The Society of Mutual Autopsy

In the Renaissance this began to change, as Greek and Roman knowledge and philosophy began to percolate into Europe via the Moors who had occupied Spain since the 9th centurx. The Renaissanbe was followed eventually in the 18th century by the Enlightenment, during which increasingly free thinking and philosophical inquiry combined with great creative and artistic ferment began to turn the tide against the deeply entrenched dominance of the Catholic Church over the lives of most of EuropeÆs citizens. The American and French Revolutions also signalled that the medieval world dominated by royalty, the aristocracy, and the Church was giving way to new ideas, such as the French RevolutionÆs ideals of freedom, equality, and universal brotherhood.

At the same time the rise of science began to transform the Western world with a number of significant new inventions. First the steam engine, and then steam-powered trains revolutionized transportation, opening up new vistas for those who could afford to use them. By the end of the 19th century these new technolog

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uman ancestors. Since Galileo and Kepler had demolished the old Greek and medieval concept of the heavenly spheres and proved that the Earth rotated around the Sun, Western man had never received such a deeply troubling psychic shock. Not only was the Bible clearly in error in its description of the origin of man, human dignity itself took a monumental blow to its collective pride when it was forced to consider the probability that our ancestors were far more beastly than what the racist Europeans believed the Africans and other non-Western peoples to be. The other great challenge to traditional bourgeois self-satisfaction came from a completely novel direction. The publication of FreudÆs book The Interpretation of Dreams purported to elucidate the interpretation of our nocturnal phantasmagorical musings, and in so doing implied that irrational forces dominate human beings to far greater extent than anyone had yet suspected or wanted to believe. To make it worse from the point of view of those who propagated and enforced social and intellectual orthodoxy in Europe and America, Freud claimed that sexuality was the basis of much of human behavior, and that its repression was a factor in producing neurosis. Forget for a minute that
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1811
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)