The Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment
A natural philosopher recreates a famous experiment of the day, where he puts a bird in a device, which then
proceeds to deprive the bird of oxygen. For some reason, he’s doing this in a very dimly lit room at night,
surrounded by candles. There is a mix of shock, horror, and awe on the faces of the onlookers, men, women,
adults, and children alike.
This is a 1768 painting by Joseph Wright, titled, perhaps unimaginatively, “An Experiment on a Bird with the
Air Pump.” But it is also the perfect image of both the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment, two ages in
which humanistic curiosity and inquiry, reason, and the triumph of science dominated social, intellectual,
political, and, of course, scientific discourse from the late 17th to early 19th century.
PARADIGM SHIFTS
The Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution marked several paradigm shifts, many of which were reactions to
things we discussed from the previous lectures.
The wars on religion made people realize that arguing about religion is immensely divisive and only leads to
violence, so why not practice this new thing called, idk, religious tolerance? Maybe there’s another way to
discuss things openly, publicly, intellectually, without murdering the crap out of each other.
People start thinking, 'You know what isn't divisive? Reason.' This is because it's intrinsic to people and based
on universal facts. 1+1 will always be two, and to argue otherwise based on what the Bible says would be silly.
Reasoning based on cold, hard, scientific facts, rather than what a religious text said would become the new
standard for intellectual discourse.
People start riffing off of the previous idea. They also start thinking if reason was universal and intrinsic to all,
maybe things like human dignity were universal as well.
Additionally, after all the trouble religion had caused, a lot of people began doubting how omnipotent or
powerful God actually was. So there was a move from leaving things in God's hands to man thinking of himself
as the solver of human problems.
If the Renaissance was about looking to the past for answers, the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution
said that the only way to create new knowledge was through lived personal experience and trial and error.
Enlightenment thinkers rejected blind acceptance of ancient authority, and stressed the autonomy of science
and learning by doing.
A popular motto during these periods was 'Sapere aude' or 'Dare to know.' This phrase captured the spirit of
the times, as it challenged the writers, scientists, and philosophers of its day to have the courage to go beyond
their understanding of the world.
In very real, tangible way, the mysteries of the world were slowly being unraveled, the shadows of the past,
magic, and superstition giving way to the light of new knowledge.
Science and religion are usually pitted as two extremes. So you might wonder if religion was phased out or
totally rejected by the general public. The answer would be, not really. Rather than reject religion wholesale,
the thinkers of the day tried to reconcile both science and religion. One way this manifested was through the
idea of Deism. Deism was an idea regarding the origins of the universe. Its proponents, called Deists, believed
that God was like a clockmaker, and the world was this clock that God crafted. Like a clock, the world operated
on invisible universal, scientific laws. And upon creating the world, He found it perfect, and left humans to their
own devices.
The attitude of combining science and religion can be seen in Galileo Galilei’s quotation, “I do not feel obliged to
believe that the same God that endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their
use.” In short, God gave us gifts, it would be a shame if we didn’t use them. Insert the FOR SCIENCE meme
here.
THE PHILOSOPHES AND THEIR IDEAS
Philosophe is French for ‘philosopher,’ though during the Enlightenment it was the catch-all term for the
intellectuals of the period. The ‘philosophy’ the philosophes were doing is very different from the philosophy we
understand today. Their philosophy is not the academic discipline that asks big existential life questions like ‘who
are we’ and ‘what is the meaning of life’, rather, it aimed to change how people thought about all aspects of
life—from science, to politics, to ourselves.
Philosophes criticized institutions and human behavior through the lens of reason. They believed that the whole
universe ran on those natural laws. Once these laws were discovered, society, its institutions, and the pre-
existing body of knowledge could be challenged, reshaped, and re-formed.
(See videos on Rene Descartes, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and John Locke by The School of Life—attached in
module)
DENIS DIDEROT
Denis Diderot was not fun enough to have his own fancy video from The School of Life, so we’re just going to
talk about him here very briefly.
During the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution, there was so much bleeding edge knowledge coming out,
being discussed, being printed. So a guy named Denis Diderot thought, why not combine everything in a massive
volume? Or a set of volumes? To that end, Diderot created En Encyclopedie, or the encyclopedia, which he
described as a collection of universal and analytical human knowledge. If your family ever owned an
encyclopedia, it’s something that’s continuing a long tradition that dates back to the 18th century.
THE ECONOMIC CRITIQUE
(See Adam Smith video by The School of Life)
THE POLITICAL CRITIQUE
For a very long time, absolutism was the undisputed political model in Europe, and it would stay that way until
the American Revolution.
Under absolutism, the monarch or sovereign wielded ultimate, unlimited, and absolute power. Whatever a
monarch wanted to do, he or she did. The best example of this is King Louis XIV, who very famously said “L’etat
c’est moi”, or “I am the state.”
Under this system, it was believed that the monarch had been given the right to rule by God Himself, which is
why we have the phrase “the divine right of kings.”
However, people across Europe became more skeptical and increasingly mistrustful of traditional institutions,
such as, for example, the monarchy, the church, and government. The reason people were becoming mistrustful
of them was because, well, these institutions were prone to abuses of power. So throughout the Enlightenment,
there was a trend towards securing individual freedom versus the abuses of authority.
To this end, monarchs had to get with the times. The people wanted woke leaders, so the monarchs decided
they would be enlightened, too. This trend was called enlightened absolutism; where the monarchs would signal
to their subjects that they were listening,and acquiring Enlightenment knowledge. Enlightened absolutism
manifested itself in an increase of religious tolerance, religious freedom, prison and police reform (particularly
getting rid of the torture of prisoners), patronage of philosophes, and the introduction of mass education.
Examples of enlightened absolutist monarchs would be Frederick the Great of Prussia, Joseph II of Austria, who
was Marie Antoinette’s brother, and who co-ruled with their mom, Empress Maria Theresa, and Queen Christina
of Sweden. Queen Christina wanted the philosophiest of the philosophes to educate her, so she hired Rene
Descartes to tutor her and make her enlightened. She forced him to wake up at 5am and report to her palace to
have conversations with her about philosophy and religion. This was the dead of winter in Sweden, where
temperatures can reach –12 degrees Celsius, and Descartes by that time was 53, and not used to the soul-
crushing Scandinavian winters. This finally took a toll on Descartes, who developed pneumonia, and died months
later.
TOWARDS A NEW SCIENCE OF MAN
Man began taming, harnessing, and controlling nature, as well as classifying and categorizing it. The mystical
world that was once full of mystery and governed by superstition was now being understood and placed into
neat little boxes, subjected to rational, scientific scrutiny.
William Gilbert, Stephen Grey, and Benjamin Franklin made headway in our understanding of electricity.
Throughout this time period, electricity became kind of like a party trick. Instead of karaoke, society ladies would
invite scientists to their manors to show off feats of electricity, like delivering mild electrical shocks to partygoers.
I know, people in the past were weird, but let’s be real, if we were in their shoes, we’d probably do the same at
parties too.
Electricity was also thought to have medicinal properties, and doctors would give their patients electric shocks
to cure them of diseases. An important feature of science during this period is that not only is science
entertaining, as in Joseph Wright’s air pump painting at the start of the lecture, and the electricity shows at
society parties, but science is useful. Because science seems useful and has so many applications, this creates
this intersection of scientific research, the government, and major industries, which would continue and expand
into the next age, The Industrial Revolution. During this time, science is not just about doing research and
experiments for the sake of doing research and experiments, but also how ordinary people could benefit from
these things. Science is nothing if it resides in the realm of theory, there must be a practical application, too.
Carolus Linnaeus’s contributions to biology emerged during this period. He instituted a system called binomial
nomenclature, which used Latin names so scientists around the world could use the same scientific names for
different species of flora and fauna without confusion. So rather than calling a domestic housecat one name in
Spanish, another in French, another in German, Linnaeus’s system created the universal Felis catus.
Linnaeus, called the Father of Taxonomy, or the scientific classification of plants and animals, is also the reason
why we have the hierarchical system of classifying living things that we study in school. This will probably be
familiar to a lot of you—Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, and Species, best remembered with the
mnemonic device, Kevin, Please Come Over For Great Spaghetti, or however else your biology teacher taught
you to memorize that.
Another familiar name to us would be the chemist Antoine Lavoisier, who discovered hydrogen, oxygen, and the
laws of conservation of mass.
After the Renaissance module was released, a popular question I was asked was, weren’t there female painters
and writers too? There were, I replied, but naturally, they were outnumbered by the men. But the point is, they
existed. The Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution were a promising time for female intellectuals, with women
increasingly infiltrating and entering spaces which had previously been closed off to them.
Today, scientific research and experiments are carried out in government facilities and fancy research labs, but
during the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution, these things would be done at home. And this is why women
had an increased access to science, because their brothers, fathers, husbands, would be engaged in either
research or experiments, or both. People could buy scientific instruments like telescopes and microscopes and
fiddle with them at home. In a way, studying became a leisurely activity for the middle and upper class.
Lady Mary Montagu, the wife of the British ambassador to Turkey, wrote extensively about the people and
customs in the Ottoman Empire. She is largely credited with introducing the concept of smallpox inoculation to
England during an outbreak of smallpox. Having first observed the practice in Turkey, she had her daughter
publicly inoculated to quell any fears the general public might have about it. This practice spread, and smallpox
did not. Lady Montagu may be considered the prototype of an Enlightenment scientist, in the sense that she
observes something that works, tests it, performs it on a larger scale, and publicizes her work.
Marie-Anne Paulze, Lavoisier’s wife, who he married when she was 13 and he was 28, btw, was instrumental in
the precision of his calculations. If you look at Lavoisier’s work notebooks, you’ll see her handwriting everywhere.
She also drew all the detailed diagrams in his work, Elementary Treatise on Chemistry, which of course has a
French name I won’t bother to butcher, and is widely considered to be the first modern textbook on chemistry.
These diagrams enabled scientists in any part of the world to replicate Antoine Lavoisier’s experiments and the
instruments. Paulze nor her contributions to his work were never acknowledged by her husband in his texts, and
if you just base academic or scientific contribution on what is written, it would seem like she never existed at all.
So how do we even know about Paulze’s role in Lavoisier’s work? Through numerous observations from guests
that visited the Lavoisier home, and letters written to and from it.
In the life of Marie-Anne Paulze we see the fundamental challenges of learning about historical women not just
in science, but in any field of life. One challenge is the refusal of men to acknowledge the contributions of women,
therefore leading to the myth of the male genius. The other challenge is that we only have scattered scraps of
evidence that they existed at all, bits and pieces of a life hidden away in diaries, notebooks, and letters across
countries and continents.
There are many more women involved in scientific research and discovery during this time; if the topic intrigues
you and you want to learn more, I’d recommend the book Pandora’s Breeches: Women, Science, and Power in
the Enlightenment by the historian Patricia Fara.
WHO RUN THE WORLD? WOMEN DURING THE ENLIGHTENMENT
Philosophes championed the idea that society could be reformed and transformed by reason. So by that logic,
women thought that they, too could use reason to improve their status in society.
Many male Enlightenment thinkers were, however, misogynistic fucks who thought women weren’t capable of
higher intelligence; some of them were mentioned in the previous sections. Rousseau thought that women were
weaker and inferior to men, except in their capacity for feeling and giving love. For him, women should be
educated to provide soothing pleasure to man, and didn’t deserve equality. In his work Emile, he says:
“The women’s entire education should be planned in relation to men. To please men, to be useful to them, to
win their love and respect, to raise them as children, care for them as adults… these are women’s duties in all
ages and these are what they should be taught from childhood.”
Diderot felt that women were too frivolous, shallow, and didn’t care about important intellectual issues. Women,
to him, only cared about gossiping and playing cards. The articles he chose for his Encyclopedie specifically
highlighted the physical weakness and supposed mental inferiority of women.
People who were against women’s education saw women were seen as the antithesis of reason because they
were seen as too emotional. Thus continued the false dichotomy of reason and emotion, which has done so
much to set back both men and women over the past few centuries.
FEMALE PHILOSOPHES SPEAK UP
Female philosophes were naturally not going to put up with this sexist bullshit. They argued that women were
just as capable of reason as men, as reason, didn’t we all agree, was intrinsic to every human being?
They realized the importance of education for women, because if women had the same education as men, they
would be more prepared for life. At this point, if women were being educated at all, it was likely the same things
they’d been taught for centuries—how to pray, how to do needlepoint, how to play a musical instrument, how
to be a good wife and mother. Italy was the exception, where it wasn’t uncommon for women to get university
degrees, but even then they were outliers and not the norm. The women decided they would take their education
into their own hands.
Bathsua Makin, widely considered England’s most learned woman, whose quotation you see in the slides, wrote
on the importance of women’s education in An Essay To Revive the Ancient Education of Gentlewomen, in
Religion, Manners, Arts & Tongues, with an Answer to the Objections against this Way of Education in 1673. The
central argument of her essay is that since women don’t have political or economic power, the best way they
can navigate society is through the art of persuasion, a skill one can only acquire through education.
Mary Wollstonecraft was another vocal champion for the right of women to be educated on par with men. In
fact, her own most famous work, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, was a response to Rousseau’s Emile,
which you heard a bit of in the previous portion, and which was mentioned in the Rousseau video by The School
of Life, which you hopefully watched.
If Rousseau said that the education of girls and women must be in relation to boys and men, Wollstonecraft
argues that a girl’s education must be not in relation to, but alongside that of a boy’s. What women learned—
dancing, singing, needlepoint, to be amusing entertainment for men—did not train their minds for reason, or to
endure life’s hardships, as a men’s education was structured. In order to contribute to society on the same level
as men, women needed to be educated the same as men.
This is normal to us now, but when Wollstonecraft wrote it, it was incredibly radical. Now, we can’t all be perfect,
and she was terribly elitist. In the same treatise where she spoke about the right of women to a good education,
she also said:
“Though I consider that women in the common walks of life are called to fulfill the duties of wives and
mothers, by religion and reason, I cannot help lamenting that women of a superior cast have not a road open
by which they can pursue more extensive plans of usefulness and independence”
Which of course, implies that lower class women could continue to be wives and mothers, but poor upper class
women who were trapped in their cages of privilege. Nevertheless, what she said of women’s education would
resonate deeply with other men and women, who would champion a better education for girls.
Wollstonecraft’s own life and work would arguably be eclipsed by her more popular daughter, also named Mary,
who went on to write one of the most famous novels of all time—Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus.
Women, as usual, would have to do the work themselves. One of the ways they filled this educational void was
by putting up their own intellectual societies. An example of this was the Bluestocking Society in England, an
aristocratic club for elite female intellectuals to discuss philosophical topics of the day. Unfortunately, as
mentioned, it was just for the elites.
Another such society that allowed women to interact with their peers regardless of sex and class was the Republic
of Letters. This was an international network of male and female intellectuals where academic discourse was
conducted through letters. So before online forums, Facebook groups, Discord servers, and that ridiculous bird
website, a way to interact with people with similar interests as you but who lived very far from you was through
the Republic of Letters.
Women had very little chance of getting their academic or literary work published, and, as in the example of the
Bronte sisters, Anne, Charlotte, and Emily, had to publish their books under pseudonyms. In the Republic of
Letters, that wasn’t necessary; you could write letters under your own name, and interact with scientists like
Anders Celsius (yes, the temperature guy) and writers like Voltaire. So, the Republic of Letters was great because
it was a way for women to get their ideas accepted, if not at the very least entertained, by the wider academic
community.
Naturally, given the social constraints placed on women at the time, the women were greatly outnumbered by
the men, which is why many historians call the participants of the Republic of Letters, men of letters. These
historians are quite overwhelmingly male, it must be said.
In the slides you’ll find an intellectual map titled “The World of Francesco Algarotti.” Algarotti was an 18th century
Italian polymath who was part of the Republic of Letters, and interacted with, as you can see on the map, a
great many intellectuals, including kings, yes, but also women.
Without mandatory mass education, a woman’s education depended on her own social class and personal
circumstances. It depended on whether or not you had a father, husband, or older brother who was willing to
encourage you to study and learn more. And more often that not, if you were upper class, or part of the gentry
or nobility, you had a higher chance of receiving an education at par with men. This was because the upper class
tended to have a library, and those libraries would have books, scientific instruments, and collections of maps,
insects, and other intellectual paraphernalia.
Another space women could exert a measure of influence in was the salon. Today, the salon is where we get
our hair cut and styled. But in the Enlightenment, a salon was a social gathering where men and women could
discuss important topics of the day. These were organized mainly by upper class women, called salonnieres.
Through the Enlightenment salons, one could not only hear about current events, but challenge and debate
people with opposing ideas on a great many topics.
TRANSNATIONAL TRANSGRESSIONS
This period also marked a time of overseas trade and colonialism across the European powers.
England was expanding its empire in Jamestown, Virginia, in what at the time was British North America—not
quite yet the United States. It was also in Bombay, India, and in Australia . France was in New Orleans and
Haiti, The Netherlands was in the Dutch East Indies, aka Indonesia, Portugal was in Brazil and other parts of
South America, which it shared with Spain, who had control of Mexico and us in the Philippines.
Wherever Europeans travel, they inevitably established colonies and plantations, and exploited the natural
resources of their newly acquired territories. The most profitable industries in these overseas territories are
agricultural—sugar, tobacco, cotton, tea. What do these industries have in common? They all run on slave
labor.
THE TRANSATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE
But what is a slave? What is slavery? In order to understand it, we need to distinguish it from all the other
instances of slavery in popular culture. It’s not the Britney Spears kind, or the 50 Shades of Gray kind.
According to slavery and race historian H. Orlando Patterson, slavery is the “permanent, violent, and personal
domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons.” Now what does that mean? Let’s break
down each part of his statement.
Slavery is a permanent because if you were enslaved, or born a slave, you would die a slave. There was little
hope of escaping your condition in life. Now I’m sure you’re thinking, “But miss, I’ve heard there were slave
owners who freed their slaves.” Sure, but those were few and far between.
Slavery was violent because it entailed cruel and unusual forms of punishment and public humiliation. Slaves
would be captured in Africa, brought over to the Americas in ships, under inhumane conditions, and subject to
inhumane treatment by their owners. We will discuss this shortly.
Slavery was personal domination because it was the social and racial dynamic of white people exerting their
authority over black people through microaggressions, insults, humiliation, caning, whipping, hanging them
upside down from a tree in the plantation, sometimes even killing the latter. And what was their rationale for
feeling that they were racially superior to the Africans, and thus could treat them like objects? Their skin color.
White was the color of purity, of cleanliness, of God—so what else could black be?
Why natally alienated? Because for a certain generation of African slaves, they would be born in America, they
would be forced to work in America, they would die in America, in a country they did not choose, simply
because circumstances had robbed their mothers of a choice of where to give birth, or whether or not they
wanted to give birth or not.
Why generally dishonored? The way Patterson phrases that is very kind. To call the treatment of African slaves
by white slaveowners ‘generally dishonoring’ them, is the understatement of all understatements. African
slaves were quite literally property. As in, things, objects that people owned. Can you even process that? How
can a person own another person? Slavery made it possible. Of course white people would find a way to own
another human being the same way you own a laptop or a pair of shoes.
The transatlantic slave trade, sometimes called the triangular trade, was the largest forced transoceanic
migration in history. There’s a diagram in the Powerpoint to help you guys understand why it’s called the
triangular trade.
It’s not just a historical event, but a profound tragedy, and one of the largest sustained crimes in world history,
for which the victims have still not received justice.
So let’s follow the average voyage of a slave ship from Africa to the United States or Brazil. Often called “The
Middle Passage,” many slaves did not survive this part of the voyage. Please refer to the images in the slides to
give you a better understanding of the conditions these people were transported in.
This was a deeply traumatic experience for men, women, and children. It was a 4-6-week trip, where people
were packed, usually below deck, like sardines. Worse than sardines, actually. Here is a firsthand account not
of a slave, but of an Irish clergyman, Reverend Robert Walsh, whose ship encountered a slave ship. Here, he’s
talking about how the slaves are kept:
“She had taken in, on the coast of Africa, 336 males and 226 females, making in all 562, and had been out
seventeen days, during which she had thrown overboard 55. The slaves were all inclosed under grated
hatchways between decks. The space was so low that they sat between each other's legs and [were] stowed
so close together that there was no possibility of their lying down or at all changing their position by night or
day. As they belonged to and were shipped on account of different individuals, they were all branded like
sheep with the owner's marks of different forms. These were impressed under their breasts or on their arms,
and, as the mate informed me with perfect indifference 'burnt with the red-hot iron.'”
Full account: http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/slaveship.htm
There’s also a diagram of the interiors of a slave ship so you can see just how packed the slaves were on these
vessels. Even in the curved part on the right side of the ship, they’ve maximized the space so they could stuff
as many slaves there as possible. On the slide after that you’ll see part of a ship manifest of a slave ship, which
is a document that tells you what kind of cargo a ship is carrying, along with the number of people on board.
As you can see, the ship is built to transport 482 people, but it actually transports 609.
The slaves had no freedom of movement below deck, they were all shackled just in case any of them decided
to stage a mutiny. There was no bathroom, only communal buckets for number 1 and number 2, the contents
of which spilled and sloshed onto the wooden floors when the waves got choppy. What if someone got sick on
board? Tough. Everyone would get sick. Or the sick would be thrown overboard, along with the dead. What if
a female slave was pregnant and had to give birth on the ship? Then she would have to give birth in these
disgusting conditions, and hopefully both mother and child would survive the trip. Privacy, proper medical
treatment, being treated like a human being? What are those things?
The difficulty of the Middle Passage is even referred to by Eric Killmonger in Black Panther, when he says, “Just
bury me in the ocean with my ancestors who jumped from ships, 'cause they knew death was better than
bondage.” Killmonger’s line is a reference to the historical Igbo Landing of 1803, where a group of captured
and enslaved Igbo people from Nigeria rose up against their captors on their slave ship, drowned their captors,
then themselves. Because they were a proud people who refused to be enslaved and subjugated. The Igbo
Landing itself is referenced in Beyonce’s music video for “Love Drought”.
I’ve included a brief account by a Nigerian slave named Olaudah Equiano, of his experience of the Middle
Passage, which you can find in your module.Okay, so let’s assume the slaves make it to their destinations,
whether it be Brazil or the Caribbean, or the United States. What’s next?
It’s time to sell them. In the slides, you’ll see two newspaper ads for slaves. Read both of them. What do you
notice about the language used? These people are being described the way you describe animals. In the case
of the ad on the right, they are being sold alongside animals, at a race track.
Let’s say a slave is sold to the owner of a cotton plantation. What then? Then the labor begins.
Work was difficult, brutish, and long, with slaves working up to 18 hours a day. Slaves were expected to be up
at the crack of dawn, and, depending on the season, made to either plant, tend to, or harvest agricultural
produce. Farm work wasn’t the only option for a slave, of course, you could also be a house servant, usually in
the capacity of a nanny or the mammy stereotype, which you see in that awful Emma Stone white savior
movie The Help. Other times they served—literally, as butlers, or as maids. Regardless of the actual work they
did, slaves but especially agricultural laborers were watched closely by a slavemaster, slave driver, or overseer,
who often did not hesitate to crack his whip if he felt a slave was slacking in their duties or output. If you were
lucky it was just one lash.
In one of the slides you will see, on the left side, a photograph of a slave’s back. Why does it look like that,
with elevated lines all over it? That’s what happens when your back has been whipped for years. There were
other forms of humiliation and punishment; in one illustration you see a slave being hung from a tree, naked,
whereupon the slave master proceeds to paddle him in full view of the household and other slaves. In Django
Unchained, you see Calvin Candie about to punish a slave by hanging him upside down before beating him. If
a slave owner wanted to kill a slave, he 100% could and it wouldn’t be a crime, because he wasn’t killing a
human being, he was just disposing of his property. The same way you’d throw away a ballpen that ran out of
ink.
As you can imagine, slaves didn’t live long when they got to their plantations. The average life span of a
plantation slave was 7-9 years. Why were they dying? Well, there were the harsh conditions, long working
hours, literally backbreaking labor that we discussed previously. Slaves were given food that was sometimes
not even fit for animals to consume, and were given one outfit every year. There was also the whippings and
punishment on top of that.
In the United States, slavery was maintained through forced reproduction of slaves. What do we mean by that?
The white slaveowners slash plantation owners created breeding farms or sex farms, where they forced their
slaves to have sex with each other in order to produce more little slaves to harvest their cotton or sugar.
Another sad part about this was that we think that this was all white people selling black people. In reality, the
middlemen were Africans themselves, even tribal chiefs, a narrative which has been whitewashed over time.
Often the slaves would be sold in exchange for guns, alcohol, and cloth.
Africa is still a largely impoverished continent because of the transatlantic slave trade, but that isn’t the only
terrible legacy from this time in history. Another is racism—the idea, the misguided belief, that some people
felt racially superior to others by virtue of their skin color, which was, white. So when a man like George Floyd
is suspected of a minor misdemeanor—not even convicted or proven, just suspected—a white officer has no
qualms about kneeling on his neck until he goes into cardiac arrest and dies. Because the white police officer
knows that the institution of whiteness, the legacy of whiteness, will naturally protect him. Because George
Floyd’s life, due to his being black, has been deemed by society as less important.
This idea that black lives matter less than white ones is even enshrined in US law. When the United States had
just finished kicking out the British, they had to get all the states to agree to the Constitution and the concept
of the electoral college, which is the weird way Americans elect their presidents. The problem was that the
northern states, which were largely anti-slavery, wanted only free people to count in the population towards
electoral votes, which they had more of. The pro-slavery Southern states were worried that they would
constantly be outvoted, and wanted enslaved people to count in determining the state population. To
compromise, both sides agreed on the Three-Fifths Clause. It established that a slave would only count as 3/5
of a person.
It’s not just how black people are treated by law enforcement, although black people have historically been
stopped without just cause five times more than white people, and a black man is twice as likely to be stopped
without just cause than a black woman. Black people have also been discriminated against at job interviews
based on their names or their hairstyles, black households in America earn less than white ones—59 cents to
every dollar that white ones earn, black votes are restricted more than any other racial group in America, and
black Americans have a lower life expectancy than white Americans. Racism lives on not just in these sad
realities, but also in every microaggression, every slur, every time one of your friends or relatives makes an
ignorant comment about African exchange students in the UAAP.
In the white West, Africans (including African-Americans) have been made to feel ashamed of their heritage,
their appearance, particularly their hair and skin; Africans are just as obsessed with skin lightening and
whitening as Filipinos. Things are changing of course, but like with any change, it’s slow, and takes time. But
maybe one day soon, hopefully in our lifetimes, as Beyonce says in Black is King, black will be synonymous
with glory.
VOX POPULI: THE COFFEESHOPS OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT
Previously a condemned beverage in the 17th century, coffee was considered “the bitter invention of Satan,”
and only consumed for medicinal purposes, if at all. Over time, coffee replaced beer and wine as the breakfast
beverage of choice in many Western countries.
Today, pre-covid at least, the cafe was the place we would gather to cram papers, pretend to be productive
and turn it into an aesthetic, or discuss projects with our group mates.
Not much has changed since the Enlightenment. The cafe or coffee house, or coffeeshop, an invention of the
Enlightenment, was a nice place for people to come in, have a cup of coffee, and discuss matters ranging from
arts, to science, to philosophy and current events. They were considered ‘penny universities,’ because anyone
could come in, pay the penny for a cup of coffee, and find all manner of topics being discussed, from the banal
to the highly intellectual.
The Enlightenment Cafe was egalitarian, in keeping with the spirit of the times. What mattered was the quality
of your opinion and how you phrased it, not your social status.
Coffeehouses created a reading public, because people are digesting and engaging with information and ideas
at a rate previously unheard of. People are reading treatises and essays, writing letters, debating and engaging
with people based on things they read, defending their opinions, responding to current events. In our time this
ability is something we perhaps take for granted because it is so common, but this had its roots in the
Enlightenment.
People begin to realize that their opinions matter. They're not just shouting into the void; the void is listening,
the void is responding. And sometimes the void shares the same opinion.
People's worlds expand. Your understanding of the world used to be confined to this narrow purview of
neighborhood, town, parish, family, workplace. But because of this explosion of ideas, combined with this
reading and writing culture, people discover that they're part of a broader group of people with similar
interests.
Now, again, we should ask. Was it an Enlightenment for all? Well, no. If you were a woman, you weren’t a
being capable of reason. If you were not white-skinned, you weren’t a human being at all. So the
Enlightenment, though making headway in terms of what we learned and knew about a world, was still largely
dominated by privileged cis white men.
Crucially, however, these Enlightenment ideas would spread to the Americas and beyond, leading to the next
ages we will discuss, the American Revolution and French Revolution.
