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Something to be thankful for: All those productive people who created the wealth that has enable so many of us to live longer and more fully.
I love this data map from Gapminder correlating life expectancy with wealth (click for full size):
And encouraging numbers over at Forbes (via R.M.): Avik Roy looks at cancer survival rates among the wealthiest countries and notes that the USA does well despite having three healthcare systems, not one.
Count me a huge fan of Rosling’s work:
See also his “200 countries, 200 years, 4 minutes.”
Imagine that this is your life story:
You are born in Africa, possibly in Ethiopia or perhaps Chad, but as a child you are taken by Arab slavers and sold in Constantinople to the Sultan of Turkey, before long catching the eye of a Russian diplomat and spy, who acquires you and smuggles you out in order to send you to the Kremlim in Moscow as a gift to Peter the Great, who becomes your godfather and, impressed with your wit and obvious intelligence, has you given the best education, whereupon you grow up to be a first rate military engineer, being posted on campaigns from the Basque country to the Baltic (where you meet in Königsberg the then-mathematics tutor Immanuel Kant), along the way learning French (naturellement!) and studying mathematics, such that when you engage in further study in Paris, you charm not only the wives of noble women with your sexual charisma but meet and impress Voltaire, Diderot, Montesquieu, and Leibniz as one of the few people in the world who is proficient at Newtonian mechanics and the new calculus, leading you to be nicknamed “dark star of the Enlightenment,” 
although when you return to Russia you run afoul of a power struggle after Peter the Great’s death and are exiled to a place in Siberia 4,000 miles east of St. Petersburg and near the then-Chinese border, though some years later you are pardoned and return to further exploits of military engineering for which you are rewarded with large estates of your own, meaning, in 18th-century Russia that you become a slave owner yourself because of the serfs who come with the land, and all is well except that your first wife hates you because it was an arranged marriage against her will and she has cheated on you, leading to a divorce and your marriage to a woman of noble Scandinavian and German origin, with whom you have ten children, one of which would become General-in-Chief, the second highest rank in imperial Russia’s military, and one of which would become the grandfather of Alexander Pushkin, thought by many to be the greatest of Russian poets.
Except that your story is real, your name is Abram Petrovich Gannibal, and your biography is well told by Hugh Barnes’s Gannibal: The Moor of Petersburg.
According to Barnes, Peter the Great’s interest in the young Gannibal was both personal and social-reformer: “by educating the young Negro in a style befitting a prince, the tsar hoped to teach the nobility a lesson, ‘and to put Russians to shame by convincing them that out of every people and even from among wild men—such as Negroes, whom our civilized nations assign exclusively to the class of the slave—there can be formed men who, by dint of application, can obtain knowledge and learning, and thus become helpful to the monarch’” (p. 97).
Further, “[Peter] admired the African’s didactic spirit, and believed his formidable mathematical talents would unlock Russian potential: ‘Abram Gannibal furnished the most striking proof of the injustice of that odious prejudice which assigns to the Negro race a reputation of intellectual and moral inferiority. He had immense spirit, a prodigious facility for study, and a rare capacity for mathematics and diverse branches of the human sciences, although mathematics always served as the science-mére. He was also blessed with a noble and elevated character and an incorruptible probity’” (p. 129).
Barnes’s Gannibal is well worth reading for a colorful, quintessentially Enlightenment-era life.
[The image is of a memorial bust of Gannibal in the province of Pskov, Russia.]
Simply wonderful, both in content and presentation:
Related posts:
Why life is 255 times better now than in 1800.
Why life in America is 40 times better than in 1900.
Why the nano is 750 times better than the Walkman.
[Via Café Hayek.]
Stephen Hicks discusses the Enlightenment vision of the eighteenth-century. This is from Part 14 of his Philosophy of Education course.
Clips 1-3:
Previous: What modernism is.
Next: Post-modernism’s themes.
Return to the Philosophy of Education page.
Return to the StephenHicks.org main page.
Some wise words from Deirdre McCloskey, for those who fear that things were healthier in the good old days and that we are degrading our environment and living less authentic lives:
“‘Ah, but the environment was better.’ Briefly for now, no. Consider that you may be mistaken. Air quality during the past fifty years has improved in some respects in every rich city in the world. Let us then be rich. Remember smoky crofters’ cabins. Remember being tied in Japan by law and cost to one locale. Remember American outhouses and iced-over rain barrels and cold and wet and dirt. Remember in Denmark ten people living in one room, the cows and chickens in the other room. Remember in Nebraska sod houses and isolation. Remember a very reasonable terror in the face of nature, wolves roaming in packs during the seventeenth century even in the highly urbanized Low Countries. Remember horse manure in New York and soft coal in London. This is what we have escaped, thanks to that used-up liberal capitalism.”
That’s from The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (University of Chicago Press, 2006), which I discussed briefly here: “Why life is 255 times better now than in 1800.”
McCloskey mentions another datum, excerpts from a diary kept by midwife Martha Ballard of Hallowell, Maine from 1785 to 1812:
“I attended funeral of [name of child obscure], who deceased being 4 years and 1 day old … Captain Lamb’s wife, and Solon Cook’s, and Ebeneezer Davis, Jr.’s wives died in child bed; infants deceased also … A storm of snow; cold for March … I had two falls; one on my way there, the other on my return … I traveled some roads in the snow where it was almost as high as my waist … I was at home this day making soap and knitting … Was called at a little past 12 in morning by Mr. Edson, to go to his wife being in travail … The river [was] dangerous but [I] arrived safe through Divine protection … I could not sleep for fleas. I found 80 fleas on my clothes after I came home… Cleared some of the manure from under the out house … Iced-over rain barrel.”
McCloskey notes: “Martha Ballard lived a typical precapitalist life. Is any of this, dear reader, typical of your life in a modern bourgeois society?”
(Perhaps not, he answers to himself, sitting in his air-conditioned family room on a humid day, sipping imported coffee while browsing the web on his laptop and watching a soccer game broadcast live from the other side of the world, kids splashing noisily in the backyard pool).
When did slavery end?
Intellectual historian Zeev Sternhell makes the following observation:
“But it is above all the French Revolution that is overlooked. Slavery was in fact abolished by the French Revolution. The slaves, like the Jews, were liberated, and for the first time in history, all men living within the frontiers of a single country, France, were subject to the same laws and became free citizens with equal rights.”
That’s from page 46 of Sternhell’s The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition (Yale University Press, 2010).
The “first time in history” is striking. Anti-slavery societies had been founded during the Enlightenment in the United States, Great Britain, and France.
But, despite its many sins, the French Revolution should get major credit for being the first to eliminate this ugly, ugly practice.
I’m reading Steven Johnson’s The Invention of Air, which is primarily about the Joseph Priestley, the great chemist and adviser to the American founding fathers. Along the way, Johnson quotes historian Tom Standage:
“The impact of the introduction of coffee into Europe during the seventeenth century was particularly noticeable since the most common beverages of the time, even at breakfast, were weak ‘small beer’ and wine. … Those who drank coffee instead of alcohol began the day alert and stimulated, rather than relaxed and mildly inebriated, and the quality and quantity of their work improved. … Western Europe began to emerge from an alcoholic haze that had lasted for centuries.”
As a contributing factor, coffee (and tea) certainly gets credit on physiological grounds. 
Also contributing was the development of European coffee house culture, the coffee houses bringing businessmen, artists, and scientists together for drinking and socializing. The great Lloyd’s of London company, for instance, had its beginning in Edward Lloyd’s Coffee House in London, which dates from (possibly) 1685 or (more likely) 1688, the year of England’s Glorious Revolution and John Locke’s return from exile in Holland.
As the Turks had both coffee and coffee houses at least a century earlier, coffee is at most a contributing factor. But it is thanks to the Turks’ militaristic and imperial ambitions that Europe got its first coffee house. As the inscription on a coffee cup at my office says: Given enough coffee, I could rule the world. Too true, as history bears out: I offer you the Suleiman-Kolschitzky-Axis-of-Coffee Thesis.
Led by Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottoman empire was expanding westward into Europe until halted at Vienna in 1529. Writes Sean Paajanen:
“Vienna was invaded by the Turkish army, who left many bags of coffee behind when they fled the city. Franz Georg Kolschitzky claimed the coffee as the spoils of war, and opened a coffee house. Apparently, he had lived in Turkey and was the only person who recognized the value in the beans. He introduced the idea of filtering coffee, as well as the softening the brew with milk and sugar. The beverage was quite a hit.”
Coffee and coffee houses then spread rapidly across Europe. (Braun has some pictures of famous European coffee houses.)
So let us give thanks to Suleiman of the Magnificent Headwear for the coffee and to Herr Kolschitzky for spotting the entrepreneurial opportunity.
Yet — amidst all the praise, we should not neglect the dissenting position. I quote from The Women’s Petition Against Coffee of 1674: “Coffee leads men to trifle away their time, scald their chops, and spend their money, all for a little base, black, thick, nasty, bitter, stinking nauseous puddle water.”
Hmmm … . I will take that under advisement, ladies, while I have another cup.
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