Hanging with History

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. The long promised look at Big History , we lay out 5 themes for the Causes of the Industrial Revolution.   Near the end there is the real answer.  Fish.  1. Cultural, unique features of English culture or values allowing for dignity and hope. 2. Numbers game, When you get a production function where wages are high enough and capital chea...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. Completing our Adam Smith arc with the end of the ideology of Calvinism.  Its replacement with the idea that God is good and the happiness of mankind is God’s purpose, allowed Hume and Smith to encode the principles of Christian love into a Newtonian framework.  Safely encased in a Newtonian system, Smith’s ideas could survive the rise o...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. Calvinism undermines itself by elevating human reason as the tool for analysis and understanding of God above feeling and love and human action.  We explore Calvinist doctrines in some detail.  Logically they are ironclad and that is their undoing. With Camie we once again bring up the tension between Acts 5:29 and Romans 13:1.  Once rul...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. Adam Smith’s systematic approach made reality tractable.  This provided enlightenment thinkers with a framework with which to analyze government policy.  And they loved it!  He launched clear and specific attacks on common government policy, the mercantile system.  Most of these abuses, based on medieval modes of thought were weakly foll...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. How does opulence among nations arise?  Smith describes a Newtonian system of non violent market competition operating through the price mechanism which can generate a life for the working poor that is many steps up from the usual run of human misery that everywhere else prevails.  That process also leads to a peaceful idyllic countrysid...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. So how do you get from a subsistence economy where the great mass lives on the edge of famine and disaster?   Funny you should ask, because Adam Smith desperately wanted this improvement for his native Scotland.  Getting it would be like a miracle.  He knew the mechanisms that led to prosperity and the obstacles that got in the way.  And...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. Why do humans behave decently towards each other?   Adam Smith doesn't do evolutionary biology, but his insights, on how we wish to love and be loved and what's more we wish to be lovely are timeless and deep.  The corresponding notions of how we wish to avoid giving offense and how we have a horror of blameworthiness...a horro...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. Private Vices are public virtues, so says Mandeville in the Fable of the Bees .  No, David Hume argues, the frame is wrong.  Strong boundaries of vice and virtue cannot be drawn in consumer behavior.   This is our introduction to the problem of leaving medieval morality behind us.  The Church did not place the economic advancement of the...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. Adam Smith and his world view.   Emerson said every writer needs a tough chaos deep soil.  What was Adam Smith’s?  We introduce the key elements of that world view and spend a fair amount of time introducing you to the idea that the ferocious Calvinism of the Presbyterian Scots was on the wane and a new God arose in its place.  Far more...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. We go through the history of the Glorious Revolution of 1688.  Marlborough defects to William of Orange. It’s a long episode because we spend time with the philosophical question of the Fool.  Is the Fool the only free agent in history?  With Camie I question that perhaps our intuitions about degrees of freedom in our actions are wrong o...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. The real lesson is don’t invade Norway. Northern Europe is suffering from state breakdown or the consolidation of absolute monarchy.  This happens in the United Provinces, Denmark, and Sweden.  But the big event is France where Louis XIV continues the work of his father driving central state control down to the local level, justifying th...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. Memetic Disaster.  The Bloody Assizes and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, convincingly play into the memes of Catholic cruelty fitting a fact pattern the English are taught very young.   Catholic cruelty and injustice are acted out on the largest possible stage in 1685. The episode takes its name from a poem by John Donne, which I...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. We look at changes brought by the Restoration in social and economic terms.  And we find there was also a lot of continuation from the Commonwealth.   Does that sound boring? There is corruption and bribery and the Cavalier parliament becomes the Pensioner parliament in Whig propaganda.  We have patronage, political parties and defeats,...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. The Stuart Restoration.  The landed classes displace the middling sorts of the Cromwellian power structure.  This is the first of three episodes looking at mainly social history of the Stuart Restoration leading to the Glorious Revolution.  The repression of Dissenters with the Clarendon Code, John Bunyan's eleven years in prison, h...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. The last campaign personally led by Oliver Cromwell. The Saints against the Elect.  It’s a crazy war, purges, persuasion and propaganda.  Can the English really conquer Scotland? Maybe if Oliver Cromwell is involved.  With Camie we discuss Oliver’s death and final religious crisis, where much like Christ himself and Mother Theresa he is...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. The English Civil War seems to be over, the king is dead.  We chopped the bloody man’s head off.  But Charles II shows up in Scotland under the thumb of the Covenanters.  It really is a self-perpetuating autocracy.  The Irish Civil War has been going on since 1641 and it is time to put an end to it.  When you have a big job to do, two bi...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. This is the 2nd in the 4part Oliver Cromwell arc (though he has appeared as an important figure since episode 45) This episode we look at the brutal fact that insane courage is what it took to win in the Age of Shot and Pike.  And the sons of nobles and gentry would have it, or completely lose their self conception.  This was a huge adva...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. Oliver Cromwell lived life on a different plane from most other people.  He established a reputation that enabled him to put in place a crazy and impractical plan to win the Civil War.  He was trusted by both the godly and the political radicals, a group with much more overlap than you might think.  Episode 53 focuses on his early life a...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. This is the long promised Jonathon Scott episode.  Featuring some real curve balls thrown at me by Joltin’ Joe. This is a deep dive into social and political history with exploration of the strong Anglo-Dutch connection. And Dutch jokes, who knew there were so many? The conceptual revolution of the 1649-1702 period see the beginnings of...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. Will you marry me? That's what Cromwell asked the Dutch.  A proposal!  Just out of the blue.   What did the Dutch think?  Then they sent Blake to ask again, more forcefully, less romantically, this time. We look at the decision of the English to emulate (totally copy) the Dutch.  And the Dutch are monopolizing large parts of world t...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. Diggers were early communists and Ranters feel like hippies.  Do it in the road.  It’s all good because it’s all god. Quakers and Baptists.  These were the big winners.  The Quakers seemed to attract supermen to their cause, and they are simply given the hugest colonial land grant in America.  Their influence is still with us today.   Ra...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. What part of history did Rowling mine for ideas?  This part. Muggles, Grindletonians, Ranters, Diggers, Quakers, oh my.  This episode explores ideas common to the lower class radical heretical sects.  We cover the Muggletonians in considerable depth with Raoul Sunset and with Camie.  Lollards and the Family of Love also.  The rest will b...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. Honest administration of government?  Getting there, we get rid of 90% of the corruption. Cheap, abundant food.  The Malthusian limits are broken.  How?  The introduction of capitalism to agriculture, better techniques and investment followed and there was improved transportation. The Diggers try to go the other direction, but Parliament...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. A Second English Civil War and a 3rd Scots invasion?  Are the royalists nuts?  Aren't they tired of war? The New Model Army still exists, it wiped the floor with the Royalists last time and this time it is no different.  The defeat of the Scots and Royalists is so complete it brings Napoleon’s destruction of the Prussians after Jena...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. This one is heavy on narrative history and lighter on analysis and theory.  We cover the Scots intervention in the Civil War in 1643 .  Then we wrap up the end of the war with Charles’ surrender to the Scots.  The negotiations are covered with perspectives from several historians provided.  The attempted disbandment of the New Model Army...