Spirit of the 18th century

From Neil Postman's Building a Bridge to the 18th Century

By the eighteenth century, the idea that history itself was moving inexorably toward a more peaceful, intelligent and commodious life for mankind was widely held. Both David Hume and Adam Smith argued that there existed a self-generating impulse of rising expectations that must lead to a society of continuous improvement. Bernard Mandeville argued that the "private vices" of envy and pride are, in fact, "public virtues" in that they stimulate industry and invention, and Hume wrote that the "pleasures of luxury and the profit of commerce roused men from their indolence," leading them to advances in their various enterprises. If any of this sounds something like what has been called, in our own time, "Reaganism," it is because it was chiefly the eighteenth century that provided Reagan with his ideas, especially those arguments which give to ambition and even greed a moral dimension. The most extreme case for the virtues inherent in self-interest economics was made by Thomas Robert Malthus in his Essay on the Principle of Population, published in 1798. Malthus argued against ameliorating the lot of the poor, on the grounds that an easier life led the poor to have more children, which led to fewer material resources to go around, which led to everybody being worse off. Of course, by this logic the best policy was to allow the poor among us to starve - a position which, happily, has not been pursued rigorously in the West.



But the point here is not that reason is unerring (although when it errs, reason itself, it is alleged, can detect its own errors). The point is that in every field - economics, politics, religion, law, and of course, science - reason was to be employed as the best means of assisting history's inevitable movement toward progress. Montesquieu, in The Spirit of the Laws, attempted to describe the process by which law improves. Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, showed how we advance economically. Thomas Paine showed how the rights of man will and must expand. Vico, Pope, Bentham, Jefferson, and others were engaged in similar efforts toward revealing the felicitous movement of history. (For all of the current discussion about Jefferson's ambiguous attitudes about slavery, he had no doubt that the future would be free of it.) And, of course, no one doubted that the future of science would reveal greater and still greater truths about nature. Here, for example, is an excerpt from a letter by Benjamin Franklin to Joseph Priestley (who, with Karl Wilhelm Steel, discovered oxygen, although Lavoisier coined the word). The letter was sent in February 1780, and conveys the sense of optimism about the future that was characteristic of the age.

. . .I always rejoice to hear of your being still employed in experimental researches into nature, and the success you meet with. The rapid progress true science now makes, occasions my regretting sometimes that I was born too soon. It is impossible to imagine the height to which may be carried, in a thousand years, the power of man over matter.