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Speed slower above 40 gigabytes of city tales. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Upgrade your business with Shopify. Home of the number one checkout on the planet. Shoppay boosts conversions up to 50%, meaning fewer cards going abandoned, and more sales going to Ching. So if you're into growing your business, get a commerce platform that's ready to sell wherever your customers are. Visit Shopify.com to upgrade your selling today. Welcome to the new Books Network. Hi, everyone. I'm Garima. And today we're going to talk about JCD Club, new book, The Enlightenment and Idea and its history. Hi, Jonathan. Thanks for being here. How are you doing today? Good day. I'm well. How are you? I'm good, too. Thank you so much. So can you share a bit about yourselves and the book? Yes, well, I'll assume you know nothing. And so to explain the basics, I'm in the store and I was educated at Cambridge. Cambridge University. And the point about that is that Cambridge University had and has distinct intellectual traditions, especially in the history of political thought. And those traditions are to do with the historical analysis of political thought. If you were to go to an American university and read political science, they would be talking about perennial problems. And their account of politics would be essentially timeless, where the Cambridge tradition is one of historical analysis to trace how things changed over time and why things differed over time. And so why we are different from people in the past, not why we are addressing perennial problems, but still when I was a Cambridge, looking back on it, I was brought up during the high tide of what we call today modernism. And I take it that everybody knows what we mean by modernism. It's an appropriate mindset, appropriate to a modern industrial capitalist liberal democratic world. And when I was an undergraduate, we just took that for granted. No one really had yet heard of post modernism. So we didn't separate off modernism and start analyzing it. We took it for granted, and therefore I have begun to use George Orwell's term group think to explain why all these things were simply assumed. But Robert Bella, the American sociologist, at the same time, coined the phrase a civil religion to explain what those values, purposes, aims and rhetoric were in every society that you are not really allowed to descend from. And this was at the high tide when I was an undergraduate. And so one of my earliest professional memories was of going to my college historical society, and listening to a paper given by the American historian Peter Gay. He had just published his classic book, the Enlightenment and interpretation. And this was a marvelous two volume work, a very important work of scholarship, praising the Enlightenment as the foundation of modernism, if I can be brief. And this was so good an account that it held the field for decades thereafter. So I went to this talk as an undergraduate. But if I remember correctly, I just sat there silent. I said nothing. What could I say? I was ignorant undergraduate. Here was Peter Gay, the great exponent of this well historical interpretation. I could not object at all. But if my memory says me correctly, I think at the time, I had some doubts. I wasn't fully persuaded of this. I thought this is an historical construct. And as my career as an historian began to develop, I began to explore some doubts and reservations about modernism. Because the scenario of modernism had been built, especially on the area of English and then British history that I was working in as a graduate student and then as a young academic, that is British history from about the 1680s to about the 1830s. And I began to develop doubts about this scenario on the grounds of its model of politics, its model of social structure. That is the rise of the middle class cliché now, but it was believed in then its political theory. John Locke is the father of contractual secular politics. And finally, I began to develop doubts about modernism's account of secularism. But these were all rather practical departments of history. They tended not to be ones in what we are called intellectual history. So how did I get to the Enlightenment specifically? Well, because a few years ago I was invited to write an essay on the English revolutionary Thomas Paine for an anthology of his works. I thought it would be a very simple thing to do because we all understood Thomas Paine. We'd all read his book, his pamphlet Common Sense and his book, Rights of Man. We thought he expressed himself in very clear language. We knew exactly what he was talking about. There wasn't a problem. So I thought I could write this essay very quickly and very simply. And I thought therefore that in order to understand Paine, I would need to read through all of his works carefully. And as I did, I appreciated that I hadn't understood him at all. And the historic Paine was really rather different from the Paine that I found in modern secondary scholarship on Paine. And so this essay on Paine turned into a book on what historians call the Age of Revolutions, especially the American of the French Revolution, in both of which Thomas Paine had been personally involved. And this study led me to be skeptical about treating either the American or the French Revolution as the result of universal human rights theory. And this led me to give attention to the Enlightenment. And to sum up briefly, I became increasingly concerned about the state of the historiography on the Enlightenment. So what was wrong with it? Let me offer you a parallel. As to whom you know nothing about the First World War, but you've heard the term and you want to wish, you want to learn more about it. And so you turn to the latest scholarship on the First World War. And you find, astonishingly, that there are fundamental disagreements among professional historians. Some historians argue that the war had occurred in the early 20th century. Others argue that the war had occurred in the mid-19th century. Some historians recall that important battles have been fought in northern France. Other historians recall that important battles have been fought in northern Spain. And historians contend that Scotland was a participant in this war. Others argue that England and that England had never been a participant. Other historians argue that England had been a participant, but that it had been the first participant. So if you were to find historians saying this, you would think that there was something seriously wrong in academe. And you would ask, "What is going on here?" Of course, as you know, if you look at military historians and diplomatic historians, they present to you no such contradictory accounts of the First World War. They're in agreement on the basic art plans. But if you look at the historians of the Enlightenment, that's exactly what you do find, very basic disagreements. And so I ask the question, why? Why do these just fundamental disagreements arise? And how can we take it forward? So as soon as I finish my book on pain, I began a book on enlightenment as a work of intellectual history. And in doing so, I drew on these Cambridge pre-commitments. In other words, that there are not perennial questions, but that everything changes over time. And that, in very brief terms, is how I came to write the book on the Enlightenment. Right. So I understand what you're saying about historical narratives and, you know, how they change with person to person, you know, from country to country and from age to age. But I think one of the first questions, one of the first questions that I want to ask you is, you know, when we repeatedly mentioned in the book that enlightenment was not a movement, as we tend to think of it, people, you know, who were a part of the Enlightenment movement, they never really thought they were a part of a movement. They were just individuals who were going about their lives. And so I was wondering, and despite that, it was a time of radical events, like industrialization and scientific discoveries, imperialism across the world, you know, the world was. And so on some level, I thought, you know, it was because of these changes that people were talking about saying the way they were. The, you know, the idea of what the cause, not necessarily, the idea were a symptom, not necessarily the cause of the changes that were taking place. So I just want to understand, you know, why would, why do you think that enlightenment needs to be understood in the historical context that you have presented in the book? It's a very good question, and you're quite right to say that all these things happened. And in my book, I say explicitly that all these things occurred, and they need to be looked at in their own terms. So why do they need to be looked at in their own terms? I've thought of another parallel, can I offer you a parallel? Yes. Let's say that, alas, you were not suffering from a number of very serious medical conditions for a number of years, and you've been treated for each of these conditions. And you've learned something about them, but one day you feel so ill that you have to go to the emergency room of a major hospital, and you go there and you describe your symptoms to the staff and ask for treatment. But the senior doctor on duty replies, no, no, you're not suffering from a variety of ailments, rather you have only one ailment, you have a headache, and I'm going to prescribe you some aspirin. Go away and take the aspirin, and all will be well. Do you think that that would be an adequate diagnosis? And would it have a good outcome? And so I suggest that unless we understand historical problems, and phenomena, and issues, and ideologies, as themselves, we won't understand them at all. What will we be doing? We'll just be putting words into the minds of people in the past, reaching back into the past to making them agree with us. But that's not what history should be doing. History is there to explain to us why people in the past were different from us. Right. Instantly, I hope you're in perfect health. Okay, so some of the ideas of the time were not very enlightening, you know. For example, Rosie's views on women. And I was wondering, do you think it's time to reevaluate a lot of enlightenment ideas and pages, especially for the flaws and mistakes, like not just what they said, but also the negative thing that they said. Well, you're right, and we should certainly reevaluate them. But how should we reevaluate them? I suggest that we shouldn't give people in the past marks out of 10 for anticipating or failing to anticipate our own values. And equally, we shouldn't give ourselves marks out of 10 for sharing or failing to share their values, because if you can do it one way, you can equally do it the other way. But neither way around, I think, is useful in valid exercise, because it doesn't actually tell us anything that we didn't know. We know what our values are, and it's quite clear that people in the past didn't share our values. I express that in very broad terms. So the question is, why not? And how do things come to change from their world to our world? The task of history, I think, isn't to indulge in moral praise or blame. The task of history is a more difficult one. It's a technical discipline to explain when, how, and why, things happened as they did. And that's actually much harder than to explain that Adolf Hitler was a very wicked man. We know that. That's an easy thing to say. But I do remember, I looked recently for professional purposes at some modern scholarly biographies of Adolf Hitler. They were very well informed, serious scholarly biographies. And they made the point that in Vienna before the First World War, Adolf Hitler hated one social group in particular. But that social group is actually the Jesuits, the Catholic religious order. And I then asked myself the question, "Well, how did Adolf Hitler come to redirect his hatred from the Jesuits to the Jews?" And the books didn't answer that question. But surely that's quite an important question. We want to know when, how, and why he came to adopt the views he did. And it's a difficult question to ask. That's why you would need historians. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Upgrade your business with Shopify. Home of the number one checkout on the planet. Shoppay boosts conversions up to 50%, meaning fewer cards going abandoned and more sales going to Ching. So if you're into growing your business, get a commerce platform that's ready to sell wherever your customers are. Visit Shopify.com to upgrade your selling today. Ford Profense Simple offers flexible financing solutions for all kinds of businesses, whether you're an electrician or run an organic farm. Because we know that your business demands financing that works when you need it. Like when your landscaping company lands a new account. Wherever you see your business headed, Ford Profense Simple can help you pursue it with financing solutions today. Get started at FordPro.com/financing. Well, I understand what you're saying. So another thing also struck me while I was reading the book is that those centuries of 18th century, 19th century, it was a time when maybe mass media was exploding for the first time. You know, there was telegram, there were newspapers, there was printing press. Travel was probably becoming a lot more cheaper than it had been previously. And academia was also just about starting to become more and more organized, like the university systems in Europe. And so I was wondering if these chuckluff things had something to do with the popularity or forming of a certain narrative around these ideas. Because ideas could now be put in paper. They could be disseminated very quickly. People could travel. They could, again, put a lot of pizza in paper. So I think that was something that was a bit of anachroistic thing in the human history because intellectual exchange has always taken place in the world. And people have always discussed these ideas. So what was the difference about the enlightenment itself? Well, again, that's a very important point. And your right to say that those 19th century technological developments made an important difference. So what happened if you were an historian in the early 19th century? You would have found that more and more and more material flooded across your desk. More books, more monographs, more journals, more products of record societies, they flooded in. So how were you to cope with all this flood of data? Many of them coped by inventing or reemphasizing general ideas, general explanatory categories. For example, the enlightenment is one of them. The Industrial Revolution, the Scientific Revolution, Imperialism, a whole variety of terms like this came into play at about the same time. Or if they were older ideas like the Reformation, the Renaissance, they were emphasized and given much greater force and definition than they'd ever had before. And as such, they were tremendously helpful to scholars. For 50 years, for 100 years, scholars accepted these notions. Feudalism is another one, very important notion. Scholars accepted these notions. They picked up the ideas and they ran with them. And they facilitated a great deal of excellent historical work. But now we've reached the stage where we stand back and say, "Well, were they really accurate? Were they really helpful? Did they include within one category?" A whole series of very different opinions. And so in all these areas, feudalism, the Scientific Revolution, Industrial Revolution, and so on, in separate inquiries, specialist scholars are moving away from saying there was just one phenomenon. And they're looking at a whole variety of different phenomena, some of which were closely related together, some of which were weakly related together, and some of which were not related together up to all. So we're moving, I think, now into a different phase of scholarship. And I think it's a much more helpful and accurate phase of scholarship. But it's happening across the board. And I'm the first to say that enlightenment is the last and most self-confident of these big generalizations, these big concepts. And we need just to stand back from it a bit and ask the question, "Well, what was this concept in the enlightenment?" And what did the term "enlightenment" mean without a leading capital? And I tried to focus in on these two words, "enlightenment" with a lower case "e" and "the enlightenment" with a capital, and so that the enlightenment was a metaphor, and the enlightenment was a concept. So how did they work, and are they really helpful? It's a very interesting issue to say that, because I come from India, and I understand that enlightenment is understood in India in a certain way, and enlightenment means different things to different people across the world. And for the Chinese, it was the Tao, you know, the balance of Yan and Yang. In India, it is the realization of the styles as the ultimate reality, which is Advait Vedanta. For the Greeks, it was, I think, platonism or the theory of forms. So I was wondering, you know, this 18th century enlightenment was most focused on maybe the material aspect of reality, which is more important. Which is material progress or, you know, equality or politics, and like that. And there was, I mean, I want to ask from you, what did any focus on the spiritual aspect of reality and why it's yes or no? I think Western scholars of the enlightenment have really failed to look at what enlightenment meant in Middle Eastern and Eastern and Asian religions and cultures. And this is the next stage in the development of scholarship. Perhaps you yourself will write the key book comparing Western East, because Western scholars of the enlightenment have been completely taken up with looking at France and Germany initially in the United States, and they're exhausted if they do these things. But of course, once they've done them, they can say, well, having done that, how does that relate to India and China and other Eastern countries? But there were spiritual aspects, not about some autonomous and clearly defined movement in the 18th century called the enlightenment. But many of the figures who are later placed in the concept of enlightenment did have spiritual views, but they tended to be people with heterodox ideas in Christian theology. And right at the end of the 18th century, they were secularists. But atheism, of course, is a theological position, and they reached the position of atheists through theological debate and criticism. It's not that they suddenly wake up while mourning and say, oh, but the world consists of material objects, so we'll talk about material objects. They have to get that position quite slowly, with great difficulty. And if you look at the most famous economist of the 18th century, Adam Smith, he doesn't use the concept of enlightenment. He doesn't say, because I'm talking about material objects in a much more intelligent way. Therefore, I'm part of Sun International Movement. He doesn't reach out to colleagues in England or France or Germany who are writing on trade or production and say, we are all part of the same struggle. He writes for his English-speaking audience, and he writes about the wealth of nations, not about the enlightenment of nations. Right, so I think it was, I mean, my personal observation is that maybe it was that time in the history of the world, because, I mean, people had been to religious or to traditional, and maybe there was some stagnation in this society at that point, and people needed to find some potential in life or in themselves. And maybe some that was, it was the explosion of that material reality, reality because maybe the spiritual reality had become a bit stagnant. I mean, that was my observation. Well, and many historians just to develop that point a little further have said that in the 18th century, people were confronted with traditional societies and old-fashioned prejudices, and they suddenly realized that they needed to break free from tradition. And to move forward with reason. But if we just compare that scenario with what George Orwell said about groupthink and what Robert Bellar wrote about civil religions, we might conclude the present-day people are actually as traditional as people in past centuries, only they're traditional with respect to different pattern of beliefs. They are as convinced of the rightness of their own religions, but they call those religions my different labels, like liberal democracy. Go around the world, go to the United Nations, you will listen to people, all of them, convinced that there is such a thing called liberal democracy. They're convinced that there are such things as universal human rights as if universal human rights were the modern equivalent of angels, they hover over people's heads, shielding them from harm and guiding them in the right path. Now, wouldn't it be marvelous if that were true, but of course it's a religion, universal human rights are not out there, they are mental constructs. And as England's greatest reform, Jeremy Bentham pointed out during the 1790s, the age of the French Revolution, universal human rights are, I quote him, nonsense upon stills. So if we want to deliver good things to real people in the real way, in the real world, we must think harder about these metaphysical concepts. We treat, as so self-evidently true, that we can't doubt them. This has been very enlightening and day. Thank you so much for your time and thoughts and all the very minutes for the book. Thank you so much, that's so kind. And I come back to the point that we need to build bridges between East and West. Definitely, definitely. Especially, you know, the point that I made about just a digression, conci, episode, the mass media continues to impact our world today. And so the European ideas are not too European idea, they're impacting the entire world. And for that reason, there has to be some clarity about ideas because, you know, European society exists in a certain context and new society exists in a certain context. African society exists in another context. And so we cannot borrow concepts as if they're universal in nature because on a practical level, they are not universal. They might be universal on a theoretical level. I mean, that's just my perspective that I thought I should add. And for that reason, we need that bridge between East and West even more than ever before. But this makes your next book even more important. Looking forward to it. Very much looking forward to it. Thank you, Jonathan. You're miss welcome. [MUSIC] [MUSIC PLAYING]
