Enlightenment: Straight Up, Not So-Called. A Review of Joel Mokyr’s A Culture of Growth

Perhaps like you, the eventful year of 2020 led me to do several unusual things. One was to rebuild this blog. Another was to attend my first protest since a bright, cold Manhattan afternoon, eighteen years earlier, devoted to speaking out against George W. Bush’s war of choice in Iraq. Yet another was to read a book twice. 

The book was Ibram X. Kendi’s bestseller How to Be an Antiracist. I read it once out of general curiosity, and the second time as part of a book group at my school site. Perhaps my consciousness was raised, though I tend to agree with Kendi’s belief that, in the end, action and policy are what matter, not consciousness raising. I certainly walked away from the second reading confirmed in my admiration for Kendi’s cleverness at self-fashioning, his capacity to relate his personal story as part of a broader American narrative. 

But I also walked away confirmed in my sense there was something off about Kendi’s impulse to bash what he describes as the “so-called” European enlightenment. See here, for instance, to read (or very likely re-read) the way Kendi casts Carl Linnaeus as the villian who, “locked in the racial hierarchy of humankind,” and links him, in a soaring but convoluted argument, to Prince Henry the Navigator, a decidedly pre-Enlightenment figure who lived some 300 years earlier. 

But my goal here is not to bicker with Kendi, a useless endeavor in any case. Instead, since Kendi is so adept at using historical figures (not to mention white school teachers) as foils to advance his personal rhetorical ends, I want to take a page from his writerly playbook. Since nearly everyone has by now read Kendi, I want to use him as a foil myself.

So, with your interest, and perhaps ire, now piqued, I want to introduce a different writer, one who has managed to garner glowing reviews from two Nobel prize winners and several elite journalists, but who I think many more people ought to read. Unlike Kendi, the particular writer I want to introduce would never label the enlightenment “so-called.” In fact, to the direct purpose of this blog, it is precisely within the European enlightenment that this writer identifies the roots of prosperity; even more, of the roots of the idea of progress as an end in itself, an actual possibility for humanity.

A Culture of Growth: A Review

That writer is Northwestern University economic historian Joel Mokyr, and his subtle and densely argued new book is called A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy. One gets the sense that the 36 pages of references at the back refer to the tip of the iceberg of Mokyr’s knowledge about early modern Europe. But A Culture of Growth is approachable, not intimidating. Unlike most non-fiction books, it avoids flogging one singular theme. I read it through all the way to the end, looking for more new ideas and tidbits of historical trivia, or perhaps non-trivia.

Progress found its fragile beginnings in the mailbox

It’s possible to take away many ideas from this book, but here I will mention three. The first is the notion that a seemingly fragile set of institutions and norms can, over time, change the world. The central chapters of A Culture of Growth circle around the evolution of what participants in the 1600’s self-consciously came to call “The Republic of Letters.” According to Mokyr, this “republic” was a transnational phenomenon, in which intellectuals took advantage of Europe’s complicated political structure to escape persecution and establish new norms of experiment and proof. Among these intellectuals were famous “superstar” names like Erasmus, Luther, Descartes, Newton, and Leibniz, but also many others, all competing for patronage and prestige in a transnational environment.

Perhaps an extended quote can pin down the nature of this odd, new-to-the-world kind of “republic.”

“The Republic of Letters, as MacLean (2008, p. 17) points out, could be seen from many different angles: a community of scholars, the content of the ideas they fostered, the means of disseminating them, the intellectual norms that set standards of persuasion (adequacy of proof, reproducibility of experiment), attitudes toward collaboration and disclosure, and so forth. Joining it meant that one had to accept a scientific ethic of sharing and communicating. For my purposes here, it can also be seen as a community that set incentives through social norms and informal rules, that is, as an institution. It was this institution that turned out to be one of the taproots of European technological change.”

(Mokyr, A Culture of Growth, page 214)

Elsewhere, Mokyr states that, “The networks of people who rarely or never met one another turned out, paradoxically, to create a unity of purpose and method that was overlaid on a highly fragmented world.” (Mokyr, p. 193) The explanation of how this project of “overlaying” took place, and why, seemingly against the odds, it survived and bore fruit, is the burden of Mokyr’s book. 

They seem like wallpaper now, but Francis Bacon’s ideas changed the world

The second idea I want to mention about A Culture of Growth has to do with Mokyr’s evaluation of Francis Bacon (“Lord Verulam”) as the seminal figure to best define the modern idea of progress. I was previously aware of Bacon, of course, and vaguely knew that his name was associated with the scientific method. During my undergraduate days at Pomona College I once walked into the Francis Bacon Library, in a small building near my freshman dorm. Nobody else was there. I learn now that this library was closed in 1995, and the rare book collection it preserved transferred down the 210 Freeway to the Huntington Library in Pasadena.

Perhaps I, and the other at the time young students at the Claremont Colleges should have heeded the existence of the Bacon Library while we could. Certainly, if one is to believe Mokyr, Isaac Newton paid a great deal of heed to Bacon, as did John Locke, Denis Diderot, and many other figures associated with the Republic of Letters. 

Mokyr memorably attempts to convey the thrust of Bacon’s influence by pulling a quotation from one of the chief of these followers. Robert Boyle, in his The Usefulness of Experimental Philosophy, stated: “I shall dare not think myself a true Naturalist till my skill can make my garden yield better herbs and flowers, or my orchard better fruit or my field better corn or my farm better cheese than theirs who are strangers to physiology.” (Boyle quoted in Mokyr, page 81). 

This quote from Boyle – the same Robert Boyle, in case your chemistry knowledge is as weak as mine, who came up with the law that describes the inversely proportional relationship between the absolute pressure and volume of a gas – perfectly captures Mokyr’s take on Bacon. He credits Bacon as the first person to successfully advance the notion that scientific knowledge (what Boyle described in the 1600s as “physiology”) ought to be wedded to artisan understanding of technique (what Boyle described as “skill”) for the advancement of society.

Today this notion seems obvious, part of the wallpaper of modern economic culture. To use one common media framing, propositional scientific knowledge at Stanford University; we think, seems obviously associated with the garden of technical skill in adjacent Silicon Valley. Whether this particular garden has in recent years produced sweet fruit or bitter is perhaps a different question.

Leaning in to the possibility for new cultures of growth

The third idea I take away from Mokyr, though only indirectly, relates to how unfashionable his research program seems. It feels much more socially acceptable to paint the European enlightenment as the taproot of modern racism, as Kendi attempts, than to outline the details of how the enlightenment sits as the jumping off point for effectively all modern economic and social progress, as does Mokyr. 

There are reasons for this, of course. It’s certainly true that the enlightenment roughly coincided with the worst of the transatlantic slave trade. It’s also true that European states used the technological fruits of science to further dehumanizing projects of global colonization, and to engage in the massive project of mutual suicide represented by the 1914-1918 and 1939-1945 wars. One might even say that the enlightenment is to be blamed for climate change as well, if Mokyr is correct that the roots of the industrial revolution are to be found in this very particular time and place, down there somewhere among the scribblings of scientists and the experiments of artisans.

History contains both genius and horror. For many it is tempting to follow Kendi and look for the roots of the horror within the genius, to trace the flourishing of unaccountable power gone mad. In truth, it feels to me that this general approach has become so dominant since Foucault as to now represent the mainstream instinct of intellectual culture.

I understand this instinct, but I reject it. Instead, it seems to me more profitable to simply observe and witness, much like Benjamin Labatut does in his brilliant and unsettling book When We Cease to Understand the World (here I must acknowledge Ezra Klein for turning me onto both Mokyr and Labatut). More hopefully, we can go a step further than observation. We can water the seeds of democracy and progress, and build new social institutions that might allow for ever more inclusive cultures of growth (and their inevitable urban manifestations). It is in this spirit that I think Mokyr is correct to remind us of the genius of Francis Bacon, of the marvelous historical institution of the Republic of Letters, and the historic newness of progress as an achievable ideal.