ACT Model Essays
Prepared for students in the
New Salem Educational Initiative
By Gary Marvin Davison, Ph. D.
Director,
New Salem Educational Initiative
Essay #1
Point:
Opting for Living in Another Place
and Time: France during the Eighteenth
Century
I am fully aware of the advantages
of living in contemporary United States society. Never before in history have my own chances
of living into my 80s and 90s been so good.
My own knowledge of nutrition and exercise is of high caliber; and medical science promises to correct any
defects that I cannot prevent via my personal habits. This is also an exciting time for a political
leftist and radical feminist who bemoans the fact that until the period of
remarkable legislative initiatives and political movements of 1964-1973, the
United States was a police state for many of the nation’s inhabitants, and that
for women the abiding circumstance of proscribed economic, social, and political
rights made lives very much less full than they should have been.
Nevertheless, the pull of the time
known as the Enlightenment (1600-1800 CE) is too strong. I would take the offer to be transported to a
different time and place. Advancement in
science and many realms of thought were widespread throughout Europe during
this period, but the intellectual center of the Enlightenment was France. Thus, since the question specifically asks me
to opt for my present life or another time and place, I will specify that I would
decide to live in France during the 18th century and that if I were
asked to identify the time even more specifically I would center my lifetime on
the year 1750.
An abundance of great thinkers graced
humankind with the output of their creativity during the Enlightenment, also
known as the Age of Reason, tied to and running concurrently with the
Scientific Revolution. I would have been
inspired as I pondered from my study in the year 1750 the great precursors who
thought deeply and produced great work just before the Enlightenment: Nicolaus Copernicus, with his depiction of a
heliocentric universe that contravened the prevailing orthodoxy of a geocentric
universe; Vesalius, with his detailed
pictorials and commentary on human anatomy;
Renes Descartes (1596-1650), the “father of modern philosophy,” asserting
that only through reason could mathematical and universal truth be
discovered; Denis Diderot, with his
28-volume Encyclopedia; and John Locke, with his seminal notions of
life, liberty, and property as rights owed all people according to a social
contract with their government.
I would remember, too the intellectual
output of those working at the very beginning of the Enlightenment: Galileo Galilei, who spied four moons
revolving around Jupiter with his telescope, thus lending the work of
Copernicus additional credence; William
Harvey, who gave an accurate description of blood circulation and then used the
recently invented microscope to show capillaries and other circulatory
structures that substantiated Harvey’s work;
and the most towering presence of all, Isaac Newton, who published his Principia Mathematica, detailing the
operation of gravity as a force affecting the motion of all objects, celestial
and terrestrial.
In my own 18th century I would
admire Voltaire, who maintained that the meaning of freedom was “to reason correctly
and know the rights of humankind”; Jean-Jacque
Rousseau, who asserted that in the social contract that binds people to their
government, that government has the obligation to follow the General Will of
the people; and Montesquieu, who sought
to limit absolute monarchical power with a three-way division among the
executive (king), legislature (parliament), and the judiciary (high court).
These male thinkers get a great deal of
emphasis, but many women were asserting themselves in the 18th
century, well before the work of the 19th century suffragettes and
the 20th century feminists.
Olympia de Gourges wrote the Declaration
of the Rights of Woman and Citizen as a response to the the Declaration of the Rights of Man that
appeared during the late 18th century French Revolution. And at about the same time Mary Wollstonecraft
wrote A Vindication of the Rights of
Women.
These women and men of the Enlightenment
established the patterns of thought for modernity, in which scientific proof
and analytical reasoning became the standard for claiming Truth, with that very
intentional capital “T.” Many of these
thinkers were deeply religious but they as a matter of intellectual integrity
vowed to make no claims incompatible with the Truth. In my view, they identified Truth with God
and therefore considered assertions on the basis of mere belief blasphemous.
Nevertheless, by the early 19th
century, religious traditionalists were pushing back, claiming Truth based on
religious texts alone, whatever scientific proof might reveal. Soon there was a counterpoising of religion
to science that endures to this day. The full reconciliation of science and
religion awaits the agreement of sophisticated intellectuals of deep
spirituality from all of the world’s great religious traditions on those
matters of ethics and spirituality shared by all.
That is a prospect for reconciliation that
could happen in these days when women and other dispossessed groups are coming
to power in the public sphere. To
participate in such an advancement would be exciting (and is, since in fact I
do live in the year 2019), but I would nevertheless opt to take the offer of
living in another place and time.
That time would be the years on either side of
1750, the 18th century, in France, where I would live among great
figures of the Enlightenment and be geographically positioned to reach out to
others in England and elsewhere in Europe who were at the forefront of the
Enlightenment. If we succeed in
reconciling religion and science, we will do so in the spirit that guided the
giants of intellect and ethics whose thought constituted the
Enlightenment. In taking the offer to
live in another place and time, I would gain the offer of dwelling in the midst
of that quality of analytical reasoning that will lead to advances in thought
and spirituality in my own time (as I write this essay) and beyond.
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