for - history - French and American Revolution - the role of coffee houses during the Enlightenment

summary - Coffee has a fascinating history - The relationship between coffee and alcohol was interesting - In Muslim culture, coffee houses began appearing in the Ottoman Empire because alcohol was forbidden for Muslims - The coffeehouses spread from the Ottoman Empire to Europe where it replaced the daily ritual of drinking beer - People in London did not drink the polluted Thames because it was so unhygienic that they could catch cholera - Alcohol had its side effects however, of making everyone drowsy. When the Industrial Revolution appeared, this drowsiness could lead to terrible industrial accidents - Coffee was the perfect replacement. Some speculate that it made the Industrial Revolution possible - Coffee houses began to spring up in London. Like in the Ottoman Empire, they were frowned upon by elites because this ability for all types of people to gather for the first time was perceived as a threat to political stability - Among the ideas born in coffee houses and cafes: - French Revolution - Storming of the Bastille j - Enlightenment intellectuals met here - American Revolution - Sons of Liberty met and planned the American Revolution - Benjamin Franklin frequented - Lloyds of London was conceived of - The idea of the Newspaper started due to notes of ideas exchanged and communicated in different columns of notes recorded - Famous scientists met there like Isaac Newton - London Stock Exchange was conceived of here

for - trivia / history - Paris Cafes - Cafe Procope - Enlightenment - French Revolution - Rosseau, Diderot and Voltaire met and shared ideas here with the public

for - interesting fact - Prometheus myth - poster boy of Enlightenment - meme - poster boy of the Enlightenment

comment - The link takes us to an analysis of Lord Byron's poem on Prometheus - A good analysis of the meaning of Lord Byron's poem is here: - https://blog.homeforfiction.com/2020/04/18/byron-prometheus-existential-empowerment/

for - earth species project - ESP - Earth Species Project - Aza Raskin - Ernest Becker - Book - The Birth and Death of Meaning

comment - what is it like to be that other organism? - Earth Species Project is trying to shed some light on that using machine learning processes to decode the communication signals of non-human species - https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=earth++species+project - https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2FH9SvPs1cCds%2F&group=world

- In Ernest Becker's book, The Birth and Death of Meaning, Becker provides a summary of the ego from a Freudian perspective that is salient to Nagel's work
    - The ego creates time and humans, occupying a symbolosphere are timebound creatures that create the sense of time to order sensations and perceptions
    - The ego becomes the central reference point for the construct of time
- If the anthropocene is a problem
- and we wish to migrate towards an ecological civilization in which there is greater respect for other species, 
    - a symbiocene
- this means we need to empathize with other species 
- If our species is timebound but the majority of other species are not, 
    - then we must bridge that large gap by somehow experiencing what it's like to be an X ( where X can be a bat or many other species)

reference - interesting adjacencies emerging from reading a review of Ernest Becker's book: The Birth and Death of Meaning - https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.themortalatheist.com%2Fblog%2Fthe-birth-and-death-of-meaning-ernest-becker&group=world

• Epoche
  • https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=Epoche

Graeber and Wengrow seem to indicate otherwise.

second and third order effects of the Enlightenment movement...

The modern day culture of the Betsimisaraka which displays both egalitarian and stubborn people who refuse the authority of any overlords is some of the evidence that their culture through pirate stories into Europe were the beginnings of the Enlightenment.

David Graeber argues that the Betsimisaraka Confederation of Madagascar represents the first stirrings of Enlightenment political thought which influenced political philosophers who fueled revolutionary regimes a century later.

Was the Enlightenment a false dream of liberation which has really unleashed an unspeakable cruelty upon the world?

Enlightenment-era salons were led by women facilitators, but they have largely been marginalized since for their contributions.

(reference?)

Perhaps summarizing Graeber and Wengrow too much here, but..

The Enlightenment came to us courtesy of discussions with Indigenous Peoples from the Americas.

Stemming from British history, but often applied in other areas including the history of science, whig history is a historiography that presents history as a path from an oppressive, backward, and wretched past to a glorious present. The term was coined by British Historian Herbert Butterfield in The Whig Interpretation of History (1931). It stems from the British Whig party that advocated for the power of Parliament as opposed to the Tories who favored the power of the King.

It would seem to be an unfortunate twist of fate for indigenous science and knowledge that it was almost completely dismissed when the West began to dominate indigenous cultures during the Enlightenment which was still heavily imbued with the influence of scholasticism. Had religion not played such a heavy role in science, we may have had more respect and patience to see and understand the value of indigenous ways of knowing.

Link this to notes from The Dawn of Everything.

The Renaissance was obsessed with creating hierarchies and imposing order. The Enlightenment was focused on examining and questioning these hierarchies and breaking many of them down.

The forms of rational, skeptical, empirical and conversational forms of debate popularized by the Enlightenment which saw the rejection of arbitrary authority were influenced by the Haudenosaunee nations of Americans.

Interesting to see the reflexive political fallout of this reoccurring with the political right in America beginning in the early 2000s through the 2020s. It's almost as if the Republican party and religious right never experienced the Enlightenment and are still living in the 1700s.

Curious that in modern culture I think of the Jesuits as the embodiment of rationalist, skeptical argumentation and thought now. Apparently they were dramatically transformed since that time.

Through the Enlightenment texts took the form of dialogues and it was the Germans of the time who began writing in a more obscure argumentative style which changed the form of the discourse.

Alexis de Tocqueville coined the ideas/phrases "individualism" and enlightened self-interest.

Indigenous peoples of the Americas critiqued European institutions for their structures and lack of freedom. In turn, while some Europeans listened, they created an evolutionary political spectrum of increasing human complexity to combat this indigenous critique.

This is a good rule of thumb for political science as well. Some of our issue in America right now is that we're seeing systemic racism and many want to change it, but we're not sure yet what to replace it with.

The renaissance created scholasticism which created a new system, but too tightly wound religion into the humanist movement. Similarly Englightement Europe and America subsumed the indigenous critique, which opened up ideas about equality and freedom which hadn't existed, but they still kept the structures of hierarchy which have caused immeasurable issues. These movements are worth studying to see how the new systems were created, but with an eye toward more careful development so as not to make things even worse generations later.

Critical theory versus Englightenment