Ch. 13: Empires & Encounters
Ch. 14: Commerce & Consequence
Ch. 15: Religion & Science
These chapters together are Part 4 of Ways of the World and cover the years 1440-1750, essentially
stepping into “The Early Modern Era,” or an age of empire.
The main thing to jump out at me while reading was in
chapter 15, the belief in “the clockmaker god” of the religion of deism
Voltaire and other “enlightenment” thinkers adhered to (671). The idea was that
God does not interfere or intervene with worldly affairs. He built the world
like a clock, with mechanisms to run itself. Also, the Pantheists (672), who
thought God and nature were identical. I have encountered this theme before in
other classes and it seems that these ways of thinking variously effected man’s
relationship with the natural world and each other. By thinking of nature as
mechanical, animals and other natural phenomena become nothing more than things
run by mechanisms that make them move (or not move), and nothing beyond that.
Those mechanisms could be used in order to progress (673, another Enlightenment
theme) and improve human society. And if by changing the way people think of
natural world, if they changed the way they thought about other humans, what
would the consequences be? That is where the idea of race comes in, combined
with people taking the concepts of the theory of evolution and survival of the
fittest (674) totally out of context (which is a total a pet peeve of mine,
whether people get it wrong on television or in conversation). This and other
pseudo-sciences are what in big part what led to things like the horrors of
slavery and generated the fuel for holocausts. Justification made easy and
enforced by resultant wealth. There are definitely other factors, such as
justification by traditional religious leaders (623), but these jumped out at
me.
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