How do idea spread? This sounds very simple,
but it's actually a really complex question.
Many of us casually speak of the discrepancies that often occur between
theory and practice or thinking and doing.
Very often abstracts concepts are very interesting,
but they're not made to be implemented one by one. Rather,
they can be fooled for thought,
they can be springboards for further elaborations,
but they need to be persuasively packaged and made adaptable to become
part of practical operations.
I'm researching how thoughts and theories and especially the those that were
generated from investigations in into society and the human
condition were circulated in the world and how they were taken up
by this. I want to find out which actual ideas,
which theories which finding had a concrete impact
by becoming implemented in, for instance, that legislation,
institutional infrastructures, or political decision makings.
In my current research,
I'm focusing on an idea that does not appear very scientific today,
but which was very much so at the end of the 18th century.
The idea of happiness, how people can be made happy,
what conditions produce happiness At the end of the 18th century,
especially in Britain, and a very influential idea took hold,
which we nowadays connect with utilitarianism,
and it is called the Greatest Happiness principle.
That means that a country's success, a society's success,
is measured by the quantum of happiness that is present
in society.
The second half of the 18th century is also sometimes called the age of
sensibility, because in large number of people,
not only intellectuals and the reading public, but economists, politicians,
religious figures, even statisticians,
took a very active interest in what produced feelings and how they
could impact it.
In order to find out what research findings actually impacted
political decision making, social reform, movements, all legislations,
one has to look very specifically at how a discussion materialized
and how it was then taken up by particular actors.
The discussion on feeling was present in many fields,
and there was for instance, uh,
debate about whether peasants were particularly happy because they lived in
remote villages,
or particularly unhappy because they were disconnected from the large and urban
areas.
But there was one specific case in particular where the matter of feeling
had a wider significance and that were children.
Children were increasingly perceived as the future of the country, and as such,
the state of their feeling was something that would impact the country in the
future.
In my research,
I'm employing a combination of methods of semantic with sociological
analysis and of qualitative with quantitative analysis. In the first step,
I was looking at the findings,
findings of what one could would nowadays call research that was
generated in various fields in society, not just in science,
but also in moral philosophy in economy,
but also in parts of what we nowadays would call technology.
After having had a quite a clear overview of
what the consensus or the state of the art on the research on feeling was,
I turned to the political issues that were pressing at the time,
and through the use of digitized sources, newspapers,
institutional minutes, statistical analysis, cataloged images,
I tried to find out if there were particular political issues that were
frequently associated with emotions or emotion research,
and there were were few that I could identify,
and one in particular was child labor.
Child labor was considered a necessary evil,
but towards the end of the 18th century,
it was increasingly considered outrageous. Now,
after having identified that child labor was a topic that was frequently
iden associated with feelings,
I turned to a sociological analysis of those political and civil
society actors that were concerned with addressing this particular
issue. And here I ask,
did the considerations of what feelings were in the 18th century
did these considerations actually impact the
practices that the actors chose to address the problem of
child labor?
Feelings matter, this sounds super intuitive today.
There really wasn't in the 18th century. It was actually a process.
Through research, through activism, through policymaking,
it needed to be established. It was really important what people felt.
It was really important how this could be influenced in the beginning, however,
it was not yet about making all people happy.
Early advocates of children's rights,
of safe working environments of public education did not go so
far as wanting to make children happy. Rather, in the first step,
they wanted to prevent them from becoming criminals.
One reason for this was that very many of the reformers were not only involved
in one social reform movement,
but in several among the prison reforms and in the prison,
they learned that it was better to prevent crime than punish it,
and where to better start than with the children.
The social reformers drew on a variety of findings.
Many of them came from moral philosophy or religion,
but others came from science, economy, even statistics,
disciplines that sound very dry today,
but at the time were very much concerned with what people felt and what
made people feel a certain way.
So when the child advocates drew on these sciences,
they established the idea that the children's feelings could not only be
educated, learned, and taught, but they could also be deadened, dulled,
stunted or blunted. And they wanted to prevent this.
When children were working, they were, uh, sweeping the streets,
sweeping the chimneys. They were doing dangerous tasks in the factories,
very monotonous work, or they were working in mines.
So the argument of many reformers ran that if the country wanted to prevent
a rise in crime,
they it needed to invest in educating children,
in saving them from environments that turned them into callous,
hard-hearted people that would then automatically become criminals.
And it was the semantic analysis in particular that alerted me to the
link between the sciences and the social reform movements because one of the
terms that frequently came up when child labor was discussed was callous.
That is a medical term.
It means that your skin hardens because it put under pressure and you care to
neglect it.
And the children's heart and the moral consciousness was imagined in just the
same term as the skin was that if too much pressure was,
was put onto it, if it was neglected, then it would also harden.
So children should be treated, and this was really new at the time.
It should be treated like skin with a soft touch.
It should be cared for
What is the place of science thinking,
intellectual labor in a society at a gift time?
These are very pertinent questions that we are also asking today.
What is the place of science?
What findings shall we follow up on what findings shall be implemented
in political regulations? In the 18th century, the questions were quite similar.
The what outputs of intellectual labor, what research findings,
what ideas that were generated from then eventually found their way in the
infrastructure. In legislation, in social reform movements,
this is very hard to trace,
and I don't want to make a point about just general vague narratives or broad
ideas that somehow spend the times. Rather,
I want to look very concretely at particular instances where you can trace
how an idea was first generated, then became published,
thereby materialized was taken up by actors and then
implemented in case of child labor.
One could say that the finding that feelings
mattered and that feelings were made became popularized it mid 18th
century and were taken up by social reformers at the end of the 18th century
and thereby and then influenced how they set up, for instance,
Sunday schools or other institutions of public education.
There's also a particular scholarly relevance to my topic.
I am employing something that could be called a cross sectorial approach,
meaning I'm not looking just at one field, for instance, economy,
politics, or religion. Rather, I'm focusing on one theme,
feelings and how this occurs in various fields. With such an approach,
I want to contribute to a current trend in the humanities.
I want to overcome the increasing insularity of sub-disciplines in the
humanities and to focus again on a more integrated view of
societies where it was, especially in the 18th century,
really impossible to disentangle politics from religion,
from economy, from science, from technology, it all belonged together,
and taking an isolated view of one particular field actually
produces a one-sided view of the past.
Many of the reforms that were initiated in the late 18th century would meet our
approval today.
It sounds entirely outrageous that children had to work 16 hours in factories
or that they had to climb up chimneys,
sometimes only wearing their underwear and sometimes dying during their work.
However, not all of the reforms were benign, and in many cases,
caring, especially a very ostentatious, caring,
could become another form of oppression.
There were particular groups where the education of feeling,
where turning them into happy good citizen was not just a benign
endeavor, but was actually a means of oppression,
of legitimizing violence or colonial interventions.
There's one particular case that I want to look at further,
and this will be my next steps. Protestant missionaries.
They're very eager to take up the idea that you could convert the
heart,
and when a group was going to China at the beginning of the 19th
century,
they specifically argued that they wanted to cure the religious
apathy of non-Christians.
So what I want to do next is looking at the dark sides,
the ambiguities of caring, compassion, and sympathy,
because next to those who were forcefully converted to happiness,
they were also other groups, especially from the military,
who were just expected to never develop refined feelings and sympathy.
In these cases, caring and compassion becomes very ambiguous,
not only because iteg legitimizes interventions,
but also because it becomes a privilege that is only granted to some,
but not to others.
One of the hardest things is actually to let ambiguity stand
and to accept that there is no need stories.
So it's not just that I am in the future, will be researching the dark sides,
but I also need to learn that some of the ambiguities,
some of the difficulties of histories I can never solve.