The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,110

a Xerox machine, and a conference grant fund, you’re OK, you’re plugged into the only university that really matters—the global campus.142

Morris Zapp had a point, but he overemphasized the technologies of the 1980s. Two decades after his words were written, they have been superseded by e-mail, digital documents, Web sites, blogs, teleconferencing, Skype, and smartphones. And two centuries before they were written, the technologies of the day—the sailing ship, the printed book, and the postal service—had already made information and people portable. The result was the same: a global campus, a public sphere, or as it was called in the 17th and 18th centuries, the Republic of Letters.

Any 21st-century reader who dips into intellectual history can’t help but be impressed by the blogosphere of the 18th. No sooner did a book appear than it would sell out, get reprinted, get translated into half a dozen languages, and spawn a flurry of commentary in pamphlets, correspondence, and additional books. Thinkers like Locke and Newton exchanged tens of thousands of letters; Voltaire alone wrote more than eighteen thousand, which now fill fifteen volumes.143 Of course this colloquy unfolded on a scale that by today’s standards was glacial—weeks, sometimes even months—but it was rapid enough that ideas could be broached, criticized, amalgamated, refined, and brought to the attention of people in power. A signature example is Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishments, which became an instant sensation and the impetus for the abolition of cruel punishments throughout Europe.

Given enough time and purveyors, a marketplace of ideas can not only disseminate ideas but change their composition. No one is smart enough to figure out anything worthwhile from scratch. As Newton (hardly a humble man) conceded in a 1675 letter to fellow scientist Robert Hooke, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” The human mind is adept at packaging a complicated idea into a chunk, combining it with other ideas into a more complex assembly, packaging that assembly into a still bigger contrivance, combining it with still other ideas, and so on.144 But to do so it needs a steady supply of plug-ins and subassemblies, which can come only from a network of other minds.

A global campus increases not only the complexity of ideas but their quality. In hermetic isolation, all kinds of bizarre and toxic ideas can fester. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and exposing a bad idea to the critical glare of other minds provides at least a chance that it will wither and die. Superstitions, dogmas, and legends ought to have a shorter half-life in a Republic of Letters, together with bad ideas about how to control crime or run a country. Setting fire to a person and seeing whether he burns is a dumb way to determine his guilt. Executing a woman for copulating with devils and turning them into cats is equally inane. And unless you are a hereditary absolutist monarch, you are unlikely to be persuaded that hereditary absolutist monarchy is the optimal form of government.

The jet airplane is the only technology of Lodge’s small world of 1988 that has not been made obsolete by the Internet, and that reminds us that sometimes there is no substitute for face-to-face communication. Airplanes can bring people together, but people who live in a city are already together, so cities have long been crucibles of ideas. Cosmopolitan cities can bring together a critical mass of diverse minds, and their nooks and crannies can offer places for mavericks to seek refuge. The Age of Reason and the Enlightenment were also an age of urbanization. London, Paris, and Amsterdam became intellectual bazaars, and thinkers congregated in their salons, coffeehouses, and bookstores to hash out the ideas of the day.

Amsterdam played a special role as an arena of ideas. During the Dutch Golden Age in the 17th century it became a bustling port, open to the flow of goods, ideas, money, and people. It accommodated Catholics, Anabaptists, Protestants of various denominations, and Jews whose ancestors had been expelled from Portugal. It housed many book publishers, who did a brisk business printing controversial books and exporting them to the countries in which they had been banned. One Amsterdammer, Spinoza, subjected the Bible to literary analysis and developed a theory of everything that left no room for an animate God. In 1656 he was excommunicated by his Jewish community, who, with memories of the Inquisition still fresh, were nervous about making waves among the surrounding Christians.145 It was no tragedy for