English coffeehouses, French salons and the age of the enlightenment (2008) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

English coffeehouses, French salons and the age of the enlightenment (2008) [pdf]

mrjohnmiddleton.org

for anyone interested there is a wonderful episode about how coffehouses became popular in Britain in the "In our Time" BBC podcast: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000c4x1

> Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history and social impact of coffee. From its origins in Ethiopia, coffea arabica spread through the Ottoman Empire before reaching Western Europe where, in the 17th century, coffee houses were becoming established. There, caffeinated customers stayed awake for longer and were more animated, and this helped to spread ideas and influence culture. Coffee became a colonial product, grown by slaves or indentured labour, with coffea robusta replacing arabica where disease had struck, and was traded extensively by the Dutch and French empires; by the 19th century, Brazil had developed into a major coffee producer, meeting demand in the USA that had grown on the waggon trails.

Somewhat related: I got a completely new angle at the formative years of civic society from David Graeber's new (and last, sadly) book [1] "The Dawn of Everything".

Surprisingly, there are also many enlightening bits and pieces in Hillary Mantel's collection of reviews for the LRB [2]. Plus her writing is among the most powerful I've ever read in English.

[1] https://www.harvard.com/book/the_dawn_of_everything/

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/oct/17/mantel-pieces-...

Fun fact, in the excellent book ‘Daily Rituals: How Artists Work’, the word Coffee appears 78 times. That’s almost every other page.

So much focus is spent on 'enlightenment' and politics. The same time, people invented clean water. People up until this time didnt have clean water and thusly would drink beer/wine all the time. People were suddenly sober.

It wasn't perfect(cholera) but add in coffee, sober + now a stimulant. Productivity took off and we started discovering as well... many social constructs dont work. The societies and communities that break with those social constructs will benefit from the greater productivity. Thus egalitarianism is born. This has been great for society.

However, just as with anything, change 1 slider, affect multiple others. We are starting to discover problems with egalitarianism and nobody predicted these problems. Worse yet, these problems are severe enough and we lack any solution. The fix isnt to go back to the 1950s or earlier. So what do we do? Our current plan of do nothing also doesnt seem to work.

So what in the world do we do? Did people figure out these problems long ago and egalitarianism is a trap? road to hell paved with good intentions?

Please don't use a single word in a title as a launchpad for a generic tangent, and especially not a generic ideological tangent. Those mostly consist of people repeating things that have been said before, usually in predictable (and often increasingly nasty) ways. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. The antidote to this is to respond to something specific (not generic) and interesting in the article.

This is doubly important when the thread is fresh, because threads are so sensitive to initial conditions. If you post something like this when a thread is new, odds are it will end up choking out the more interesting and specific responses, which take longer to appear.

> The same time, people invented clean water. People up until this time didnt have clean water and thusly would drink beer/wine all the time. People were suddenly sober.

This seems to be a myth.

Romans of course had clean water through fountains and aquifers. Some of that tech was lost through the dark ages, but surely by the middle ages it was rediscovered?

Fountains of clean water are a staple throughout European towns. After all, water is the lifeblood of humans. And if not a fountain, then at least a village well.

I take it that you are not aware of Dr. John Snow[1] who in the 1850s demonstrated that Cholera was a water born illness that came from drinking contaminated water.

Or of the "Great Stink"[2] in 1858 that was caused by so much sewage in the Thames, the main source of water for London, that it forced Parliament to actually do something about it.

By and large, yes there were fountains and village wells. But that water was usually contaminated because Europe at that time didn't have great sewage systems. People pissed a shat where ever they happened to be and that usually were near the very water sources they drank from.

[1] https://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/snow/snowcricketarticle.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Stink

> I take it that you are not aware of Dr. John Snow[1] who in the 1850s demonstrated that Cholera was a water born illness that came from drinking contaminated water.

I'm aware of Cholera yes, but I'm not sure what it has to do with my point.

If anything, the widespread proliferation of Cholera proves that people in the 1800s mostly drank water rather than beer, does it not?

Furthermore, without any theory of microorganisms, people in the 1800s were simply too ignorant (even the doctors) to understand why people were getting sick. Classical "Miasma" theory only works on airborne diseases (the "air is infected". "Don't breath the air", mask up, etc. etc. Its hilariously wrong but "good enough" to prevent airborne diseases).

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EDIT: Or to be more clear: with a modern understanding of microorganisms, we're able to say today that "Alcohol kills bacteria / viruses" and can make the strange, but possibly true, argument that beer could be healthier than water in some circumstances.

But go as far back as the 1800s (let alone the 1500s, 1000s, or 500s), and people didn't even know what a bacteria or virus is. Suddenly, its near impossible to make an argument to drink beer rather than water (well, aside from entertainment purposes).

> I take it that you are not aware of Dr. John Snow[1] who in the 1850s demonstrated that Cholera was a water born illness that came from drinking contaminated water.

The fact that they did not understand germ theory does not mean that people in general did not have access to clean (enough) water, this is a non sequitur. Your point is not refuting the parent. There were in fact places without cholera epidemics, though cities were pretty dire overall.

>Romans of course had clean water through fountains and aquifers. Some of that tech was lost through the dark ages, but surely by the middle ages it was rediscovered?

Are you arguing my word usage is incorrect? Yes there was some previous attempts but check out this link https://www.freedrinkingwater.com/resource-history-of-clean-...

>Fountains of clean water are a staple throughout European towns. After all, water is the lifeblood of humans. And if not a fountain, then at least a village well.

Access to water is a thing to be sure but clean water was something else.

I'm not sure how you mean "egalitarianism is a trap". Where does this egalitarianism exist? Wealth gaps are massive and continue to grow basically everywhere in the world. There's now a large class of people who own nothing and likely always will.

Or do you mean you oppose specifically legal egalitarianism? That all people should not be equal under the law; some more equal than others?

>I'm not sure how you mean "egalitarianism is a trap".

Complicated subject to be sure. I am a through and through egalitarian. That is not to say we should have true equality. True equality is not possible.

> Where does this egalitarianism exist?

Legal, social, etc. Most people would agree places like Canada or Iceland or Norway are egalitarian. I suspect you're arguing from the Marxist classless society point of view. I'll let you define that if you are doing so.

>Wealth gaps are massive and continue to grow basically everywhere in the world.

Because of egalitarianism believe it or not. Lets look at an example. We had X amount of jobs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_force_in_the_United_Stat...

When women entered the workplace, those werent new jobs. Total % relatively unchanged. That means women displaced men. I think this has been great. More talented women replaced less talented men.

However, what did that do? It meant for the same number of jobs, there was far more competition. Supply demand. More supply of workers, and same demand. That means the workers lose. Thus fueling inequality.

>There's now a large class of people who own nothing and likely always will.

https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2013/05/World-Poverty-Sin...

Not at all. We used to have 90% poverty 200 years ago. Today we're down to 10%. That's for 1 reason and only 1 reason. Capitalism. The trend is obvious as well. Way down. In fact we might expect to see capitalism spread through africa and a few other parts of the world eliminating poverty. No longer will there be people who own nothing unless they do so intentionally.

>Or do you mean you oppose specifically legal egalitarianism? That all people should not be equal under the law; some more equal than others?

Oh no, I dont oppose eqalitarianism in any way.

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