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- [00:00]
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Quillette Podcast Intro/Outro
Welcome to the Quillette Podcast. Quillette is where free thought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.
- [01:16]
Interviewer (Iona Italia)
Welcome to the Quillet Podcast. I'm your host, Iona Italia. My guest today is Adam Wakelink. Adam is a historian based in Melbourne. While he has a day job as a lawyer, he is also the author of the last 50 Australia and the End of the Great War Stern the Forgotten Story of Australia, Japan and the Pacific War Crimes Trials, A House of Commons for a Den of Thieves, Australia's Journey From Penal Colony to Democracy and the subject of our podcast today, why the Enlightenment Matters, the Shift in Our Thinking that Made the Modern World. Adam is a frequent contributor to Quillet and is currently working on a critical biography of George Orwell. In this episode, among other topics, we talk about why the Enlightenment took place, when and where it did, the most important pillars of Enlightenment thinking, the work of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Adam Smith, the importance of the Netherlands to the Enlightenment project, and how to defend Enlightenment values. Today, as Adam was visiting Sydney this week, I decided to interview him in person. Since I don't have a recording studio and work only for my laptop, this presented a few technical challenges, but I believe it was well worth it. I hope you enjoy my interview with Adam Wakelink. Welcome to the Coolette Podcast, Anna. Thanks for having me and welcome to my recording studio, which I've seen, I
- [02:51]
Guest (Adam Wakelink)
think quite a few times in your other videos, so it is interesting to see it from a different angle off through the screen.
- [02:56]
Interviewer (Iona Italia)
So Adam is my first in person guest here, so please be patient with us if there are any technical glitches. But hopefully this can be the start of more in person interviews because it's more fun this way. So I'm going to begin by reading a passage from from the book. This is from the introduction People who live in Western countries today live in the most successful societies in human history. Our civilization is the only one to have had knowledge of the atom, the cell, the galaxy, evolution through natural selection, the connection between germs and disease, vaccination, how electricity may be harnessed to create motion, general anesthesia and birth control. Ours is the only civilization in which the majority of citizens can read and write, where the death of a woman in childbirth is seen as a freak tragedy rather than a fact of everyday life, and where starvation is almost unknown. We have gone further than anyone before in restraining the exercise of power with the apparatus of law, providing effective means of peaceful dispute resolution, and protecting the rights of individuals to speak and worship as they choose. Anyone who turns on the TV news at night can see that we still have a way to go and the struggle against want, injustice and oppression will not be one in our lifetimes, if at all. But we have the potential to keep going. In this book, I will argue our successes are not simple good fortune or the inevitable progress of history. Rather, they are due to a decisive shift in our thinking which took place over the 17th and 18th centuries across the Christian and Islamic worlds in servitus time. So that's the you begin by telling a story from pre Enlightenment the pre Enlightenment era From the Atlantic coast of Ireland to northern India, conventional thinking on topics from science to politics was defined by a rigid philosophy combining the ideas of ancient Greece with the scriptures of the Abrahamic religions. China remains similarly constrained by centuries of inflexible Confucianism. Due to some historical and geographical oddities, thinkers in northwestern Europe in the early 17th century began to tear down this philosophic edifice and come up with replacements. For simplicity. I will refer to this shift in thinking in its entirety as the Enlightenment. Although many historians view the Enlightenment as a narrower and more specific period of this time, the shift in 17th and 18th centuries gave us the ideas on which the success of the modern west depends, like freedom of speech, the scientific method, legal restraints on the power of government, a free market economy, and human rights. In short, modernity I have set out to explain how this happened and why it mattered. So I want to begin with a very obvious, perhaps introductory question which why did the Enlightenment take place at that particular moment? And why did it take place in the particular region of northwestern Europe? Let's start with a historical moment, perhaps.
- [06:26]
Guest (Adam Wakelink)
Yeah. So if you're looking to explain why most modern Europe, say North America, Australia, New Zealand, became successful, you have to explain two things. They are time and place. Why this shift in thinking happened where it did in northwestern Europe, and why it happened when it did in the 17th and 18th centuries and not before. When history happens, we tend to think of it as being inevitable, like that these things could only happen at this time, but there's really no reason why they're. Couldn't have been an industrial revolution in the 13th century. The coal was there. They just didn't dig it up and make steam engine out of it, make a steam engine running on it. Or why, say, the constitution, the constitutional government and restraint and the power of the king weren't introduced in, say, the 10th century or the 16th century. And the reason why, in terms of time, I think it is important, I think that it happened then in the 17th and 18th centuries was because the Protestant Reformation had broken what was then the orthodoxy of the Catholic Church. So it became possible for, in different countries, for there to be a different church, religion, philosophy. And this created some competition in ideas. And then in certain countries, certain ideas proved more successful than others. Also, the Protestant Reformation moved some of the learning out of the scholastic universities, which had a very rigid way of thinking, into the secular realm. It broke some of the power of the guilds, which had been illustrated on commerce, that sort of thing. And I think some people would tend to think the Protestant Reformation was necessary for things like human rights and represented some sort of softening of the power of the church. But early Protestantism was a very fundamentalist and in some ways very anti modern, anti humanist religion. The early Protestants still burned people at the stake for heresy, but it allowed that competition and in some ways it forced, after the wars of religion failed to settle the question by force. Catholics and Protestants had to come to some way to live, some way of living together.
- [08:43]
Interviewer (Iona Italia)
Yeah. So it began in a society that was forced to accept disagreements in divergences in thought.
- [08:50]
Guest (Adam Wakelink)
Yes.
- [08:51]
Interviewer (Iona Italia)
So you talk about later in the book, you talk about Song China, the Song dynasty in China. And they had a number of new inventions during that time, a number of innovations. Gunpowder, I can't remember the others now. Paper, I think. Yeah.
- [09:09]
Guest (Adam Wakelink)
The pound Lock.
- [09:10]
Interviewer (Iona Italia)
And nevertheless, there was no Chinese Enlightenment. Or as you put it, there was no Chinese Manchester. So why was that? Why was Enlightenment not possible in Song dynasty China, where it was in northwestern Europe?
- [09:27]
Guest (Adam Wakelink)
So that is a question that historians have been asking for a long time. It's called the Needham Puzzle after one of the historians who first asked it. Probably the best answer to that is that China was united under one dynasty, whereas Europe was separated into multiple kingdoms. And that may just be an accident of geography. China is a compact country without internal lateral barriers, while in Europe you have the Alps, the Pyrenees, the English Channel, the Adriatic, making it very hard to unite Europe. And some very determined conquerors tried, but none succeeded. So an example that I refer to in the book is the Ming dynasty built ships, ocean going ships, and sent them around the Indian and the Pacific oceans. Then the policy changed and they stopped. While in Europe, if one kingdom had have started doing something and then stopped it, there is no reason another one couldn't have continued. Like for example, the Portuguese built ships, the Spanish built ships out of the Dutch, so that if policy, say in Portugal had changed and they stopped building oceangoing ships, there's no reason the Spanish or the Dutch wouldn't have continued.
- [10:35]
Interviewer (Iona Italia)
They would have had to build ships. Yes. So free trade was crucial to this as well, because your ideas are in direct competition as to whose ideas will create the most profits for your country. And if your country is weak enough, then you can get invaded and it isn't over. So the stakes are high.
- [10:53]
Guest (Adam Wakelink)
Yes.
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Interviewer (Iona Italia)
Yeah. So it's about creating the conditions in which you can foster. Foster disagreement. Right. I think part of the Chinese thing is that you write about the self sufficiency of the Middle Kingdom. They were able to just stop going to other countries because they had everything they needed and they weren't in. Everyone else was too far away to be in direct competition. And they also had this extremely centralized bureaucratic system in which which involved wrote an enormous amount of rote learning in order to pass the exams and become a Mandarin. And part of that was also the Chinese language and writing system was also a stumbling block to enlightenment. I think you imply, at least because part of the issue was that people are very invested in rote learning because rote learning involved. It was so difficult to learn things by rote in Chinese.
- [11:58]
Guest (Adam Wakelink)
Yes.
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Interviewer (Iona Italia)
You ended up having to learn hundreds of thousands of characters along the way. And once you've invested in that much time and energy, it's difficult to break away from that out into new lines of thinking.
- [12:14]
Guest (Adam Wakelink)
I mean, I don't pretend to be an expert in China. It's obviously a big topic on its own, but yeah, that's definitely something that's come up in the writings of a number of people who've looked at this topic, this situation where there was a bureaucracy that was trained in memorizing Confucian texts and memorizing Chinese characters and spending a lot of time in that and very little time in, say, practical knowledge.
- [12:40]
Interviewer (Iona Italia)
How do you assess Tom Holland's idea that the Enlightenment wouldn't have been possible without Christianity, that the Enlightenment couldn't have happened in a non Christian society, and that in fact our modern values and morals are rooted in Christianity?
- [12:57]
Guest (Adam Wakelink)
I think it's. I find Tom Holland's argument very interesting and in some ways quite persuasive, although in other ways I think he understates just how much of a shift in our thinking there was in the 17th and 18th century and that things such as slavery, such as imposing the death penalty for what we consider to be petty crimes, such as waging wars of conquest against people, and the justification really solely that they were of a different culture, a different religion, were all widely accepted, like, up until then. Like to speak of Tom Holland, I'm a big fan of the podcast the Rest Is History. And I've been watching their recent series on the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire. And the Conquistadors were deeply religious Christians, but what they considered to be acceptable or normal was completely alien to us, such as taking the native people of South America as their slaves, burning people to death on the basis they were allegedly heretics, but in practice because they wouldn't hand over gold or didn't know where the gold was, seizing the land of indigenous people, seizing their women as concubines or sex slaves. And when we look at that today, that sort of behavior and mindset is more what we would think of, say, when we think of Islamic State, like in practice a group like Islamic State or other groups that we consider to be extremists with an anti humanist ideology. So, I mean, I don't know if the Enlightenment could have happened in a society that was not Christian. I mean, in practice it only happened in a series of Protestant Christian societies. And so we don't have the counterfactual. It only really happened once and in one place and in one time. But my response to that would be the shift was so big and old ideas had been so established for so long that it's hard to. I see that it wasn't a decisive shift away from Existing ideas.
- [15:02]
Interviewer (Iona Italia)
I mean, I feel that I have two problems with Tom Holland's ideas, which I might be misrepresenting here, or at least my understanding of what he's saying, because it's a long time since I've read Dominion, and I do have a very poor memory from both books, so I tend to forget the details of the argument. So I apologize if I'm misrepresenting. But a couple of things really stand out to me, and one is that enlightenment is fundamentally. What made the Enlightenment possible was questioning of authority. That's what made scientific progress possible, also political progress, and that is the opposite of religion, which requires belief and faith. And faith in some kind of blind faith, in a sense. And you talk about the Enlightenment, one of the Enlightenment principles being a recognition of the limits of reason, which seems counterintuitive, but would you like to explain that?
- [16:12]
Guest (Adam Wakelink)
Sure.
- [16:13]
Interviewer (Iona Italia)
For the listeners?
- [16:14]
Guest (Adam Wakelink)
Yeah, absolutely. And it is kind of intuitive because the Enlightenment gets called the Age of Reason. And that's actually the title of Thomas Paine's famous book, which is seen as being a critical worker Lakerman thinking. And this idea that blind faith was challenged by reason, but that's not entirely true for a couple of reasons. One of them is that reason had always been an important part of Western philosophy. But the problem was the Greek philosophers and the scholastic Christian philosophers and the medieval Islamic philosophers were coming from the assumption that the universe was made according to some sort of divine order. And you could think through it and figure it out and figure out this divine order. This is if you read, say, the works of Plato, for example, where they're talking about basically finding the truth and cutting through the material world. The problem with this is that if it's possible to come to the truth through reason, then it is possible to come to some sort of absolute truth. And then you are justified in rejecting new ideas if they offend, like the reason. Or you're justified in putting people to death for heresy, because you've come to the absolute truth through your reason. And the example that I use in the book is the idea that the sun goes around the Earth. So heliocentrism, this was established in Western Christian and Islamic thought for 2,000 years. And the idea of the sun and all the planets orbited the Earth in fixed spheres, and they moved in a perfect circle.
- [17:49]
Interviewer (Iona Italia)
Geocentrism.
- [17:50]
Guest (Adam Wakelink)
Yeah, geocentrism. Sorry, yeah. But they moved in these perfect circles because the heavens were the realm of the divine. So, of course, by reason, there had to be ruling perfect circles. And the earth had to be the center of the universe because reason tells us that man, which is God's perfect creation, should be at the center of God's creation. So you can figure out that that's not true, that the Earth actually orbits the sun and that the orbits of the planets are not perfect circles. But you need to get over these ideas that are inherently reasonable and come at things with an open mind and a blank slate and just follows pure empiricism. And for the enlightenment to happen, people have to accept the limits of their reason and say, well, maybe we aren't right, maybe we don't have the right information and we are not perfect reasoning machines, no matter what we like to think. And we have to just at the world around us. And then that also leads to the idea of the toleration of dissent. Because if my reason is not perfect, I have to accept I might not be right. And then I can't really justify burning you at the stake if you've come to a different conclusion.
- [18:56]
Interviewer (Iona Italia)
That's the epistemic humility. So this is, I mean, a much later thinker, but Karl Popper always comes to mind, partly because he's one of my two pinups. The other one is Samuel Johnson. But Popper's idea that if we are, if we don't, if ideas are no longer welded in a life and death manner, existential manner to identity, then you can have disagreements and our ideas can die in our stead. This is how Popper phrases it. We can have battles between ideas rather than battles between people. And we can also. The important thing is not to be able to find out perfect truth, but to be able to discard bad ideas. Just as the important thing in politics for Popper is not to have the best, the most just government, but to be able to discard a bad government, to be able to get rid of bad governments without violence. That's the crucial thing for Popper. There was a lot of interest in psychology in the Enlightenment and in particular in epistemology, in how we come to believe things, why we believe the things we believe, how we come to have knowledge. That's Locke in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Adam Smith's Moral Sentiments. And that is part of the idea of a, of human fallibility, the fallibility of reason.
- [20:35]
Guest (Adam Wakelink)
Yes, Locke is an interesting example because he was a very devout conventional Christian, an Anglican, and there's nothing in his writings that suggests that he had any doubts about that, that he was confident in his own beliefs. But then when you read his writings and you see that he's willing to accept that somebody else may have a different view. And he was, by modern standards, not what we consider tolerant. He was quite ambivalent about tolerating Catholics, for example, and he was opposed to tolerating atheists. And he said that an oath can have an oath that cannot bind an atheist. So an atheist cannot be a member of a civil society because you can't trust them not to break their promise. But even just going so far as to tolerate dissenting Protestants was a big step by the standards of the time.
- [21:29]
Interviewer (Iona Italia)
Yeah, you had some interesting things to say by Adam Smith, which I'm going to just find in my notes. Oh, yes, you have a lovely quotation here from Bertrand Russell, which I think is very apt in the context of the idea of the limitation of reason. You say. Actually, I think this is your wording entirely consistent systems are more likely to be consistently wrong than consistently right. That's a fantastic insight.
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Guest (Adam Wakelink)
I think I wrote it, but if I did steal it from somebody else, I apologize for their plagiarism.
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Interviewer (Iona Italia)
I think you were summarizing Bertrand Russell's ideas at that point in the book. But I think that's your formulation, which I am going to. I'm going to. This is what you say by Adam Smith. Smith didn't believe morality could be reasoned. Instead, he saw it as being based in sympathy, our ability to conceive of the feelings of others. Sympathy gave us a natural inclination to morality which could be trained. And by living in society we become socialized to consider the needs of our fellow men and women. Smith rejected attempts to build intricate systems of philosophy in favor of deferring to the judgments of ordinary people and made no effort to develop rules which were universally applicable. Here again is the limitations of our reasoning powers. The theory of Moral sentiments leads to a political conclusion. Because it is not possible to develop universal systems of moral behavior. The government should not promote religion or virtue. Here is the link to the wealth of nations, in which Smith outlines a role for the government which doesn't include trying to control the economy and dictate the exchan exchanges of citizens. Rather, these exchanges are based on our understanding of each other's needs and wants. So I think that's a very interesting parallel, that there's a parallel between the Enlightenment interest in individual psychology and especially the epistemological branch of psychology, why we believe the things we believe, how we come to believe them, and the Enlightenment flourishing of free trade, the beginnings of a shift from mercantilism to free trade, because trade also involves economics. Is about psychology. It's about trying to understand rather than making people want something or deciding what they ought to want, it's trying to understand what they do want and then supplying that want and what they want and what they can give you in return. So you have to do that, you have to understand the kind of psychology and you have to put yourself in the other person's shoes and understand how they will act in terms of their self interest. So that's how economics begins. And the theory of that also begins in this period. I don't know what I was going to ask about that. Yeah. Do you want to talk a little bit more about actually that shift from mercantilism to free trade? So I wrote a short piece on the Enlightenment a while ago, which I called it Free Thought and Free Trade. So those to me were the two crucial points and they were connected. Do you also see them as connected?
- [25:07]
Guest (Adam Wakelink)
Yes. So when I set out to write this book, I looked quite a bit at philosophy and you need to, when you are writing about the Enlightenment, obviously, but philosophy is not really my area and it wasn't my main interest in writing this book. The thing that interested me more was not so much the ideas themselves, but how they manifested themselves in the real world. So to use free trade and the Scottish Enlightenment as an example. So Isaac Newton, when he wrote his Principia Mathematica, basically came up with a complete science of physics, an explanation of the laws of physics and how the universe worked, gravity and the laws of motion. For the first time people were able to explain why the moon orbited the earth, how the earth orbited the sun. Thinkers in the Scottish Enlightenment had this idea that they would develop the science of man. So their ideal would have been to write a but for man rather than physics. And so the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, like Adam Smith, but also his predecessors, David Hume, Lord Kames, really dove into this question of how to explain the relations between people. And Smith, he wrote the Theory of Moral Sentiments, where he looked that question of how we understand morality, how we understand our relation to each other. And that was critical to his modern economics, which is in the wealth of nations, because for trade to work, I have to be able to put myself in your shoes and understand what you might want or need so I can sell it to you. So mercantilism was the economic ideology of early modern Europe. There was this idea that if citizens of our country buy things from foreigners and give them money, that's bad because we are giving our money overseas. That in fact we should keep all our gold and silver in the country. We should go out and conquer colonies. We should only permit those colonies to trade with us, with the homeland. We can fight wars with other countries to try to cut down their trade, to maximize our trade, we should try to sell things to other people. We should never buy things, if we can help it, from others. And mercantilism was an ideology that lined up neatly with the divine right of kings. So the ideology of the Stuart kings of England and of Louis XIV in France, in this idea, I am the state, the idea of absolute sovereign power. So Adam Smith in the wealth of nations argued against mercantilism very effectively. And his arguments against mercantilism are still as good today as they were when he was writing them back in the 1770s. And so he pointed out that, say, Scotland cannot produce wine cheaply, have to grow grapes in greenhouses. So there is no reason why the Scots should grow their own wine if they could buy wine cheaply from the Portuguese. And then they should put that time and effort into producing things which they can sell. So maybe they can sell whiskey to the Portuguese and the Portuguese can sell wine to the Scots, and that overall will lead to more wine and more whiskey than if everyone tried to produce their own. And as he said, with regards to gold and silver, gold and silver are no different to any other goods. So if we have to buy our gold and silver from somebody else, it doesn't matter if we send our gold and silver embassies, it doesn't matter. As long as we can produce something that we can sell and we can produce something that we can sell more efficiently than other people, we don't need to worry if we go to buy things from foreigners or the example I use in the book Mechantelism, is almost me saying, I don't want to keep buying things from my local supermarket because they never buy anything from me. So in practice, as long as I can sell something else, like, say, this book, and somebody buys this book and gives me money for it, then I can go to the supermarket and buy bread. Then I definitely have to make my own bread, or I don't need to
- [29:07]
Interviewer (Iona Italia)
go and hawk, hold up your book.
- [29:10]
Guest (Adam Wakelink)
I don't go and hook something to the owner of the supermarket.
- [29:13]
Interviewer (Iona Italia)
Yeah. Two other points came up in relation to what you've just been talking about. They were both quite interesting, I think, and one is, the first thing is Smith's idea that our moral sentiments are trained by being in society. So this goes against the kind of. There was an anti Enlightenment movement. During the Enlightenment, there were thinkers who I consider kind of anti Enlightenment thinkers who are contemporaries of Smith's, and the most obvious one being Rousseau. And Rousseau's idea that there was a state of nature in which men were noble men and women, but in which people were noble savages before they were corrupted by becoming part of society, in effect by property, in effect by capitalism. So it's, it's a theory that has been taken up, in a sense by many communist groups, starting from, or most notoriously the Khmer Rouge, but right up into Tankis today on Twitter, like capitalism is corrupting and evil, et cetera. And I think it's interesting that the Enlightenment thinkers moved away from these, these two polarized ways of seeing human beings, which are the Rousseauian view, that you begin with innocence and purity and then you are corrupted by society, and the religious view, which is that you are born in sin and then you have to be redeemed through religion and through Christ or whatever religion it happens to be. This is a trope in other religions as well as Christianity. And the sense of man as fallible, not perfectible, but improvable. That's a very. To me, that's a key Enlightenment idea.
- [31:16]
Guest (Adam Wakelink)
Yes. So the state of nature is an interesting thought experiment. And quite a few thinkers at the time ask this question. They say if people were born into a world where they had no experience of society, they were not taught anything, how would they act? And the reason why it's important to ask that question is because any way of organizing society or approaching other people needs to be based in a correct assumption of human nature. So if you try to organize society in such a way that just goes against what's fundamentally human nature, it won't work. And so the three thinkers you have there are Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau. Hobbes famously says the state of nature is a state of war of all against ordinan, like his nasty British, in short, so that if we weren't restrained, we would kill each other or rob each other. And he was probably influenced by the English Civil War, which happened during his lifetime, although he was not in England at the time. And so his argument was then we're in a strong state where we all have to basically, in the interest of self preservation, give up our right to commit violence against each other to this sovereign, the Leviathan, and obey as subjects. Which is in some ways a very authoritarian idea, because if you follow Hobbes word, it means you have to obey any totalitarian government because it's better than no government. But it was interesting because every thinker in Western Christian before Hobbes had basically said, well, we have to obey the king because that's in the natural order, the divine weight of kings. God is established that there should be a king and that we should follow them. Well, Hobbes wrote this way of thinking about government that was entirely without any reference to religion, and that was based entirely in first principles. And this made him a very controversial writer at the time. He was accused of promoting atheism because of his purely mechanical account of society.
- [33:12]
Interviewer (Iona Italia)
Yeah, his idea was you just have got to choose somebody and follow that person, because you've got to follow someone or there will be anarchy. There's nothing intrinsically special about the person you're choosing. They're not anointed by God. And it can be the king, because that's the tradition. So it is the easiest thing to grasp. But there's nothing intrinsic. The king is not born special. So that is in itself quite a revolutionary idea.
- [33:46]
Guest (Adam Wakelink)
And the other thing that made him very controversial is he said we should have a national religion that we all follow. But he said, it doesn't matter what it is. And so he managed to basically anger everybody. I think if he had just come out and said, you know, this, my religion is right, then probably he wouldn't have copped so much flak, because that was accepted at the time. But the fact that he came out and said, just pick one, it doesn't matter, that basically got him slammed from all sides.
- [34:10]
Interviewer (Iona Italia)
Can you trace a little bit for us the development from Hobbes to Locke and the second treatise of government in particular?
- [34:16]
Guest (Adam Wakelink)
So Hobbes was then writing this in the mid 17th century. So then we come to the late 17th century, and we get John Locke, who's the next thinker to ask this question. And he writes about the state of nature in his second treatise on government. So his first treatise on government was challenging the divine right of kings. So there was a writer called Sir Robert Filmer who wrote this very odd book where he said we should all obey the king because he's the descendant of Adam. And so this is within God's order that we should abandon.
- [34:46]
Interviewer (Iona Italia)
Aren't we all descendants of.
- [34:49]
Guest (Adam Wakelink)
This is one of the many objections that John Locke has to Filmer. And even if you believe in the divine right of kings, and I imagine not many people listening to this podcast probably do, then Filma does not argue for a particular persuasively, and Locke takes down his argument quite easily. But then obviously Locke Then says, well, if film is arguing about the divine right of kings is not right, what is right? So he writes this interesting little book called the Second Treatise of Government. And he says, well, suppose I live in the state of nature. What will I do? And he says, well, I'll walk around and find food for myself. I might pick an apple from a tree. Then, well, what right do I have to claim the apple is mine? And he says, well, I mix my labor with the apple. So what if I plant a field of wheat? Well, then I mix my labor with the ground so that I'll grow wheat. And then beweeds his mind. So he says, there's a natural right to property that comes before the formation of the state and a right to life and liberty based on his conception of natural law. So Locke had what we might call a Christian conception of natural law and of human rights, that you have a right to life, liberty and property even before economic. Yes, although a very economic conception. Keeping in mind, Locke uses property to mean things more broadly than physical property or talk about your property within yourself. But it was a very economic one. And it was also a conception of human rights that privileged some people over others. For example, if you're a Somerset farmer, like one of his tenants, then you're okay because he recognizes your concept of human rights. But if you're, say, a Native American who is living as a hunter gatherer, then you're out of luck in Locke system. And so the Lockean conception of property did provide a justification for European colonialism. I can say that if indigenous peoples weren't farming their land well, they hadn't mixed their labor with it. So then someone was justified in coming along and farming that land and taking and making of their own. Land had no owner until it was farmed.
- [36:55]
Interviewer (Iona Italia)
Yeah, people were to sort of steel man this. People were horrified to see all this land going to waste. And this was at a time when it was still survival and nourishment was still heavily, heavily dependent on agriculture, and therefore in farming land, in grazing animals, in making the best use you could in order to produce food and to support a population. So when they went to countries where people were not practicing any kind of sophisticated system of farming, that seemed to them like a waste, a waste of resources.
- [37:38]
Guest (Adam Wakelink)
And that was part of the broader Enlightenment project. And while, obviously, I argue in the book, the Enlightenment has a very positive legacy for countries like ours, you can also see that it facilitated certain forms of injustice, like, for example, seizing land from indigenous peoples on the basis that they were viewed as not using it the basis that indigenous systems of land management and getting food and making a living from the land weren't recognized. And also from this idea of progress, which is positive in some ways, that we should develop, we should improve, we should get more scientific knowledge, we should protect human rights better than we did in the past, we should have more material goods or that sort of thing. But also this idea that you were justified then in making a negative judgment against people who did not live up to what was your contemporary idea of progress. And that is something that the legacy of the Enlightenment sad to grapple with, but if you go back to Locke's state of nature, so his conclusion was, in a state of nature, we might fight, we might trade. Like I might come to you with my apples and give them to you in exchange for something else that you have and that I want. And so he had this idea that we could almost form a society without a government that based in natural law and our own instincts. And his state of nature is kind of like the world's nations today in that there is no world government. But the countries form alliances, they trade, they generally live at peace. Sometimes they fight, sometimes they attack each other. Probably locked state of nature would be human beings living together in some sort of state like that. So his idea of a state of nature was one, we would work towards building a society then, because after all this would become too complex to administer ourselves. And then sort of like modern liberal society has an idea of the state of nature that's very vaguely similar for Wox. A lot of the conceptions, say of liberal legalism based to this idea, like contract, for example, we are free to enter into a contract, we sign it, that doesn't need any involvement of the state. But then if I break the contract, you can go off to the court and say, here's the contract, now government, please deal with this person. And that's kind of like within the Lockean state of nature. But then Rousseau comes along and he rubbishes Locke. He says, the first person who put a stake into land and said this is mine was the cause of all society's problems. Somebody should have come along and ripped the stake up and said, nobody can own land. That's ridiculous. And so the Rousseau state of nature is, as you say, the idea that we are in the state of nature would be morally pure. But then society corrupts us. And there's certain types of anti Enlightenment thinking in some ways on both the right and the left of politics which come out of Rousseau's conception of the state of nature. Because he makes various other claims as well. Like he seems to like dictatorship and the idea of a strong leader who embodies the national will, although it's hard to tell. Rousseau is very provocative, naturally. And sometimes it's hard to tell when he is actually making an argument, when he's just trying to offend people on purpose.
- [40:55]
Interviewer (Iona Italia)
Yeah, he fell out with everybody also. And famously deserted all his children. Yes, he was an absolute cunt. I think I can say that on this forecast, since we're in Australia here, a couple of interesting things came out of what you just said. I've got two ideas, so let's see if I can hold them both in my mind. The first thing is that this idea of kind of progress, that was a strongly Enlightenment idea. And it's so natural to us now to think in those kinds of terms, in terms of progress and advancement and change, that we've lost touch with how constant and cyclical things seemed to people in the three Enlightenment days. And although there were some shifts and some developments and some technological advances, nevertheless there was a very flat. The kind of scientific advances and changes to people's lifestyle for a long time. Those changes were extremely gradual. So you can see history going along pretty much flat like that. And it's reflected in population. If you look at population counts, you see population counts very flat. And then there's a sudden spike and there is suddenly a sense of we're on the train and we're heading somewhere. It's not a circle, it's not a cycle of life, it's not a great wheel of fortune. It's a track heading from here, the past towards the future. I think it's also. I'll come to the second idea in a moment, but the other thing that happens during the Enlightenment, and I think this is you don't touch on this in your book, but I actually write about this in my book, so I'll mention it here, which is. It's the first time that we have a. People start to complain that there are too many books. So up until about the late 17th century, for reasons that are both technological, to do with printing technology, advances in printing technology, which is one of the first fruits of the Industrial Revolution, and then also changes to the law. And that was also part of a larger atmosphere of free thought, which was that pre publication censorship ceased in 1694 in the UK and England, as it still was, wasn't yet the UK until 1707. England and later the United Kingdom, was obviously one of the pioneers of this meant that suddenly a lot more, it was possible to put a lot more books out on the market. And although people had always complained about some books being bad and evil and even shoddy books, for the first time people complained that there were simply too many books. It wasn't even that some of them were bad. There were just way too many. And that became a kind of, that became a major trope in the 18th century. There's just way, way too many people are shooting their mouths up saying a load of bollocks, which sounds just like today and the Internet. So that is also a kind of an inability for people in authority, in moral or ecclesiastical or governmental or academic authority, to maintain control of discourse. Suddenly there's a proliferation, I think that's important. The thing, that idea I want you to get back to from what you were just saying just now is that one of the common conceptions is that Western countries became prosperous during the Enlightenment and in the immediately ensuing period in the Victorian age because of colonialism and overseas empires. And that's an idea that you take issue with, that you challenge in the book. Do you want to say more about that?
- [45:21]
Guest (Adam Wakelink)
So there's no doubt that.
- [45:22]
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- [45:53]
Guest (Adam Wakelink)
Through colonialism and through the slave trade, European countries plundered what would be, in today's terms, trillions of dollars in wealth from Africa and the Americas and from Australia or Asia. The reason why it's not enough as a sole explanation for the success of European countries is that countries had built colonial empires before as it plundered other countries for their wealth without getting the sorts of advances that we got in northwestern Europe in the 17th and 18th century. So to give the obvious example of maybe the most proximate one, Spain, I plundered staggering amounts of wealth from the Americas in the early 16th century and onwards. But by the year 1700, while it was still rich, Spain was not an advanced country compared to, say, England or Scotland or The Netherlands, it didn't have particular scientific progress. It never had an industrial revolution. By the 20th century, it was a poorer country than the countries in northern Europe. And you can see, obviously there's many other examples throughout history, like the Mongol Empire saw the Mongols conquer such wealthy and prosperous societies as China and Persia, but it never led to an industrial revolution in Mongolia. It never led to a scientific revolution in Mongolia. So I think it's important to acknowledge that a lot of the wealth modernity did come through colonialism, both in a general sense and even in some cases from specific sense. Some of these enlightened thinkers had investments in plantations which enabled them to sit in Oxford and Cambridge in these such places, writing their books about human nature and human rights and that sort of thing. Or Thomas Jefferson writing, all men who created equal while living off the labor of 80 slaves at Monticello, however many they were. But it's not a sufficient explanation. These advances only happened once in this relatively specific environment, while empires based on conquest and economic exploitation have been with us for much longer.
- [48:10]
Interviewer (Iona Italia)
Yeah, the Spain and Portugal, to me, are always a good counterexample to what was happening in the Enlightenment, because they had some of the largest empires and overseas trade. They also had the strongest team churches. And contrary to Tom Holland's idea, Enlightenment didn't take place in the countries where Christianity was strongest. And most it took place as Christianity was weakening its hold in the countries where it was weakest. Would you like to talk a little bit, perhaps, about the role of the Netherlands in this? Because that was absolutely crucial. Why did the Enlightenment particularly take off in the Netherlands?
- [48:52]
Guest (Adam Wakelink)
So that's a very interesting question, and it shows the importance of some of these factors of history and geography to what makes a country successful. So in the Middle Ages, the Netherlands was largely a fiefdom of the Duke of Burgundy, although it was passed around to different people through marriage or through dynastic conflict, ended up as part of the Spanish Empire. But in the 17th century, Forth had won a war of independence against the Spanish. And we got the Dutch Republic. It was a very urbanized society. It had many towns. Compared to the amount of land it had, it was a society in which church authorities had been weaker for a few reasons. One of them is that the bishop responsible for the Netherlands had tended to live somewhere else. And in some cases, for example, for parts of the Netherlands that were controlled notionally by, say, the Spanish Empire, the bishop may have lived in the lands of the Holy Roman Emperor or in France. So there was a bit of a split between secular and church authority. And then because of the seaports and the towns, they promoted trade. And not having much land and being surrounded by powerful neighbors, sea trade became very important to the towns in the Netherlands, and in particular trade in books. Dutch is not a widely spoken language. It wasn't then, it isn't today. If you go to the Netherlands, most Dutch people can speak English in other languages as well. So it was naturally a good place to get books translated. And many books went to and from different countries between France and England and Germany, through the Netherlands, where they were translated and distributed. And so this gave the Netherlands a large printing industry as well as the manufacture of the goods. And it was to the advantage of the Dutch to attract skilled artisans from other parts of Europe. So in the book I talk about Baroque Spinoza, the philosopher. His came from a family of Jewish people from Spain or Portugal who were expelled because out of the Reconquista's desire to achieve uniformity and expel non Christian elements from society, the Dutch were happy to take them in and take advantage of their skills as artisans. And then this led to a bit of a snowball effect where the Netherlands became more and more prosperous just because it had made itself the center of trade and because it was willing to find a home for skilled artisans who are torn out of other parts of Europe because of their political or religious views.
- [51:30]
Interviewer (Iona Italia)
I want to changing tack a little bit because I would like to put you a couple of the questions that people have asked on Twitch, because I think some of them were interesting. Joseph Grosso asks, and this is a question that I have personally as well, which parts of the Enlightenment project need defending today and what is the best way to do it? So one of the issues with the Enlightenment project is that it's about tolerating differences of opinion, which is of course very important for scientific and philosophical progress. If you just impose an orthodoxy of thought, you will not be able to get anywhere. But because it's about tolerance of differences of opinion, tolerance of differences of lifestyle, and there it's. It's hard to get people to rally around it as a, as a system. And what we have in the world today is of course some people who are wedded to an Enlightenment openness and toleration, and others who are wedded to deeply authoritarian systems, which as you point out out in the book, human beings have more often lived in places more like modern Iran, hopefully not such longer, let's hope, but in places like the Islamic Republic than they have in places like Amsterdam. And so there's something very psychologically comforting and easy about an authoritarian system. Iran's not a good example because so many of the population are against their government now. But there is comfort for many people in an authoritarian system, in a theocratic system, in a very intolerant and narrow theology, and particularly in Islam. Of course, at this point in history, Islam is the main religion that is manifested in that way. This hasn't always been the case, but at the moment it's Islam. And given how much easier it is for people to feel passionate about that and to think of themselves and their way of life as special, how do we defend our way of life? And given also that enlightenment thought is built on the ability to question ourselves, a very, very important ability, how can we prevent, first of all tolerating the intolerant and also not falling into a question and second guessing of ourselves. That leads to a kind of oikophobia, a hatred of Western values and enlightenment values. So how do we stick up? How do we have muscular liberalism and how do we stick up for our enlightenment values?
- [54:32]
Guest (Adam Wakelink)
In response to the question what's the most important part to defend? I'm going to cop out and just say all of it. It's a complete package. It's hard to find any one part of it. But it is definitely a problem because in some ways it does ask quite a bit of you. The willingness to tolerate dissent, the willingness
- [54:54]
Interviewer (Iona Italia)
to doesn't come naturally. It's not very nice when people disagree with you. I do like it personally and there's
- [55:04]
Guest (Adam Wakelink)
to look to empiricism over reason, to accept that there may not be some sort of complete system that explains everything, but you may have to just accept the gaps and they may not be filled in in your lifetime. My apologies. From my perspective, coming at this as a historian rather than say as a philosopher or anything else, I think to me the critical thing, one of the reasons I wrote this book is to have this understanding of history, to understand where we came from, that a lot of this success is not accidental, like our scientific progress, modern medicine, which is so critical progress, human rights, the fact that we don't just have to follow some arbitrary king or high priest or warlord, because that's what we do. And I think that to understand how hard fought these gains were is the first step to understanding why we should continue to both defend them, but also to look to the future, to how things can be made better. And it's absolutely a huge problem with the toleration of dissent. And you mentioned when the printing press made books widespread that there would be questions about like what do we do now that the market is flooded with books and anybody can say everything and everyone has a voice and there are lunatics who are publishing books along with scholars. And obviously social media has exacerbated this tenfold. And I was working on a revision of this book during part of a COVID pandemic and when I was reading stuff online that was completely unhinged, just conspiracy theories and pseudoscience and pseudo medicine. Obviously there is no good and there is a lot of ill that comes from just everybody having an opinion on everything, regardless of their knowledge. Or even just the levels of bigotry, the levels of condoning violence, the cheerleading for various types of authoritarians that you see on social media. And you can't help but either laugh or despair when you see somebody who has the benefit of living in a country like this one cheering on in Iran or cheering on Vladimir Putin or talking about Hitler actually had the right idea or some sort of ideas which are now which are sadly very common on social media. And again, I wish I had an easy answer. I think I have to accept the limitations of my own reason here and say that I can't come up with a complete answer to this question. But to me it does come back to this understanding of history that we understand where we came from to understand where we would like to go and most importantly, where we don't want to end up.
- [57:46]
Interviewer (Iona Italia)
Is there anything that you wish we had talked about that we hadn't talked about or that you feel would have been important to have asked?
- [57:55]
Guest (Adam Wakelink)
No, not really. I think that covers it very well. I can see with all of your post it notes in the book that you've picked up.
- [58:02]
Interviewer (Iona Italia)
I haven't picked up all of those by any means, so I feel I just scratched the surface. But I don't want to the podcast become a replacement for reading your book. So I highly recommend the book to everyone. And I'll put the details for the book obviously in the introduction to the audio podcast. And if you're watching this on YouTube, then go to Quillette.com to see the details there. And yeah, thank you so much for joining me, Adam. And thank you to everyone watching for putting up with this experiment. Sitting together. I have to sit cross legged because we're so close. We have to be so close to the screen. But I hope nevertheless it was watchable and enjoyable for people. I don't know where the camera is. Hello. Thanks so much.
- [59:02]
Quillette Podcast Intro/Outro
Thank you for listening to this episode of the Qualette podcast. For more Quillette content, please visit us at quillette.
- [59:08]
Narrator/Advertiser
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