The Enlightenment: Transforming European Thought and Society

hi I'm John Green and this is crash course European history so far we've seen a ton of political change and

continuing warfare in the midst of the 17th centuries little ice age and history often focuses on those types of

political and military stories but there were also other changes occurring ships and how people perceived the everyday

world like the linking of phenomena such as earthquakes and eclipses with human events goes back a very long way like to

the beginning of our species as does the belief that supernatural forces are deeply shaping the lives of individual

humans for instance in a previous video about witchcraft we discussed how earthquake tremors in Istanbul in 1648

were seen as portents of assault ins death a few months later but a century after that a huge earthquake struck

Lisbon Portugal on All Saints Day of 1755 and tens of thousands of people died many from a tsunami that followed

the quake now some theologians argued that this was punishment from God for the world's sins but others pointed out

that the earthquake had destroyed a lot of churches while sparing a lot of brothels Voltaire wrote a famous poem in

response to the earthquake that included the memorable lines as the dying voices call out will you dare respond to this

appalling spectacle of smoking ashes with this is the necessary effect of the eternal laws freely chosen by God the

way Europeans were looking at the world had changed between the Istanbul earthquake and the Lisbon one the

Enlightenment was thriving so today we want to emphasize that the Enlightenment was not all highfalutin

calculations of the sun's orbit or theories about the mathematical laws of the universe or for that matter theories

about earthquake causality it also considered much more down-to-earth situations like how people of different

social classes should relate to one another how trade and manufacturing should function and what the

relationship of ordinary people should be to their government the Enlightenment or Age of Life refers to the belief that

the musty old ideas needed to be exposed to the light of rational investigation to see if they were still valuable the

bright light of Reason needed to shine on tradition and this momentous challenge to tradition came about during

a time in which Europe was being completely transformed in many ways that are sometimes forgotten amid all the

excitement about Voltaire and reason so let's go straight to the thought-bubble today beyond the wars in state building

we've already seen increasing abundance and novelty was creeping into the everyday lives of Europeans coffee tea

chocolate tobacco and other commodities led to experimentation for instance one English housewife saw tea for the first

time and thought it was meant to be baked as a kind of pie filling a diplomat said that tea and coffee had

brought a greater sobriety and civility to everyday life in Europe Europe had previously been a land of famine and

mere subsistence for essentially all of its history but now the cultivation of new foods from the Americas like

potatoes and corn along with literally thousands of other new plants meant that available calories were increasing and

it also introduced the idea that maybe the world didn't have to be perpetually on the brink of starvation and

catastrophe also by this time tens of thousands of Europeans had travelled the world and had experienced other social

orders firsthand for instance travelers discovered that people across Asia didn't seem as quarrelsome as Europeans

drivers of carts didn't block narrow streets for hours arguing over who had the right-of-way they politely agreed to

let one or the other pass they also saw that not all social orders were as hierarchical

as most European ones and that some societies even gave less weight to a person's parentage and more to a

person's individual skills and talents thanks thought-bubble so one of the first ways writers

criticized outmoded ways of life was to make fun of them writers like Charles Louie de second Dom Baron de la bread ed

de Montesquieu aka just Montesquieu he really was the proper person to criticize outmoded ways of life because

boy did he have an outmoded name Montesquieu was a jurist who owned an estate near Bordeaux which by the way

still makes wine under his name and in 1721 he published the Persian letters in which Jews Beck visitors find Europe

amusing if not shocking the visitors for instance are amazed at the magic of priests who somehow perform the trick of

turning wine into blood and although they clearly see the problems in French society they also firmly adhere to the

must eNOS of their old ways such as keeping women secluded in a harem guarded by eunuchs the message was that

both Easterners and Europeans were imperfect the author Voltaire who slightly off-topic was quite handsome I

mean very striking eyes at any rate he had similarly critical and amusing takes his discourtesy to aristocrats

eventually got him sent to the Bastille prison in fact in many rollicking tales Voltaire made fun of overweening rulers

and their endless corruptions he valued honesty and those who lived simple lives cultivating their gardens as he famously

put it in his satirical novel Candide which you can learn more about in crash course literature full of horrors and

injustice Candide appeared four years after the Lisbon earthquake which Voltaire thought was firm evidence that

we did not live in the best of all possible worlds to replace the old stuffy ways of monarchs and priests and

aristocrats telling us that we were already living in a perfect world people needed to learn how to embrace the newly

desirable traits of the Enlightenment like being honest and inquisitive and opened Swiss thinker jean-jacques

Rousseau had many ideas about edgy in reform for instance he wasn't a wealthy or titled person but rather was

born into a watchmaking family and lived among artisans his best-selling novel Emil describes a boy who grows up not in

a city or a palace but in a countryside where one can be oneself a natural individual instead of experiencing

common rote learning with large doses of religious and classical reading Emil learns carpentry and gardening and other

practical skills in the countryside he behaves in what Rousseau saw as the best possible way naturally and without

pretentious airs Rousseau promoted what would come to be called middle-class values like hard work practicality and

domesticity for women when a meal becomes a young man the spouse chosen for him is plump and smiling and devoted

to taking care of him not studying or reading or practising a craft or working hard to support the family like farm

women did also she will breastfeed their children whereas both aristocratic women and busy working women at the time

commonly used wet nurses and as with Emile's upbringing all of this is presented as natural meanwhile wealthy

women in Europe instituted the Enlightenment salon regular get-togethers in their homes to hear the

latest idea learn about the latest book or meet the latest philosopher influencer called a philosophic French

slightly off-topic but I just loved the idea of Rousseau and Voltaire as influencers like I would have loved to

see their Instagram feeds Voltaire's smoldering selfies Russo's weird rants written in the Notes app and then

screenshot it it would have been gold at any rate eighteenth-century salon goers were often great readers and also

experimenter z' with the latest commodities and fashion just like contemporary influencers actually and in

terms of fashion instead of looking to the courts for fashion inspiration men like Voltaire now sported Cotton's from

India made into handkerchiefs that were worn around the neck which would soon

metamorphose into the necktie they also sported bonny ins that is loose bathrobe type garments that didn't need corsets

which men traditionally wore as Rousseau believed men should take off their makeup wigs and high heels and be

natural just like people did in other parts the world just natural man as he is

naturally made in the countryside wearing a bunion and a feather hat transformation was in the air for

everyone not just the elites although imported foreign Cotton's were still illegal in France for instance many

people now wore them including servants who received cast-off cotton dresses or shirts that were bright and easy to keep

clean and to help people learn there were many new texts like in France there was the encyclopédie you'll notice my

amazing French pronunciation which provided discussions of topics such as natural rights and the status of women

its main editor Denis Diderot wrote all things must be examined debated investigated without exception and

without regard for anyone's feelings Diderot favoured social and political reform but the Encyclopaedia you know

what I'm just gonna translate it encyclopedia also contain technical drawings of machinery including

machinery for mining and that reflected practical values and also provided a spur to inventiveness and growing

prosperity in Europe also mining which was already pretty important is about to become extremely important thanks to

coal in general enlightenment aims were more worldly than spiritual in Scotland philosopher David Hume promoted reason

above religion concluding that belief in God was mere superstition some people called deists argued that God existed

but that he didn't have influence on everyday life after having set in motion the machinery of the universe many

important founding fathers in the United States were deists and if you believe as many philosophic God keeps a distance

from human affairs then the persecution of people for their religious beliefs starts to seem like cruel fanaticism and

some philosophic aim activists like Voltaire was outraged by the torture of Jean Callas who was accused of murdering

his son to prevent him from converting to Catholicism colossus son had in fact committed suicide due to gambling debts

colossus waterboarded and had every bone in his body broken before eventually dying under torture is there a bone back

there all right listen this is a femur i don't think it's an actual femur i think it's

like a recreate stan is this a real femur it is not a real femur so i asked our brilliant writer

if COAS really had every bone in his body broken and she responded quote it's hard to know whether they got everyone

and then she described Colossus torture to me with a level of detail that led me to conclude that one they probably did

break every bone in his body and to oh my god 18th century European torture was the worst so last thing I'm gonna say

about this if you invent a time machine and I believed absolutely that you can do not go back in time before like maybe

2003 don't get me wrong things are bad but remember they used to be so much worse speaking of terrible let's talk

about slavery so enlightenment views also fed into rising movements in Britain and France and the Netherlands

and their colonies to abolish slavery by this time the slave trade was massive and there was growing acknowledgement of

its cruelty in 1770 the French Catholic obey or clergyman Guillaume rein all laid out the violent devastation of

native peoples by invading Europeans and in 1788 the freed slave allowed aqueon Oda scribed the Middle Passage after he

had been kidnapped in present-day Nigeria and enslaved now equiano's often believed to have been born in South

Carolina and his riveting memoir may have been cobbled together from the harrowing tales of others but still it

was a best-seller and it captured the inhumanity of white people toward black people and advocated enlightenment

freedom and human rights for all it also stirred freedmen and slaves alike to struggle for abolition and there was

also growing movements for other kinds of freedom The Scotsman Adam Smith took on the mercantilist theory that global

wealth was static and States could only increase their wealth by taking it from others when he rejected ideas about

stockpiling gold and refusing entry of goods into one's country and also remaining a subsistence agricultural

economy with surface he advocated instead for manufacturing and the division of labour and free trade in a

free or laissez-faire market an individual would work and interact with others in the economy on the basis of

their self-interest and the sum of all self-interests would make for a balanced harmonious and prosperous society Smith

is best known today as the father of the free market free trade and individualism thanks to his 1776 book an inquiry into

the nature and causes of the wealth of nations but he also opposed absolutism and urged concern for the overall

well-being of society because in addition to the benefits of laissez-faire economies that he saw

Smith saw the potential harms so he also argued for healing social policies another important Enlightenment book was

jean-jacques Rousseau's the social contract which famously begins man is born free and everywhere he is in Chains

Rousseau picked up on John Locke's theme of the contract that individuals made with one another to form a state or a

nation and he believed that once freely formed the state embodied the best that was in the collective community thus

individuals needed to give the state unconditional obedience because it represented the general will today

thinkers see that this call for obedience to the general will planted the seeds of dictatorial governments

into the 20th century and beyond but Rousseau did also emphasize individual sentiments as valuable at the opposite

end of Rousseau's general will was German philosopher Immanuel Kant's attention to individual reason he

famously exclaimed dare to no as he advanced the Enlightenment commitment to the human mind and the ability of every

person to think for themselves instead of simply obeying old commands and ideas the human mind he argued housed

categories of understanding with which information interacted to produce purely rational judgments and in this way we

can trace our own cultures emphasis on individualism back to the Enlightenment and many other individuals took refuge

in Enlightenment thought as well as taking it as a call to action upper class Jewish women across Europe found

the world of ideas so inspiring that they began salons too in Berlin for instance they established nine of the 14

salons in the city and philosopher and author Moses Mendelssohn used the more tolerant atmosphere to express his

optimism about the future of Jews in Europe because of the Enlightenment emphasis on reason he believed that the

age-old persecution Jewish people would soon end of course we know now that wasn't the case and

that much exploitation and depression has taken place under the guise of reasoned thought pseudo scientific

reason has been used to justify many forms of structural inequality from racism to sexism to class systems

rationality would not prove to be a way out of the human urge to create and marginalize Outsiders but enlightenment

thought was nonetheless transformative and seeking worldly explanations for inequality and injustice did have

significant real-world consequences I mean no longer would we see earthquakes merely as acts of God enlightenment

challenges to the idea that we were already living in the best of all possible worlds would also help us to

imagine and eventually to live in better worlds albeit ones that are still profoundly imperfect thanks for watching

I'll see you next time thanks for watching crash course which is made by all of these nice people and filmed here

in the Jaden Smith studios in Indianapolis huge thanks as always to our animators at thought cafe also we've

got lots of other crash course for you including our video about Candide so check that out thanks again for watching

and don't forget to be awesome [Music]