A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (32 page)

The contrasting economic fortunes of the different parts of Europe were matched by a contrast in intellectual endeavour.

The Renaissance and Reformation had broken upon a world penetrated at every level by superstitious beliefs—beliefs in religious relics and priestly incantations, beliefs in the magic potions and talismans provided by ‘cunning men’, beliefs in diabolical possession and godly exorcism, beliefs in the ability of ‘witches’ to cast deadly spells and of the touch of kings to cure illnesses.
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Such beliefs were not only to be found among the illiterate masses. They were as prevalent among rulers as among peasants. Kings would collect holy relics. Men as diverse as Christopher Columbus, Oliver Cromwell and Isaac Newton took prophecies based on the biblical Book of Revelation seriously. A Cortés or a Pizarro might ascribe victory in battle to divine intervention, and a king (James VI of Scotland, soon to be James I of England) could write a treatise on witchcraft.

Such beliefs went alongside ignorance of the real causes of the ills that afflicted people. Life for most was short. Sudden death was common and all too often inexplicable given the level of knowledge. The ignorance of doctors was such that their remedies were as likely to make an illness worse as to cure it. An epidemic of plague or smallpox could wipe out a quarter or more of a town’s population. Devastating harvest failures—and sudden hunger—could be expected by most people once or more a decade. A single fire could burn down a whole street or, as in London in 1666, a whole city.

The only long term solution to any of these problems lay in beginning to understand the natural causes behind apparently unnatural events. But science was still not something fully separate from superstition. Knowledge of how to separate and fuse natural substances (chemistry) was mixed in with belief in the transmutation of base metals into gold (alchemy). Knowledge of the motions of the planets and the stars (astronomy)—essential for working out dates and charting ocean voyages—was still tied to systems of belief which purported to predict events (astrology). A serious interest in mathematics could still be combined with faith in the magic of numerical sequences. And it was possible to reject most of these confusions but still believe scientific knowledge could be gained simply from the study of old Greek, Latin or Arabic texts.

There was a vicious circle. Magical beliefs could not be dispelled without the advance of science. But science was cramped by systems of magical beliefs. What is more, the difference between a set of scientific beliefs and a set of unscientific beliefs was not as obvious as it might seem today.

Take the belief that the planets, the sun and the stars moved around the Earth. This was based on the views of Aristotle, as amended after his death by Ptolemy.
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There had long existed a different view, holding that the Earth moved round the sun. It had been developed in the ancient Graeco-Roman world by Heracliedes of Pontus and in the medieval period by Nicole Oresme and Nicolas Cusanus. But hard as it may be to understand today, the most learned and scientifically open minds rejected the view that ‘the Earth moves’ for a millennium and a half, since it contradicted other, unchallenged Aristotelian principles about the motion of objects. The new account of the Earth and planets moving round the sun presented by the Polish monk Copernicus in 1543 could not deal with this objection. It was far from winning universal acceptance, even among those who recognised its utility for certain practical purposes. For instance, Francis Bacon—whose stress on the need for empirical observation is credited with doing much to free science from superstition—rejected the Copernican system since ‘a teacher of the modern empirical approach does not see the need for such subversive imaginings’.
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Scepticism was reinforced by inaccuracies discovered in Copernicus’s calculations of the movements of the planets. It was half a century before this problem was solved mathematically by Kepler, who showed the calculations worked perfectly if the planets were seen as moving in elliptical rather than circular orbits. But Kepler’s own beliefs were magical by our standards. He believed the distances of the planets from each other and from the sun were an expression of the intrinsic qualities of numerical series, not of physical forces. He had turned from the Aristotelian picture of the world to an even older, and if anything more mystical, Platonist or even Pythagorean picture in which there were universal patterns to be found in different sectors of reality. Such a belief could justify astrological predictions as well as astronomical calculations, since what occurred in one part of reality was believed to follow the same pattern as what occurred elsewhere. Kepler was quite prepared to make astrological forecasts. In Prague in 1618 he predicted, ‘May will not pass away without great difficulty.’ The forecast turned out to be correct, since the Thirty Years War began—but hardly because of celestial movements.

Kepler was by no means alone in believing in the mystical influences of some bodies on others. ‘Neo-Platonism’ remained influential at Cambridge University until well into the second half of the 17th century, with people believing that treating a knife which has cut someone could help heal the wound—just as a magnet can affect a piece of iron some distance away.
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Galileo did most to win acceptance of the Copernican picture of the universe when, using the recently invented telescope in 1609, he discovered craters and mountains on the moon. This showed that it was not made of some substance radically different to the Earth, as the Aristotle-Ptolemy account argued. He also developed the elements of a new physics, providing an account of how bodies move, which challenged Aristotle’s. But his was still not a full break.
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Galileo accepted, for instance, that the universe was finite, and he rejected Kepler’s notion that the planets moved in ellipses. To this extent he was still a prisoner of the old ideas. He was soon to be a prisoner in another sense as well—put on trial by the Inquisition, forced to denounce the Copernican system and held under house arrest until his death.

The arguments over physics and astronomy became intertwined with the general ideological arguments of the period. In 1543 Copernicus had been able to publish his views without fear of persecution by the Catholic church to which he belonged. Indeed some of the hardest attacks on his views came from Luther’s disciple Melanchthon, while the reform of the calendar by the Catholic church relied on computations based on Copernicus’s model.

But things changed with the counter-Reformation. Its supporters mobilised behind the Aristotelian model as adopted by the theologian Thomas Aquinas 250 years earlier to resolve the philosophical arguments of the 13th century—a model imposed on doubters at the time by the newly born Inquisition. Aristotle (and Aquinas) had taught that everything and every person has its own place in the scheme of things. There was a fixed hierarchy of celestial bodies and an equally fixed hierarchy on Earth. This was the perfect world view for kings and classes which wanted not just to destroy the Reformation but to force the rebellious middle and lower classes to submit to the old feudal order. From such a perspective the Copernican worldview was as subversive as the views of Luther or Calvin. In 1600 Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake for suggesting there were an infinity of worlds. The ideological climate in the Catholic states worked against further scientific investigation. On hearing about the trial of Galileo, the French mathematician and philosopher Descartes suppressed a finding that foreshadowed the later discoveries of Newton.
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It is hardly surprising that the centre of scientific advance shifted to the Dutch republic and post-revolutionary England—and to Boyle, Hook, Huygens and, above all, Newton, whose new laws of physics solved the problems which had plagued Copernicus’s, Kepler’s and Galileo’s accounts of the universe.

This was not because the Protestant leaders were, in themselves, any more enlightened than their Catholic counterparts. As Keith Thomas notes, ‘theologians of all denominations’ upheld the reality of witchcraft.
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But the popular base of Protestantism lay with social groups—artisans, lesser merchants—who wanted to advance knowledge, even if it was only knowledge of reading and writing so as to gain access to the Bible. The spread of Protestantism was accompanied by the spread of efforts to encourage literacy, and once people could read and write, a world of new ideas was open to them. What is more, the mere fact that there was a challenge to the old orthodoxy opened people’s minds to further challenges. This was shown most clearly during the English Revolution. The Presbyterians who challenged the bishops and the king could not do so without permitting censorship to lapse. But this in turn allowed those with a host of other religious views to express themselves freely. Amid the cacophony of religious prophecies and biblical interpretations, people found it possible for the first time to express doubts openly about them all. One drunken trooper in the New Model Army could ask, ‘Why should not that pewter pot on the table be God?’ The conservative political theorist Thomas Hobbes published a thoroughly materialist work,
Leviathan
, which contained attacks on the notion of religious miracles. A group of likeminded scientists had been able to gather in the liberated atmosphere of Oxford after the New Model Army had taken it from the royalists and set up a society for scientific advance.

Hobbes feared he might be burned at the stake for heresy, at the time of the Restoration. But in fact he received a royal pension and the society became the ‘Royal Society’. Science was beginning to be identified with an increase in control over the natural world which paid dividends in terms of agriculture, industry, trade and military effectiveness.

This did not mean the battle against superstition was won. Vast numbers of people in advanced industrial countries still put their faith in astrologers and charms, whether religious or ‘magical’. And this is not just true of supposedly ‘uneducated’ people. ‘World leaders’ such as Ronald Reagan, Indira Gandhi and former French prime minister Edith Cresson have consulted astrologers. In the 18th century the influence of magic was even greater.

But a change did occur. The professional witchfinder Matthew Hopkins had been able to push 200 convictions for witchcraft through the courts in England’s eastern counties in the mid-1640s amid the chaos of the unresolved civil war. This was a far greater number than at any time previously.
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By contrast, the occupation of Scotland by the New Model Army brought a temporary end to prosecution for witchcraft,
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and by 1668 one commentator could note, ‘Most of the looser gentry and the smaller pretenders to philosophy and wit are generally deriders of the belief in witches’.
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The last witchcraft execution in England took place in 1685, although the crime remained on the statute book for another 50 years. A change in the general ‘mentality’ had resulted from the economic, social and political changes of the previous century.

The most radical intellectual challenge to received ideas since the rise of class society occurred in the aftermath of the Dutch and English revolutions. The more intellectually aware sections of the middle, and even the upper, classes elsewhere in Europe began to feel that their societies were defective, and sought to bring change by changing ideas. This led to a much more far-reaching attack on prejudice and superstition than had occurred in the Renaissance and Reformation. The result was a current of ideas known as the Enlightenment.

This catch-all category included a range of thinkers and writers—natural scientists, philosophers, satirists, economists, historians, essayists, novelists, political theorists and even musicians like Mozart. They did not all hold the same set of views. Some had diametrically opposed opinions on major issues.
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What they shared was a belief in the power of rational understanding based on empirical knowledge. This had to be applied to the world, even if it meant challenging existing myths and established beliefs. Such an approach represented a challenge to many of the institutions and much of the ideology of existing European societies.

One influence was that of the philosophers Descartes in France, Spinoza in Holland and Leibniz in south western Germany. They were convinced a complete understanding of the world could be deduced from a few unchallengeable principles of reason—a conviction which grew in the 18th century on the basis of Newton’s success in establishing basic laws for physics.
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These ‘rationalist’ philosophers were not necessarily political radicals. Leibniz famously declared that the universe ran according to a prearranged harmony, that ‘all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds’—a view caricatured brilliantly in Voltaire’s
Candide
. But the rationalist approach could become an almost revolutionary weapon in other hands, since it implied that every institution or practice not deducible from first principles should be rejected.

Another influence was the rather different tradition begun by John Locke in England. He insisted that knowledge came not from the ‘innate ideas’ of the rationalists but from empirical observation of what already existed. Locke was just as politically conservative as Leibniz. He reflected the attitude of English gentlemen landowners and merchants. Their aims had been achieved once English kings agreed to govern through an upper class parliament. Yet as the 18th century wore on, increasingly radical conclusions were drawn in France and Germany from the English empiricist approach. So Voltaire and Montesquieu in France were great admirers of Locke, drawing from his writings the conclusion that the countries of continental Europe should be reformed along English lines. A conservative doctrine in England could be a subversive one across the Channel.

The Enlightenment thinkers were not revolutionaries. They were dissident intellectuals who looked to members of the upper class for sponsorship. They placed their hopes not in the overthrow of society but in its reform, which would be achieved by winning the battle of ideas. Diderot saw no contradiction in visiting the Russian empress Catherine the Great, nor did Voltaire in collaborating with the Prussian king Frederick the Great. Their milieu is demonstrated by those regularly in attendance at the twice weekly ‘salons’ organised by d’Holbach’s wife, where thinkers like Diderot, Hume, Rousseau, the future American leader Benjamin Franklin and the radical chemist Joseph Priestley mixed with the ambassador of Naples, Lord Shelbourne, the future French royal minister Necker and the Prince of Brunswick.
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Voltaire insisted, ‘It is not the labourers one should educate, but the good bourgeois, the tradesmen.’ Even the French encyclopedists, who were zealous propagandists of the new thinking, concentrated their efforts on books which were way beyond the financial reach of the bulk of the population (the early editions of Diderot and d’Alembert’s
Encyclopédie
, in 17 volumes, sold only 4,000 copies), through the salons of friendly aristocrats or participation in Masonic Societies whose secret semi-religious rites brought together the ‘Enlightened’ elite of the upper and middle classes.

There were also limits to how far most of the Enlightenment thinkers were prepared to take their critiques of existing institutions and ideas, at least in public. So Voltaire could rage against the superstition of religion (‘
écrasez l’infame
’—‘Crush the infamy’—was his slogan) and subject biblical accounts of miracles to devastating critiques, but he was very upset when d’Holbach published (under a pseudonym) a thoroughly atheistic work,
The System of Nature
. ‘This book has made philosophy execrable in the eyes of the king and the whole of the courts,’ he wrote.
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Gibbon, in England, could write a pioneering history, the
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, which was scathing in its attack on the influence of the Christian church. But it was not intended to shake the faith of the masses. The Scot David Hume did not publish his own savage attacks on religion during his lifetime. Voltaire objected to what he saw as Rousseau’s negative attitude to existing social institutions in
The Social Contract
, while Rousseau objected to Voltaire’s ‘negative’ attitude towards religion.

But however reluctant they were to take a radical stance, the thinkers of the Enlightenment challenged some of the basic props of the societies in which they lived. These were not open to easy reform, and powerful interests saw any questioning as deeply subversive. Many of the thinkers suffered as a result. Voltaire was beaten up by the hired thugs of an aristocrat, endured a spell of imprisonment in the Bastille and then felt compelled to live away from Paris for many years. Diderot was incarcerated for a period in the fortress of Vincennes, near Paris. Rousseau spent the latter part of his life out of reach of the French authorities across the Swiss border, and the plays of Beaumarchais (whose
Marriage of Figaro
laid the basis for Mozart’s opera) were banned in several countries for suggesting that a servant could thwart the intentions of his master.

The church could be especially hostile to any questioning of established ideas. In southern Europe the counter-Reformation stamped viciously on all opposition until the second half of the 18th century. In Spain there were 700 cases of
auto da fé
(the burning alive of ‘heretics’) between 1700 and 1746.
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In France, Protestants could still be sentenced to slavery in the galleys and two Protestants were broken on the wheel before being hanged in Toulouse in 1761 and Abbéville in 1766.
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By challenging such things, the thinkers raised fundamental questions about how society was organised, even if they shied away from providing complete answers. Voltaire’s
Candide
suggested that no state in Europe could fulfil people’s needs. Rousseau began his
Social Contract
with the revolutionary idea, ‘Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains,’ even though he seems to have put little faith in the masses himself. The philosophers d’Holbach and Helvetius attempted thoroughgoing materialist analyses of nature and society which rejected any notion of god.
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The naturalist Buffon put forward an almost evolutionist theory of animal species (and insisted on the unity of the human species, ascribing differences between ‘races’ to climatic conditions).
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The Scots Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith saw human society as progressing through stages, of hunting, pastoralism and agriculture, and so laid the basis for a materialist understanding of social development. Between them, the Enlightenment intellectuals went further than anyone ever before in trying to make sense of human beings and human institutions.

There is a sense in which their ideas became ‘hegemonic’, in that they dominated intellectual discussion right across Europe, everywhere throwing apologists for other views on the defensive. They received a hearing from all those, even at the very top, who wanted the kind of ‘modern’, economically successful society they saw in England, as opposed to the ‘antiquated’, economically stagnant societies of continental Europe.

At various points, governments in Austria, Russia, Portugal and Poland tried to push through certain reforms associated with Enlightenment thought (and so are sometimes called ‘enlightened despots’ by historians). Between 1759 and 1765 the rulers of Portugal, France, Spain, Naples and Parma threw out the Jesuits—and, under pressure from the Catholic monarchs, the pope disbanded the order in Europe.
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In France, Turgot, one of the most prominent ‘physiocrat’ Enlightenment economists, became a minister of Louis XVI in 1774. But in each case the reforms from above were eventually abandoned. Even ‘enlightened’ monarchs were unable to implement them in the face of resistance from ruling classes whose wealth depended on residual forms of feudal exploitation.

Diderot wrote in the
Encyclopédie
that its aim was ‘to change the general way of thinking’.
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The Enlightenment thinkers did make a highly successful challenge to the ideas of intellectuals, including ruling class intellectuals, and it was a more far-reaching challenge than that of the Reformation two centuries before. By the 1780s the works of Voltaire and Rousseau ‘did speak to an enormous public’,
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and cheap (often pirated) versions of the
Encyclopédie
sold far more copies than Diderot himself ever intended. ‘It spread through the bourgeoisie of the
ancien regime
’ and ‘a progressive ideology…infiltrated the most archaic and eroded segments of the social structure’.
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Yet the Enlightenment thinkers were hardly effective in achieving their goal of reforming society. Voltaire, apparently, was dispirited when he died in 1778.
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Kant noted six years later that, although ‘he was living in the Age of Enlightenment…the age itself was not enlightened’.
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Changing ideas was not the same as changing society. It would require another cycle of revolutions and civil wars to bring that about.