Did anybody actually think our civilization was organized around science?
I did when I was a kid, and I think a lot of us did. That’s the thing - they teach us in school about all the good stuff capitalism has allowed for, specifically so that it takes us longer to realize that they’re cherry picking what they can out of a big pile of shit. But by then hopefully we’ve started a family or a career or something that we don’t want to lose, so they can sell us the lie of complacency and avoid ever having a new revolution. It’s getting harder and harder for them to hide the smell of the shit pile, though, and people are getting radicalized younger and younger.
I would say that there was plenty of ‘science’ showing that European men were endowed by nature to rule over the world. “Science” replaced "the divine right of kings’ which replaced ‘make the best warrior the leader.’
I’ll take best warrior over divine right, at least that was still badass.
I was just contemplating that in another thread. I had a shower thought, trying to imagine if the ancient Greek religion had survived to the present day through the industrial revolution, how their system of “god of bread, feasts and wheelbarrows” thing would have handled internal combustion engines and email. I think we’ve concluded that Hephaestus would be the god of magnetos, distributors and spark plugs and that Mercury would probably rule over SMS and email.
CGP Grey made a video about why the Atlantic Exchange went the way it did; Europeans arrived in the Americas and steamrolled the native populations, partially with vastly superior technology and mostly with plagues. Well, people of the old world were more advanced technologically because almost all of the animals that were ripe for domestication are from Africa, Europe or Asia. It’s a lot easier to bootstrap yourself to the bronze age when you have horses, oxen, cattle, donkeys, sheep, pigs, cats, dogs and silkworms, and not so easy when maybe you have llamas. You’re not going to domesticate a moose or a bison on foot with wood and stone tools, hell we haven’t domesticated moose with helicopters and machine guns. They literally didn’t have the horsepower to climb the tech tree.
Why did the natives die of plagues but the arriving Europeans didn’t? Plagues are animal diseases that jump to humans and then become endemic in large, dense population centers. No animal husbandry, there’s no source of viruses in the first place and no dense population centers in which to become endemic. Thus no “Americapox.”
That’s why the Native Americans were doomed. Now what about the East? China, Japan, India, Korea, hell even the Middle East and North Africa, they had horses and cattle and such, all of them can lay claim to sophisticated cultures, they had their versions of science and philosophy…so why was the Industrial revolution peculiar to the British of all people? Portuguese and Spanish inventors patented steam powered machines before the British did, so why didn’t the Industrial Revolution belong to Portugal or Spain, let alone India or China?
If I were to hypothesize, I think it was a Wright Flyer moment. I use the 1903 Flyer as an example of something that happened the instant it was possible and not a day before; The Flyer barely had enough power to weight that it basically couldn’t fly in density altitudes above -600 feet. It barely lifted one Ohioan a few feet above Hatteras Island in the cold of December. They didn’t have the engine in December 1902 and they didn’t have the weather in November 1903, they flew in December the very day it became possible.
I think maybe 1700s Britain was just rich enough from all the Wooden Ships And Iron Men they’d done, and just barely socially mobile enough to allow people like Michael Faraday to exist. Hinduism or Confucian Buddhism won’t tolerate a Michael Faraday.
If you never saw it, ‘Connections’ is an old BBC show that explores the way seemingly random events come together to create vast changes.
Also, for pure fun, try Poul Anderson’s fantasy novel “A Midsummer’s Tempest.” The conceit is that Shakespeare was a great historian and everything he wrote about, including MacBeth’s witches and the clocks chiming in Rome was 100% accurate.
I didn’t. I thought the enlightenment was more of a move away from superstition and toward reason, but never once did I think it addressed capitalism. I also don’t remember ever thinking it was any sort of absolute movement. I mean shit, look around five minutes, we have never had a reason to think society is based on science. It’s based on competing human impulses, just so happens that greed is a heavyweight champ in that ring.
Economics filled the void in society vacated by religion after the Enlightenment.
A mechanism of control, conjured by the ruling class, imposed indiscriminately upon the masses, protected from scrutiny, and justified by arbitrary, curated rules.
- Economists are its priests.
- Banks its churches.
- Finance its mythology.
- GDP its God.
Economics can be fixed if the rights of future generations are included in the cost of depleting natural resources.
“Feudal lords were the masters of feudalism. Capitalists, however, aren’t the masters of capitalism. They are merely the high priests of capitalism. The master of capitalism is Capital itself.”
-Roderic Day, Why Marxism?
the immediate needs of capital.*
Some nations get it. Angela Merkel is a physicist with a doctorate in quantum chemistry. Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, with her doctorate in energy engineering, was a contributing author to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.
I’m sure there are more, but those are the first two that come to mind.
The Enlightenment and Positivist narrative is problematic, even before there was Capitalism.
Many things that are blamed on previous times are actually products of the “enlightenment”, later like Capitalism may as well.
Like:
“Now that we don’t live in the darkness of superstition anymore and are enlightened by reason, we now know that a woman’s place is in the kitchen, and black people’s place is serving the white, until they are enlightened as well”.
I’m going to need a source for that. Because while there were attempts by some to scientifically justify their religious beliefs like racism and misogyny, the enlightenment was about following evidence without holding onto past dogma.
Women (who owned property worth more than £5 (which remained as the restriction on men) lost the right to vote in 18th century England off the top of my head.
Midwivery was illegalised too, and replaced by scientific male doctors.
Science and Reason was used to justify both.
1830 was post enlightenment. It was characterized by a return to religious fundamentalism known as the Second Great Awakening.
A lot of the enlightenment was also about bullshitting science to justify past dogma. It can’t be said that it was a unified movement, so there will definitely be plenty of examples of people who were genuinely forward-thinking and had only good intentions. But pseudosciences like eugenics and phrenology were used to sell a narrative of European racial superiority, and even more legitimate ideas like evolution and psychology were twisted to fit this narrative that Europeans were somehow more evolved and developed. This in turn justified practices of colonialism, slavery, and segregation as somehow making the world a more enlightened place, under the stewardship of the enlightened peoples.
The enlightenment was like a metaphorical medicine that cured society of its superstitious past, but like many medicines, it could be poisonous if taken the wrong way.
It’s exactly about those that I’m talking about.
I’ll just partially disagree on the phrasing of “religious beliefs like racism and misogyny”. Yes, there was misogyny in the Church, but it was not so strong before. And racism was “invented” and retroactively connected afterwards.
It’s what I learned in school and through my life, but I don’t have sources on that.
Yes, there was misogyny in the Church, but it was not so strong before.
Martin Luther was very into mysogeny.
https://margmowczko.com/misogynist-quotes-from-church-fathers/
Before that, medieval Saints like Augustine wrote against women.