Out of Our Minds

by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

  The traditions were summarized and taken to a further stage by the Confucian astronomer Nishikawa Joken (1648–1724), guided by contacts with the West and informed by the vastness of the world that Western cartography disclosed. He pointed out that no country was literally central in a round world, but that Japan was genuinely divine and inherently superior on allegedly scientific grounds: the climate was best there, which was proof of heaven’s favour. From the time of the Meiji restoration in 1868, a state-building ideology recycled traditional elements in a myth of modern concoction, representing all Japanese as descendants of the sun goddess. The emperor is her senior descendant by the direct line. His authority is that of a head of family. The 1889 constitution called him ‘sacred and inviolable’, the product of a continuity of succession ‘unbroken for eternal ages’. The most influential commentary on the constitution averred that ‘the Sacred Throne was established when the heavens and earth separated. The Emperor is Heaven, descended, divine and sacred.’50 Acknowledging defeat after the Second World War, Emperor Hirohito repudiated, according to the translation deemed official by the US occupying forces, ‘the false conception that the Emperor is divine, and that the Japanese people are superior to other races’. But allusions to the divinity of emperor and people continually resurface in political discourse, popular culture, religious rhetoric, and the comic books that, in Japan, are respectable adult entertainments.51

  In the West, once the notion of a universal empire had collapsed, even as a theoretical ideal, it was impossible to take as narrow a view of interstate relations as in China or Japan. In Europe’s teeming state system, a way of escape from chaotic, anarchic international relations was essential. When Thomas Aquinas summarized the traditional state of thinking in the Western world in the thirteenth century, he distinguished the laws of individual states from what, following traditional usage, he called the ius gentium, the Law of Nations, which all states must obey and which governs the relationships between them. Yet he never said what where or how this ius gentium could be codified. It was not the same as the basic, universal principles of justice, because these excluded slavery and private property, both of which the Law of Nations recognized. Many other jurists assumed it was identical with natural law, which, however, is also hard to identify in complex cases. In the late sixteenth century, the Jesuit theologian Francisco Suárez (1548–1617) solved the problem in a radical way: the Law of Nations ‘differs in an absolute sense’, he said, ‘from natural law’ and ‘is simply a kind of positive human law’: that is, it says whatever people agree it should say.52

  ‌This formula made it possible to construct an international order along lines first proposed earlier in the sixteenth century by one of Suárez’s predecessors at the University of Salamanca, the Dominican Francisco de Vitoria, who advocated laws ‘created by the authority of the whole world’ – not just pacts or agreements between states. In 1625 the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius worked out the system that prevailed until the late twentieth century. His aim was peace. He deplored the use of war as a kind of default system in which states declared hostilities with trigger-happy abandon, with ‘no reverence left for human or divine law, exactly as if a single edict had released a sudden madness’. Natural law, he argued, obliged states to respect each other’s sovereignty; their relations were regulated by the mercantile and maritime laws that they formerly ratified or traditionally embraced, and by treaties they made between themselves, which had the force of contracts and which could be enforced by war. This system did not need ideological concurrence to back it. It could embrace the world beyond Christendom. It would remain valid, Grotius said, even if God did not exist.53

  It lasted reasonably well, but not as enduringly as Grotius’s claims might have led his readers to hope. His system was fairly successful in helping to limit bloodshed in the eighteenth century. For a while, law seemed to have filleted savagery out of warfare. The great compiler of the laws of war, Emer de Vattel, thought combat could be civilized. ‘A man of exalted soul’, he wrote, ‘no longer feels any emotions but those of compassion towards a conquered enemy who has submitted to his arms … Let us never forget that our enemies are men. Though reduced to the disagreeable necessity of prosecuting our right by force of arms, let us not divest ourselves of that charity which connects us with all mankind.’ Such pieties did not protect all victims of combat, especially in guerrilla warfare and in aggression against non-European enemies. But law did make battle more humane. For much of the nineteenth century, when generals abandoned all notions of restraint in pursuit of ‘total war’, Grotius’s principles still contributed to and maintained peace – at least in Europe. The horrors of the twentieth century, however, and especially the genocidal massacres that came to seem routine, made reform urgent. At first, when US governments proposed a ‘new international order’ after the Second World War, most people assumed there would be a collaborative system in which international relations would be brokered and enforced by the United Nations. In practice, however, it meant the hegemony of a single superpower, acting as a global policeman. Exercised by the United States, the role proved unsustainable because, although American policy was generally benign, it could not be immune to the distortions of self-interest or escape the outrage of those who felt unfairly treated. By the twenty-first century, it was obvious that the US monopoly of superpower status was coming to an end. The power of the United States – measured as a proportion of the wealth of the world – was in decline. Today, the search is on for an international system that will succeed American guardianship, and no solution is in sight.54 Grotius left another still redolent, relevant legacy: he tried to divide the oceans of the world, which were arenas of ever intensifying conflict among rival European maritime empires, into zones of free and restricted movement. His initiative was designed to favour the Dutch Empire over others, and was rejected by legists in most other countries, but it laid down terms of debate which still animate controversies over whether the Internet is like the ocean – a free zone everywhere, or a partible resource for sovereign states to control if they can or divide if they wish.55

  ‌Redefining Humanity

  In the sixteenth century, a further consequence of the construction of extra-European empires was to turn political thought back to wider considerations that transcended the limits of states. ‘All the peoples of humankind are human’, said the Spanish moral reformer Bartolomé de Las Casas in the mid-sixteenth century.56 It sounds like a truism, but it was an attempt to express one of the most novel and powerful ideas of modern times: the unity of humankind. The recognition that everyone we now call human belonged to a single species was by no means a foregone conclusion. To insist, as Las Casas did, that we all belong to a single moral community was visionary.

  For in most cultures, in most periods, no such concept existed. Legendary monsters, often mistaken for products of teeming imaginations, are really the opposite: evidence of people’s mental limitations – their inability to conceive of strangers in the same terms as themselves. Most languages have no term for ‘human’ that comprehends those outside the group: most peoples refer to outsiders by their name for ‘beasts’ or ‘demons’.57 There is, as it were, no middle term between ‘brother’ and ‘other’. Although sages of the first millennium bce had expatiated on the unity of humankind, and Christianity had made belief in our common descent a religious orthodoxy, no one was ever sure where to draw the line between humans and supposed subspecies. Medieval biology imagined a ‘chain of being’ in which, between humans and brute beasts, lay an intermediate, monstrous category of similitudines hominis – creatures resembling men but not fully human. Some of them appeared vividly to the imaginations of mapmakers and illuminators, because the Roman naturalist Pliny catalogued them, in a work of the mid-first century ce, which Renaissance readers treated with all the credulity an ancient text was thought to deserve. He listed dog-headed men, and Nasamones, who wrapped themselves in their enormous ears, Sciapods who bounced around on one leg,
pygmies and giants, people with backward-turned, eight-toed feet, and others who took nourishment by inhaling for want of mouths, or had tails or lacked eyes, sea-green men who battled griffins, hairy folk, and Amazons, as well as ‘the Anthropophagi and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders’ who were among the adversaries Shakespeare’s Othello faced.

  Medieval artists made the images of these creatures familiar. Should they be classed as beasts or men or something in between? On the portico of the twelfth-century monastery church of Vézelay many of them appear in procession, approaching Christ to be judged at the Last Trump; so the monks clearly thought the weird creatures capable of salvation, but other scrutineers, with the authority of St Albertus Magnus, denied that such aberrations could possess rational souls or qualify for eternal bliss. Naturally, explorers were always on the lookout for such creatures. It took a papal bull to convince some people that Native Americans were truly human (even then some Protestants denied it, suggesting that there must have been a second creation of a different species or a demonic engendering of deceptively human-like creatures in America). Similar doubts were raised concerning blacks, Hottentots, Pygmies, Australian aboriginals, and every other odd or surprising discovery exploration brought to light. There was a protracted debate concerning apes in the eighteenth century, and the Scots jurisprudentialist Lord Monboddo championed the orang-utan’s claim to be considered human.58 One should not condemn people who had difficulty recognizing their kinship with other humans or deride those who sensed humanity in apes: the evidence on which we base our classifications took a long time to accumulate, and the boundaries of species are mutable.

  The question of where to draw the frontiers of humankind is of vital importance: ask those who, unfairly classified, would lose human rights. Although over the last couple of hundred years we have drawn the limits of humankind ever wider, the process may not yet be over. Darwin complicated it. ‘The difference’, he said, ‘between savage and civilized man … is greater than between a wild and domesticated animal.’59 The theory of evolution suggested that no rupture of the line of descent divides humans from the rest of creation. Campaigners for animal rights concluded that even our present broad category of humankind is in one respect too inelastic. How far should our moral community, or at least our list of creatures with selective rights, stretch beyond our species to accommodate other animals?

  Another problem arises: how far back should we project our human category? What about Neanderthals? What about early hominids? We may never meet a Neanderthal or a Homo erectus on the bus, but from their tombs they admonish us to interrogate the limits of our moral communities. Even today, when we set the frontiers of humanity more generously, perhaps, than at any time in the past, we have really only shifted the terms of the debate: there are no Neanderthals on the bus, but there are analogous cases – the unborn in wombs, the moribund in care – that are more immediately challenging, because they belong unquestionably to our own species. But do they share human rights? Do they have the right to life – without which all other rights are meaningless? If not, why not? What is the moral difference between humans at different stages of life? Can one detect such a difference more readily or objectively than between humans, say, with different pigmentation, or variously long noses?

  A large view of humankind; a narrow view of the moral responsibilities of the state; shaky confidence in sovereign states as a workable basis for the world, without overarching empires or theocracies; classicizing values and aesthetics; and faith in science and reason as allied means to truth: these were the ideas that made the world the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution bequeathed to the eighteenth century: the world in which the Enlightenment happened.

  ‌Chapter 7

  Global Enlightenments

  Joined-Up Thinking in a Joined-Up World

  Reflected and refracted among the rocks and ice, the dazzle made the Arctic ‘a place for fairies and spirits’,1 according to the diary of Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, who pitched camp at Kittis in northern Finland, in August 1736. He was engaged in the most elaborate and expensive scientific experiment ever conducted. Since antiquity, Western scientists had assumed that the Earth was a perfect sphere. Seventeenth-century theorists broached doubts. Isaac Newton reasoned that just as the thrust you sense on the edge of a circle in motion tends to fling you off a merry-go-round, centrifugal force must distend the Earth at the equator and flatten it at the poles. More than a basketball, it must resemble a slightly squashed orange. Meanwhile, mapmakers working on a survey of France demurred. Their observations made the world seem egg-shaped – distended toward the poles. The French Royal Academy of Sciences proposed to resolve debate by sending Maupertuis to the edge of the Arctic and a simultaneous expedition to the equator to measure the length of a degree along the surface of the circumference of the Earth. If measurements at the end of the world matched those at the middle, the globe would be spherical. Any difference between them either way would indicate where the world bulged.

  In December 1736, Maupertuis began work ‘in cold so extreme that whenever we would take a little brandy, the only thing that could be kept liquid, our tongues and lips froze to the cup and came away bloody’. The chill ‘congealed the extremities of the body, while the rest, through excessive toil, was bathed in sweat’.2 Total accuracy was impossible under such conditions, but the Arctic expedition made readings that were overestimated by less than a third of one per cent. They helped to convince the world that the planet was shaped as Newton predicted – squashed at the poles and bulging at the equator. On the front page of his collected works, Maupertuis appears in a fur cap and collar over a eulogy that reads, ‘It was his destiny to determine the shape of the world.’3

  Seared by experience, however, Maupertuis, like many scientific explorers, discovered the limits of science and the grandeur of nature. He set off as an empiricist and ended as a mystic. In his youth he believed that every truth was quantifiable and that every fact could be sensed. By the time of his death in 1759, ‘You cannot chase God in the immensity of the heavens’, he averred, ‘or the depths of the oceans or the chasms of the Earth. Maybe it is not yet time to understand the world systematically – time only to behold it and be amazed.’ In 1752 he published Letters on the Progress of the Sciences, predicting that the next topic for science to tackle would be dreams. With the aid of psychotropic drugs – ‘certain potions of the Indies’ – experimenters might learn what lay beyond the universe. Perhaps, he speculated, the perceived world is illusory. Maybe only God exists, and perceptions are only properties of a mind ‘alone in the universe’.4

  ‌An Overview of the Age

  Maupertuis’s mental pilgrimage between certainty and doubt, science and speculation, rationalism and religious revelation, reproduced in miniature the history of European thought in the eighteenth century.

  First, a great flare of optimism lit up confidence in the perfectibility of man, the infallibility of reason, the reality of the observed world, and the sufficiency of science. In the second half of the century, Enlightenment flickered: intellectuals elevated feelings over reason and sensations over thoughts. Finally, revolutionary bloodshed and war seemed for a while to dowse the torch completely. But embers remained: enduring faith that freedom can energize human goodness, that happiness is worth pursuing in this life, and that science and reason – despite their limitations – can unlock progress and enhance lives.

  Environmental changes favoured optimism. The Little Ice Age ended, as sunspot activity, which had been wayward in the seventeenth century, resumed its normal cycles.5 Between 1700 and the 1760s, all the world’s glaciers for which measurements survive began to shrink. For reasons, still obscure, which must, I suspect, be traceable to renewed global warming, the world of microbial evolution changed to the advantage of humankind. Plagues retreated. Population boomed almost everywhere, especially in some of the former plague trouble spots, such as Europe and China. Traditionally, historians have ascribed the
demographic bounce to human cleverness: better food, hygiene, and medical science depriving the deadly microbes of eco-niches in which to pullulate. Now, however, awareness is spreading that this explanation will not do: areas of poor food, medicine, and hygiene benefited almost as much as those that were most advanced in these respects. Where the Industrial Revolution threw up slums and warrens that were ideal environments for germs to breed, the death rate declined nonetheless. The number of people continued relentlessly upward. The main explanation lies with the microbes themselves, which seem to have diminished in virulence or deserted human hosts.6

  The political and commercial state of the world, meanwhile, was conducive to innovation. Europe was in closer contact with more cultures than ever, as explorers put just about every habitable coast in the world in touch with all the others. Western Europe was perfectly placed to receive and radiate new ideas: the region was the emporium of global trade and the place where worldwide flows of influence focused and radiated. As never before, Europe generated initiative – the power of influencing the rest of the world. But Westerners would not have had a world-reshaping role were it not for the reciprocity of impact. China exerted more influence than ever, partly owing to a growing trade gap in Europe’s disfavour, as new levels of trade in tea, for instance, porcelain, and rhubarb – which may no longer be a world-stopping medicament but was in much demand as an early modern prophylactic – added new near-monopolies to China’s traditional advantages. The eighteenth was, in one historian’s apostrophization, the world’s ‘Chinese century’.7 Jesuits, ambassadors, and merchants transmitted images of China and processed Chinese models of thought, art, and life for Western consumption. In 1679, Leibniz, whose contributions to science included calculus and binomial theory, reflected on the new proximity of the extremities of Eurasia in Novissima Sinica, his digest of news from China compiled mainly from Jesuit sources. ‘Perhaps’, he mused, ‘Supreme Providence has ordained such an arrangement, so that, as the most cultivated and distant peoples stretch out their arms to each other, those in between may gradually be brought to a better way of life.’8