by Morris, Ian;
All these discoveries, contradicting the ancients and even scripture, produced firestorms of criticism. Galileo’s reward for watching the skies was to be dragged before a papal court in 1633 and browbeaten into retracting what he knew to be true. Yet all that the bullying really accomplished was to accelerate the new thinking’s migration from the old Mediterranean core to the northwest, where social development was rising fastest, the shortcomings of ancient thinking seemed clearest, and anxieties about challenging authority were weakest.
Northerners began turning the Renaissance on its head, rejecting antiquity instead of seeking answers in it, and in the 1690s, as social development nudged within a hair’s breadth of its peak under the Roman Empire, learned gentlemen in Paris formally debated whether the Moderns were now surpassing the Ancients. By then the answer was obvious to anyone with eyes to see. Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica had appeared in 1687, using the new tool of calculus that Newton himself developed to express his mechanical model of the heavens mathematically.* It was as incomprehensible (even to educated readers) as Einstein’s general theory of relativity would be when he published it in 1905, but all the same, everyone agreed (as they would about relativity) that it marked a new age.
Hyperbole seemed inadequate for such monuments of mind. When called upon to immortalize Newton, England’s leading poet, Alexander Pope, exclaimed,
Nature, and Nature’s laws lay hid in night,
God said Let Newton be! And all was Light.
In reality, the shift from night to day was a little less abrupt. Newton’s Principia came out just five years after England’s last witch-hanging and five years before the Salem witch trials in Massachusetts began. Newton himself, as became clear when thousands of his personal papers were auctioned off in 1936, was as enthusiastic about alchemy as about gravity, remaining convinced to the end that he would turn lead into gold. Nor was he the only seventeenth-century scientist to hold views that today seem distinctly odd. But gradually Westerners were disenchanting the world, dispersing its spirits and devils with mathematics. Numbers became the measure of reality.
According to Galileo,
Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze … It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one wanders about in a dark labyrinth.
And what was true of nature, some scientists speculated, might be true of society too. Up to a point, government officials—especially financiers—welcomed this thought. The state, too, could be seen as a machine; statisticians could calculate its revenue flows and ministers could calibrate its intricate gears. But the new ways of thinking were also worrying. Natural science had taken its new turn by exposing ancient authority as arbitrary; would social science do the same to kings and the church?
If scientists were right and observation and logic were really the best tools for understanding God’s will, then it stood to reason that they would be the best tools for running governments, too. It was equally reasonable, the English theorist John Locke argued, that in the beginning God had endowed humans with certain natural rights; “Man,” he deduced, “hath by nature a power … to preserve his property—that is, his life, liberty, and estate—against the injuries and attempts of other men.” Therefore, Locke concluded, “The great and chief end … of men’s uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property.” And if that was so, and if man was “by nature all free, equal, and independent, [then] no one can be put out of this estate, and subjected to the political power of another, without his own consent.”
These ideas would have been troubling enough if they had been limited to intellectuals arguing in Latin in ivy-clad colleges. But they were not. First in Paris, then more widely, wealthy women sponsored salons where scholars rubbed shoulders with the mighty and new thinking moved back and forth. Amateurs established discussion clubs, inviting lecturers to explain new ideas and demonstrate experiments. Cheaper printing, better distribution, and rising literacy allowed new journals, combining reporting with social criticism and readers’ letters, to spread the ferment to tens of thousands of readers. Three centuries before Starbucks, enterprising coffeehouse owners realized that if they provided free newspapers and comfortable chairs, patrons would sit there—reading, arguing, and buying coffee—all day long. Something new was coming into being: public opinion.
Opinion makers liked to say that enlightenment was spreading across Europe, shining illumination into dark recesses obscured by centuries of superstition. But what was enlightenment? The German thinker Immanuel Kant was blunt: “Dare to know! Have the courage to use your own understanding!”
The challenge to established authority was glaring, but rather than fight it, most eighteenth-century monarchs compromised. They insisted that they had been enlightened despots all along, ruling rationally for the common good. “Philosophers should be the teachers of the world and the teachers of princes,” the king of Prussia wrote; “they must think logically and we must act logically.”
In practice, though, princes often found their subjects’ logic annoying. In Britain* kings just had to put up with it, and in Spain they could silence it, but France was sufficiently avant-garde (a French term, after all) to be swarming with enlightened critics yet sufficiently absolutist to imprison them and ban their books from time to time. It was, the historian Thomas Carlyle thought, “a despotism tempered by epigrams”—which made it a perfect garden where enlightenment could blossom.
Of all the books and bons mots that set Paris atwitter in the 1750s, none matched the aggressively enlightened Encyclopedia or Reasoned Dictionary of the Sciences, the Arts, and the Crafts. “One must examine and stir up everything, without exception and without caution,” wrote one of its editors. “We must trample underfoot all that old foolishness; overturn barriers not put there by reason; restore to the sciences and arts their precious liberty.” One bewigged rebel after another insisted that slavery, colonialism, and the legal inferiority of women and Jews were contrary to nature and reason, and from exile in Switzerland in the 1760s the greatest wit of all, Voltaire, challenged even what he labeled “the infamous thing”—the privileges of church and crown.
Voltaire knew exactly where Europeans should be looking for more enlightened models: China. There, he insisted, they would find a truly wise despot, ruling in consultation with a rational civil service, abstaining from pointless wars and religious persecution. They would also find Confucianism, which (unlike Christianity) was a faith of reason, free from superstition and foolish legends.
Voltaire was not entirely wrong, for Chinese intellectuals had already been challenging absolutism for a century before he was born. Printing had created an even broader readership for new ideas than in western Europe, and private scholarly institutes had revived. The most famous of them, the Donglin Academy, confronted the infamous thing even more directly than did Voltaire. In the 1630s its director promoted self-reliance, urging scholars to seek answers through their own judgment, not in older texts,* and one Donglin scholar after another was jailed, tortured, or executed for criticizing the Ming court.
The intellectual critique only intensified when the conquering Qing dynasty took control in 1644. Hundreds of scholars refused to work for the Manchus. One such was Gu Yanwu, a low-level civil servant who never passed the highest examinations. Gu took himself off to the distant frontiers, far from the tyrants’ taint. There he turned his back on the metaphysical nitpicking that had dominated intellectual life since the twelfth century and, like Francis Bacon in England, tried instead to understand the world by observing the physical things that real people actually did.
For nearly forty years Gu traveled, filling notebooks with detailed descriptions of farming, mining, and banking. He became famous and others copied him, particularly doctors who h
ad been horrified by their impotence in the face of the epidemics of the 1640s. Collecting case histories of actual sick people, they insisted on testing theories against real results. By the 1690s even the emperor was proclaiming the advantages of “studying the root of a problem, discussing it with ordinary people, and then having it solved.”
Eighteenth-century intellectuals called this approach kaozheng, “evidential research.” It emphasized facts over speculation, bringing methodical, rigorous approaches to fields as diverse as mathematics, astronomy, geography, linguistics, and history, and consistently developing rules for assessing evidence. Kaozheng paralleled western Europe’s scientific revolution in every way—except one: it did not develop a mechanical model of nature.
Like Westerners, Eastern scholars were often disappointed in the learning they had inherited from the last time social development approached the hard ceiling around forty-three points on the index (in their case under the Song dynasty in the eleventh and twelfth centuries). But instead of rejecting its basic premise of a universe motivated by spirit (qi) and imagining instead one running like a machine, Easterners mostly chose to look back to still more venerable authorities, the texts of the ancient Han dynasty. Even Gu Yanwu was as excited about ancient inscriptions as about mining or agriculture, and many of the doctors gathering case histories rejoiced as much in using them to clarify Han medical texts as in curing people. Instead of turning the Renaissance on its head, Chinese intellectuals chose a Second Renaissance. Many were scholars of brilliance, but because of this choice none became Galileos or Newtons.
This was where Voltaire went wrong. He was holding China up as a model at the very moment it was ceasing to provide one—at exactly the moment, in fact, that some of his rivals in Europe’s salons started drawing exactly opposite conclusions about China. Although they had no index to tell them that Western social development had whittled away the East’s lead, these men decided that China was not the ideal enlightened empire at all. Rather, it was the antithesis of everything European. Whereas Europeans had learned dynamism, reason, and creativity from ancient Greece and were now surpassing their teacher, China was the land where time stood still.
Thus was the long-term lock-in theory of Western superiority born. The Baron de Montesquieu decided that climate was the ultimate explanation: bracing weather gave Europeans (particularly Frenchmen) “a certain vigor of body and mind, which renders them patient and intrepid, and qualifies them for arduous enterprises,” while “the effeminacy of people in hot climates has always rendered them slaves … there reigns in Asia a servile spirit, which they have never been able to shake off.”
Other Europeans went further. The Chinese were not just servile, they argued: they were a different kind of human. Carolus Linnaeus, the founding father of genetics, claimed to recognize four races of humans—white Europeans, yellow Asians, red Americans, and black Africans; and in the 1770s the philosopher David Hume decided that only the white race was capable of real civilization. Kant even wondered whether yellow people were a proper race at all. Perhaps, he mused, they were merely bastard offspring of interbreeding between Indians and Mongols.
Daring to know, apparently, was for Europeans only.
TRIAL BY TELESCOPE
In 1937 three young scientists-in-training took ship from Nanjing, China’s capital, for England. It would have been hard enough under any circumstances to exchange their bustling, chaotic hometown (known as one of the “four furnaces” of China for its steaming humidity) for the hushed cloisters, relentless drizzle, and cutting winds of Cambridge; but the circumstances that summer were particularly tough. The three did not know if they would ever see their families and friends again. A Japanese army was closing in on Nanjing. In December it would butcher thousands of their fellow citizens so brutally that even a Nazi official caught up in the disaster was shocked.
Nor could the three refugees anticipate much of a welcome when they arrived. Nowadays Cambridge’s scientific laboratories teem with Chinese students, but in 1937 the legacy of Hume and Kant was still strong. The three caused quite a stir, and Joseph Needham, a rising star at the Biochemistry Institute, was more stirred than anyone. One of the students, Lu Gwei-djen, wrote that “the more he got to know us, the more exactly like himself in scientific grasp and intellectual penetration he found us to be; and this led his inquisitive mind to wonder why therefore had modern science originated only in the western world?”
Needham had no training in languages or history, but he did have one of the sharpest, quirkiest minds in a university famous for both. Lu became his lover and helped him master China’s language and past; so desperately did Needham fall in love with Lu’s native land, in fact, that in 1942 he forsook the safety of his college for a Foreign Office posting to Chongqing to help China’s universities survive the disastrous war with Japan. The BBC wrote to ask him to record his impressions, but Needham did rather more. In the margin of their letter he jotted a query that would change his life: “Sci. in general in China—why not develop?”
This question—why, after so many centuries of Chinese scientific preeminence, it was western Europeans who created modern science in the seventeenth century—is now generally known as “the Needham Problem.” Needham was still wrestling with it when I got to know him, forty years later (my wife was studying anthropology in the Cambridge college where Lu Gwei-djen—still Needham’s lover—held a fellowship, and we rented the upper floor of Dr. Lu’s house). He never did solve his problem, but thanks in large part to his decades of work cataloguing Chinese scientific accomplishments we are now vastly better placed to understand what happened than we were in the 1930s.
As we saw in Chapter 7, China had made particularly rapid scientific and technological advances when its social development pressed against the hard ceiling in the eleventh century, but these were derailed when development collapsed. The real question is why, when development again pressed against the hard ceiling in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Chinese intellectuals did not, like Europeans, create mechanical models of nature and unlock its secrets.
The answer, once again, is that intellectuals ask the questions that social development forces onto them: each age gets the thought it needs. Western Europeans, with their new frontier across the oceans, needed precise measurements of standardized space, money, and time, and by the point that two-handed clocks had become the norm Europeans would have to have been positively obtuse not to wonder whether nature itself was a mechanism. Likewise, the West’s ruling classes would have needed to be still more obtuse not to see enough advantages in scientific thinking to take a chance on cutting its eccentric, unpredictable thinkers a little slack. Like the first and second waves of Axial thought and the Renaissance, the scientific revolution and Enlightenment were initially consequences, rather than causes, of the West’s rising social development.
The East also had its own new frontier on the steppes, of course, but this was a more traditional kind of frontier than the Atlantic, and the need for new thought was correspondingly less pressing. Natural and social philosophers did ask some of the same questions as western Europeans, but the need to recast thought in terms of mechanical models of the universe remained less obvious; and to the Qing rulers, who badly needed to win China’s intellectuals over to their new regime, the dangers of indulging radical thought massively outweighed any possible advantages.
The Qing court did everything possible to woo scholars back to state service from their private academies and fact-finding tours of the frontiers. It set up special examinations, paid generously, and flattered mercilessly. The young emperor Kangxi assiduously presented himself as a Confucian, convening a special group of scholars to study the classics with him and in 1670 issuing a “Sacred Edict” demonstrating his seriousness. He funded huge encyclopedias (his Complete Collection of Illustrations and Writings from the Earliest to Current Times, published shortly after his death, ran to 800,000 pages),* but instead of stirring up everything, like contempo
rary French encyclopedias, these books aimed to stir up nothing at all, faithfully preserving ancient texts and providing sinecures for loyalist scholars.
The strategy was a stunning success, and as intellectuals drifted back to state service, they turned kaozheng itself into a career path. Candidates for the examinations had to display evidential research, but only scholars with access to good libraries could master it, which effectively blocked everyone outside the narrowest elite from high scores. The lure of profitable niches as state servants was a powerful incentive to conventional thought.
I will postpone until Chapter 10 the most important question—whether, given more time, Chinese intellectuals would have had their own scientific revolution. As things actually turned out, Westerners did not give them time. Jesuit missionaries had been infiltrating China from Macao since the 1570s, and though they came to save souls, not to sell science, they knew that good gifts make for welcome guests. Western clocks were a big hit; so, too, eyeglasses. One of China’s greatest poets, whose vision had long been fading, described with joy how
Clear glass from across the Western Seas
Is imported through Macao.
Fashioned into lenses big as coins,
They encompass one’s vision in a double frame.
I put them on—things suddenly become clear.
I can see the very tips of things!
And read fine print by the dim-lit window
Just like in my youth.
The biggest gift the Jesuits brought, though, was astronomy. The missionaries knew that calendars were a weighty matter in China; celebrating the winter solstice on the wrong day could throw the cosmos out of joint just as badly as getting Easter wrong would do in Christendom. So seriously did Chinese officials take this that they would even employ foreigners in the Bureau of Astronomy if the aliens—mostly Arabs and Persians—demonstrably knew more about the stars than did natives.