Magical Mystery Tour Lecture Notes
Recall Great Awakening
Percolating, percolating
Second step: Enlightenment
Visual cues: Let students identify characters
Note Jefferson cribbing Locke
NBS joke
Uncle Fred: Intellectual history doesn’t have to be boring
Ideas matter dance
Tueting is a Morganite: Interpretative school
Cross-legged outside: Something different; get out of copy from the board mode.
Scholasticism:
Bible is all. (Label image)
Schola: The book
Scholar root
Medieval Universities: Scholastic
Seeds of own destruction (think NE patriarchy and female literacy)
Angels dancing on the head of a pin
Actual colloquiums. Today: Phrase meaning arguing about irrelevant things (examples)
Humanism:
Individual talens/thoughts matter
Is Renaissance opposed to religion? No, but seeds o’ destruction of Church hegemony over intellectual thought.
Outside references: Greek and Roman
Identify painting?
Individual reason: Scientific Revolution
Deduction/Induction (Renee deCarte is a drunken fart!) Bacon: Sizzlin’ idears
Reason, hypothesis, scientific method.
Danger Will Robinson!
Avatar (refresh vocab) of Scientific Revolution
Galileo
GEOCENTRISM/HELIOCENTRISM
Bible v. scientific method conflict
Center of Solar System
Pi
Genetics (Mendel)
Pope afraid: Church will lose primacy.
Scientific method triumphant today, but battle still rages.
Battle no longer between elites; elites vs. public
Religious accommodation: moderate Christians (figurative interpretative) and fundamentalist (every word is literally true) 19 Articles dance.
Dover school board
Pope was right: Now people turn individual reason to religion
Review Luther/Calvin/Henry: Who was theological/ideological? Who was political/dynastic?
Reporter’s chart
Compare Johnson’s quote on GA.
Who:
Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, perhaps Voltaire, Montesquieu. Franklin in America (Enlightenment in the colonies personified).
What:
Application of reason to social organization (guv’mint)
Where:
Primarily Western Europe: Spreads to colonies (i.e. Jefferson/Locke) No tax without rep
Why:
Trend of individual thought continues, secularism, reaction to new monarchies, reaction to events (Hobbes to civil war, Locke to Glorious Rev)
When: Mid Eighteenth century (Though Hobbes is a forerunner)
Prior to Enlightenment:
Legitimacy from God (historical examples – why a good plan?)
Divine right
Bishop Bousset and the Sun King
King James Bible and “Obey legitimate authority/king)
Set aside unprovable Biblical claim: Look for evidence.
Imagine Life in the State of Nature
Natural rights
Complete freedom: Good?
Sleep the great equalizer (small girl and stick in Mr. Tueting’s eye)
Discuss why Life in the state of nature is risky.
Why would complete freedom become meaningless?
Social Contract
Give up some rights to keep others (ante up to society: poker chip icon)
Rousseau: Man basically good: Minimal government
Government that governs least governs best
Maximize freedom
Confucian? Link to World History
Book: Lord of the Flies is Golding’s middle finger to Rousseau
Social contract
Locke: Tabula Rasa
Man must be controlled
Deist attitude toward utility of religion for the common people.
Contract to preserve rights.
Two Treatises
Hobbes: Nasty, Brutish Short
War of all against all
Man is evil
Leviathan
Absolute power!
Locke: Balancing act
Consent of the governed: Locke different from Hobbes (who denies right to withdraw consent)
Trinity of rights!
Breach of contract
Tyranny, sir!
Right to rebel
Influence on DOI
People often think the brain and heart are in conflict; but GA and En worktogether. A social contract between ideas, if you will ;)
Show link:
Paine’s enlightenment Common Sense communicated to masses by GA speaker Henry, leads to the people getting riled up (and thinking that they have the right to be riled up from both GA and En).
The stage has been set.
Now we only need to usher in the grievances and the bubblin’ pot o’ ‘Merican individualism will explode. (Note frontier’s impact on individualism – Living our lives nt by your leave, but hacking them out of the wilderness, bearing their children as they go).