The Fall and Rise of China by Paul U. Unschuld

Author:Paul U. Unschuld
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

SEVENTEEN

Europe and the Discovery of Social Welfare

UNTIL THE LATE eighteenth century the development of Europe in some ways resembled that of China. The secular, non-religious, analytical explanation of the world gradually evolved into natural science. Christian theologians always watched this tendency with suspicion and occasionally even considered the murder of this or that scientist to be justified if it helped preserve the influence of theology. Yet over the centuries European science accumulated more and more insights that helped liberate people from what theologians saw as the unknowable will of God or, in the scientists’ view, the rigours of nature. The growing appreciation of the laws of nature served to unshackle people from all the restrictions that nature had imposed upon them.

The aeroplane overcame humans’ inability to fly. Highly complex prosthetic devices eased the disabilities of amputees. To relax the strictures facing the human mind, computers were introduced to work alongside it as electronic brains. Theologians protested vigorously whenever another threshold seemed to have been crossed on the way towards perfecting the human organism, freeing it from pain and fulfilling most people’s wishes for lasting good health. Yet Europe’s analytical science also set in motion a process of existential self-determination that remained closed to China’s relationist science.

As European science conveyed the message that behaving according to the dictates of the laws of nature helps people to avoid sickness, it also placed responsibility for illness itself on the individual. In the course of almost two millennia, this individualized responsibility obviated the need for any healthcare policy worthy of the name today. Minimal steps were enacted here and there to remedy the most deplorable conditions, but there was no conceptual basis for the comprehensive, caring intervention of a government authority.

That changed in Europe – indeed, only in Europe – during the later eighteenth century. The transformation was admirably captured in two influential books that were published in quick succession and could not have been more different. The first of these, The Divine Order in the Circumstances of the Human Sex, Birth, Death and Reproduction, was written by a theologian named Johann Peter Süssmilch (1707–1767). Süssmilch was the first – cum grano salis – medical statistician. The long tables of figures he compiled convinced him that God’s plan was behind the regularities of birth, sickness and death. They still remind us today that statistics can be used to back up any opinion one might wish to advance. Completing the irony, Germany’s medical statisticians named their professional association after Süssmilch.

Soon after this theological statistician ‘proved’ that human destiny was controlled by unknowable forces, a physician influenced by Rousseau named Johann Peter Frank (1745–1821) reached some very different conclusions. Most human illnesses, Frank demonstrated in his multi-volume work,44 are influenced by human behaviour and can therefore be avoided by acting accordingly.

At first glance, his seemed like just another voice in the unending struggle between those who deny human autonomy and those who, ever since Socrates, have championed it. Yet it was the product of something completely new.

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