What You Can Change . . . And What You Can't*: The Complete Guide to Successful Self-Improvement Read Online Free PDF

shattered. The first crack was the movement toward individual liberty.
    Political liberty . On June 15, 1215, at Runnymede, England, a handful of rebellious barons wrested from King John a document, Magna Carta, that protected them from some of the caprices of their king. While it hardly proclaimed universal suffrage, Magna Carta is certainly the forerunner of freedom as we know it:
No freeman shall be taken, or imprisoned, or disseised [dispossessed], or outlawed, or exiled, or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him, nor will we send upon him, except by the legal judgment of his peers or by the law of the land. . . .
All persons are to be free to come and go, except outlaws and prisoners.
    The growth of freedom was glacial in its pace, however, and it was more than four centuries before civil war broke out in England, Charles I was beheaded, and the Commonwealth declared. It was almost six centuries before the American Revolution realized John Locke’s claim that government derives its power from the consent of the governed. This was followed in 1789 by the even more sweepingly democratic Declaration of the Rights of Man of the French Revolution.
    The movement toward liberty had now become a torrent. For our purposes, it is one of the three streams that washed away the dogma that human character cannot change and that individuals cannot, without the intervention of God, improve or advance.
    The second crack was the belief that we are not completely at the mercy of nature.
    Science can manipulate nature . Until the Renaissance, Western science did little but describe God’s creation, though detailed observation of the tides and of the heavenly bodies predicted eclipses, and sometimes even floods, pretty well. Given the prevailing worldview that humans were powerless to change the nature of things and that all knowledge depended upon authority, the feeble science of the era should come as no surprise.
    Enter Francis Bacon, one of the truly iconoclastic minds of the Renaissance. Bacon, who it has been speculated wrote the works attributed to Shakespeare and was the bastard son of the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth I, was born in 1561. His father was Nicholas Bacon, keeper of the great seal of England, and his mother was Anne Cooke, lady-in-waiting to Elizabeth. Bacon senior was notable for his social progress: He had been a clerk before Henry VIII established the Anglican church, but when Henry abolished the monasteries, and was short of loyalists to run things, he promoted Nicholas Bacon, among other formerly humble men. Bacon senior leapt social barriers, becoming the first member of his family to rise in class. First the Black Death had destroyed the feudal system; now Henry had disenfranchised many of the gentry, opening up the higher-status jobs that the myriad plague dead and Henry’s new enemies had once filled. Whole families scrambled upward. Francis Bacon grew up knowing that the social order is not fixed.
    Francis Bacon entered Cambridge at twelve (no artificially prolonged adolescence in this subsistence economy) and immediately loathed the mandatory Aristotelian curriculum that then passed for knowledge. He rebelled against it openly. In a breathtaking break with the past, he urged us to look to nature—not to authority—for knowledge in order to benefit humankind. Science should not be restricted merely to observing nature passively, he said. Humans can actually manipulate nature (just as he had learned that man could alter the social order). We can do experiments. If we want to know why water is boiling, we should not consult Aristotle or the Church. We can experiment and find out. We remove the fire and the boiling stops. We rekindle the fire and the boiling resumes. Fire is the cause.
    Science can change things, Bacon told us. Within fifty years Isaac Newton had unlocked the secrets of motion. This was followed rapidly by an explosion of knowledge in medicine, agriculture, and economics. In a burst of