17. Myth, Empire, & Utopia: The Rise and Rule of Britannia, Pt. 3 – Progress: A Confession of Faith
The Story of Nowhere – Studies in Utopianism and Humanity
The Story of Nowhere (available as eBook, Audiobook, & Paperback): https://storyofnowhere.com/book/
The Story of Nowhere Podcast Introductory Episode—“Episode Zero”: https://storyofnowhere.com/zero/
A Brief History of Critical Thinking Full Series
Myth, Empire, & Utopia: The Rise & Rule of Britannia Full Series
Music Credits:
PRELUDE
Richard Hakluyt to Walter Raleigh, 1587
Charter by Queen Elizabeth I Founding the British East India Company, 1600
The Commonwealth of Oceana by James Harrington, 1656
1. BRITANNIA: A LIFE
“Timeline of the British Empire” – Historic UK
2. CIVITATEM AD SABBATUM
“Progress” – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- “Philosophical proponents of progress assert that the human condition has improved over the course of history and will continue to improve.”
“Enlightenment” – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
“Globalization” – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- “Covering a wide range of distinct political, economic, and cultural trends, the term ‘globalization’ remains crucial to contemporary political and academic debate. In contemporary popular discourse, globalization often functions as little more than a synonym for one or more of the following phenomena: the pursuit of classical liberal (or ‘free market’) policies in the world economy (‘economic liberalization’), the growing dominance of western (or even American) forms of political, economic, and cultural life (‘westernization’ or ‘Americanization’), a global political order built on liberal notions of international law (the ‘global liberal order’), the proliferation of new information technologies (the ‘Internet Revolution’), as well as the notion that humanity stands at the threshold of realizing one single unified community in which major sources of social conflict have vanished (‘global integration’).”
3. “THE GUIDING SPIRIT IN COLONIZATION SCHEME”
“King James Version” – Encyclopedia Britannica Online
“Francis Bacon” – Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- “Sir Francis Bacon (later Lord Verulam and the Viscount St. Albans) was an English lawyer, statesman, essayist, historian, intellectual reformer, philosopher, and champion of modern science. Early in his career he claimed ‘all knowledge as his province’ and afterwards dedicated himself to a wholesale revaluation and re-structuring of traditional learning. To take the place of the established tradition (a miscellany of Scholasticism, humanism, and natural magic), he proposed an entirely new system based on empirical and inductive principles and the active development of new arts and inventions, a system whose ultimate goal would be the production of practical knowledge for “the use and benefit of men” and the relief of the human condition.”
“The Philosophy of Francis Bacon” – The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant (Audio)
The Works of Francis Bacon, Vol. III
The Case of the Post-Nati of Scotland – Francis Bacon
“State Monopoly on Violence” – Encyclopedia Britannica Online
“Of Plantations” – Francis Bacon
“Francis Bacon on Imperial and Colonial Warfare” – Samuel Garrett Zeitlin
- “This article offers a textual and historical reconstruction of Francis Bacon’s thought on imperial and colonial warfare. Bacon holds that conquest, acquisition of peoples and territory through force, followed by subjugation, confers a legal right and title. Imperial expansion is justified both by arguments concerning the interstate balance of power and by arguments related to internal order and stability. On Bacon’s view, a successful state must be expansionist, for two key reasons: first, as long as its rivals are expansionist, a state must keep up and even try to outpace them, and, second, a surplus population will foment civil war unless this ‘surcharge of people’ is farmed out to colonies. These arguments for imperial state expansion are held to justify both internal and external colonization and empire. Paradoxically, Bacon holds that the internally colonized may be treated with greater severity, as suppressed rebels, than the externally colonized, who are more fitly a subject of the ius gentium. Bacon holds that toleration offers both an imperial stratagem and a comparative justification for why English and British imperial expansion is more desirable than Spanish imperial expansion. The article concludes with reflections about how one might understand the place of imperial and colonial projects in Bacon’s thought, contending that these projects are central to an understanding of Bacon’s political aims and thought more broadly.”
4. THE PASSION OF LORD VERULAM
“Scholasticism and Bacon’s Response” – St. John’s College
“Francis Bacon: An Alchemical Odyssey Through the Novum Organum” – American Chemical Society
“The Great Instauration” – Francis Bacon
The New Atlantis – Francis Bacon
- “There we imitate and practise to make swifter motions than any you have, either out of your muskets or any engine that you have: and to make them and multiply them more easily, and with small force, by wheels and other means: and to make them stronger and more violent than yours are; exceeding your greatest cannons and basilisks. We represent also ordnance and instruments of war, and engines of all kinds: and likewise new mixtures and compositions of gun-powder, wild-fires burning in water, and unquenchable. Also fireworks of all variety both for pleasure and use. We imitate also flights of birds; we have some degrees of flying in the air. We have ships and boats for going under water, and brooking of seas; also swimming-girdles and supporters. We have divers curious clocks, and other like motions of return: and some perpetual motions. We imitate also motions of living creatures, by images, of men, beasts, birds, fishes, and serpents.”
The History of the Royal Society – Thomas Sprat
Personal History of Lord Bacon – William Hepworth Dixon
“Brief Historical Sketch” – Peter Dawkins
Thomas Jefferson to John Trumbull
5. INTERMEZZO: A MODERN SOLUTION
“Act of Union” – Encyclopedia Britannica Online
“United Kingdom” – Encyclopedia Britannica Online
6. ENLIGHTENMENT EMPIRECRAFT
“Freemasonry” – Encyclopedia Britannica Online
The Constitutions of the Free-Masons – James Anderson
- “Adam, our first Parent, created after the Image of God, the great Architect of the Universe, must have had the Liberal Sciences, particularly Geometry, written on his Heart; for even since the Fall, we find the Principles of it in the Hearts of his Offspring, and which, in process of time, have been drawn forth into a convenient Method of Propositions, by observing the Laws of Proportion taken from Mechanism: So that as the Mechanical Arts gave Occasion to the Learned to reduce the Elements of Geometry into Method, this noble Science, thus reduc’d, is the Foundation of all those Arts, (particularly of Masonry and Architecture) and the Rule by which they are conducted and perform’d (Year of the World 4003 before Christ).”
“Temple of Solomon” – Masonic Dictionary
“Hiram Abif” – Masonic Dictionary
“The Great Work in Speculative Freemasonry” – The Masonic Trowel
Workman Unashamed: The Testimony of a Christian Freemason – Christopher Haffner
“Freemasonry in India” – Bob Nairn
“From Britain to India: Freemasonry as a Connective Force of Empire” – Simon Deschamps
- “From the very origins of its creation, freemasonry turned its attention to the ‘wider world’ as shown by the contents of its Constitutions (Anderson 63). This may explain why it was so closely associated to the British Empire. In India, masonic lodges spawned in the wake of the trading agreements and territorial expansion carried out by the East India Company. Thirteen years only separate the creation of the Grand Lodge of England, the first masonic governing body, from the constitution of the first lodge on the Indian subcontinent. In 1729, Captain Ralph Farrwinter, an officer of the East India Company, was appointed Provincial Grand Master for East India in Bengal, and warranted the first Indian lodge East India Arms, No. 72, based in Fort William, Calcutta (Firminger 6).”
Builders of Empire: Freemasons and British Imperialism, 1717-1923 – Jessica Harland-Jacobs
“Freemasonry Comes to India” – Internet Archive
Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology – Neil Postman
7. A CONFESSION OF FAITH
“Cecil Rhodes” – Encyclopedia Britannica Online
“Confession of Faith” – Cecil Rhodes
- “It often strikes a man to inquire what is the chief good in life; to one the thought comes that it is a happy marriage, to another great wealth, and as each seizes on his idea, for that he more or less works for the rest of his existence. To myself thinking over the same question the wish came to render myself useful to my country. I then asked myself how could I and after reviewing the various methods I have felt that at the present day we are actually limiting our children and perhaps bringing into the world half the human beings we might owing to the lack of country for them to inhabit that if we had retained America there would at this moment be millions more of English living. I contend that we are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race. Just fancy those parts that are at present inhabited by the most despicable specimens of human beings what an alteration there would be if they were brought under Anglo-Saxon influence, look again at the extra employment a new country added to our dominions gives.”
The Last Will and Testament of Cecil J. Rhodes – Cecil Rhodes & W.T. Stead
The Anglo-American Establishment – Carroll Quigley
“The Rhodes Scholarship” – Rhodes Trust
8. THE NEW ROUND TABLE
“Pax Britannica” – Encyclopedia Britannica Online
- “Victorian writers such as Thomas Macaulay, Charles Kingsley, and William Whewell celebrated the scientific and technological Utopia that they thought British scientists had created for the benefit of humanity. In the course of doing so they also explained the importance to them, as they perceived it, of the work of Francis Bacon (1561-1626) whom Macaulay described as both ‘a great philosopher who had made new discoveries in moral and political science'(Whyte, p. 79) and the ‘great apostle of experimental philosophy’ (p. 87). In examining relation between Victorian idea of inductive science and utopia, I shall address the way in which Victorian scientists, who adopted Baconian inductive scientific methodology, claimed they had triumphed over all previous scientific work and thereby improved the quality of life not only for the British people but also for people on a global scale. Others thought differently.”
“On the Origin of Species” – Encyclopedia Britannica Online
“Francis Galton” – Encyclopedia Britannica Online
“The Early History of the Eugenics Movement” – Human Life International
“The Horrifying American Roots of Nazi Eugenics” – Edwin Black
- “Eugenics was born as a scientific curiosity in the Victorian age. In 1863, Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, theorized that if talented people only married other talented people, the result would be measurably better offspring. At the turn of the last century, Galton’s ideas were imported into the United States just as Gregor Mendel’s principles of heredity were rediscovered. American eugenic advocates believed with religious fervor that the same Mendelian concepts determining the color and size of peas, corn and cattle also governed the social and intellectual character of man.”
Idylls of the King– Alfred, Lord Tennyson
The Return of King Arthur – Debra Mancoff
“The Arthurian Revival” – Clas Merdin
9. NEW WORLD ORDER
The Third British Empire – Alfred Zimmern
The Anglo-American Establishment – Carroll Quigley
Tragedy & Hope: A History of the World in Our Time – Carroll Quigley
“The Ideal Arrangement of Rhodes and the Organic Unity of Empire” – Kevin Cole
- “‘In 1894 Mr. Rhodes came to England and again discussed with me the working of the scheme, reported to me his impressions of the various Ministers and leaders of the Opposition who he met, discussing each of them from the point of view as to how far he would assist in carrying out ‘our ideas.’ We also discussed together various projects for propaganda, the formation of libraries, the creation of lectureships, the dispatch of emissaries on missions of propaganda throughout the Empire, and the steps to be taken to pave the way for the foundation and the acquisition of a newspaper which was to be devoted to the service of the cause.’ – William T. Stead, ‘The Last Will and Testament of Cecil John Rhodes'”
The Deep End #08: “The Trivium and Empire”
History… Connected: “Cecil Rhodes and the Anglo-American Establishment”
10. THE ENDS OF EMPIRE
“10 Atrocities Committed by the British Empire” – History Collection
