The 18th Century
Introduction
In our last entry we made an attempt to discover the ruling values at the highest cultural level that could account for the decisions made by the writers, thinkers, artists and political leaders of the time. This is what Cultural History is all about.
An important takeaway from that entry was the connection the cultural leaders of the 17th century, or Baroque period, made between two things: realistic statements and predictive behavior.
In other words, the more realistic our verbal responses the better we could predict our non-verbal behavior. It was an extraordinary advance in human thought and helps explain why the 17th century is often referred to as The Century of Genius.
It certainly helps us understand exactly why the 17th century became synonymous with The Scientific Revolution, since science is the most sophisticated, the most advanced method we have for understanding the relationship between verbal and non-verbal behavior. That’s why it’s called the model of knowing.
Note: That science is literally the model of knowing (sciere in Latin means to know) is exactly why Cancel Culture is currently in the process of placing it under the iron paw of a shallow and narrow-minded political ideology masquerading as the truth. All a part of their grand plan of building their global monument to intellectual backwardness (social and moral too). Idiots!
This is extremely important for understanding what happened to the Arts & Sciences and political life between the years of 1720 and 1790, or what is commonly known as The Enlightenment, but that we’ll refer to here simply as The 18th Century.
As we saw in our last entry, the 17th century was intensely interested in problem-exposure and cognitive tension.
The 18th century moved in exactly the opposite direction. It was interested in the resolution of tension, or, affective congruence, which is the feeling that the situation matches the expectation.
Note: Affective Congruence is not to be confused with Effective Congruence which is a phrase we use in our second entry. The former is about the emotion that accompanies one's way of responding to the world, while the latter has to do with the intended result of an action.
Since this change was to have a profound influence on Western Cultural Life and still does, why don’t we take a closer look?
Affective Congruence can be described as an act of categorizing.
It’s an act of categorizing a person, place, or thing, that carries with it a feeling of subjective certainty, or even necessity. It’s an unjustified intuitive leap supported by a sense of conviction.
One infers the existence of something from an overwhelming emotion. For example, one might infer the existence of God from the overwhelming beauty of a mountain scene. Even though that individual, or group, had that response, or was instructed to have that response, by someone other than God.
A person in such a state can not be convinced that before God is anything God is a word, and words come from people not Gods.
Their response might be something like, But such beauty could not come from people and certainly not from some random force of nature. As if a person who thinks like that would even know.
They might ask, not without a little contempt, Did you make the mountain?, as if the question can’t be answered. But it can be.
One could simply respond by saying, No, I didn’t. And neither did you. But you are responding to it, not God. And I’m responding to your response. After that you’ll discover why Christians invented Hell. Because, as far as they’re concerned, that’s where you are going for responding to them like that.
But, easy as it is to make fun of some Christians who think this way, their response is harmless compared to that of your average political fanatic who is ever ready to respond with violence whenever anyone disagrees with them. Just look around.
In any event, and speaking of which, in its most extreme pathological form validation by affective congruence makes it possible for the paranoid to construct a pseudo environment in which the random noises around them are categorized as words being spoken against them. Again, sound familiar?
At this level of “functioning” one automatically accepts as unquestionably true such unknowable absolutes as God, Heaven, Hell, The Dignity of Man, Racism, Sexism, Antisemitism, Homophobia, Xenophobia, Islamophobia, Transphobia, White Privilege, White Supremacy, and Nativism and any other handy capitalized word, or words, these life-destroying religious and political fanatics, and mediocrities, can get their paws on.
But all of this is not to say that affective congruence in and of itself is bad. On the contrary. Every artist and scientist uses validation by affective congruence. In fact, such validation is the basis on which they undertake to use a promising hypothesis.
The hypothesis simply feels right.
Just as the artist or scientist will doubt their ideas or theories if they feel something is wrong, so too will they try out a new idea or theory if they feel that it is right. They proceed with a hunch.
And those hunches are what is meant by affective congruence.
For this feeling let’s use the term cognitive harmony so as to mark it as the exact opposite of cognitive tension.
Again, this is extremely important for understanding what happened to Western Cultural Life in the 18th century.
Part I
Inferring the existence of God from a beautiful mountain scene, such as we mentioned above, didn’t exist at all as a response in the West prior to the 18th century. In fact, such a response belongs to the 18th century. During The Middle Ages mountains were seen as a sign of aging, as wrinkles on the face of the earth because of original sin and man’s fall from paradise. Paradise being a place where no one ages because no one does anything.
But during the 18th century that all changed. Well, sort of.
Not only did God become the creator of Divine Nature, but Divine Nature itself eventually replaced the need for God.
In short, all explanations of the West, that up until that time ended with the word God, now ended with the word Nature. Hence the sort of above. Because one important thing did not change.
What was maintained was the sense of Redemption, which is the assumption that a single word can terminate an explanation and that an explanation can redeem human behavior once and for all.
Perhaps more than anything else, this assumption, or better yet, this expectation, has caused the human race, the world over, untold and needless suffering. The phrase Expectations are resentments waiting to happen comes irresistibly to mind.
It wasn’t realized until late into the 19th century that it would be not only more practical, but even more morally responsible, to abandon the entire notion of redemptive explanatory systems and, to use a phrase of ours here at PRC, Embrace The Fucked-upness that comes with accepting the hypothetical character of all theoretical and explanatory constructs.
Note: The above is as good an explanation I could offer for why I am not and never will be a man of the Right or Left. The real cancer of the human race isn’t the White man, as Susan Sontag once squawked with such noble self-abnegation. No. It’s Redemptionism. Which is exactly what she herself clung to until she died from the very thing she accused an entire race of being.
But we’re not ready for that yet. That’s for our next entry.
In any event, the act of inferring divinity in a beautiful mountain scene was typical of the 18th century, and the most conspicuous founder of this tradition was Lord Shaftesbury (1671-1713), whose work was published in the early part of the century.
In his A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm he rescues an emotion that the cultural leaders of the 17th century had rejected.
Shaftesbury dragged it up from the lower cultural levels and justified it at the highest. We’re still suffering the consequences.
The 18th century has been called The Age of Reason and this term is justified so long as it is realized that the 18th century made logic serve the purposes of cognitive harmony, not cognitive tension, as was the case in the 17th century. As we said in our third entry, their reasoning was constittutive, not instrumental.
The 18th century focused on problem-solving, not problem-exposure. Their most important thinkers and artists did not focus on an awareness of the gap between behavioral pattern and situational demand, but on the closing of that gap.
This explains the emergence of Sentimentalism. A trait found in all people who want to hear the tune without paying the piper.
Sentimentalism can be seen in that awe-struck posture many assume when in the presence of nature, that melting of the soul before natural beauty. It can also be seen in a worship of all things primitive, as well as in the worship of the irrational and even in the irrationally terrible, or, the worship of violence.
Note: a lighter example could be seen during the early 70’s with people sporting earth shoes and eating dried raisins while walking to yoga class so everyone could see their earth shoes. Or, to use another example from the 70's, it could be seen in a family sitting around the TV to cheer on Chicken George while tearing itself apart. Again, we see the connection between sentimentality and violence.
In other words, when it comes to cognitive harmony, the more basic the confirmation of a belief is to carrying out one's goal, whatever that goal might be, the more readily that belief will be aroused, the more easily confirmed, and the less readily questioned. This placing of cognitive harmony above cognitive tension is what breeds religious and political fanaticism, dysfunctional family systems, and maladaptive social institutions.
Also, and obviously, sentimentalism is central to redemptionism.
This being case, is it any surprise that the 18th century Enlightenment ended with The French Revolution?
Note: A revoution, moreover, not simply inteneded to liberate the French, but to make Europe fear France. Any surprise that the bloody fanaticism of The French Revolution (and Russian) is actually seen as a model to be emulated by Cancel Culture and imposed on the host populations of the West?
Part II
The important thing that should capture our attention at this point regarding the whole idea of affective congruence and cognitive harmony is that this is why the notion of adaptation of organism to environment became the dominating value of the 18th century and why its political and social behavior was aimed at the perfect adaptation of organism to environment. As if that’s even possible.
How familiar this all is!
It’s ironic that those who reject God laugh at believers while at the same time clinging to a belief that automatic and unreflective conformity to a political ideology will redeem the human race.
Such arrogance isn’t just presumptuous, it’s psychotic. The only thing an explanation will ever redeem is verbal behavior.
And given how common it is for human beings to squander that gift, the only thing that separates us from all other species, redemption by verbal behavior doesn’t amount to much and certainly isn’t worth the destruction it so often causes.
Be that as it may, the 17th century was interested in enduring the cognitive tension that is always the result of problem-exposure.
This is why they rejected sentimentalism and enthusiasm.
Note: As we shall see when we turn to the 19th century, when it comes to rejecting enthusiasm, there’s no question the 17th century went too far. Which accounts for the 18th century’s move in the opposite direction. It’s exactly this polarization that the 19th century attempted to resolve.
But the 18th century was interested in reducing that tension in order to achieve cognitive harmony. So their most influential cultural figures embraced both sentimentalism and enthusiasm.
At the highest cultural level of the 18th century, and in an area in which economic power and social status intersected with innovative culture to form the social center, psychic comfort, physical comfort, and perfect adaptation,were the values that lay behind all of its problem-solving and significant innovation.
This can be seen in two seemingly trivial home innovations, upholstered furniture and dishware shaped appropriate to a category of food (fish served on a fish-shaped plate). Better examples of perfect adaptation would be hard to imagine. However, such innovations weren’t seen as trivial at the time.
And for a reason. The home is the one place on earth where human beings must experience psychic and physical comfort.
Note: One only needs to consider how many dysregulated brains have emerged from dysfunctional families and the consequences that inevitably result. Because when such people enter our institutions all hell breaks loose. An obvious fact constantly proven, and with depressing clarity, everywhere you look. That being the case, you’d think the family would warrant more consideration than something as abstract as race. But, apparently that would be asking too much.
This focus on comfort and ease is one reason why the 18th century has had so much staying power. Unfortunately, however, it’s also why it’s done so much damage. This comes out so well in one of the first documents clearly announcing the new evangel, Shaftesbury’s The Moralist: A Philosophical Rhapsody.
Just consider the title. In itself it is enough to make clear what the cultural leaders of the 18th century were interested in.
In fact, the 18th century Enlightenment can be reduced to a single principle: perfect adaptation to the environment should be the basis of all of our intellectual and moral decisions.
Or, The Moralist makes all of our moral decisions. While our intellectual response is one glorious Philosophical Rhapsody.
Everything, and everyone, in its place. All morals and ideas perfectly aligned, like ducks in a row, or fish on a fish-shaped plate about to be eaten by someone sitting comfortably on their upholstered chair after a long day in the pursuit of happiness.
To one with a strong drive toward reality this might appear a bit too Pie In The Sky, and I’m afraid it is. But, just as many have never even entered the 18th century, many have never left it.
The reason for singling out Shaftesbury’s work in this entry is that it so perfectly lays out the 18th century Enlightenment tendency to suppress awareness of any objection to a position by repeating the same idea in different words, over and over again, until the effect of the word, or words, blot out any threatening cognitive tension by a heavily reinforced cognitive harmony.
Note: Of course, this is still the whole purpose, and effect, of all political propaganda, and why it’s continued success spells the ruin of all involved. Given its destructive influence, successful political propaganda is an oxymoron. Political Propaganda is synonymous with Pyrrhic Victory.
In the case of Shaftesbury, Oh mighty Nature! Wise substitute of Providence! is indeed repeated over and over again in different ways. In fact, today it almost reads like a parody. This sort of over the top religious rapture is clearly what Monty Python were making fun of in this scene from The Meaning of Life.
But the most important part of Shaftesbury’s book is the part just quoted, Oh mighty Nature! Wise substitute of Providence!
Did you get that? The word Nature replaces the word God, while Providence, as in providential thinking, is maintained.
Providential thinking is the belief that everything happens for a reason. But everything does not always happen for a reason. For the most part, things just happen, and the reasons come later.
Sentimentalism, Enthusiasm, Providential Thinking, Divine Nature, Cognitive Harmony, Redemptionism and Violence.
This is the beating heart of the 18th century vision.
Note: The Python scene works just as well if one were to replace the word God with Nature or any other handy capitalized word currently in use, such as Racism, Sexism, and all the rest.
Part III
When thinkers and artists make their decisions in response to this kind of attitude the changes are immediately obvious. The implicit and subtle becomes explicit and obvious. Only a few examples are needed to show that this is exactly what happened.
From Bach to Vivaldi. From Vanbrugh’s Blenheim Palace to Boule’s Cenotaph for Newton. From Pope and Swift to Thompson and Fielding. From Watteau to Tiepolo and David.
In every instance there’s a movement from complex to simple, from implicit to explicit, from the subtle to the obvious.
Note: That’s not to say that in the movement from 17th century complexity to 18th century simplification there was a loss in the charm and beauty of the art produced at that time. Not at all. The point is how quickly simplification moved to oversimplification and the bad habits that followed.
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