Since Enlightenment cultural assumptions and expectations seem to have collapsed in our society and been replaced by distant simulacra, I have been looking into the circumstances that caused the modern European Enlightenment in the first place, in the hopes that - combined with an understanding of the causes of the collapse - this might lead to an idea how to reproduce the phenomenon.
One striking thing to be explained is that in a fairly short period of time, a few apparently quite different changes happened in Europe, in something more like a sudden explosion than a gradual accretion of know-how. A presumption of the value of censorship was replaced with free speech. Joint stock companies suddenly sent ships across vast oceans on highly profitable commercial ventures. Physics was no longer a talky subject of effectively useless speculation, but a science with mathematical precision comparable to engineering which quickly yielded practically useful results. Medicine and biology wasn't mathematized, but also quickly developed from a way to show care for the sick by bothering them in speciously systematized ways that frequently did more harm than good, to a body of reproducible knowledge that formed the basis for new technologies.
17th Century England and the Dutch Republic seem like important focal sites for the emergence of Enlightenment civilization, and I've just finished reading through Jonathan Healey's book The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, which gives a good overview of the English civil war, which turned a censorious and deeply corrupting monarchy into a republic with freedom of speech, which lasted for decades and only collapsed after Oliver Cromwell died of old age.
One thing in the book that struck me as puzzling and potentially important was the importance of Calvinism in the process by which the republican party found itself, and the immediate recognition by everyone involved that Arminianism was a complicit, Royalist theology.
I'm used to thinking of the Enlightenment as more philosophical than religious; figures like Galileo, Newton, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Smith, and Voltaire seem central to the story; theologians do not, with the notable exception of the Quakers.
Even among religious theories, Calvinism in particular had previously not seemed to me like a plausible a priori candidate for a liberatory theology, since the idea that God has predetermined who is a member of the Elect, will be saved, and will repent of their sins, and who on the other hand is permanently damned, seems disempowering. Arminianism is basically free-will Prostestantism, which would seem on the face of it more consistent with Enlightenment values - anyone can freely choose to be good. Reflecting on the roles played by Arminianism and Calvinism in the English civil war, and the context within which those roles emerged, led me to a very different conclusion.
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