a chemical account of creation plus some theories on speciation through hybridation or acclimatation (though still believing in the historicity of Noah’s Ark). Outside Christianity, proto-evolutionary thought can be found in works of Islamic scholars such as Ibn al-Khaldun. If, of course, Israel had added the words “non-theistic”, he would’ve been right. He just assumes that it is superfluous to specify it, but unfortunately for him Darwin was still far ahead in the future. Another statement that I didn’t find quite correct was that the mechanistic view of nature commenced with Galileo and Descartes. But it really commenced in the fourteenth century. The Ancient world, with all his Hellenistic age automata, never reached a mechanicist worldview (see Sylvia Berryman “Ancient Automata and Mechanical Explanation”), but we can see it in germ in the Late Middle Ages (as with many other things). It came to fruition with Descartes, that’s what Israel was supposed to write. However, this can seem nitpicking, but it’s just that from many other statements on different subjects it seems to me that he believes in a traditional intellectual history of “Age of Faith and Theology” abruptly followed by “Age of Reason and Science”. He’s a serious scholar and writes in a cautious and non-sensationalistic way, it’s just heavily implied, and that’s deeply irritating. Without talking of other articles of his and replies to critics when he says things like (I’m not quoting ofc) “there’s no need to put economics into the account of the Enlightenment because it’s a Marxist historiography thing”, “it’s ideas that change socio-economic conditions, not the opposite” and obsessively criticize Post-Modernists (like in his article “Which Enlightenment?) (criticizing post-modern philosophers is always a good thing, but who else wrote a book about the Enlightenment and has an obsession with Postmodernism? Hint: Tim and Ted McCormick talked about him in the interview). Now I repeat that to judge a 3000 pages book series from the very little I was able to read it’s bold and I could in fact be totally wrong about Israel. Anyway, in the time I would spent reading his heptalogy I could read instead read the entire bibliography of Carlton Mellick III (um, well, at least, a large part of it), so I’m going to give a look at the suggested books in this article rather than Israel’s mammoth.
Wouldn’t you consider the French Revolution to be a rather abrupt and dramatic event? A very dramatic Revolution had followed Voltaire; separating Church and State, etc..
Such things are generally thought to be a major part of the revolutions of 1776, and 1789. Which we call “revolutions”, and not smooth incremental events.
To be sure, even in Revolutions, there are still incremental subtleties and hesitations, and so forth.
But in the end? A revolution is … a revolution. An at-least somewhat abrupt and dramatic change.
.
@Nigel:
“In the philosophes, we begin to see a rather abrupt and confrontational break beginning.”
??
Are you thinking of eg Wilhelm Leibnitz, who independently of Newton developed differential and integral calculus? And also developed the best possible world argument for god?
Perhaps the empiricist George Berkeley, bishop of Cloyne?
Immanuel Kant then, that ultra-rationalist, who advocated the moral argument for god?
Like I wrote, if there was a break with god it happened after Enlightenment ended (and oh irony, the deeply religious Søren Kierkegaard was instrumental in this).
“Wouldn’t you consider the French Revolution to be a rather abrupt and dramatic event?”
For France, yes. For the rest of the world less so. What’s more, many ideas promoted during the FR are rooted in the American Revolution (see the American DOI) and the Dutch Act of Abjuration (1581). The idea of Separation of State and Church goes back to the Middle Ages.
Abrupt, dramatic yes – a break with old ideas no – instead a triumph of one idea over another in a centuries old contest. What’s more, it was not even a definite triumph. After 1815 many European countries maintained state religions; Norway (not exactly a backward country) only abandoned it in 2016.
Such ideas were part of revolutions, sure, but but that’s not nearly enough to justify the conclusion that there was a break in ideas. Not in philosophy, not in science, not in politics. The big picture shows gradual development.
I think you should learn something ToN stresses over and over again: before arriving at a conclusion consider all relevant facts. You neglect way too many. That makes you an easy target.
Yes of course; as historians and methodological naturalists say, “nothing comes from nothing”. Almost anything – and arguably everything – that happens, is thanks to earlier pre-existing conditions.
But? Certain old ideas do often suddenly, abruptly Triumph. Over many other competing conditions.
I agree that say, the French Revolution comes out of the American; 1789 comes from 1776. And Democracy goes much further back. But? A rather tight nexus, or precipitating event, can be found in 1776-89; both called “democratic” “revolutions” moreover. By historians.
And particularly, the Separation of Church and State. Or say, Religion and Reason. Or Faith vs Science.
Which in fact, was being in some ways practiced even by partly rational medieval philosophers. Albeit very imperfectly.
But? 1776-89 crystalizes a particular trend, to a very, very high degree. In a partiular area. And eventually? That seeds … increasingly, the rest of the world. Suggesting that these crystalline, precipitating moments, are extremely important; and far-reaching in their effects.
And that they are in fact, as historians say, “pivotal”; and “revolutions”.
All of human history at least begins to pivot, reverse direction, from these critical moments.
@Nigel
Well, the American and French Revolutions were obviously abrupt and dramatic, in so much as they were political revolutions, stemming from contingent causes not “older” than a few decades (for the French Revolution, for example, economic crisis and famine, despite Israel insisting it was just the “Enlightenment”). In regards to the ideas that were proposed during those revolutions, they didn’t pop up abruptly, nor were they eighteenth or late sixteenth century ideas in general. The separation of state and church was a medieval idea, that in turn was born out of political upheavals, economic transformations and philosophical discussions. In Antiquity, there wasn’t a “Church”, but religion (a term that had different meaning back then) couldn’t be separated from common civic life. A Roman emperors was also pontifex maximus (or a pharaoh, or God’s vicar on Earth, in the Eastern provinces in which the absolute monarch had for centuries been accepted as chosen by God or even divine himself), and sacrifices were required to demonstrate the allegiance to the State. In the Late Medieval period (from thirteen century on, jurists or philosophers like Marsilius of Padua and William of Ockham, to name the most famous but absolutely not the only ones) the separation of state/secular life and church/spiritual life was advanced and elaborated in political philosophy. This continued in the Early Modern Period: it is little known, but Roberto Bellarmino (yes, that one) authored a work in which he argued that, while the Catholic Church must have the absolute power in the spiritual sphere, she had to refrain from interfering in the secular sphere and shouldn’t have all the temporal power she had at the time; and that the power of the rulers doesn’t stem from God but the people he rules. The work was placed in an edition of the Index (never promulgated) but not in the following ones. Other similar works proposing separation of secular/religious spheres and denying the divine right of kings in favour of people’s “power” were the De Optimo Senatore by Polish Bishop Laurentius Goślinski and De Legibus by Francisco Suarez. We’re still in sixteenth- very early seventeenth century, not Enlightenment. Far from ideas born from Zeus’ head in the 1789. This is just the separation of state and church that you cited and the criticism of divine right of kings. I (or better, people more knowledgeable than me) can do the same for all Enlightenment ideas in law, natural rights, science etc. Even the idea of natural rights can be found in germ in the benighted Late Middle Ages, particularly in the works of political theorists and glossatores (see Brian Tierney’s works, and Tierney, while Catholic, was not exactly an apologist – he ended up in a quarrel with a Cardinal for defying the traditional teaching of the Church in a book about the historical origins of papal infallibility). Richard Tuck as well, forty years ago, when discussing about the traditionally recognized fathers of natural rights in the seventeenth century, traced the root of their ideas to the Middle Ages, especially Gerson. Anyway, political revolutions by definition happen “abruptly”, but ideas have usually a long development.
Yes, many ideas have a long gestation. But these particular ideas did not begin to very systematically and fully and programmatically usurp kings, and begin to rule most of the world, until 1776.
Many decades ago, I was one of the first contemporaries to strongly and continually stress that simple dramatic dates, dates of wars, were often naively simple, in light of the incrementalism evident in say, intellectual or cultural history. However?
That view now apparently having been evidently now firmly established as serenely self assured dogma? I feel it is time for a critical review. Suggesting that, after the first too-simple emphasis on single dates, what I would call the “new incrementalism”, now has its own excesses. And now loquaciously neglects to adequately credit some brief, but genuinely dramatic and pivotal, decisive – abruptly effective – moments.
Great interview which covers, among other points, the consequences of celebrities untrained in history using it for polemical purposes ( Pinker, Dawkins, Hitchens, Nixey, Obama) . Add to that the further damage done when the jobs of reviewing or reporting on these books are assigned to journalists equally untrained in history. The blind lauding the blind.
In a way, there is a silver lining in all of this – Pinker’s book demonstrates that not everyone can do history, and why we need professional historians. Because so often you’ll hear people, precisely the kind of people Pinker is trying to pander to – overzealous promoters of STEM who think all our economic and social problems would be solved if everyone did degrees in bioengineering, geochemistry, nuclear physics or whatever, and populist anti-intellectual types – claim that doing a degree in history (or any other humanities subject for that matter) is pointless because you can “learn all you need about those subjects just by going to a library.”
Pinker demonstrates precisely what you get with that. With no training in historical theories, methods and argumentation and next to no knowledge of sources and historiography, he goes down to the metaphorical library, prunes a random assortment of stuff off the shelf that supports his pre-formed conclusions, uses all the data in a totally uncritical and decontextualised fashion and then tries to join the dots to form a coherent picture with no sense of how historical causation actually works. “Enlightenment Now” is what you get from this, and its a strong demonstration of why history writing needs to be done by historians. I don’t want to be an elitist snob/ gatekeeper and saying that only people with a PhD in the subject or who teach/ research history at an academic institution should be taken seriously, but in order to write respectable history you at least need to be familiar with the tools of the trade, and plenty of non-specialists/ lay people are and do a really good job of it.
Yet the problem with Pinker is that he’s one of these people who tries to have it both ways. On the one hand he says “this isn’t a history book. I’m not a historian. I’m not really interested in intellectual movements in eighteenth century Europe. Therefore you can’t hold me accountable on the historical side of things.” Yet on the other hand, he also claims he’s elucidating higher truths about the human past that historians are wilfully in denial about/ trying to conceal from the public out of ideological bias and obscurantism. In effect, Steven Pinker is playing a not too dissimilar historical game from Dan Brown, ancient astronauts enthusiasts, proponents of the Phantom Time hypothesis or this total fruitcake who thinks ancient Rome never existed and was made up by the Spanish Inquisition in the 1500s (https://www.insider.com/history-anthropology-tiktoker-ancient-rome-not-real-backlash-viral-2021-12) – in other words, he’s talking like a conspiracy theorist.