Invisible Beginnings

Fiction as sociological theory. Tertius Orbis. Alan uses this phrase to describe the miracles of modern China: from almost nothing a new society has grown, and this in little more than a generation. What starts as an idea in someone’s head, a few paragraphs in a book, a map on a page, soon covers all of the territory, where real lives to live inside some author’s fantasy. Tertius Orbis. An electrical shock, that odd tremor of Jungian synchronicity, when two ideas - mine and someone’s else’s - meet on the same ground. Borges’s strange story, I have often thought, one answer to the pattern of History.

What is historical change? All the great thinkers have a go at explaining it; each inventing some thaumaturgical concept, which inevitably suffers the usual defect of magic: too abstract to touch the mundane realities of life. Abstraction, a disease of the Modern, that has caught the cold of the Idea. Here’s someone with a particularly bad case of the flu.

...human destiny was regarded generally as the product, not of anonymous, blind natural forces, but of willing, acting individuals, known well by their names and deeds.1

Blind natural forces. Achoo! In a pre-modern cosmology, the universe had meaning and purpose, so that all things could be ascribed to a conscious will. It is why the scholastics, though entangled in the skeins of their logic, allowed humans to make their own history; with God allowed the occasional inexplicable gesture.

The Renaissance increased the power of Man, giving him access to the divine. Employing its vitalist philosophy Man could, in conjuring with the spirits of the universe, shape not only his own fate but that of Nature itself.2 It is an idea that turned out to be true, only the intellectual tools proving inadequate. When their successors did find the right instruments - modern science - Man was to become his own God, producing the paradoxical belief that we are victims of forces outside our control. Nature is Master now. The test tube picks the lab technician, the microscope decides what professors to use it....

It is to ignore that we act with intention and foresight. Our actions have purpose, have meaning; are consciously directed towards some object or imagined future. To ignore such obvious truths, their effects all around us, would seem absurd to a scholastic or Renaissance magi; though the latter smugly congratulating himself that we’ve proven the truth of his ideas about the creative spirit. Not so fast Philo Pomposterous! The mistake was to think we know the ‘names and deeds’ of these creators of human destiny. We don’t. The vast edifice of the past is built by obscure people in out-of-the-way places, most of whom will remain unknown to posterity. Not seen when alive; they cannot be resurrected when dead. Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. The origins of all societies are mysterious. Why we create fictions about them.

To understand historical change, especially in culture, intellectual history and politics, we have to consider the role of individuals, small groups, cults, and tiny associations; these to create new ideas, produce original life forms and discover odd ways of doing things. The ideas can be mad inversions of the known reality, or insane beliefs about impossible futures; they may arise from the rage of the deracinated or an exile’s reflections on the governing elite. Most groups dissolve without trace, their one effect to make their adherents a bit more wise or crazy. A few survive. Some succeed; their early growth unnoticed by the rest of society, that has bigger, more important things to think about. Smallness and obscurity such a great evolutionary advantage!

Not convinced? Ok, let me give you three examples of Borgesian sociology: Christ’s disciples, Marx’s followers, the geeks of Silicon Valley. Think - go on think! - of their origins and how their beliefs turn the existing world upside down.

Rewatching Alan’s Ernest Gellner lecture, I again ponder the origins of the modern world. As I do, Margaret pops her head around the study door:

In a time of strife such as this, said Thomas Sprat, “to have been eternally musing on Civil business..was too melancholy a religion”; while “the consideration of Man and humane affairs” would have affected the group “with a thousand various disquiets.”3

Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. To account for the emergence of industrial society, Gellner had to explain why states, kings, robber barons and pirates didn’t prey on its early successes, gobbling them up. Predation the instinctive response of power. A queen sees businessmen making lots of gold: she sends out the goons to expropriate it. She finds scientists diffusing wealth and influence to other classes: confiscate their instruments! Why did this not occur in England? One explanation is what Alan calls the game of Grandmother’s Footsteps: the predators didn’t notice the prey until it was too late. Once the State became dependent on commerce - it provided the money for conquest and weapons - the industrialists had become both too necessary and too powerful to dislodge; while the scientists too useful to be trodden upon. A suggestive idea. Which adds to the mystery: how could such a powerful social instrument like science remain out of eyesight and earshot of kings and queens, with their enthusiasm for its technological wonders and artful entertainments?4

Thomas Sprat supplies the answer. The Royal Society, wary of social turmoil, isolates itself from the political and religious scene. This the first time in history that knowledge is self- consciously separated from religion; abstract enquiry divorced from moral belief. Within this tiny society a revolution of thought had been accomplished, and not even the founders knew they were doing it. Of course, there are precursors. The logical games of the Scholastics (stamped upon by the Church).5 The Renaissance obsession with history, giving rise to the idea of cyclical growth and decay, out of which grew the idea of progress. A major break with the Christian idea of the Fall.6 Christian ethics and natural philosophy already parting company by the time Descartes arrives to detach the mind from the body; the body to be studied as an independent object, free of all metaphors of moral stain and moral contagion. Descartes, uneasy with this separation, tried to bring them together under the concept, that divine intimation. All things to fuse in the idea. It was a belief that couldn’t outlast the 17th-century. Newton to find a better, more mysterious way of tying God to the universe; which under the influence of his followers was to remove godly will and purpose from Nature’s workings.7 Laws and forces only. As religion and science were finding a new accommodation, where reason to sit in the heavenly control room, up pops John Locke to cut the concept down to size: it grows out of the garden, it does not plant the garden. Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. We don’t create the world. The world creates us. Blind natural forces.

Who to clobber a few dusty eccentrics in some cold and unhealthy lecture room? Aside from a few odd feats of virtuosity - an evening’s amusement - they would have seemed harmless enough. Factor in the influence on the dissenting academies, where much of the scientific learning was spread, it is little wonder the King and Queen did not pay much attention to the termites eating away at the Throne.8 By the time the elite came to realise that these characters were creating a new world right on their doorstep it was too late; science too powerful and too important, too complicated and mysterious, to be controlled. Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.

But like all such keys, it opens only one door. Why London, not Paris, Vienna or Berlin: Leibniz was assiduous in creating scientific societies?9 There must be something peculiar about England that allows such a Royal Society to flourish without political or religious interference. It is to start all over again with this problem. To add to an already long list of culprits, I suggest the Dutch. William III and his great Spanish war a massive distraction from the most important conqueror of the time, that was accumulating its power in anonymous lecture halls and studies, amongst those rarely if ever seen at court. Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. Alan counters with Maitland’s idea of trusts; John Brewer writes at length about the military-fiscal state; Schloss gives me a sermon on that strange post- revolutionary religious settlement, where Nonconformity is permitted but officially persona non grata. Under such assaults I clutch desperately onto my delftware.... Some answers, not all! It’s what we don’t know that rules us in the end.

_________

Notes

1 Margaret T. Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, p.225. I give the wrong impression: this is a wonderful book, that makes one think especially hard about historical explanation.

2 The great book: Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition.

3 Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, p.189.

4 See the account of automata in Frances A. Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment.

5 Edward Grant, God & Reason in the Middle Ages.

6 Margaret Hodgen is extremely good at showing how the old Christian worldview dissolved under the multiple intellectual challenges created by the European expansion over the globe.

7 Also a factor: Newton couldn’t be open about his Unitarian Christianity. In the century’s greatest thinker there was a fissure between this scientific pronouncements and his private religious beliefs. Richard Westfall, The Life of Isaac Newton.

For how Newton’s ideas where incorporated into the Anglican Church: Margaret C. Jacob: The Newtonians and the English Revolution 1689-1720. For the reaction to Newton from the ‘Left’: Margaret C. Jacob: The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans.

8 Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs and Margaret C. Jacob, Newton and the Culture of Newtonianism. 9 Maria Rosa Antognazza, Leibniz: An Intellectual Biography.