Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: How The Enlightenment Works

Episode Date: May 23, 2020

The Enlightenment stands as the moment the West withdrew from superstition and found its faith in reason. Did it shift too far? In this classic episode, learn about this massive shift in thinking which we are still sorting through and coming to understand today. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey there everyone, it's me, Josh. And for this week's SYSK Selects, I've chosen how the Enlightenment works. And the reason we named it Works rather than Worked is because we realized during this episode

that this battle between rationalism and superstition is still going on today. The Enlightenment is still going on today. And I've chosen it this week because I feel like it explains a lot, a lot of the division in the world today. Not just in the United States, not just in the West, but all over the world.

Where there's a dividing line that is separating people, that this gulf, this wedge is getting deeper and deeper. And I think that this is the basis of the whole thing. See if you agree. If not, it's fine, it's still an interesting episode. Either way, I hope you enjoy it. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry R. So this is Stuff You Should Know. The Enlightened Ones. Exactly. The three of us. Yep.

No one else. No. We're the Enlightened Ones. I am going to go ahead and preface this with what I just said off the air. This is a very tough subject to distill in a 30 to 45 minute podcast because volumes of books can be written on the age of enlightenment.

And have been. And have been. So this is tough. This is going to be a very bird's eye view. Yeah, there's a dude named Jonathan Israel who just came out with, I think, this third volume of a three volume set on the Enlightenment. And he wrote literally several thousand pages of it.

And it's considered an obscure text. Yeah, he probably doesn't even think that he covered it in full. No, I'll bet he doesn't. Although he's. Fourth volume coming soon. Right. I think he does have another one coming.

So maybe it was a second. But the idea that he doesn't think that it's done, that it's not finished, is actually a pretty standard view of the Enlightenment. Like during research for this, I realized that there are tons of intellectual arguments going on right now, like the Bill Maher thing. Bill Maher in Islam.

Yeah. He's been accused of being like just a complete racist, xenophobic dude because of his recent statements on Islam. Did you see him and Ben Affleck? Did you see them get into it? Yeah. OK, that argument is an Enlightenment argument. Yeah.

Like it provided the Enlightenment was so massive that the ripple effects are still being felt on a daily basis because it was such an enormous change in the way humans think that we're still trying to sit there and analyze what the heck happened. And that is one manifestation of it. Yeah, sure. Is what Bill Maher is saying is, well, Islam is a religion

or whatever, and therefore it's antithetical to progress and culture and real thought and rationalism. And Ben Affleck is saying, you can't say that about a culture. Like each culture is its own thing. So what we're seeing there is the idea of moral absolutism arguing with moral relativism. And that is textbook Enlightenment argument. Pretty interesting.

Sure. Like researching this article, seriously, it tied together probably 10 different things that I didn't realize were connected. Well, yeah. I love it when stuff like that happens. It was the start of, and the age of Enlightenment, quote, unquote, started and ended, but it was the birth of just

a new kind of thought, a new value system. Philosophical, scientific, cultural, intellectual, basically saying reason over this previous long-held belief that just strict religious dogma is all you need to worry about. Right, exactly. And don't question anything. Right. Don't try to think about science and nature

and things like that other than just this is God's creation. And what does it mean in terms of religion? Exactly. So of course it's still going on. But it wasn't just that. It was definitely, if you're an Enlightenment fan, you would say Enlightenment was the domination of reason over religion or faith.

It was a value system, basically. But there was another aspect of the Enlightenment, the domination of the will of the people over the monarchy. Economic. There was an economic change. Huge economic changes thanks to Adam Smith. There were a lot of huge monumental changes in the way people thought.

So much so that modern historians who are trying to unpack the Enlightenment still, one of the schools of thought is that you can't just call it the Enlightenment. It happened in too many different places under different circumstances. And then again, the different aspects of it, the fact that one part of it dealt with governmental change,

one part of it dealt with religious change, another part dealt with economic change, that it's been kind of distilled into separate compartments now. Yeah, I mean, separate compartments. Some were divergent and contradictory. It occurred nearly simultaneously in the 18th century in France, Great Britain, Germany,

Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Portugal, American colonies, all over the place. I like to say it's the period of time where the world started waking up and pulled their heads from their rear ends, basically. Well, the question now, I mean, if you're a religious type, you're probably happy about the fruits of the Enlightenment. Like everybody points to the Industrial Revolution

is proof positive the Enlightenment was great. Or the American experiment, proof positive the Enlightenment was great, but you probably don't like the fact that the world completely turned its back on religion, or not completely, but largely did. If you're a pro-Enlightenment type, you're probably saying, this was for the best. Like we were backwards, we emerged from the dark ages

thanks to the Enlightenment. And this is the argument that's still going on today. Like yes, the Enlightenment changed everything, but did it go too far? So we'll get into all that, but Conger, who wrote this article, I think did a very good job of taking the whole thing back further than the 18th century out of the French salons

and set the stage for what created the basis for this change in thinking. Yeah, I think Kristin did a great job of distilling a complex topic down to like an eight-page article. But she does take it back to, there were a couple of things that sort of laid the groundwork. Well, a lot of things, but a couple of them are, Mr. Sir Isaac Newton and the famous story

of the apple falling on his head, which makes a great story. He told a lot of people that, I don't know how factually exactly true that is, but it makes for a great story. But either way you wanna look at it, Isaac Newton looked at the space at some point between that apple and the ground

and said there's something going on in that empty space that should be explained because that apple doesn't fall up. Something's keeping us all rooted here on the ground and I wanna look into that. Although if you were a fan of David Hume, as you would say, well actually it could considerably fall up because we've never proven it won't fall up.

Yeah, and Hume was one of the proponents of, well not proponents, but he was active in the age of enlightenment. Yeah. Another thing that really laid the groundwork was the 30 years of war from 1618 to 1648, which pretty much paved the way for a Protestant Reformation and the Roman Catholic Church took a lot of the teeth away

from the Roman Catholic Church for the first time. Yeah, there was a huge change. So what you just described, Chuck, is the foundation for the intellectual branch of the enlightenment thinking, usurping the power from theological thinking. And then with the 30 year war, the political power was taken away from the church

because for the first time now, the precedent has been set that you as a citizen, your allegiance is not split between church and state. Your allegiance is first and foremost to the state. And we see that still today. Like if somebody kills their parents or whatever because it's the seventh sign and Demi Moore's running around and it turns out that they were brother and sister.

So you kill them because it's the will of God. The state says, I don't care if it's the will of God, you can't kill your parents. The state's law is more powerful and more important than God's law, that's straight out of the 30 years war. That changed everything. Have you ever seen the seventh sign? Man, I saw that like when it came out.

I don't remember anything about it. I just remember like one of the characters was this kid with Down syndrome and he murdered his parents because he found out that they were brother and sister and he was super religious. Then the state was gonna execute them. Yeah, when they execute, I think he was like the last martyr. Oh, okay.

Man, I'll have to check that out again. Yeah, Demi Moore. So Conger points out even further back about the dark ages sort of laying the groundwork, which the dark ages were dark for many reasons, but one of the big ones was that the Roman Catholic church basically ruled everything. Latin was the language.

The center of life and academia were monasteries and abbeys. You weren't encouraged to get educated outside of theological realms. It was not encouraged. You have to actually, I wanna say, you have to be careful using the term dark ages because apparently it is a disparaging label that people on the pro-enlightenment side of the argument,

the humanists, they say, these are the dark ages. That was back when the church controlled everything, when everybody was just an ignoramus. Once the enlightenment came along, we emerged from the dark ages. Technically, once the Renaissance came along, we emerged from the dark ages.

So if you're an historian, you call it the middle ages, but even the middle ages are kind of sad because it just says these ages kind of existed between this important age and this important age. We just call those the middle ages, but it's better than the dark ages. I like dark ages. But that's an argument or a disparaging label

that humanists use unfairly because there were scientists working and laying the groundwork for future science in the dark ages. And Congregate even mentions them in this article, like Thomas Aquinas came up with scholasticism. Yeah. And scholasticism is basically the idea

that you can understand God even more and be even more pure and divine yourself by studying nature. Yeah. Roger Bacon was another monk who was a proponent of that. And I think that allowed them, and I don't think that's the reason they did it, but that allowed them to pursue these scientific avenues

because it was still tied to God. Another big change was, like I said before, in the not so dark ages, perhaps, Latin was the language and they didn't have something called the printing press until Johann Gutenberg came along in 1438 and says, you know what, everyone should be able to read, start printing stuff in your native tongue.

And that led directly to people starting to educate themselves. Yeah, it was the democratization of education right there. Exactly. And all of this didn't happen out of the blue, like Roger Bacon and Thomas Aquinas and a guy named Leonardo Bruni. They didn't necessarily come up

with their ideas on their own. There was some, this really seminal thing that happened back in the mid 13th century, where somebody, I don't know who did, somebody translated Aristotle, I believe, his works into Latin. And all of a sudden, the Greek rational thinkers of antiquity, their ideas were suddenly available

to the West for the first time. And it just so happened that some people started paying attention to these things. Leonardo Bruni read Petrarch and revived the idea of humanism, which was a huge sea change. Because humanism says humans are pretty awesome and the fruit of our labors, the fruit of our intellect,

the fruit of everything that we do comes from human ability, not God. Like we're not just vessels for God's brilliance to be shown through. If you create something, you come up with a work of art, that's because God did that, you did that, and let's figure out how you did it. That's humanism, and this is what the Renaissance

started to revive and was a huge change. Like maybe we should start paying attention to ourselves a little more. Exactly, let's explore the human condition. Yeah, Aristotle was not a heretic because he tied his geocentric universe ideas to God as well. He thought the universe was composed of 10 separate crystal spheres and beyond the 10th sphere

there was heaven and God. Copernicus pretty much said, no, that's not true, the universe is infinite. And he was pretty alone in that thinking early on. He faced a lot of criticism from every religion, Protestants and Catholics. They thought it was a dangerous way of thinking because he didn't make room for God in the cosmos.

And it definitely was a dangerous way of thinking to the church. Like the Protestant Reformation was going on. You had the 30 years war coming down the pike. You had Copernicus thanks to this revival of interest in astronomy. Yeah, and Galileo Galilei. Yeah, starting to look at the universe around us

and finding even like symbolic stuff. Like who was it? Kepler, he was an assistant to Taiko Brahe. And Kepler figured out that the planets revolve around the sun in an ellipse. Well, the church, the holy Roman church said that the circle was a symbol of perfection. So of course, everything revolves around the earth

in a circle. Not only did things not revolve around the earth, they revolved around the sun and they didn't even do that in a circle. They did an ellipse. So the church is just losing its mind because all these people are coming forward saying, everything that you're saying over here

is starting to prove to smell like BS. And the church is losing its power left and right, both politically and intellectually. It's losing its authority. Yeah, Galileo even recanted because he was accused of heresy for his theory that the earth rotates on its axis. So he said, I'll take it all back.

I didn't mean that. Please don't kill me. He's like, but just make sure my manuscripts survive. So we were talking about bacon. He is the creator of the scientific method. And he says, you know what? We should use experiments to actually try and explain things. And so it's 1620, I think it's high time

we have a method for doing so. So that was Francis Bacon. Yes. I wonder if he was related to Roger Bacon. I don't know. They were separated by a few centuries, but they could have been fan. Sure, I think so.

Did you ever take philosophy in college? No. I think I might have. I didn't get much out of it if I dig, I don't remember. I took one class. We studied Descartes a lot. I've grown to be a little more interested in it, but I like the more existential crisis philosophy,

like Nick Bostrom stuff. I don't know what that is. Just basically how the world's gonna end. Oh, okay. This stuff is, I think like Descartes is interesting, but I'm not like a, it doesn't light my fire. Yeah, it was all right. I think I made an A in that class.

Actually, cause it interested me at the time, but I never took a follow-up class. I just took the intro. So it clearly didn't mean that much to me, but I get it. Well, yeah. And what Descartes was saying is, our experience is not, it's not what you thought. Like mind and matter are two different things.

And the human experience is a subjective experience. And the mind, what the mind produces is different than what is reality. And really kind of that changed things tremendously too. So you've got all these people like contributing to this. We haven't even reached the 18th century yet. Like the groundwork is definitely being laid. And it's still being laid as far as the government goes.

John Locke was one of the people who contributed to the idea of the social contract. The social contract, there was Hobbes, Locke, and later on Rousseau and others contributed this idea that humans are born with natural rights. You're born free. I'm born free. Even Jerry's born free.

I know, look at her. And to form a society, you give up some of these natural rights. For example, one thing that you give up is your right to kill in retribution. Any society typically demands a state monopoly on violence, which means that if somebody kills your family member, you don't go kill that person.

You go to the state and say that guy killed my family member. Try him, convict him and kill him on my behalf because there's a state monopoly on violence. So that's a natural right that you give up, I think appropriately so and for the better, but as part of the social contract. And so the idea that humans had these rights and that society in turn had rights

because humans gave them rights, that was a big basis of enlightenment thinking that would be added to later on too. Yeah, and Locke also was one of the first champions of what would kind of become nurture over nature. His idea of the tabula rasa that when humans are born, their minds are a clean slate and they are shaped by experience and education

and not some preordained thing that you're born with. And this French intellect gobbled that stuff up. His name was Francois-Marie Arouette and he went by a name you might know, Voltaire. And he really loved this stuff and went back to France with all these ideals and said, we got to get on this and let's, you know, we can't go out in the streets right now

and talk about this stuff, but we can meet in private in homes like a Tupperware party and we'll call them salons and we'll talk about these radical ideas and this new way of thinking and the privacy of homes for those that are willing to host it. The New York Times on the podcast, Hey Dude the 90s called David Lashar

and Christine Taylor, stars of the co-classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slipdresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in,

as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to, Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough,

or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you.

Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael.

And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen

so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. So Chuck Voltaire has been lit up. He was in England from 1726 to 1729, living in exile, because he was already critical of the French monarchy. While he was there, he ran into the ideas of Locke,

of apparently Descartes as well. He basically got turned on to rationalism, and he was primed and ready for it. Like this guy was just waiting for these ideas to pour into him. And when they did, he became a lightning rod for what we think of as the Enlightenment. Like Voltaire was the main dude to start,

from what I understand. Yeah, and like we mentioned, the salons, they had to do this in private because Louis the 14th, is that right? Yeah. Getting better at that. He was pretty hard on the track. He didn't like that kind of talk.

It threatened him for a good reason. Well, yeah. I mean, the reason why is like the power was taken from the church and placed more in the monarchy. But in very short order, people said, you know, we're not really that fond of the monarchy either. We think we should rule ourselves, or at least elect people to rule ourselves.

So this divine right of kings thing seems kind of hinky now that we think about it. So the monarchies were threatened as well by the Enlightenment. Well, yeah, the monarchy liked the dumb masses that stayed under their thumb. And any kind of like radical thought or original thought was super dangerous.

Sounds familiar. Yeah, exactly. It is interesting how you talked about, I think there are periods of time where things like the Age of Enlightenment keep popping up. Like the 1960s in the United States. And I think, like you said, we're in one right now. I think we're in one probably more

than even the 60s right now. Yeah, and I think there are periods where that lulls, like maybe the 1980s, where there seems to be back. Or the 70s, remember disco? Yeah, like a dumbing down of things. Yeah, just people not caring or whatever. Yeah, it's weird and cyclical. I read this article called Things Fall Apart,

How Social Media Leads to a Less Stable World. It was by a guy named Curtis Howland, H-O-U-G-H-L-E-N-D, and saw knowledge at Wharton, like the Wharton Business School website. And it was basically saying it wasn't, I thought it was condemning social media. And this guy was just basically stating, matter of factly, that social media erodes the state.

And that now we have ways to connect with other people in ways that are more important to us than, say, our allegiance to the state. So you may feel more connected to somebody over Hello Kitty. And your fondness for Hello Kitty, more than you would identify yourself as, say, an American. And with social media, you're able to connect with other people who feel the same way.

And so you form on social media basically bodies that supersede the state, in your opinion. No boundaries. Exactly. And as this happens, more and more the state's what's called sovereignty erodes more and more and more. And it becomes a less and less stable world. The guy's point was that, yes, while it's very unstable

and things are much more dangerous during periods like this, it's basically just a period of upheaval and change. And then eventually things stabilize again. But what this guy was saying, using this as an example, is that we're in a, like, right now, possibly on the cusp of a period of tremendous fundamental change in the world. Oh, I see that every day.

Yeah. Yeah. It's a pretty interesting time to be alive. Yeah. A little scary to me. Yeah, well, I mean, it's like the guy said, it's more dangerous than your average time. Yeah.

Because change frequently comes out of spasms of violence or upheaval. Where nobody's in charge because there's a power struggle going on. Or our normal structures are being eroded. It's interesting. It's super interesting. So back to the salons.

We're back to the age of enlightenment, the traditional age of enlightenment. The salons, the members were known. There was a group of people known as the philosophes. We've mentioned a few of them, Rousseau, Diderot, Voltaire. How do you pronounce that? Is it? It's not Monti, he was it?

Montiskew. Montiskew? And they were, they're kind of skeptics and critics of not everything, but the establishment of government, or the way government was at the time. Especially the church. Hated the church. Like, Voltaire especially hated the church,

and the very fact that it even existed. And a lot of the enlightened ones were dais. And dais, and basically, I like the way Konger put it, in a big picture way, they believe in a clockmaker God, which means maybe God created everything and set things in motion, but then was like, all right, that's it, I'm out. I'm not getting my fingers in all the pies of everyone.

And you have free will, basically, after you're born. Which, again, was pretty dangerous to the religious establishment. Yeah, so you've got the basis, you've got the foundation of the Holy Roman Empire in the West losing tons of power and political and intellectually. You've got the monarchy now being assaulted by the French salons who are planting

the seeds of democracy. Like, Montesquieu, for example, wrote in 1748, the spirit of the laws. And he basically proposed the idea of a separation of powers. He's like the first guy to do that. He's this French lawyer who is in the salon scene. And all of a sudden, it's like separation of power.

What are you talking about? No, you've got a monarch. And what the monarch says is right. And as a result of this kind of thinking, the seeds of democracy are planted. And then a hostility toward religion of almost any kind that you still see today, like in the form of like Bill Maher, or Richard Dawkins, or formerly Christopher Hitchens,

all of this started coming out of the French salons. Yeah. All right, after this message, we're going to talk a little bit about how the Age of Enlightenment manifested itself in different parts of the world. Stuff you should know. On the podcast, Paydude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor

stars of the co-classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up

sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, OK, I see what you're doing.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there

for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one.

Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

So we've mainly been in Europe this whole time. In France, there was an emphasis on the arts. In England, they had a more emphasis on science and economics. You mentioned Adam Smith at the beginning. He was a Scottish man in 1976. In 1776, wrote his Wealth of Nations, which basically said the government should not

interfere with matters of finance and economics. There should be the invisible hand guiding all these principles. Yeah, I read this article by this guy who's explaining that change in thought. Before that, it was that whole social contract thing, like Rousseau, saying this is an interplay between citizens and citizens and citizens in their government,

and the government's role is to protect the rights of people. What Hume said is the government is legitimate, not Hume, but Smith. The government's legitimate in so far as it steps out of people's affairs and lets free trade take place, which that might sound familiar if you subscribe to a Republican or Libertarian ideology.

Like the whole laissez-faire attitude of government is what legitimizes government, and the government that meddles in someone's affairs is an illegitimate government as far as classical economic thought goes. Yeah, and we talked about that, and our stuff, you should now guide to the economy, which we got an email.

Someone bought that the other day. Yeah, they thought it was 17 hours long or something. And then also in Scotland was David Hume, who's like my favorite philosopher of all time, just because he's like a. He's only one he studied. He's a meat. No, he's a meat.

He's the only one who's ever really spoken to me of the Enlightenment philosophers. And Hume was this meat and potatoes dude who basically said, show me the proof. Yeah, he was a skeptic. He was an empiricist. He said, you basically can't believe anything that you can't see with your own eyes.

My belief in his philosophy has been eroded with the idea that consciousness is a subjective experience. Just totally subjective, basically. But I like his idea. And it was like the cause and effect, right? I think he used like Billiards as an example, where you hit a ball, like you're playing a ball. You hit like the eight ball with the cue ball.

You can predict where that's going to go, where the eight ball is going to go, based on how you hit it with the cue ball. But Hume's point is, you can't say for certain that that's what's going to happen. You're basing that strictly on previous experience, rather than proof that this is what will happen. So we can't prove that hitting that cue ball

will make this eight ball go in a certain direction ahead of time. And so therefore, we've come up with this thing called cause and effect, which basically serves as a stop gap between what we think will happen and the phenomenon we've already observed. Like, in other words, you can't say for certain the sun's going to come up tomorrow,

just because it's already come up so many days before. And the reason why is because we don't have empirical proof. And I liked him for that. So you don't think the sun will come up tomorrow necessarily? It's not the point that I think it won't come up tomorrow. What Hume was saying is, we can't prove that it will. You can't prove that it will just based on previous experience. Right.

Well, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were on board that train to a certain degree. And we mentioned earlier that most of the establishment was pretty threatened by most of these ideas and the people in power, but not everybody. Some people wanted to get on the Enlightenment train because I think it was progressive and maybe made them seem open to ideas in modern, perhaps.

Empress of Russia, Catherine the Great, was one of those who had a lot of dealings with the Phyllisos. And Frederick the Great of Prussia even had Voltaire over and said, you know, why don't you come and live here? Yeah. And he did. Yeah. He said, for free?

And he said, for free? He said, OK. I was trying to think of Prussian money, but I have no idea. The prowlers? The prouble? That's way better. It was also happening in Germany all over the world with Emmanuel Kant.

He was one of the first champions of freedom of the press. And his motto is one that I love, dare to know. And again, he was just challenging people. Go out there and learn about something and don't just accept what these religious leaders are telling you you have to accept. Yeah. And actually, he came up with this idea

called the categorical imperative. And basically Kant gave the world the idea that there is such a thing as moral absolutes, right? And I guess he didn't give the world that because the Judeo-Christian ethic and most religious ethics say that there is such a thing as right or wrong. And today you have that argument of, is there such a thing as moral absolutism?

Or is moral or cultural relativism a thing? That's the argument that's one of the arguments that's playing out right now in the intellectual world. I just think it's fascinating too. It totally is. So what does this all lead to? Eventually, it's going to lead to war because any time there is, well, not any time,

but a lot of times when there's a uprising of radical thought, people are going to want to take action. And it happened in the United States by way of the American Revolution and in France by way of the French Revolution. And they had different results, to say the least. They were both experimentations in this new idea of democracy. Yeah, pretty much.

And yeah, the American one worked out pretty well, some would say. The French one, not so much. Because apparently Robes Pierre, who was the head of the Jacobin party that took power during the French Revolution, Robes Pierre was a follower of Rousseau. I remember Rousseau contributed to the social contract

by saying the people will something, and then it's up to the people in charge to carry out that will. And so Robes Pierre took that to mean that the people stormed the Bastille and overthrew the monarchy. And so it was his job as the head of the Jacobin party, which is now in power, to kill everybody who

wasn't down with the revolution. And so thousands and thousands of French people lost their lives at the guillotine as a result during this reign of terror. So some people would say America founded itself based on democratic principles. And let's not pay attention to some of these darker spots over here, and just pay attention

to the democratic experiment. And it worked out great. And then the French one, there was a revolution. They tried to install democratic ideals. And thousands of people had their heads chopped off. So it didn't work quite as well. Well, and some people say that effectively killed the age of enlightenment, as we know it,

the French Revolution, because the chaos and violence that erupted was, in certain circles, blamed on the enlightenment and proof that we can't self-govern. And these are radical ideas, and that's why we got stomped on. Have you ever heard the theory that the French Revolution was due to moldy bread? No.

There is one theory that people got ahold of bad bread. So it was air goat poisoning? And basically, we're tripping on acid on July 14, 1789, when they decided to storm the Bastille. That was one of the explanations for the Salem witchcraft trials. Yeah. Crazy, I hadn't heard that.

Yeah. So they were like, it's go time. I guess so. Let's get this party started. But like I said, some people say that ended the age of enlightenment, as we know it. Romanticism was soon ushered in and was way more appealing to the common folk than this weird radical thoughts that

were going on before. Well, Romanticism was the first time people questioned the idea on a large scale that maybe the rationalism and the humanism of the enlightenment went too far in the other direction. Like, sure, maybe we were way too religious, and the religious organizations had way too much power. But we swung way over here, and just rationalism

had this idea too. And it became dogmatic in and of its own right. And so we still never really figured out how to fine tune it enough. And that's what we're still figuring out right now. A lot of people say the enlightenment, the idea that the course of humanity is always towards civilization and rational thought.

And that any culture that's not there is inferior to a culture that does think rationally. So that means that colonialism and imperialism was supported by enlightenment thought, which is a huge, like, enlightenment's not supposed to be about that. It's supposed to be about good things and freedom and all that, but it also supported colonialism. That was a huge, that's people are arguing about that right

now too. Yeah, let's go conquer these people and make them modern and bring them into today's world. Exactly. So there's another article I want to recommend. It's called The Trouble with the Enlightenment. It's by a guy named Ollie Cussin. It's on Prospect Magazine.

Awesome article about this. He basically reviews a couple of books, one by Jonathan Israel, who I mentioned earlier, where he basically says, like, forget the philosophs. You've got to look at Baruch Spinoza, who was a Dutch philosopher from, I think, the 17th century. He was the one who came up with the Enlightenment ideas. And had we followed his Enlightenment ideas,

there wouldn't have been any governments now, or there wouldn't be any religion whatsoever. He came up with the real revolutionary Enlightenment. And what we got, what we think of as the Enlightenment, was a watered down, moderate version that was changed. Sure, there was tons of change, but it was still palatable to the elite that people could still be governed easily. Even in these new democratic experiments and stuff

like that. There's a lot of people who take issue with his book, but it's pretty interesting to discuss it. What's it called? Democratic Enlightenment, I think. He's the one who wrote the several thousand page trilogy. Oh, that guy. And then there's another guy in a story named Anthony Pagin.

He believes that the Enlightenment project is still going on. And basically, as long as there's religion in the world, the Enlightenment won't be fulfilled entirely, which is, again, it's like this idea that rationalism has become dogmatic. And if you're not just strictly rational, if you hold any kind of what could be considered

a rational or superstitious belief, you're acting irrationally, you're not thinking correctly, and therefore you have to be converted, which is... Just as dogmatic. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Lots going on right now. Huge time of change.

And also go read The Dark Age Myth in Atheist Reviews God's Philosophers by Tim O'Neill on strangenotions.com. Tim O'Neill? Tim O'Neill. And I think that's about it, huh? That is it for me. If you want to learn more about the Enlightenment, go check out those three articles or check out and check out

how the Enlightenment worked by typing that in the search bar how stuff works. And now it's time for Listen to Mail. I'm going to call this Mad Cal Theory from Seattle. Hey, guys, just listen to your podcast on fatal familial insomnia. In it, you mentioned the late 18th century cases in Venice, and then wondered about the unrelated cases

and what they were eating. This made me finally sit down and write my first email for years I've had a theory about prion disease and mad cow in specific. Years ago, I was watching a program on Egyptian mummies. We talked about how mummification may have started out with the pharaoh, but the practice eventually made it down to call it budget mummification.

They talked about how in the late 18th and 19th century Crips of these early mummies, they would be ground up and sold as fertilizer, specifically in England. Sometime later, when I learned about prions and how nearly indestructible they were, I wondered, could ground up mummies have been used to fertilize a field

than a cow comes along and eats grass that has been contaminated with prions, leading to mad cow disease. A human eats the mad cow's brain. It gets Kreuzfeldt-Yakobs. So I've always wondered, could never figure out if you could prove it or disprove it, if CFJ was a real mummy's curse of desecrated Egyptian corpses.

And that is Darren Gray in Seattle. And man, I just like that kind of speaking of radical thought. I had not heard that one. Darren's having, well, it's Darren's own grayism. Nice going, Darren. Yeah. If you have anything to say about that, anybody else, we would like to hear from you.

Can you prove or disprove that Kreuzfeldt-Yakobs disease is a mummy's curse? You can tweet to us at SYSKpodcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can send us an email, which seems appropriate, to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com. And join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's

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