Words&Dirt

“‘Sooner or later one of us will break,’ Jack said wearily.  ‘This Inquisition is as patient as Death.  Nothing can stop it.’

‘Nothing,’ said de Ath, ‘except for the Enlightenment.’

‘And what is that?’ Moseh asked.

‘It sounds like one of those daft Catholicisms: The Annunciation, the Epiphany, and now the Enlightenment,’ Jack said.

‘It is nothing of the sort.  If my arms worked, I’d read you some of those letters,’ said de Ath, turning his head a fraction of a degree towards some scrawled pages on the end of this table, weighed down by a Bible.  ‘They are from brothers of mine in Europe.  They tell a story––albeit in a fragmentary and patchwork way––of a sea-change that is spreading across Christendom, in large part because of men like Leibniz, Newton, and Descartes.  It is a change in the way men think, and it is the doom of the Inquisition.’

‘Very good!  Well, then, all we must needs do is hold out against the strappado, the bastinado, the water-torture, and the thongs for another two hundred years or so.'”

––The Confusion, by Neal Stephenson, pg. 767

“Opposition to the mercantilist policies in Europe and the colonies continued to mount, leading the 13 American colonies to break with England in 1776, followed by the French Revolution, which initiated the overthrow of that nation’s monarchy in 1789.  These two great defining moments in political history were as much about the struggle to secure private property through free trade in open markets as they were about securing political freedom and democratic representation.  Any doubt on that score was quickly put to rest as the first modern nation-states deliberated the question of who should be extended the right to vote.  The United States, Britain, France, and most of the other nation-states in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries believed that the central mission of government was to protect private property and a market economy.  With that rationale in mind, the right to vote was extended only to men of property, aligning the new nation-state with a market economy based on the free exchange of private property.”

––The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism, by Jeremy Rifkin, pg. 37-8