Stephen Hicks, Ph.D.

Coffee and the Enlightenment

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.

Bridge over the Colorado River

From Popular Science’s “Looking Back at the 100 Best Innovations of 2009.” I love the drama of this photo of a bridge being constructed over the Colorado River:

You can almost feel the drive of the bridge’s arch sections to meet and complete themselves. It struck me as analogous to the energy flow between God’s and Adam’s hands in Michelangelo’s Creation of Man.

Creators indeed.

Here’s the description of the bridge at Popular Science:

“Temperatures upward of 115°F, winds capable of felling cranes, an 890-foot drop below: ‘Inhospitable’ doesn’t begin to describe conditions at the Colorado River’s new Mike O’Callaghan–Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge.

“A 1,900-foot span designed to divert traffic from the narrow, switchback-laden road across the Hoover Dam, it will be the longest concrete arch bridge in the Western Hemisphere when it opens next fall, with 106 segments of ultra-high-strength concrete forming a twin-rib arch. Workers scaled the canyon’s walls, digging notches for concrete foundation columns. To construct the 1,060-foot-long arch, they cast 24 feet of concrete at a time, while a separate, temporary cable-stayed bridge held up the unfinished ends until the gap was closed this year.”

For more wonderful, dramatic, and just plain interesting innovations from 2009 in Security, Health, Entertainment, Auto Tech, Computing, Building Technology, and more, visit Popular Science’s feature.

Defining modernism and pre-modernism

Intellectual systems and movements are defined philosophically by means of their characteristic claims in the five major branches of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, human nature, ethics, and politics. As historical movements, they are defined by the time of their formulation and most vigorous activity.

So in the following table I offer a definitions of pre-modernism and modernism, each with the implicit genus “philosophical system” and a five-dimensional differentia.

Next: Defining post-modernism in contrast to modernism and pre-modernism.

[This chart is from Chapter 1 of Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Scholargy Publishing, 2004, 2011). The full book is available in hardcover or e-book at Amazon.com. See also the Explaining Postmodernism page.]

The Knife Man

I am reading Wendy Moore’s The Knife Man: Blood, Body Snatching, and the Birth of Modern Surgery. A fascinating book, but not for the squeamish.

The key figure is John Hunter, an 18th-century anatomist and revolutionary surgeon of volatile temperament, with a hunger for knowledge that drove him to rob thousands of graves, record the tastes of corpses’ bodily fluids (”gastric juice,” apparently, “is a little saltish or brackish to the taste”), deliberately infect himself with syphilis, and … well, you should read the book.

Surgery in the 1700s was brutal, in large part due to surgeons’ appalling ignorance of anatomy. Moore puts it this way:

“Although medical students usually learned some rudimentary anatomy, this was considered a useful but not vital adjunct to on-the-job experience. And when patients died on the operating table as a result of ignorance and blundering, as they frequently did, few, if any, lessons were learned from the outcome.”

Antiseptic and anesthesia were not discovered until the 1800s, so the brutality and low success rates of surgery in the 1700s make some sense. But the ignorance of anatomy is odd — after all, the 1700s were two centuries after Andreas Vesalius and one century after Francis Bacon. How slowly things change sometimes.

The revolution in anatomical knowledge pioneered by Vesalius and the epistemological revolution pioneered by Bacon — with its emphasis on observation and experiment — had not yet reached English medicine, or only barely so. As Moore puts it, “treatment regimes still owed their basic principles largely to the theories of the ancient Greeks.” The reverence for tradition and authority was so strong that it took a pugnacious, thick-skinned man like Hunter to be willing to crack heads, literally and metaphorically, with his colleagues to get them to consider new methods.

I’m just starting Moore’s book. Exams are over for me at the end of next week, so I will follow up with more then.

For now, there’s more on John Hunter at the Endocrine Today site.

Follow up: My post on Anatomy and Philosophy.

Thankful

On this day in 2009, I am thankful in a way that history puts in perspective. Three quotations:

From William Manchester, A World Lit Only By Fire, on life in medieval Europe:
“Because most peasants lived and died without leaving their birthplace, there was seldom need for any tag beyond One-Eye, or Roussie (Redhead), or Bionda (Blondie), or the like.
“Their villages were frequently innominate for the same reason. If war took a man even a short distance from a nameless hamlet, the chances of his returning to it were slight; he could not identify it, and finding his way back alone was virtually impossible. Each hamlet was inbred, isolated, unaware of the world beyond the most familiar local landmark: a creek, or mill, or tall tree scarred by lightning. There were no newspapers or magazines to inform the common people of great events; occasional pamphlets might reach them, but they were usually theological and, like the Bible, were always published in Latin, a language they no longer understood” (pp. 21-22).

From Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror:
“Difficulty of empathy, of genuinely entering into the mental and emotional values of the Middle Ages, is the final obstacle. The main barrier is, I believe, the Christian religion as it then was: the matrix and law of medieval life, omnipresent, indeed compulsory. Its insistent principle that the life of the spirit and of the afterworld was superior to the here and now, to material life on earth, is one that the modern world does not share, no matter how devout some present day Christians may be. The rupture of this principle and its replacement by belief in the worth of the individual and of an active life not necessarily focused on God is, in fact, what created the modern world and ended the Middle Ages” (p. xix).

From Jacob Burkhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy:
“In the Middle Ages … [m]an was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation—only through some general category. In Italy this veil first melted into air; an objective treatment and consideration of the state and of all the things of this world became possible. The subjective side at the same time asserted itself with corresponding emphasis; man became a spirited individual, and recognized himself as such” (p. 70).

I am thankful to be an individual, to be living in the modern world, and to be able to enjoy its wonders — good food and plenty for me and those I care about, safe travel to exotic places and home again, books and music and art and conversation with the many active-minded and free-thinking people living vital lives.

(And of course for the internet.)

Happy Thanksgiving.

William Kamkwamba

The boy who harnessed the wind — a 14-year old who decides to design and build a windmill to bring electricity to his remote village in Malawi. A deeply human story of initiative, ingenuity, and independence.

And here is the book, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, at Amazon.

High technology — very, very high

I just sent my first email from 36,000 feet, flying somewhere over Iowa or maybe Nebraska now.

Which means we should all watch that excellent Louis CK video again:

We live in a time of wonders.

The Enlightenment Vision — Flowchart

The Enlightenment of the long 18th century was an era of awesome intellectual and cultural transformation.

My Enlightenment Vision flowchart [pdf] is pitched at a high level of abstraction, showing schematically how the philosophical revolution of the 17th century led to the 18th-century revolutions in science, technology, politics, and economics — which in turn led to the dramatic increase in health, wealth, freedom, and goods in the 19th century.

To put it another way, the chronology shows how the ideas played out as philosophy, then as an intellectual movement, then as activism, then as the working technology of culture.

I use the chart in my classes and published a version of it in my 2004 Explaining Postmodernism. It’s here as a PDF and as an Excel file, in case you’d like to adapt it for your own purposes.

[This is an excerpt from Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Scholargy Publishing, 2004, 2011). The full book is available in hardcover or e-book at Amazon.com. See also the Explaining Postmodernism page.]