Scientific Mentality Growth
Overview
Scientific Mentality Growth
The relationship of the Enlightenment is an important one to evaluate its role in the broader discussion on the social transformations of Europe and the colonial worlds. The Scientific Revolution played a significant part in how populations began to think about themselves and others. This had unfortunate consequences for individuals inside of Europe and their colonial worlds.
Learning Objectives
- Evaluate the evolution of the scientific perspective that created different mentalities.
- Analyze the impact of colonialism on the development of the scientific perspectives.
- Evaluate how Europeans used science as a way to justify the reason for their colonization.
Key Terms / Key Concepts
Malthus: 19th century philosopher who argued that the poor should not be cared for by the state.
The Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment as a Middle-Class Movement
To understand the importance of the Scientific Revolution, it is important to recognize that many in Europe looked for a way to rationalize the world. How science came to revolutionize how Europeans thought of themselves and others is important to put this in a historical moment.
It is important to note that the discussion on science here is not that all science is inherently good or bad, but instead that science is a tool that can be used to explain the world. There is a way to measure and quantify, to make hypothesis and to test their validity in the scientific model. In this discussion of science, that this is an approach that science is more of a tool to help people understand their world, rather than individual advancements here. By using science as a tool, this will help for a deeper discussion on the problems that the uses of science have occurred.
Following the Renaissance, European intellectuals began looking at alternative answers to Catholic Church explanations of the world. The challenges that European intellectuals faced was that there was limitations of explanations. Many of these intellectuals were of the middle and upper classes, who saw the differences in explanation as ways to gain more power and money in the system. The middle class began to view advancements in knowledge as a way to gain more power and money. As the Renaissance began to turn into the Scientific Revolution, explanations of the world became clearer. Advancements in science and understandings of universal truths of gravity, physical sciences, and anatomy all proved beneficial to the middle class.
As exploration began to turn in the late 17th and 18th centuries to imperialism, so too did the use of science as a way to extract as much as possible. It is important to not create a negative opinion of Europeans here as evil, instead realize that as a business, that growth is necessary. The question of how to achieve growth would be very important to Europeans of the time period. This growth was coupled with ideas of imperialism, to expand and grow, not just themselves but also the European country. This growth would lead to many opportunities overall. This can best be seen in the conflict of the Seven Years War, where the tensions between the European and colonial worlds were at a juncture of how both sides saw themselves in relationship to European imperial growth.
As the Age of Revolutions began sweeping through Europe, so too did a change between Europeans and the use of science. The Enlightenment paved the way for rational thought, the growth of individuals who were looking for a universal truth and how to access that became an international fascination. Europeans in many ways, became blinded by the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution. The Industrial Revolution relied on economic and political theories developed during the Enlightenment. Adam Smith’s capitalism, for example, became the primary economic model for the use of the Scientific model of economics in Europe. While there are many positives to capitalism, it is important to point out, that as Europeans began to study and implement Smith’s capitalism, that many in the industrial centers suffered. The supply and demand of workers and wages meant that many low class individuals in Europe suffered because of limitations on wages and work. This use of a scientific approach demonstrates that there are limitations.
The tensions of scientific approaches are important because in many ways, the use of science as an overarching understanding of the world became a problem in the 19th century. In search of more and more efficiency, engineers began to work on finding ways to make machines stronger and more powerful. The end result was jobs that required high alert for workers of moving machines that could cause deadly results if the worker was not paying attention.
There was a callousness in Europe of low skill and low wage workers. There was a feeling that individuals who did this type of work were seen as lesser because they were impoverished. This attitude is a key problem, because many middle and upper class individuals began to incorporate the latest scientific models to explain the reasons why individuals were at the bottom. By combining biological theories of Evolution, with the social classes of Europe, many in Europe started thinking and seeing the lower classes as “weaker” and “lesser” because they were not as advanced or as high on the evolutionary latter. This is the formation of Social Darwinism, the combination that there is a biological reason for classes in society. In the 19th century, this model went further than simply pointing out that there was differences in classes, to include that individuals were lesser and not as important if they were not in the middle and upper classes. A famous philosopher Malthus began to write about how the poor were seen as “scum” and not to be pitied because they chose their life. This is a very hard stance to take, because many poor in Europe were not poor because of choice, many jobs in the early Industrial Revolution, paid very little and had little benefits to the individual. Long hours and hard work for little pay would not create a way for an individual to have much of anything, let alone a way to build themselves up from the bootstraps. Malthusian philosophy began to spread throughout Europe, this became a centerpiece of how science, as a tool, began to describe the prejudices of Europeans in the 19th century.
Europeans went further, as the 19th century progressed and understanding about genetics increased, this too became a methodology of explaining and making changes to European society. Many early geneticis saw that diseases were traits passed down from family member to family member. This was an important part of the Eugenics Movement, that took the idea that there was a genetic component to society and that individuals should forcibly stop others from having access to reproduction. This model can be clearly seen in North Carolina in the 1910s, where the Eugenics movement had success in changing laws in the state, if an individual was accused of a crime, that they would be taken out of the eligibility of reproduction through chemical or physical means. The idea was that through actively selecting which genes were able to reproduce, that future society would inherently be better. The problem is that this is lives of individuals and caused real harm to people. The North American Eugenics Movement was the inspiration that Hitler looked to in the 1930s for many of his ideas about genetics and the Jewish population.
The Scientific Approach to Colonization
Many historians point that the differences before the Age of Revolution to after is a stark difference. European states saw that there was a significant problem with how they treated their Atlantic World colonies, and the ways that they colonized might have caused an issue that created revolution. Many government officials looked to the scientific process as a way to remove those problems in the post-Age of Revolutions period. For example, in India, Governor General Hastings used the Enlightenment as a way to understand the past in India. But because of his limited understandings and prejudices, meant that this became the foundation of many of the problems in the Indian Subcontinent.
Again, science is a tool that the individual used, it does not justify or encourage any prejudices that the individual might have already. This is important to remember because in the 19th century, many of the European colonizers began to use science as a way to justify their own superiority. It can not be stated enough that the use of science as a tool to justify racism and prejudices is a misuse of science. Yet, theories and individuals used this tool to hurt and colonize many territories in Africa and Asia.
The term Social Darwinism is a very broad term that is used to define the use of science as a basis of racism and discrimination. In the colonial world this could be very broad and hard to define. Some of the easiest and clearest examples of Social Darwinism in the colonial world, is the justification of European superiority in Africa and Asia. While the actual reason is the technological difference between Europeans with Gatlin guns and indigenous peoples with less advanced weapons is the real reason that Europeans were able to easily win in the battlefield, many saw that European superiority had a very different reason.
There were different theories in the 19th century, ranging from skin color, to the thought that head sizes were the problem. The idea of cranial theories is that European brains are superior because the head size was thought to be bigger than other races. This is not only accurate, but also in many ways insulting to indigenous groups. Braincase size has nothing to do with intellect, take that idea further, that if this theory was true, that whales would be the smartest creatures on earth right now because they have the biggest brain size. This is blatantly using science as a way to justify racist thoughts of Europeans.
While there were many theories as to European colonization and why the use of science as a significant reason for European power is debunked by sociologist, historians, and other academic groups. These justifications are part of the central reasons that second wave colonization is fundamentally different than first wave colonization. The use of racism as a justification for European colonization is a significant problem.
Primary Source: The White Man's Burden
The White Man's Burden
Rudyard Kipling 1899
Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.
Take up the White Man's burden--
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain
To seek another's profit,
And work another's gain.
Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.
Take up the White Man's burden--
No tawdry rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper--
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go mark them with your living,
And mark them with your dead.
Take up the White Man's burden--
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard--
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:--
"Why brought he us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?"
Take up the White Man's burden--
Ye dare not stoop to less--
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloke your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh your gods and you.
Take up the White Man's burden--
Have done with childish days--
The lightly proferred laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!
From the Kipling Society
https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_burden.htm
Attributions
Attributions
Images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons: Thomas Robert Malthus: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/Thomas_Robert_Malthus_Wellcome_L0069037_-crop.jpg
Boundless World History
White Man's Burden: https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/kipling.asp