Counter-Reformation
Article
Counter-Reformation is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between April 20, 2023 and August 11, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “the Church only started being anti-science after the Counter-Reformation”; “copying back from Counter-Reformation spirituality”. It most often appears alongside Africa, Europe, Harvard.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: April 20, 2023
- Last seen: August 11, 2023
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Africa (2 shared issues)
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- Europe (2 shared issues)
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- Harvard (2 shared issues)
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- 15 minute cities (1 shared issues)
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- 200 Concrete Problems In AI Interpretability (1 shared issues)
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- 2022 ACX Forecasting contest (1 shared issues)
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- AB 835 (1 shared issues)
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- Achilles (1 shared issues)
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- ACX (1 shared issues)
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- Adam Smith (1 shared issues)
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- Alex Lee (1 shared issues)
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- Alexey Guzey (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
29: You’ve spent the past ten years hearing arguments about how the Catholic Church wasn’t anti-science and Galileo had it coming. But a recent paper puts a new spin on the story, arguing that the Church only started being anti-science after the Counter-Reformation. "Across Europe, Catholic and Protestant cities had shared comparable numbers of scientists per capita prior to the Counter-Reformation, but Catholic cities experienced a cataclysmic relative decline precisely when the Counter-Reformation was implemented . . . the shock persisted in the long term . . . overall, the Counter-Reformation appears to be one of the largest shocks to science in human history." Twitter summary here. Bias warning (not sure if joking or real): be sure to note the lead author’s institutional affiliation.
Here’s one thing that looks to me like a historically extended push: from the earliest Reformers onwards, the constant drive towards character education. It starts with Lutherans trying and failing to reform the country peasants by teaching them their catechism5. Then the later Puritans and Pietists, copying back from Counter-Reformation spirituality, going deeper into themselves before they try to change the world; the first children’s books, the great spiritual classics like Pilgrim’s Progress. Then the secular 18th century experimenters like Rousseau; and the first state education systems – all universally agreed that the point of education is character, not technical skills; and mostly within a broadly Christian framework.
Inline links: 5