The Age of Genius

IT IS or should be a puzzle that an explosion of genius occurred in the tumultuous 17th century—a time of wars, civil strife and the continuation of post-Reformation religious agonies disruptive and destructive to an unparalleled degree in Europe’s history to that point. How does one account for the coexistence of the flowering of genius alongside the attrition of such conflict? Does the tumult of the century in some way explain its genius and those changes, or cause them, or might there have been even greater innovation if it had been a time of peace?

The answer in my view is that the wars and tumults of the century helped to make the change possible because of the failure of authority in both theoretical and practical respects during the chaos they caused. In the breakdown of systems of control over the movements of people and their ideas, exchanges especially of the latter were able to occur with much greater freedom than hitherto. The comparison is with the way border posts might be abandoned in a time of war, so that people can cross into neighbouring territories unhindered and unobserved. In effect, this is what happened in the seventeenth century, particularly its first half. With armies tracking destructively, like swarms of locusts, back and forth across Europe and for a time the British isles, with demographic upheavals and the breakdown of order, and with the distraction of authorities on matters mortal to their own concerns, gaps and holes opened for new and once death-inviting ideas to circulate and mutually potentiate each other.

‘The distracted authorities’—I think there is a major clue in this. People were indeed distracted, busy with the problems that strife and change bring, unable to step back enough to notice that the scenery of the theatre of life was grinding round to something different. It is entirely plausible to think that there might have been some people living between 1620 and 1690 who woke one day to the amazed reflection that how things seemed to them in their adolescent years in the 1630s now belonged to an utterly lost era.

A fractured and fractious time, therefore, helps change to happen, even if inadvertently; it has to be an ill wind indeed that does not allow anything good to come of it… The world of 1945 was a remarkably different place from the world of 1939 because of the speeding up of history in those years. Transpose to the key of world-view, science, theory and belief, and the seventeenth century comes into view as a time when everything went into fast forward in these respects, leaving one era behind and rushing towards a new one.

But!—this is not a view that everyone agrees with. Is my argument the iteration of a myth, a new myth to replace all the old myths, a new myth about the recent history of the mind of humankind and the world it dominates? Some emphatically think it is. They criticise all the Whiggish, progressivist, secularist accounts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (the Long Enlightenment let us call it) – of which this book is one – as rationalisations, parti pris accounts rather than records of a great moment (as I put it, the epoch) in human history.

Let us see. The revolution in thought in the seventeenth century produced the mind that recognizes human beings as a species of animal on a small planet in an outer arm of a galaxy which is one among trillions of galaxies; and (and this is the equally important point) that the same knowledge which revealed this has also enabled the development of technologies (including medical technologies) which have transformed the existence of that species of animal and the small planet it inhabits—not always for the better, but largely so, and in many ways.

This transformation of world-view was not complete until after Darwin, of course, and its application via technology to the transformation of life in the world required the wider spread of literacy and education in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Moreover it is not by far the world-view of everyone even today—perhaps not even a majority of people today – but it is the world-view that drives almost everything of significance that happens in our world, from technologies to economies, with the resulting impact on the social and political organisation of almost all societies, even the ones where the majority of people still hold to a version of the pre-seventeenth century mind-set.

I say almost all societies, because religious fundamentalism in its political and socially influential forms in some parts of the world keeps the pre-seventeenth-century mind actively in control of people’s lives. That world-view is one that says our world is at the centre of the universe and we humans are at its summit, and that all lies under the government of a deity whose requirements are meant to shape most aspects of human lives—which means their choices and behaviour and their attitudes to each other. The mental totalitarianism of Islam is the paradigm.

A fractured and fractious time helps change to happen; it has to be an ill wind indeed that does not allow anything good to come of it

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The power of societies in which the modern world-view has become the driver means that even though most people in the world, for most of the time since the seventeenth century, have in some sense remained pre-modern in mind-set, they are holders of what is in fact a functionally marginal view. In the few countries, and in a few places in some other countries, where this otherwise functionally marginal mind-set remains dominant, most are—if one indulges the requisite sombre survey—places of religious strife and backwardness.

Now: in asking whether there is something mythical about this picture, one is not asking whether it is untrue that science has had a major impact on world history since the seventeenth century. That of course is undeniable, even by those who most ardently wish it were not so. Rather, the mythical aspect of the story would instead be this: that the story is one in which heroes and martyrs (scientists, philosophers) struggled against the forces of darkness (superstition, ignorance), and eventually triumphed; that whereas the efforts of the heroes and martyrs displaced humankind from the centre of the physical universe, they firmly placed humankind at a new and better centre: the centre of the universe of thought and knowledge. Thus scientific salvation has come to a benighted world, where lives were short, diseased, constrained by false beliefs, and full of petty struggle—and liberated it, at least for those able to take advantage of the liberation.

This story appears to have all the lineaments of any narrative in which a battle against the odds is eventually crowned with victory, though with tragic losses on the way – with setbacks and lucky strokes, with its Odysseus and the Sirens, its Perseus and Medusa, its Harry Potter and Voldemort, its Siegfried and the dragon’s blood, its holy grail or precious ring – its Manichean conflict between light and dark.

Well, think what you like: the story indeed has the lineaments of an epic myth. But it is nevertheless true. There are two twists in the tale, however, either of which could have a strangulating effect on a putative happy outcome. They are or can be related twists.

One is that as the scientific world-view becomes more remote, in its technicality, difficulty, mathematicity, and distance from the understanding of most people—who encounter it only in the most user-friendly ways by touching a screen (or, less frequently but more dreadfully, by being on the receiving end of a drone strike)—it leaves an ever widening gap to be filled by the old stories and beliefs. The old stories are so much easier to understand, and provide the neat narrative structure – beginning, middle, end and purpose— that human psychology loves. The basic story and requirements of any of the world’s major religions can be explained in less than half an hour, which is within the attention span of most humans. By striking contrast, it takes years to master physics. It takes applied study to unfold the history of human thought as it moved from the shadows inside Plato’s cave to the sunlight of knowledge based on evidence and reason. It takes intellectual maturity to see things as they are rather than as how so many wish they would be.

The second twist is that the active reassertion of the old stories and beliefs is under way in parts of the world where they never fully or even partially lost their hold. The reasserters are happy to use the technologies that the new mind has created in order to reassert the old mind’s dominion: terrorists use anti-aircraft missiles and mobile phones to communicate with each other, inventions from a world that repudiated their vision of the world four centuries ago. Thus humanity is in a bottleneck of contradictions, a moment of peril, as the new mind outstrips the old mind so far that the old mind is trying to pull the new mind back, even trying to extirpate it, yet using its discoveries in a severity of self-contradiction that approaches madness.

The solution? It is what it has always been, though it has never been as successfully applied as it might be. The solution is education. What a cliché that seems; yet like most clichés it is so deeply true that we cease to see its truth. Scarcely anywhere do we really educate. The time, technique, cost and commitment it would take really to educate are applied in very few places—only in the most elite and expensive schools, and in the graduate departments of the world’s top universities, hardly scratching the surface in world-population terms. It is not the fault of dedicated teachers at schools around the world—teachers are among the most important people on the planet, given what they can do in the way of inspiring and enlightening when they are really good at it, and are given the tools and opportunities to do it—but they rarely have enough of either. As the world moves forward in some respects, dragged sideways or back by the conflicts between the old mind and the new in other respects, a type and quantity of education scarcely different from fiftyor a hundred years ago continues to let the majority slip further behind.

A new mythic adventure is therefore required: to make the world fully capable of using the mind that the seventeenth-century revolution brought to birth.

(Excerpt from The Age of Genius: The Seventeenth Century & the Birth of the Modern Mind; AC Grayling; Bloomsbury; pages 365; Rs 1,960)

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AC Grayling