A Brief History of Control
Although not commonly acknowledged, the Renaissance's cutting-edge intellectual current was magic. The daring intellectuals of the day were magicians. Magicians like Marsilio Ficino, Cornelius Agrippa, Tommaso Campanella, and Giordano Bruno taught esoteric, magical doctrines to society's upper-crust–a strata of society that has always felt a need to be on the cutting-edge of intellectual pursuit, even though the edge is frequently precipitous. (In a telling example, the genius pioneer of modern astronomy, Johannes Kepler, was often unable to make a living as an astronomer, so he frequently fell back on working as a court astrologer.)
Magic's dominance in this era is significant because magic is the quintessential method of control–in its quest for control, it perverts the proper order of things by seeking to elicit the supernatural for purposes of controlling the mundane. The Renaissance cultural elite's fascination with magic indicates that the modern era began with a swelling lust for control.
The magis' patriarch was a mysterious character known as Hermes Trismegistus. He was presumed to have pre-existed Moses, but in 1614 Isaac Casaubon conducted a critical analysis of Hermes' writings and conclusively proved that he lived and wrote in the Christian era. This, when combined with magic's increasingly-apparent ineffectiveness, made magic laughable. It largely disappeared, becoming the freakish province of secretive outside groups like the Rosicrucians.
But the magis' lust for control didn't disappear with it. The lust passed to the Renaissance scientist and triggered the Scientific Revolution.
The Scientific Revolution is an enigma. No one really knows what started it. In her book Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, the historian of intellectual history Frances Yates examined the science boom of the early seventeenth century. Noting, among other things, that it began at the same time as Hermes Trismegistus' downfall, she concluded that the attitude of magic didn't die away, but rather was passed to the arena of science. Quoting the leading historian of science, A.C. Crombie, she wrote, “'In its initial stages, the Scientific Revolution came about rather by a systematic change in intellectual outlook, than by an increase in technical equipment.'" This systematic change in intellectual outlook was the old Renaissance magician's urge to control passed to the hands of a new discipline. The attitude was the same; the tools for asserting the attitude had merely changed. “The new world views, the new attitudes, the new motives which were to lead to the emergence of modern science [previously] made their appearance” in Renaissance magic. (Significantly, both the Renaissance magician, Tommaso Campanella, and father of science-based progressivism, Francis Bacon, wrote book-length treatises on their proposed utopias–ideal societies where man would have complete mastery over the earth's problems and limitations.)
But, unlike magic, this “science-with-an-attitude” was successful. The 150 years from 1600 to 1750 witnessed a plethora of new inventions and discoveries: Galileo's powerful telescope; Newtonian mechanics; modern astronomy (Kepler); the law of refraction (Snellius); vast improvements in understanding the human body, including the circulation of blood (Harvey); increased understanding of magnetism (Gunter); development of the mercury thermometer (Farenheit), the barometer (Torricelli), and clock pendulum (Huygens); discovery of the polarization of light (Huygens); and the first computer, a mechanical adding machine (Pascal). The new science was well on its way to making earthly life better by increasing mankind's control over his conditions.
So it is not surprising that it became the handmaiden of almost every progressive thinker in modernity. Fourier, Turgot, Saint-Simon, Herbert Spencer, and August Comte all relied on science as the fulcrum around which their well-planned society would turn. The attitude of control–control over human actions, control over material adversity, control over society–saturated the progressive thinker and science was his tool.
The attitude of control through science rode into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, impelling brutal and dauntless theories and experiments (such as eugenics) for increasing human control, theories and experiments built on an unyielding materialism that brooked no uncertainty and believed science could pinpoint and cure all ills. The most-celebrated thinkers in these centuries were concerned primarily or exclusively with the issue of control. Control was essential to Bentham's and Mills' utilitarianism. It underlay Dewey's pragmatism and its assertion that the philosopher exists to solve man's mundane problems. Collective control obsessed Marx and Engels. Providing a high level of control for the individual animated Adam Smith. Nietzsche–the will to power, master/slave morality, the Superman–frothed for control.
The urge to control has so saturated modern thinking that even reactions against the science-based currents have been marked by the urge for control. Rousseau's and Thoreau's back-to-nature preachings, for instance, urged man to take control of his own affairs, assert his autonomy, flex his will, and be his own man by returning to a more simplistic setting. They were both reactions against an increasingly-sophisticated world that didn't give room for the individual control they craved.
The New Age and occult, another reaction against science-based progress, has also been marked by the urge to control. The rise of irrational systems in the past 150 years has been nothing more than a return to the magic-based control urge of the Renaissance magician. As shown in James Webb's book The Occult Establishment, the myriad forms of occultism–theosophy, Rudolf Steiner and anthroposophy, various conscious-evolving movements in the Sixties–were all marked with the progressive mindset. They all wanted to change the world into a place where man would be a more-effective master.
The twentieth century has seen a peak in our culture's pre-occupation with control. The previous control currents strode forward unabated: Dewey-like pragmatism became a priori valued; social engineering became the accepted norm, a prima facia good thing, regardless of the political archetype; science matured into the technology revolution, bringing us the awe of electronics.
And, for the first time in history, intellectuals sought complete removal of barriers that frustrate the desires of the passionate will. By weakening societal disapproval of passionate actions and removing the laws that prohibit such actions, people are better able to act out even their most-debased desires. The resulting license removes any shred of restraint, giving each person the power to pursue perversion. Icon intellectuals like Margaret Mead and Alfred Kinsey potently strove to establish societal approval of the perverse will–using questionable research and fraudulent theories to approve the most debased sexual drives. The same goal also arguably drove much of psychoanalysis and its goal to stigmatize civilized limits to the naked will.
As a result, society today disdains any opinion or law that hinders a person from acting on passion, no matter how twisted. Such restraints make us twitch, vicariously feeling the imaginary harness such laws appear to place on people who enjoy perversion, intuitively thinking we are stepping on someone's right to control their lives.
This conquest of the control obsession has contributed to the twentieth century's most-destructive legislation, regulation, and court decisions–obsession with control camouflaged as protecting the pursuit of happiness and liberty. Roe v. Wade and the partial-birth abortion are the hallmarks. Not only do they preserve our control over sex, but they also allow removal of those things that sap control from adults more effectively than anything else–babies. Millions of children have died to preserve our society's obsession with control.
Control's predominance has become so complete that no one thinks about it. Control is the thing everyone desires; it just sits there as the unquestionable goal of every human life. And it's a spiritual pox of the first degree.
