On Reading Watson's Ideas
I have always liked reading big books. I can remember how, in my youth, I trudged my way through Isaac Asimov's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology (941 pages), for instance. I also can remember reading David Kahn's The Codebreakers (1200 pages), but I can't say I remember any details. It all goes into the pot, simmered and stirred to make the tasty but indistinct broth that is my mind.
Earlier this year I took several weeks — a couple of months even — to read Peter Watson's book, Ideas : A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud (New York : HarperCollinsPublishers, 2005, 822 pages), and what a delightful time it was. I am grateful to Bill for drawing my attention to it. As I read I was enjoying the reading of it so much that I was thankful it was a large book lest it end far too soon.
I wrote a book note here, with rather too many excerpts from the book, but it was hard to hold back. Naturally there were some that didn't seem to belong there, so here they are instead.
This first one comes at the beginning of a chapter that refers in its title to the "year 0", an idea that rather appeals to me, by the way. During the recent time of millennial fever when some pedants rejoiced in pointing out that 2001 was really the millennium (a pointless distinction in my mind about an arbitrary number of years measured from an arbitrary starting point), my suggestion was that we rename 1 BC as year 0; the loss to calculating BC dates wouldn't make much difference in most cases, and it would make the AD stuff easier. No one took me seriously.
There was, of course, no year 0, and for several reasons. One is that the zero had not yet been invented: that happened in India, probably in the seventh century AD. Another is that many people around the world, then as now, were not Christians, and conceived time in completely different ways. A third reason is that the conventional chronology, used for dating events in the West over several centuries — AD, for Anno Domini, the year of Our Lord, and BC, before Christ — was not introduced until the sixth century. Jesus, as we have seen, never intended to start a new religion, and so people of his day, even if they had heard of him, never imagined that a new era was beginning. Use of the AD sequence did not in fact become widespread until the eighth cnetury, when it was employed by Bede in his Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, and the BC system, though referred to by Bede, did not come into general use until the latter half of the seventeenth century. [p. 171]
In Ideas Christianity kept popping up, as do other religions, because, right or wrong, religions have been influential ideas. Here is an interesting view on how what some of us see as cultural progress has not been uniform in one direction.
This brings us back to Christianity. As was mentioned above, in early antiquity religious toleration had been the rule rather than the exception, but that changed with the animosity with which the pagans and Christians regarded one another. We should not overlook the change that had come about in men's attitudes with the arrival of Christianity as a state religion [c. 320]. There was an overwhelming desire to 'surrender to the new divine powers which bound men inwardly' and 'a need for' suprahuman revelation. As a result, the thinkers of the period were not much interested in (or were discouraged from) unravelling the secrets of the physical world: "The supreme task of Christian scholarship was to apprehend and deepen the truths of revelation." Whereas paganism had imposed few restrictions on the intellectuals of Rome, Christianity actively rejected scientific inquiry. The scientific study of the heavens could be neglected, said Ambrose, bishop of Milan (374–397) at the time it was the capital of the western empire, "for wherein does it assist our salvation?" The Romans had been more than comfortable with the notion, first aired in Greece, that the earth was a globe. In his Natural History, Pliny had written "that human beings are distributed all around the earth, and stand with their feet pointing towards each other, and that the top of the sky is alike for them all and the earth trodden underfoot at the centre in the same way from any direction." Three hundred years later, Lactantius challenged this, "Is there anyone so senseless as to believe that there are men whose footsteps are higher than their heads?…that the crops and trees grow downwards? That the rains, and snow, and hail fall upwards to the earth?" Lactantius' view became so much the accepted doctrine that, in 748, a Christian priest named Vergilius was convicted of heresy for believing in the Antipodes. [p. 243]
This next excerpt I include merely to tweak the noses of the crowd who so vehemently argue that gay people should not be allowed to marry because marriage has always been exactly the way they imagine that theirs is today.
No less important or complex [in Imperial Rome] was the legal relationship between husband and wife. Romans made much of the fact that husbands should keep their wives under strictest control, but in practice this depended on which form of marriage the couple had concluded. There were three forms of union. Two made use of ancient ceremonials. In one, the couple offered a cake made of emmer wheat in a joint sacrifice held in front of ten witnesses. In the other ceremony, a father "sold" his daughter to her husband before five witnesses. In both cases, this had the effect of transferring a woman from the control of her father to that of her husband. her property became his and she fell under his manus.
Quite what women got out of these arrangements is hard to say, so it is important to add that there was an alternative. There was a third way by which a marriage could come into being and this was, as the Romans, in their inimitable style, called it, 'by usage'. If a man and wife lived together for a year, it was enough: she passed into her husband's control. By the same token, if the couple spent three nights apart in any one year, this 'usage' lapsed. In practice, then, people could get married and divorced without much fuss, or their partner's consent. [p. 203]
I have, in the past, been amused by Freud and particularly some of his ideas about interpreting dreams and psychoanalysis, but they always seemed more a parlor trick to me than anything approaching a science. Only those who wouldn't know a science if it bit them in the bum wouldn't be able to see the difference. Not surprisingly, I am attracted to any author who confirms my views.
This concept, the unconscious, and all that it entails, can be seen as the culmination of a predominantly German, or German-speaking, tradition, a medico-metaphysical constellation of ideas, and this genealogy was to prove crucial. Freud always thought of himself as a scientist, a biologist, an admirer of and someone in the tradition of Copernicus and Darwin. Nothing could be further from the truth, and it is time to bury psychoanalysis as a dead idea, along with phlogiston, the elixirs of alchemy, purgatory and other failed motions that charlatans have found useful down the ages. It is now clear that psychoanalysis does not work as treatment, that many of Freud's later books, such as Totem and Taboo and his analysis of the "sexual imagery" in Leonardo da Vinci's paintings, are embarrassingly naive, using outmoded and frankly erroneous evidence. The whole Freudian enterprise is ramshackle and cranky. [p. 728]
Finally, a little tidbit to help with perspective. We are reminded that Peter Watson is English, and writing from his perspective on the other side of the Atlantic. More well-deserved nose tweaking, it seems.
But since the rediscovery of the gene, in 1900, and the flowering of the technology based on it, Darwinism has triumphed. Except for one or two embarrassing "creationist" enclaves in certain rural areas of the United States, the deep antiquity of the earth, and of mankind, is now firmly established. [p. 645]