It would be impossible to measure today how much John Locke contributed to Western civilization. From the intellectual and social heritage left by him, three main questions that fascinated the thinker during his life became works that intrigue us to this day. They are how we should educate our children, who should govern our society and what we should do with people whose religious beliefs are different from ours.
Locke was born in a small village in England in 1632. He studied medicine at Oxford University and planned to become a doctor, but his plans changed considerably when he met Anthony Ashley Cooper, a captivating wealthy and ambitious politician of Greek origin. Cooper, the Baron of Shaftesbury, went to Oxford in search of a cure for a liver disease.
After meeting the brilliant Locke, he suggested that the young man should move to his house in London. Once inserted in Cooper's social circle, Locke started to live at the center of great scientific, pedagogical, religious and political debates. To know and learn a lot.
In the process, he also discovered a cure for Shaftesbury's disease, earning his recognition and gratitude. In these years of intellectual discovery, many questions interested Locke. The first one referred to religion and how in a society we should deal with people who follow different beliefs from ours.
The rise of Anglicanism breaking with the Catholic Church in the 16th century generated waves of questioning of traditional religious molds. Increasingly, members of the government and the highest spheres of power advocated for total state control over religion to avoid social schism. Locke rowed against this tide, becoming one of the greatest advocates of religious liberty, with a beautiful work on tolerance.
On it, he defended tolerance based on three pillars. First, because earthly judges, mainly state judges, and human beings in general do not have the ability to reliably assess which conflicting views related to religion are the true ones. Even if they could one by one true religion, it would never work because you cannot be forced into something through violence.
Ultimately, coercion and religious uniformity leads to far more social conflict than allowing diversity. For Locke, the main purpose of the State is only to preserve the conditions for a calm and comfortable life in society. The State should not be concerned with the intimate and spiritual issues of each individual in this society.
Religion would be a personal choice and churches, voluntary organizations. Therefore, they should be able to choose their own rules and rituals without interference. It was because of Locke that the idea of arresting people for their beliefs was no longer the norm.
In the 18th century, intellectuals from other countries saw England as a modern place in that way, where what one believed did not necessarily defined one's status or future in that environment. This great social change was not the only one generated by Locke. He published another extraordinary book, Two Treatises of Government.
On it, Locke explored the question of who should govern a country and on what legal grounds that choice would be possible. A very common idea at that time was that political authority was derived directly from God. Another idea, developed by Thomas Hobbes, defined that the absolute power of kings was justified by the ability to maintain order and prevent new waves of chaos that, according to him, prevailed before the existence of powerful governments.
For Hobbes, any society more organized than the savagery of the prehistoric natural state would be better even if it is ruled by a mediocre person. He insisted that rulers were not responsible for guaranteeing religious freedom or human rights. Locke, in his Two Treatises, refutes both ideas.
In the first, he wrote about the notion that God had created kings by giving them divine probation to rule. In the second, he debated Hobbes' conception of the natural state of supposed social savagery. Locke agrees with Hobbes that without some kind of government there really would be a state of nature.
The disagreement was in the mold of this reality. Locke understood that in fact this society would have been pacified and that, once a government had been organized and submitted to it, these people were not agreeing to abandon their autonomy, but seeking to preserve it. In fact, according to Locke, people have a series of inalienable natural rights, which no government can ever take away from them.
What would have happened is that people voluntarily accepted the government's organization so that society could live in a more organized way. Therefore, it would not make sense to expect people to give up in this natural way, since their preservation would be exactly the objective of the governmental organization. If the ruler started acting like a tyrant, disrespecting freedom, life and property of his subjects, it would be perfectly legitimate to remove that individual from power and change him for someone approved by the people.
Locke's Two Treatises profoundly influenced the entire organization of Western society. One of the most direct influences was the American Declaration of Independence, a great Liberal Revolution that advocated the separation of church and state, for example, and respect for the natural rights listed by Locke: life, liberty and property. No wonder the English philosopher is considered the father of liberalism.
In 1684, an aristocrat named Edward Clarke sought Locke's help by asking how he should educate his son and heir. Locke never married or had children, but he became interested in Clarke's request and responded to it through several letters turned into a book. In Some Thoughts Concerning Education, Locke says that we all begin life with empty minds, like a blank slate.
This idea may seem conventional today after all the influence of Locke's work, but at the time it was far from the norm. The common idea in Locke's social environment is that human beings are born with all sorts of predetermined conceptions about ethical, social, religious and related issues. Locke, on the other hand, believed that everything we know, believe and think derives from a common denominator, experiences.
Our conceptions come from what we feel, see and absorb from the world we live in, deriving from it reflections about ourselves. It was this conception that led Locke to understand education as absolutely crucial for the development of an ethical adult, suitable for life in society. Locke believed we are very vulnerable to the ideas that are taught to us throughout our lives, especially in the early years.
He wrote that the small impressions of our childhood have lasting and very important consequences. The associations of ideas made when we are still children are more important than those made as adults, according to Locke. This is because they are the foundations of who we become as people.
Locke is the forerunner of our modern ideas of early childhood education. Until we reach the current condition of teaching and learning, the foundations were built many centuries ago from the work of a great thinker, who was reinterpreted, studied and shaped. In 1704, John Locke died, hailed as one of the most influential thinkers of his days.
In the centuries ahead, this influence would continue to grow. Thanks to men like him, our common sense points to religious tolerance as something virtuous, tyranny as something abominable, and childhood as a very important moment of intellectual flowering.
