Confident times produce confident governments, which allow their citizens to think for themselves, differ, grow. Anxious times produce anxious governments that restrict thinking as too risky. Ages remembered as golden came when citizens felt free to effloresce, expressing the abundance within. Makers of art and thought could take more chances. Golden ages seldom anticipate their close. Life is grand – what could go wrong?
Spinoza was born into the so-called Golden Age of the Dutch Republic, which began when the Republic began in 1588 and ended in 1672, known in Dutch as Raampjaar, the Disaster Year. A few dates evoke the abundance of that period.
Frans Hals (1582-1666)
Rembrandt (1606-1669)
Vermeer (1632-1675)
Grotius (1583-1645)
Huygens (1629-1695)
van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723)
Spinoza (1632-1677)
“It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of Holland in the seventeenth century,” wrote sage Bertrand Russell, “as the one country where there was freedom of speculation. Descartes lived in Holland for twenty years (1629-49). Hobbes had to have his books printed there; Locke took refuge there during the five worst years of reaction in England before 1688; Bayle (of the Dictionary) found it necessary to live there; and Spinoza would hardly have been allowed to do his work in any other country.”
The age could be golden because the Netherlands were independent, prosperous, peaceful and, compared to the rest of Europe, tolerant. Europeans back then were squandering blood, treasure and tranquility on religious strife. Refugees from civil wars fled to Amsterdam where they could work in peace.
Freedom, though, is comparative, never absolute: think of all you think yet cannot say! On a rabidly Christian continent, where minorities were only grudgingly tolerated, no one wanted to hear that the God of the Bible made no sense, especially from a renegade Jew! Spinoza wrote what he found – but published only once – and then anonymously – and in a language few could read. Did he dream of an audience for his findings? Which author doesn’t? But in a visionary future, where thinking was free.
The overconfidence of governors, envy of external enemies, and resentment of the alienated concluded the golden age for the Dutch as they have for others, in what seems a flash, though these corrosive forces have been building, retrospect realizes, a long while.
Spinoza, an optimist, trusted thought to better human behavior, but he knew it would not be easy. “The supreme mystery of despotism,” he wrote,
… its prop and stay, is to keep men in a state of deception, and with the specious title of religion to cloak the fear by which they must be held in check, so that they will fight for their servitude as if for salvation.
Also:
The superstitious know how to reproach people for their vices better than they know how to teach them virtues, and they strive, not to guide men by reason, but to restrain them by fear, so that they flee the evil rather than love virtue. Such people aim only to make others as wretched as they themselves are, so it is no wonder that they are generally burdensome and hateful to men.
Also:
The ultimate aim of government is not to rule, or restrain, by fear, nor to exact obedience, but contrariwise, to free every man from fear, that he may live in all possible security; in other words, to strengthen his natural right to exist and work without injury to himself or to others.
This is the fourth of seven reflections on my new pal.