Review: The Age of Genius, AC Grayling

[rug]

The Age of Genius: The Seventeenth Century and the Birth of the Modern Mind
AC Grayling
Bloomsbury, $30

STEVE WALKER
Last updated 05:00, May 22 2016

Atheist philosopher AC Grayling's mission is to prove that the 17th century was "the epoch in the history of the human mind". Not the Renaissance or the Enlightenment, but the bit in between.

I can think of no better guide to the collapse of orthodoxy and the hegemony of the established church. But does he successfully arrive at his destination?

Grayling's aim is undoubtedly bold, and not without justification. En route, however, he becomes bogged down in the quagmire of the Thirty Years War and travels quickly over France's slide into despotism under Louis XIV.

Some uncomfortable facts which don't fit his world view are brushed under his capacious carpet.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/books/80106055/review-the-age-of-genius-ac-grayling

[Cartoonist]

1. What else is new?

If nothing else, Grayling's work serves as a timely warning against the malign influence of established religion.

I think we all know that.

[Jim__]

2. Julian Baggini was similarly unimpressed with Grayling's book.

An excerpt from his review in The Guardian:

...

He gives similarly short shrift to historians who dispute that the Westphalian settlements created “a society of states based on the principle of territorial sovereignty” or “shifted the focus of politics from the religious to the secular”. “A glance at the map of Europe after 1648” is sufficient to counter the first objection, while “a cursory view across the landscape of the centuries since Westphalia” deals with the second.

However, the truth is not as self-evident as Grayling claims. He identifies several supposed turning points that support his narrative, but fails to make the case that these are one-off epochal pivots rather than part of the ebb and flow of history. Take, for instance, toleration of criticism of church orthodoxy. In 1686, Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle published Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, outlining the new Copernican heliocentric cosmology. Grayling points out that 70 or 50 years earlier “he could not have published these views freely, without thought of punishment or proscription”. But he also notes that Copernicus published an early sketch of his theory in 1510, without problems, supporting the view that toleration for heterodox views has waxed and waned over the centuries and did not simply weaken during the 17th. For instance, the last execution by the Inquisition wasn’t until 1826 in Spain, while the medieval Islamic caliphate of al-Andalus was for long periods more tolerant than many of the Christian kingdoms that succeeded it.

Grayling occasionally comes tantalisingly close to grappling with the complexities of the debate. At one point he notes that rather than there being a series of two-way tussles between science and religion, religion and occultism, occultism and science, there was “a three-cornered relationship that was sometimes a fight and sometimes not, between each of the three and the other two”. But rather than develop this, it is offered simply as an observation at a chapter’s end.

At times, it seems his desire to keep the message clear leads him to make some egregious omissions. Discussing the loss of Dunkirk and Calais to France, he says: “One wonders what sentiment would be in Britain today if parts of the continent still belonged to it.” Well, the last time I took a cursory look at the map, Gibraltar was not in Africa. He also claims John Locke as a champion of secular thinking without mentioning the well-known fact that, in his Letter Concerning Toleration, Locke argued that “those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of a God” since “promises, covenants, and oaths… can have no hold upon an atheist”.

...

Sounds like a book worth missing.

[MisterP]

3. what, no Athanasius Kircher? Joseph Glanvill?

Last edited Sun May 22, 2016, 03:28 PM - Edit history (2)

what sort of puzzles Americans is these British atheists' idolization of Protestantism: it's pure Whiggery, producing a strange "bundling" of science and democracy and tolerance and everything else that we happen to like at the moment: Luther was the first step to the humane secularism that supposedly reigns in the West, while Himmler and Beria would've fit naturally into a scarlet robe had they been transported a few centuries back

in this fantasy Boyle and Kepler and Lyell defeated Catholicism and the God Hypothesis in one fell swoop while "the Church" was busy burning scientists left and right simply because they were curious

I've heard Tolkien accused of not really thinking by these types because he was, after all, a Papist; even the term "organized religion" is deeply Puritan

for an American it's just highly amusing to hear these Brits implicitly hankering for some independent DIY horizontalist ultra-Protestantism that's the complete opposite of Catholicism--since that's precisely what the televangelists and Southern Baptists are