Hildegarde

Okay.

Back on track.

With everything.

Really.

A long way back there, I said that it was possible to look over the course of history and see where the provision of a liberal arts education where none had been before–or a very weak version of which had been before–was followed by an overall improvement of the basic morals of society at large.

And since society is made up of individuals, and the overall moral improvement of society cannot come about unless at least some individuals (and probably lots of them) are also showing moral improvement, then the fact that individuals improve in periods where a liberal arts education is vigorously offered and pursued is at least indicative of there being some kind of connection between the two.

It is also of at least some interest that the men and women who re-introduced liberal learning to their societies at least believed that a re-introduction would result in elevated moral functioning by the citizens around them.

There are going to be enough of you out there who will say that correlation is not causation, and that not only I, but the men who made these arguments in the 18th century, are engaging in an orgy of post hoc, ergo propter hoc. 

 About the men of the 18th century, that may be true.  I think I’m a little more circumspect.

However that works out, however, I need to point out one thing:  no matter what you’ve been told, there were two Enlightenments, not one.

And those two Enlightenments came out of what had become, over the previous hundred odd years, very different religious, philosophical, cultural and material environments.

And that was true even though it took nearly to the start of the 18th century and the rise of the Enlightenments (plural) to pull the two parties to the dispute apart.

Except, of course, that by that time there were many more than two parties.  There was a joke when I was a child that went:  any time you get three Greeks together,  you have seven political parties.

This is, after all, the civilization the Greeks made, and it was always that even in its Christian incarnations.

And all the parties to the dispute shared one common circumstance:  they were witnesses to the violent upheavals of the wars of religion and everything that went with them.

This was the period of the great witch hunts–not the Middle Ages, but here, as everybody and  his brother insisted that the lady next door (or, yes, her huband) were sleeping with the devil, and you could know that because she said the Hail, Mary or stayed away from the confessional or…

There were lots of ors.

The Protestant reformers turned out to have been very wrong about the most basic thing.

It was not the case that every man could read the Bible for himself and see the “plain” meaning of it.  The meaning turned out to be not so plain, and instead of a vast sea of Christians living in spiritual equality and all practicing religion as Christ had commanded it, what we got was forty new Churches a year, each with its own idea of what the Bible “plainly” said.

And there was no end to it in sight, and no indication that there could ever be an end. 

And that’s where each side of the discussion turned back to the idea of the liberal arts, but did it in its own particular way.

And the particular ways mattered.

For Catholics, the purpose of bringing back liberal education was to use it to shore up the central teaching authority of the Church. 

Priests, being armed with better educations than the people in the pews, would also be better able to refute heresies and squash any rebellious attempts to assert the “right” of individuals to their own interpretations.

Catholicism was always about centralized authority, the Church (meaning now the body with Christ at its head, including the clergy and the laity and the religious, as well as the souls in Paradise and the souls in Purgatory)–the Church speaking in “one voice.”

One voice could be attained in only one way–if there was Authority at the top, with all the rest following “docilely” underneath. 

What’s more, such unanimity was important.  Without it, there was nothing but confusion, and the constant danger that the whole world would be turned over to the Devil and his everlasting torments.  A man preaching something other than the Church’s understanding of religion was not following his conscience.  He was a stalking horse for hell, and if he was left free to make his case he would drag many  more souls down into the pit with him.

The Protestants had a similar understanding of the damages done by heretics.  If you don’t believe me, go look at what various Protestant communities did to the Quakers and the Baptists among them.

What the Protestants did not have was an ingrained need to assert and enforce a centralized authority about religion or anything else.  At the core of the Protestant idea was that precept–that every man and woman could read the Bible and know what it meant himself, without the intervention of a Church’s teaching authority.

It was not comfortable that, having installed their idea of religion in various countries of the world, those countries seemed to be landing in just the chaotic mess the Catholic Church had prophesied they would.

The elders of the various Protestant Churches began to bring back liberal learning in the hope that it would cure the chaos–with the thought that by better training the minds of clergymen and laymen alike, those minds would see clearly the outlines of “true religion,” and the chaos would settle into agreement.

Both the Catholics and the Protestants were, quite simply, wrong.

I think that, by its very nature, liberal learning leads not to unanimity but to diversity of opinion, belief and practice. 

I think that applying the light of reason to a question that is anything but a simple material one will lead us, inevitably, into a situation where each researcher will have different perspectives, different inclinations, different focuses.

I think that the social sciences are not sciences not only because they were never meant to be–they were meant to be substitutes for religion–but because they could never be. There subject matter will not lend itself to real scientific investigation. 

If you don’t like the word “choice” then call it whatever you do like–but nothing will get you out of the basic problem. 

If we teach men and women to apply reason and logic to human problems, they will inevitable disagree with each  other about what the solutions to those problems are.

They’ll do more than that.  They’ll even disagree with each other about what those problems are.

 The two Enlightenments arose as answers to this question:  what do we do about the fact that reason and science will not produce social and religious unity about the most important questions in human life?

And Catholics and Protestants proceeded to act like Catholics and Protestants, even when they were calling themselves Philosophes and Deists. 

More, with any luck, tomorrow.