For some time
now I’ve been sharing with readers of this blog the concept of a “dominant
reason” that determines how we think, how we reason and thus what kind of
solutions to our society’s problems we can arrive at. I will have more to say
in future posts how such reason is transmitted to kids (and adults) to ensure
it is constantly reproduced, and strengthened through each individual’s
lifecycle, but I would like to dwell in this post on how such reason came to be
in the first place. It is a dense, complicated history, which starts at least
2,300 years ago in Greece, and which has been enriched by many traditions
originated outside Europe (Judaism, Middle Eastern wisdom literature, a handful
of Chinese inventions, Mongol military tactics, and a long etcetera), so I will
focus just in the latest four hundred years, the period I have studied more in
detail and about which I feel more confident talking about. It helps to
conceive such reason as the answer that a society gives itself to some
historical discontinuity, normally catalyzed by a significant (seismic?) change
in the technology it uses to adapt itself to its environment, an environment
marked both by its natural surroundings (the climate it experiences, the
fertility of the soils it occupies, the stocks of plants and cattle it has
access to) and the separate societies that it has to interact with. I maintain
that we can find the following main discontinuities in the period under
consideration of Western history, and differentiate the following types of
dominant reason in response to each of them:
Now let’s
review what are the rules that each type of reason presented to the members of
society reared in it (under its dominion):
·
Baroque reason (1650-1750): The Westphalian treaties that gave
birth to the modern state system (necessarily in balance, threatening with
annihilation any nation small enough or unproductive enough not to enter in an
alliance with others) had just finished the wars of Religion in Europe and marked
the end of the hegemony of the Spanish empire (soon to be compounded by the
accession to the throne of the feeble Charles II in 1665, whose catastrophic
reign serves up to this day as a warning of the perils of monarchic rule).
Religion was still important enough to fight and die for, as a result of the
gains in agricultural productivity population had already recovered from the
last bout of the Black Death and socially the hereditary aristocracy, although
still strong (specially in the countries in the periphery of the forming
World-System, which pivoted to an economy based on a few staple commodities produced
for such market) was ceding its place of preeminence to a new ascending class:
the bourgeoisie. If we had to summarize under just three headings what made
people tick, it would be:
1. The goal of life is to save oneself
(in the afterlife)
2. The position in the social hierarchy
is determined by birth (so there is no point in trying to improve one’s place
in it)
3. People may pursue a number of
different, sometimes conflicting desires (first and foremost to survive, having
enough food, shelter and health; afterwards things like belonging to a group,
and even acquiring some mastery in a recognized pursuit, from humanistic
disciplines to crafts as prescribed within the guild structure –what MacIntyre
called “a practice”- were welcomed)
It is easy to
see that producing material goods was not the most immediate concern for the
vast majority of the population, and that societies following those 3 rules
were abysmally worse than ours in growing their GDP. They had other, more
pressing concerns, and just didn’t devote that much effort to it (and why would
they? Since they were kids they were taught that there are more important things
in life than working and selling things or selling their time to earn more
money)
·
Economic reason (1750-1800): The longest period of peace in the
history of Europe in many, many centuries (I once told a classroom of young
kids in Mexico that they shouldn’t be fooled by our recent economic successes,
what Europeans had showed the rest of the world how to do during 99% of our
shared history, what we are distinctly good about, what we really excel at is
killing and maiming and invading and destroying each other). So it comes as no surprise
that the economy takes off, technology really comes into its own, we inadvertently
stumble upon the most generic procedure for problem resolution that man has
ever known (aka “scientific method”), we launch the Industrial Revolution, we
define a way of governing a polity that for all practical purposes is the best
we have ever had (parliamentarianism, with England’s “Glorious Revolution” and
the American war of independence), we fall in love with the somewhat
contradictory concept of universal reason (aka the Enlightenment) and we top it
off with the discovery of a new form of totalitarianism in the name of majority
rule and a new round of continent wide slaughter (aka French Revolution and
Napoleonic wars). In the meantime of
such a meaty half century, our friend David Hume (leaning on the teaching of
Hobbes, Locke, Machiavelli –which I’m not sure he even read, the 3rd
Earl of Shaftesbury, Samuel Butler and Francis Hutcheson) formulates a moral
system entirely independent of religious teaching, and thus enables the enthronement
of a slightly different set of principles for conducting everyday’s life:
1. The goal of life is to satisfy
desires (as only emotions, or in his words, “passions”, can move us, and those
passions can only be explained as the impulse towards feeling pleasure and
avoiding pain, which is what desires consist in)
2. The position in the social hierarchy
is determined mostly by birth, but it can be slightly improved by “moral worth”
(as defined by social consensus)
3. People may pursue a number of
different, sometimes conflicting desires (survival in a peaceful time is more
of a given, so things like recognition, justified by an innate “sympathy” can
play a greater role)
It may seem
like the production of material goods is still of no great concern for the
majority, but we see that one of the obstacles to devote most of one’s energies
to this worldly pursuits has been removed, by redefining the goal of a life
well lived (something that happened first in the protestant countries, as
described superbly by Max Weber, but also Werner Sombart, as I mentioned in
this old post Luxury and Capitalism,
so it comes as no surprise that those countries surge to the position of world hegemony
vacated by the Spaniards and their Genoese financiers).
·
Sentimental reason (1800-1900): The bourgeois upheavals of the preceding
period (English and American) were relatively mild and bloodless affairs
compared with the one that closes it with a cataclysmic bang (the French
Revolution). Even when performed in the name of Reason and weaving into its
banner nice slogans like “Freedom, Equality and Fraternity”, “the Universal rights
of Man” and all the rest, it soon backfires through the Terror and triggers a conservative
backlash in the rest of Europe (until the revolutionary embers were rekindled
by the middle of the XIX century) that turned a significant amount of the intelligentsia against reason and autonomy
and towards authority and tradition. All the arts were rocked by the romantic
turn, and the majority’s idea of what was a reasonable way of living could be
no exception, so for those times the big directions about how life should be
conducted looked something like this:
1. The goal of life is to satisfy
desires (indeed, the more outrageous the desire, the better)
2. The position in the social hierarchy
is determined mostly by genius (the cult of the artist), although genius is
sooner or later recognized by the majority (the solitary artist, true only to
his calling, is but a temporary stage), which can also ennoble themselves by
recognizing it
3. There is only one desire worthy of
being pursued, to “be oneself”, to “become who you are”
It has to be
noted that for such a seismic shift in what the dominant reason accepts as a
valid object of desire the “subsistence problem” had to be mostly solved first.
It’s OK to have a bunch of young people full of angst and ennui demanding a “revolution
of taste” and a “transvaluation of all values” as long as you can feed and
clothe them, and they are not going to distract the vast majority of people
toiling in unwholesome factories and mills more than the time strictly
necessary for them to forget about the hopelessness of their condition (so they
are really agents of their alienation by making it more bearable, rather than the
revolutionaries they considered themselves to be).
Mostly old history (and very schematic one at
that), but it sets the stage for what I’ll have to say about the last two
iterations of the dominant reason whose evolution I’m documenting, which I’ll
do in a soon to come post.
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