Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…If you are missing something, I’m missing it too. I admire Jonson’s structural ingenuity, and I admire his flair, and I really admire his capacity for gossip because it gave us a lot of the knowledge that we have of the time. But I have never managed to find him a poet who gets into your intestines. There’s a recent book by Clare Jackson called Devil-Land, which I very much admire. It stresses how much British thought and life in the 17th century was — I think she even uses the word “deranged,” crazy. It was a highly ideological era. People started believing, writing, doing all kinds of crazy things. Do you agree? If so, why did that happen then? I know that’s a big question, but I’ve been very interested in this issue. [laughs] I think it does look, to us now, like a time where a febrile intensity of thought became not just commonplace but contagious. Certainly, you could wake up in the morning, and you could see acts of great devotion and great violence before breakfast. You could see a man burned for his belief. You could see a woman hung for hers. You could see people willing to push large beliefs on themselves to the point of death. Certainly, I think it was also exacerbated by plague, by the fact that, every few years in Britain, the plague would come galloping through major cities, and thousands of people would die overnight. I think that closeness to death, to war, to pestilence, also to beauty, to an influx of money, to the fact that suddenly we had access to far greater knowledge because of the boom of the printing press — that’s enough to create a febrile moment, both intellectually and emotionally, I think.…

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