Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

It is surely beyond reasonable doubt that, at the present time, and for some considerable time in the past, the countries that make up what we call the West – traditionally western Europe and northern America in particular, but with outposts such as Australia – have been the most successful and prosperous societies on earth, in terms of both the material advantages enjoyed by their citizens and the political and therefore moral freedoms they have. (This situation is changing now but these sentiments are true as far as they go.) These advantages are linked, intertwined, in so far as many material advances – medical innovations, printing and other media, travel technology, industrial processes – bring with them social and political freedoms in a general process of democratisation. And these are the fruit, almost without exception, of scientific innovations based on observation, experimentation, and deduction. Experimentation is all-important here as an independent, rational (and therefore democratic) form of authority. And it is this, the authority of the experiment, the authority of the scientific method, independent of the status of the individual scientist, his proximity to God or to his king, and as revealed and reinforced via myriad technologies, which we can all share, that underlies the modern world. The cumulative nature of science also makes it a far less fragile form of knowledge. This is what makes the experiment such an important idea. The scientific method, apart from its other attractions, is probably the purest form of democracy there is. But the question immediately arises: why did the experiment occur first and most productively in what we call the West? The answer to this shows why the idea of Europe, the set of changes that came about between, roughly speaking, AD 1050 and 1250, was so important. These changes were covered in detail in Chapter 15 but to recap the main points here, we may say that: Europe was fortunate in not being devastated to the same extent as Asia was by the plague; that it was the first landmass that was ‘full’ with people, bringing about the idea of efficiency as a value, because resources were limited; that individuality emerged out of this, and out of developments in the Christian religion, which created a unified culture, which in turn helped germinate the universities where independent thought could flourish and amid which the ideas of the secular and of the experiment were conceived. One of the most poignant moments in the history of ideas surely came in the middle of the eleventh century. In 1065 or 1067 the Nizamiyah was founded in Baghdad (see here). This was a theological seminary and its establishment brought to an end the great intellectual openness in Arabic/Islamic scholarship, which had flourished for two to three hundred years. Barely twenty years later, in 1087, Irnerius began teaching law at Bologna and the great European scholarship movement was begun. As one culture ran down, another began to find its feet. The fashioning of Europe was the greatest turning-point in the history of ideas.

It may seem odd to some readers that the ‘soul’ should be a candidate as the third of the most influential ideas in history. Surely the idea of God is more powerful, more universal, and in any case isn’t there a heavy overlap? Certainly, God has been a very powerful idea throughout history, and indeed continues to be so across many parts of the globe. At the same time, there are two good reasons why the soul has been – and still is – a more influential and fecund idea than the Deity itself.