Jun 29, 2016 05:44 AM
https://aeon.co/essays/six-centuries-of-...w-to-books
EXCERPT: Every presidential election cycle brings candidates touting their religious convictions. Being too secular is rarely a winning political strategy. In fact, Bernie Sanders might have been the first openly secular major presidential candidate in the history of the United States. Even Thomas Jefferson, though not a Christian, was a deist who firmly believed in a creator God. [...] With conservatives decrying what they see as creeping secularism, and liberals warning of attacks on the separation of church and state, one gets the impression that many Americans believe that secularism is something quite new, a product of declining morals or aftershocks from the cultural revolution of the 1960s. Yet the roots of secularism in the West run far deeper, deeper even than Jefferson and the Age of Reason. Most historians agree that secularisation took hold in the period known as the ‘early modern’ – the era between about 1500 and 1750, when science, capitalism, religious crisis and the growth of centralised states coalesced to reshape Western consciousness.
The religious implications of secularism are often misconstrued, too. Secularisation did not mean godlessness; for the most part, early modern Europeans were profoundly Christian. It was rather that the boundary between the religious and the secular became more distinct than before. As the 17th-century English philosopher Sir Thomas Browne put it, humans live ‘in divided and distinguished worlds’. The sphere of religion was diminished, so that many of the hopes and fears formerly expressed in religious terms became expressed in worldly terms. For better or worse, secularisation rested on the realisation that eternal truths are inaccessible to the intellect; only the limited insights afforded by experience in this world are relevant to the earthly career of the human race.
Accompanying the secularisation of Western society were dramatic changes in material life. It was visible everywhere in the marketplace. The newly emerging secular world was a world exploding with things [...] from the New World [...] from Ottoman Turkey [...] from the distant Far East [...] Besides a bewildering array of exotic natural and manufactured objects, Europeans were inundated with new inventions and fashions [...] Everything exotic had a story, and knowing which stories were true could be a daunting task. Understanding the world of material things had become critically important.
The need to know how things worked was met by an avalanche of how-to books for popular readers, created using the newly developed printing press. Books on mechanical arts [...] Yet by elaborating mechanical processes and spelling out how things worked – in striking contrast to the well-documented secrecy of the guilds – writers began to transform the mechanical arts from personal know-how into scientific knowledge. [...] trade secrets lost their mystery. Books of secrets made it clear as never before that a recipe might effectively replace the artisan’s cunning [...] Books of secrets, flying off the printing presses, engendered a new how-to culture that permeated daily life in early modern Europe.
[...] The German sociologist Max Weber [...] wrote of the ‘disenchantment of the world’ that took place in the early modern period [...] Weber said the change entailed the conviction that ‘there are no mysterious incalculable forces’ in nature; the natural world is – at least in principle – knowable, predictable, and manipulable. In a disenchanted world, everything becomes understandable and tameable, even if it is not yet understood and tamed. Instead of the ‘great enchanted garden’ of the late medieval world [...] Weber saw the early modern world as human-centred, and the universe as dead and impersonal.
In Weber’s view, this path to secularism began within the religious realm. He attributed disenchantment to the Protestant Reformation which, he claimed, eroded beliefs about the immanence of the holy. Relics lost their efficacy and the sacraments no longer automatically conferred divine benefits. Freed of ‘superstitious’ magical rituals, religion became a matter of internal conviction. But this claim is dubious. The Reformation did little to strengthen the barrier between the sacred and the profane. At no time did Protestant reformers reject the notion that the sacred could intervene in the world [...] Protestants didn’t deny that the sacred intruded into the secular world, only that it didn’t do so at human behest.
[...] The outpouring of technical manuals and books of secrets swamped the idea that machines themselves were in any way magical. [...] Technical literacy, then, led straight to Weber’s ‘disenchantment of the world’. It was a direct consequence of those how-to books that translated mysterious craft secrets into simple rules. Readers of books of secrets might not have understood why certain materials hardened iron or made fast dyes, but they had a better idea of how to do it. The world of the crafts – like that of politics – lost its magic; it broke free of its yoke to the divine....
EXCERPT: Every presidential election cycle brings candidates touting their religious convictions. Being too secular is rarely a winning political strategy. In fact, Bernie Sanders might have been the first openly secular major presidential candidate in the history of the United States. Even Thomas Jefferson, though not a Christian, was a deist who firmly believed in a creator God. [...] With conservatives decrying what they see as creeping secularism, and liberals warning of attacks on the separation of church and state, one gets the impression that many Americans believe that secularism is something quite new, a product of declining morals or aftershocks from the cultural revolution of the 1960s. Yet the roots of secularism in the West run far deeper, deeper even than Jefferson and the Age of Reason. Most historians agree that secularisation took hold in the period known as the ‘early modern’ – the era between about 1500 and 1750, when science, capitalism, religious crisis and the growth of centralised states coalesced to reshape Western consciousness.
The religious implications of secularism are often misconstrued, too. Secularisation did not mean godlessness; for the most part, early modern Europeans were profoundly Christian. It was rather that the boundary between the religious and the secular became more distinct than before. As the 17th-century English philosopher Sir Thomas Browne put it, humans live ‘in divided and distinguished worlds’. The sphere of religion was diminished, so that many of the hopes and fears formerly expressed in religious terms became expressed in worldly terms. For better or worse, secularisation rested on the realisation that eternal truths are inaccessible to the intellect; only the limited insights afforded by experience in this world are relevant to the earthly career of the human race.
Accompanying the secularisation of Western society were dramatic changes in material life. It was visible everywhere in the marketplace. The newly emerging secular world was a world exploding with things [...] from the New World [...] from Ottoman Turkey [...] from the distant Far East [...] Besides a bewildering array of exotic natural and manufactured objects, Europeans were inundated with new inventions and fashions [...] Everything exotic had a story, and knowing which stories were true could be a daunting task. Understanding the world of material things had become critically important.
The need to know how things worked was met by an avalanche of how-to books for popular readers, created using the newly developed printing press. Books on mechanical arts [...] Yet by elaborating mechanical processes and spelling out how things worked – in striking contrast to the well-documented secrecy of the guilds – writers began to transform the mechanical arts from personal know-how into scientific knowledge. [...] trade secrets lost their mystery. Books of secrets made it clear as never before that a recipe might effectively replace the artisan’s cunning [...] Books of secrets, flying off the printing presses, engendered a new how-to culture that permeated daily life in early modern Europe.
[...] The German sociologist Max Weber [...] wrote of the ‘disenchantment of the world’ that took place in the early modern period [...] Weber said the change entailed the conviction that ‘there are no mysterious incalculable forces’ in nature; the natural world is – at least in principle – knowable, predictable, and manipulable. In a disenchanted world, everything becomes understandable and tameable, even if it is not yet understood and tamed. Instead of the ‘great enchanted garden’ of the late medieval world [...] Weber saw the early modern world as human-centred, and the universe as dead and impersonal.
In Weber’s view, this path to secularism began within the religious realm. He attributed disenchantment to the Protestant Reformation which, he claimed, eroded beliefs about the immanence of the holy. Relics lost their efficacy and the sacraments no longer automatically conferred divine benefits. Freed of ‘superstitious’ magical rituals, religion became a matter of internal conviction. But this claim is dubious. The Reformation did little to strengthen the barrier between the sacred and the profane. At no time did Protestant reformers reject the notion that the sacred could intervene in the world [...] Protestants didn’t deny that the sacred intruded into the secular world, only that it didn’t do so at human behest.
[...] The outpouring of technical manuals and books of secrets swamped the idea that machines themselves were in any way magical. [...] Technical literacy, then, led straight to Weber’s ‘disenchantment of the world’. It was a direct consequence of those how-to books that translated mysterious craft secrets into simple rules. Readers of books of secrets might not have understood why certain materials hardened iron or made fast dyes, but they had a better idea of how to do it. The world of the crafts – like that of politics – lost its magic; it broke free of its yoke to the divine....