2.2 The Invention of Modern Liberalism and Conservatism: part 2

The Founding Principle of Enlightenment

Centuries of intellectual darkness followed the fall of Rome. Religious wars and growing mercantile wealth exposed the limits of the old polity without providing new answers. Westerners typically imagine the entire world was dark. It wasn’t. Sixteenth century Western Europe was a cultural backwater. Paris, France was the only European city with a top twelve population.

India, China, Japan, and the Americas had advanced cultures. The Persian-Muslim Golden Age (8th-13th centuries CE) saved ancient Greek and Asian texts the Holy Roman Empire burned. Science, medicine, history, optics, astronomy, and mathematics flourished.

Mariam Al Astralabi mastered the mathematics to create complex astrolabes: analog astronomy calculators.

Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) encouraged bias free histories, preceding European writers  including Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche and Toynbee by centuries. He wrote the first scientific economic text, which was translated into Ottoman Turk in 1749 and “discovered” in France. Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) included concepts Ibn Khaldun identified centuries earlier: division of labor, labor theory of value, capital accumulation, multiplier, economic depression, supply side economic, and aggregate demand.

The Kitab al Tasrif  by Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrwi (1,000 CE) was the medical cannon in Europe into the 1700s. The text separated diseases, addressed disease transmission vectors, created over 200 surgical instruments, used alcohol as an antiseptic, separated men’s and women’s wards, developed medical records, and established pharmacies.

Western Europe played an active but uncertain role in destroying knowledge. Caesar burned part of The Great Library of Alexandra by accident. It ran out of government support. Christian Emperor Theodosus burned it in 391 CE to drive out non-Christians. Whatever the cause, 500,000 to 1,000,000 texts of knowledge from around the world were destroyed. Some surviving texts reached Bagdad’s House of Wisdom, which became one of the largest tenth century libraries.

So why, after nine hundred years of intellectual stagnation in Western Europe, did so many brilliant scholars suddenly appear in seventeenth century Britain? For the same reason that there was a new class of wealthy people. Colonization and trade introduced international knowledge. Their work was brilliant, but it grew from the knowledge of cultures Britain deemed inferior.

The myth of European superiority reflects an implicitly racist weltanschauung. That racism hides in every ancient astronaut, lost white civilization explanation of the Great Pyramids and ancient stone cities in the Americas.

Understanding Locke’s new Enlightenment polity requires understanding the old polity. In 1650 political liberalism and conservatism did not exist as we understand. The King, God’s chosen representative on Earth, sat atop the Great Chain of Being. Every other person (and beast) was similarly assigned a station in life: noble man, freeman, peasant, serf. To try to rise above that station sinned against God. If you were born a serf, you would die a serf, as would your children and their children. Helping others rise above their station would also rebel against God. The Great Chain of Being was Christianity’s version of the Hindu cast system (varna-jati ). Filmer’s Patriarcha, which presumed the Great Chain, underpinned Edmund Burke’s conservatism, and reemerged from the weltanschauung in conservative sociological and political polemics.

Enlightenment appeared in the shadows of the Reformation. Wars between denominations and between Crown and Parliament created chaos. Calvinists ideas that financial success hinted at God’s approval contradicted the Great Chain. Where religion seemed to lead to war and chaos, the Enlightenment celebrated using reason to understand the universe and improve the human condition. The goals of rational humanity were knowledge, freedom, and happiness. “The Enlightenment is seen as introducing a possibility that had simply not existed before: that of self-conscious projects for shaping society in accord with some rational ideal.” It introduced two transformative principles to British-American thought. One, (as God’s creations) every individual had the same rights. Two, society and individuals could improve their condition through reason and effort.

We find these rights and revelations in Locke’s Two Treatises on Government:

“The state of Nature has a law of Nature to govern it, which obliges everyone, and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another’s life, health, liberty or possessions; for all men being all the workmanships of one omnipotent and infinitely wise Maker; all the servants of one sovereign Master, sent into the world by His order and about His business; they are His property, whose workmanship they are made to last during His, not another’s pleasure. And being furnished with like facilities, sharing all in one community of Nature, there cannot be supposed any such subordination among us that may authorize us to destroy one another, as if we were made for one another’s uses, as the inferior ranks of creatures are for ours. Every one as he is bound to preserve himself, and not to quit his station willfully, so by the like reason, when his own preservation comes not in competition, ought he as much as he can to preserve the rest of mankind, and not, unless it be to do justice to an offender, take away or impair the life, or what tends to preservation of the life, liberty, health, limb, or goods of another.” Two Treatises Chapter II §6

When the Preamble to the Constitution says, “We the people…to form a more perfect union…promote the general welfare…do establish”, it enshrines Enlightenment beliefs in individual rights and the affirmative responsibility of government to “preserve the rest of mankind”.

For roughly one-hundred and thirty years this polity of individual rights and opportunity guided political thought. Then the newly rich embraced anti-Enlightenment or Romantic Age principles to create modern political conservatism. Succeeding depended on recasting Christianity, misrepresenting science, and undermining education.

¹ Beijing, China 672K; Vijayanagar, India 500K; Cairo, Egypt 400K; Hangzhou, China 250K; Tabriz Iran 250K; Teotihuacan, Mexico 250K; Tenochtitlan Mexico 200K; Gauda, India 200K; Istanbul, Turkey 200K; Paris, France 185K; Guangzhou, China 150K, Nanjing, China 147K.

²  This use contrasts Enlightenment’s rational thought to Romanticism’s faith.

³ Graeber, David and David Wengrow The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 2021 p 495

Next: Edmund Burke and the anti-Enlightenment.