Social Complexity and Sustainability by Joseph Tainter

I promised a fuller review of this paper at the beginning of the month when I just pulled out the currency data (See http://historybooksreview.blogspot.com/2010/11/quantitative-easing-roman-way.html).

Did Rome fall because it was too complicated?

But interesting as that was there is rather more to Professor Tainter’s work that is worth looking at.  His paper was published in a biological journal, The Journal of Ecological Complexity and is an attempt to look at historical phenomena from an ecological perspective.  In particular he looks at the rise and fall of the Roman Empire -a subject much on History Books Review’s mind at the moment given the ongoing extended review I am doing of Gibbon at the moment.

Rome came to world prominence more as a result of its defeat of Carthage than of any other single episode in its history.  And at first sight, its victory was surprising.  The Carthaginians had been in the empire business for quite a few centuries before the Romans and had ample resources, in particular they had an efficient fleet and more than enough hard cash to employ mercenaries to deal with anything the Romans might throw at them.  Any rational observer who was inclined to make a prediction would undoubtedly have picked the Carthaginians as the likely winner.

Observers at the time like Polybius attributed the triumph of the Romans to some kind of unique grit in their character that enabled them to bounce back from setback after setback.  Tainter sees things differently.  He sees the very sophistication of the Carthagninans as their Achilles heal.  By having a complex society it became impossible for them to rapidly adapt to changed circumstances.  By contrast the agrarian Romans simply packed their bags and went off to fight.  They could and would stay in the field for as long as they remained unkilled.  Carthaginian generals by contrast had elaborate problems relating to pay, supplies and politics.

Having beaten Carthage the Romans settled down to mimic the very features of  Carthaginian society that made it vulnerable to Roman attack.  When Augustus left Rome a city of marble rather than brick he must also have created a profession of architects.  We start hearing about lawyers, poets and full time soldiers. There must have been quite a few mosaic designers around too.

And complex sophisticated societies can come up with impressive achievements.  The most impressive one in many ways was the Roman army, which was able to field several hundred thousand men full time year in year out for centuries.  Under normal circumstances the legions were unbeatable in both training and numbers.  Tainter regards the army as an example of problem solving.  The problem was maintaining the existence of the empire in the face of external and internal threats – and for a long period of time it was an effective solution.

But the productive capacity of the empire was finite and the cost of the army was high on the rest of society.  And the attacks on the empire were continual.  By the time of Diocletian and Constantine it was draining the resources away from most other activities.  We see an attempt to solve this problem in Constantine’s restrictions on movement between professions.  Typically for a complex society the response to a problem is to increase complexity – in this case regulations.   As I have also discussed in my earlier blog post, inflating the currency was another.  Calls for increasing regulatory activity and resorts to complex financial engineering have a very contempary ring, don’t they?

Meanwhile, the illiterate barbarians had a much simpler problem.  If they could get together enough of their poor but valiant friends to have a sporting chance against a legion, the empire offered big opportunities in the form of portable wealth.  It needed a lot of personal courage and a reckless disregard of danger, but it didn’t require any planning or accumulation of knowledge, expertise and material.

If you track the barbarian invasions from the third century onwards you will see that the barbarians were rarely able to prevail against a determined emperor with his well trained and sophisticated military machine behind him.  (My upcoming podcasts are one option if you want to do that.)But every blow weakened the structure and also increased the complexity as the government tried more and more solutions to their problems.  In the end, the whole edifice collapsed.

If this paper is correct Rome fell simply because at the end of the day, running an empire of that size was just too hard.

Reference

Joseph Tainter Social Complexity and Sustainability Ecological Complexity 3 (2006) 91–103

This is on my Christmas list if anyone wants to get it for me.

 

Baron Hennessy of Nympsfield

Peter Hennessy is having an exciting year.  Not only has one of  his books been reviewed here on the History Books Review, yesterday he also became a member of the House of Lords.

Congratulations your Honour, and hopefully this will give you more time to write more books.

See the review of The Secret State by Peter Hennessy here:

http://historybooksreview.blogspot.com/2010/09/secret-state-by-peter-hennessy.html

The Gordians: Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Chapter 7 Part 2

So the senate was now resolved to do battle with the upstart Maximin.  Everyone’s hopes were invested in the Gordians, who they felt represented the best of the traditions of Rome.  Envoys to the rest of Italy had quickly established a high level of support in the heart of the empire.  The problem was Maximin had the army, and he knew how to use it.  Once the excitement of the rebellion had died down the sober assessment of the situation was bleak. What could stop a march into Italy by the legions.  And the nominal leader of the revolt hadn’t even made it to Rome yet.

In fact, he was never going to – as the Senate deliberated the situation in Rome things changed radically in Carthage.   A small number of troops guarding the frontiers in Mauritania, with some barbarian allies, had responded to the threat to their paymaster by invading Africa and advancing towards Carthage.  The younger Gordian led a large but untrained levy out against them.  They were no match for real soldiers and were easily defeated. Gordian himself was killed – an heroic but futile sacrifice.  His father, despairing, killed himself on hearing the news.  The revolt in Africa had lasted barely over a month. 

This not only deprived the Romans of their new found leader – it also made apparent what must have been obvious.  There was simply nothing that could stop Maximin reasserting his authority in exactly the same way.   But given the tyrant’s personality, there was no option of surrender either.  He would show no mercy whatever the circumstances.  All they could do was meet whatever was in store with as much courage as could be mustered.  A senator called Trajan, a relative of the great Trajan, summed up the situation they faced in a crisis meeting in the Temple of Concord.

“We have lost two excellent princes; but unless we desert ourselves, the hopes of the republic have not perished with the Gordians… Let us elect two emperors, one of whom may conduct the war against the public enemy,whilst his colleague remains at Rome to direct the civil administration. I cheerfully expose myself to the danger and envy of the nomination, and give my vote in favour of Maximus and Balbinus. Ratify my choice,conscript fathers, or appoint in their place, others more worthy of the empire.”

It was a council of despair, but there was no other course open.

And so the senators Maximus and Balbinus were selected to try and save the hopeless situation.   The team looked good on paper.  Balbinus was an experienced and effective administrator. Maximus had had a successful military career.  But no matter how good your skills are leading an army, it isn’t going to be a lot of help without an army to lead in the first place.  Italy had not seen fighting since the establishment of the empire by Augustus.  The country’s defences were long neglected and the Italians as unused to combat as the heroic but unsuccessful younger Gordian.

But before they could even get started on putting together some kind of defence, yet another crisis suddenly forced itself onto them.  The people rose up, surrounded the Senate and demanded a third emperor be appointed.  From somewhere they had found the 13 year old grandson of Gordian who they now wanted to be appointed as a third co-emperor.  Disunity was the last thing needed at a time like this, so the Senate consented and Gordian the third became the latest imperial member of the house of Gordian.  Few dynasties in history can have got to their third emperor in less than three months.

How did Maximin respond to the challenge to his position?  It is reported that he greeted the news with the fury of a wild beast and was so angry that he threatened to kill those about him, even his own son.  If true, he seems to have calmed down pretty quickly.  Rather than marching directly to Rome to put down the puny rebellion, he stayed to finish his campaign against the barbarians. He did not appear in Italy until the following Spring.  Gibbon notes that this behaviour could indicate that he was not quite the monster he is portrayed as by the party that opposed him.

He at least did not put the borders of the empire at risk in his haste to avenge himself.
This enabled Maximus to put into practice the only strategy open to a general without effective fighting troops.  The land was cleared of people and supplies and everything that could be of use to the invaders was removed or destroyed. 

When Maximin’s army finally made it into Italy it was to find that all the available supplies had been stripped and removed to the defensible cities.  Supplying an army is no trivial matter so this was a serious blow against Maximin.  But nonetheless, he still had the upper hand.  He no doubt intended to act with speed.  The scorched earth policy simply made speed necessary as well as desirable.  The first blow fell on Aquileia.  The city was well stocked with provisions and was defended heroically.  The fortifications, built by Marcus Aurelius, although not well maintained were strong.  Determination was evident on both sides. The attackers uprooted vineyards and pulled down the houses outside the walls to provide timber to build siege engines.  The defenders used artificial fire to burn them down.

Facing unexpected stubborn resistance in a ravaged country, it was not too long before the besiegers were starting to run low on supplies. By contrast the defenders were well supplied, their morale high and they were effectively led by some representatives sent by the Senate.

The obvious strategy for Maximin was to break off and march on Rome.  Maximus had only newly levied troops and some auxiliaries, but knew that a battle had to be risked if the capital was to be protected.  The chances were slim but there was no choice.

But in the event, the untried army was never put to the test.  In the besieging camp disease and hunger had led to yet another revolution.  With apparently no easy success in sight the soldiers had turned against Maximin, and killed him, his son and his closest advisers. They displayed his head on a spear to the defenders in the town. The gates were opened and the former attackers were allowed in for some much needed food.

Rather than having to fight a desperate battle against the odds, Maximus advanced only to find a leaderless army ready to submit to the Senate’s authority.

Maximus returned to Rome and was greeted outside the city by the other two emperors, who  with him led a great triumphant procession.  Against all the odds, the Senate had won.  Power was now in the hands of two men selected by and from the Senate, not unlike the consuls of centuries earlier.  The army had been brought to heel in a way that only shortly before could not have been conceived.  And all this had been accomplished with minimal bloodshed. 

It looked possible that a new golden age had dawned for the empire.

Thanks to Wikipedia for the images.

Byzantium The Lost Empire

Empress Theodora in a Byzantine Mosaic

This series ran on UK television a couple of years ago.  The photography is truly stunning.  I am going to be reminding myself with this YouTube edition, which by my calculation must sadly be missing some of the footage that was originally screened.  It is probably not going to be as enjoyable on the computer as on the full sized telly screen, but still well worth a look.

Don’t expect anything much in the way of detailed analysis of politics or history, this is all about the art, architecture and religion with the history just thrown in as a bit of background.  But the story of the look and feel is a story that is well worth telling.  It is so familiar that we hardly notice on a day to day basis just how much we owe to the Roman Empire, particularly via the eastern half of it.   When you look at London, Paris and Washington the common language of power they all share in their architecture all goes back to the churches and monuments of Constantine’s great city.

One interesting statistic to bear in mind is that when it was built, Hagia Sofia, the church of the Holy Wisdom was the largest enclosed space in the world.  It kept that distinction until the late Middle Ages.  Today that honour is held by the Pentagon.

My only warning is that it is best to watch this video when you are relaxed and in no hurry.  The Eastern Roman empire lasted a thousand years, and this documentary sometimes feels like it is going to last nearly as long.  This also means that the narrators love of his subject and enthusiasm for all things Byzantium gets a little grating after a while.

But as a way of getting a feel for the size, scale, look and feel of an empire to which we owe so much and which we all know so little about, it is an unbeatable experience.

Quantitative Easing the Roman Way

When someone finds a Roman coin in a field, they often imagine that they have stumbled across something of great value.  It is after all old, rare and made of a precious metal.  The reality is that only the first of those things is true.  Roman coins can be bought on Ebay for a pound or less.  And the disappointment with the low value of the coin is something that the original owner probably shared.

 

I am not sure how I acquired it, but I have just been looking at a paper from the learned journal Ecological Complexity.  It is by Joseph Tainter.  I’m afraid I don’t know anything about him except that he has written this very interesting paper.  I did a bit of googling and learned that he has written books and papers on ecological issues.  He is currently at Arizona University.

The paper is called Social Complexity and Sustainability and it’s premise is that societies become more complex when they acquire more energy.  So for instance Great Britain became more complex as a result of the improved harnessing of power during the industrial revolution.  But that this complexity makes the society less adaptable and less able to cope with shocks.  All interesting stuff, especially for those of us with highly specialised jobs that are only sustainable in an energy dependent highly complex society like the one we live in at the moment.

Its a very interesting paper but I only have time to pull out one thread from it at the moment.  He uses the Roman Empire as an example of a complex society.  During the time that the empire expanded the Romans were able to pull in new resources that enabled them to become more complex and sophisticated.  When the empire stopped expanding the issue became sustainability.  This could only be done by increasing central revenues via taxes for distribution to the civil service and much more importantly the army.

Well there was one other way.  As the empire was a money based economy there was also the option of debasing the coinage.  The medium of exchange was silver, and the denarius was supposed to be an official designation of a prescribed amount of silver.   But of course, if you replace a bit of silver with a cheaper metal, nobody will notice and you get more denari for your bullion.

In the long run of course it doesn’t create any more resources, it just diverts the resources away from the individual citizen and towards the central government.  In this respect it is very much like taxation. But it has the advantage that the citizen doesn’t notice in the short run.  In the long run it puts prices up – but who cares about the long run when you have legions of highly armed men trained to kill who are expecting to get paid on your hands.

Interestingly Professor Tainter (I am assuming he is a professor) produces a graph showing the silver content of the denarius over the first two and half centuries of the empire.  I don’t want to infringe his copyright so I will do a sketch of his graph.

The decline starts at about 60AD and is fairly steady from then on.   But the rate of debasement increases from 160 until around 235 when it plummets ending up at zero in 269.  What does this tell us?

Well, basically they were all at it from Nero onwards.   Once the process had started the logic compelled it the direction of further debasement.  After all, you would need a lot of silver to increase the content of coins.  And you would have to withdraw the coins already in circulation.  There is one upward spike around 200.  Maybe Severus was able to extract a lot of metal from the Parthians when he sacked their capital in 197.

But basically each successive emperor bequeathed his successor a currency that was worth less than the one before, even though there were many more coins in circulation.   It is little wonder that you can find Roman coins in fields in southern England so easily.  The original owners probably couldn’t be bothered to pick them up if they dropped them.  By the end of the third century the official coins were worthless and the government would not accept them itself as payment for taxes.

It is also pretty obvious that people behind the debasement knew very well what they were up to.  Until the very end, the debasement was small and stealthy and probably did relatively little actual economic harm in the short run.  It isn’t difficult to get used to small levels of inflation.

It may well not have been the palace itself that was the primary motor  of the process.  There is a story that the emperor Aurelian tried to reform the currency, and the coiners reacted so violently against his proposals that the emperor had to send the army in with a reported 7,000 casualties.  It is entirely possible that some or even most of the gains were funelled into private hands.  Cash bought power in the Roman world, much like it does today.  The debasers may well have been an influential lobby.

So are there any lessons for us today?  Economically speaking debasing the quantity of silver in the coinage is exactly the same process as printing money, or to use its current euphemism quantitative easing.  You can get away with it for a long time.  The Caesars managed it for centuries.  But the benefits were pretty thin, and not particularly fair.   The senatorial class, whose wealth was primarily in the form of inflation proof estates did very well.  The mass of poorer citizens were paid wages in money that continually declined in value.  This made it impossible for them to save.

Governments around the world, especially in the US and UK, are cheerfully churning money out at the moment.  Will the effect be the same as in Ancient Rome?  I personally think not.   Sophisticated as they were, the Romans didn’t have the level of complexity to have what we call a financial sector.  There was plenty of trading going on and lending and borrowing was widespread.  But they didn’t have banks that were able expand the supply of credit.  The closest they had was silver mines.  So the only people able to increase the supply of money into the system were the government owned mints.

I have a feeling that all the quantitative easing at the moment is simply replacing some of the inflationary effects that banks were having by increasing the effective amount of money around through various clever bits of financial engineering.  Most of these were simply ways of hiding up the fact that the banks were lending with no collateral. 

But there is a clear danger of things getting out of hand like they did in the third century.  If nothing else, it shows that once you start this kind of thing,  it is difficult to stop.


Reference

Joseph Tainter Social Complexity and Sustainability Ecological Complexity 3 (2006) 91–103

Thanks to Wikipedia for the picture of the Roman Coin

I have just found an interesting sounding book by Joseph Tainter on Amazon.  I haven’t read it but it looks interesting.  (Bit pricey for a paperback though.)

Barbarian Emperor: Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Chapter 7 Part 1

If you want to follow this series it starts with the reign of the first Roman emperor Augustus.  The previous episode is covers the reign of Alexander Severus the last of the Severan dynasty to rule Rome.

Few reigns, even in the brutal world of Rome, had such an ugly start as that of Maximin. There is no record of the plotting that led up to his coup, but on the day appointed he was acclaimed by the troops in the camp as emperor.  Alexander, realising that his tenuous grip on the throne was now gone fled to his tent.  It was no protection, and pleading for mercy and blaming his mother, he was killed in short order. His crime was simply to stand in the way of someone determined to have the throne.

Maximin had no claim whatever to the throne. His father was a Goth and his mother an Alan. There was no way to dress it up.  Rome had its first barbarian emperor. Maximin got his big break from the emperor Severus. On a tour of the Balkans the emperor set up camp to celebrate the birthday of his son Geta. A wrestling contest was part of the show, and Maximin a tall and strong man had proved able to beat several Roman soldiers.  Severus was impressed and signed him up to his guards.  He showed both skill, leadership and intelligence and by the time of the reign of Alexander had got to be in charge of the 4th legion.

The discontent of the troops gave him his chance. His long and distinguished career in the army, including some training duties, gave him the contacts.  There doesn’t seem to have been any particular pretext or trigger – the driving force was simply the ambition of Maximin.

Having seized power in the most brutal way he proceeded to exercise that power with brutality.  His first pre-occupation was in keeping the barbarians pressing on the borders out. In this he was, as might be expected given his background, successful.  But the civil administration was dealt with in the same manner. Enemies were simply killed.  Potential enemies were killed. And people who had know Maximin before his elevation were also targets – witnesses as they were to where he had come from.  There was a strong element of show to all this. Maximin knew that he could not rule through love or legitimacy.  The only option open was a reign of fear.  For instance a senator called Magnus was killed on suspicion of plotting against the emperor.  It doesn’t hugely matter if the accusation was true or false.  Along with Magnus himself another 4,000 were killed as co-conspirators. There was no semblance of a trial.  Many of the killings were carried out in ways that were both cruel and theatrical.  Victims were clubbed to death, or sewn into the skins of wild beasts, or thrown to animals.

There was a purpose-terrifying his new subjects into submission.  The other aspect was the need to keep the troops sweet.  This required cash.  Lots of it.  Taxes were raised with similar brutality to every other aspect of the reign.  But in addition temples were looted of their treasures.  The ordinary citizens could probably have lived with terror directed at the senatorial class.  When it hit their own pockets they got more concerned.  And to add sacrelige against the Gods – that was both wrong and risky. Many died defending their religious relics. 

Maximin’s aim was clearly to be feared rather than loved.  He succeeded only too well and came to be hated by the mass of his subjects.

It was only a matter of time before this discontent broke out.  In the event, the first place to try and resist was the peaceful province of Africa. The procurator of Africa was as rapacious as his master required and was in the process of exacting the entire fortune of a wealthy family.  Facing ruin, in despair they resisted.  Killing the procurator and forming their household into a makeshift army.  The standard of rebellion was raised in the small town of Thysdrus. But who to lead it?

As it happened, there was a highly eligible candidate right on hand. A stately old senator called Gordian, already in his eighties, was the possessor of immaculate connections. He was related to Trajan no less on his mother’s side and on his father’s  from the Gracchi – a notable family of the late republic. He had succeeded in keeping out of the way of successive tyrants by sticking in his comfortable African villa – once owned by Ceasar’s great rival Pompei – and showing no sign of ambition. His connections could easily have got him command of a province or an army earlier in life.  But given the way the empire was being run, keeping out of politics was probably a shrewd move.  But having accepted late in life the role of proconsul of Africa he now found himself, along with his 22 year old son, right in the thick of it.

The aristocratic Gordians must rank among the most unlikely rebels in history.  The older Gordian was cultured and amiable. He used some of his enormous fortune to put on elaborate games for the population. He also composed a huge poetical history of former days.  All in all a man who enjoyed life too much to risk it in the hazards of the pursuit of power. His young son was shaping up to be an equally appealing and unthreatening character.  He had a library of 62,000 books and a harem of 22 concubines, both designed as Gibbon notes wryly ‘for use rather than ostentation’.

They moved to Carthage and were acclaimed by the population.  But what to do next?  They were now in effective control of a province, but not of any troops. They knew that their situation was quite simply hopeless as it stood.  So they sent a message to the Senate asking to be recognised as the legitimate emperors.  The Senate now faced a choice.  To renounce the Gordian’s would in effect legitimise Maximin.  But to support them would inevitably bring down on their heads the wrath of the barbarian at the head of the legions.  They met in secret in the Temple of Castor to decide on their next course of action.

The meeting must have been a tense one. Gibbon translates a speech given by the consul Syllanus. “The two Gordians have been declared emperors by the general consent of Africa. Let us return thanks to the youth of Thysdrus, let us return thanks to the faithful people of Carthage, our generous deliverers from a horrid monster–Why do you hear me thus coolly, thus timidly? Why do you cast those anxious looks on each other? Why hesitate? Maximin is a public enemy! may his enmity soon expire with him, and may we long enjoy the prudence and felicity of Gordian the father, the valour and constancy of Gordian the son!”

His stirring speech roused the Senate. The sent some tribunes to seek out the Praetorian praefect Vitalianus – Maximin’s guard in the city.  He was killed and the assassins ran through the streets waving their blood stained daggers and calling out the people to support the insurrection. The statues  of Maximin were thrown down and the authority of Gordian proclaimed.  Where Rome led the rest of Italy followed.

The next episode covers the short lived dynasty of the Gordians.

Thanks to George Shulkin for use of image of Balbinus, and to Wikipedia for the rest of the images.

God is not Great by Christopher Hitchens

I am very grateful to the lay preachers at Frenchgate Chapel in the nineteen sixties for being just about the worst advocates for their religion I can imagine.  They not only failed to convince me, at about age 7, that I should believe in God.  They failed to persuade me that they did either.

Looking back at the age of fifty I realise what a lucky escape I had. I am not talking about escaping from some hideous fate. Child molesting clergy, while a lot more common than anyone realised were and are still pretty rare. But the horrific experience of a few is one thing. The not terrible, but nonetheless still rather poor experience of the majority is another.

Thanks to the incompetence of the particular one I came into contact with, I didn’t appreciate just how effective most churches are at impressing their doctrines onto young minds. Knowing a bit more about the way the things work I can now better understand the misery it must cause. Trying to believe the unbelievable is hard work. And on top of that there is the guilt of failing to live up to the impossible demands Christianity places on its adherents. It may not be out and out child abuse, but what an unnecessary burden to place on young impressionable minds.

When I was younger I imagined that I was just a natural skeptic immune to such things.  Now I am not so sure.  I just think I had a lucky escape from a lot of nonsense that could easily have distracted me from more useful stuff and would almost certainly have made me unhappy.  I should thank my Dad too for buying a marvellous set of encyclopaedias. These included an illustrated Bible, but that was dull, dull, dull compared to the one devoted to science.  That put me on the course to a reason based approach to life that has stood me in good stead ever since. I have even been lucky enough to be able to make a career out of it.

So when I saw that Christopher Hitchens had written a book slamming faith, my reaction was that there was no particular reason for me to read it.  It was hardly going to change my mind about anything. I have a long enough reading list as it is without adding stuff to it that just confirms what I already believe.  (Or to be precise, don’t believe.)

But after a recent bad experience exposed to the full blast of someone’s religious zeal I thought it might be nice to lay back and bathe in eloquently expressed atheism for a while.  So I gave it a spin and thoroughly enjoyed it.  Hitchens is an aggressive debater and goes straight for the jugular.  A few chapter headings give the flavour.  Religion’s Corrupt beginnings. The Nightmare of the Old Testament. The “New” Testament Exceeds The Evil Of The “Old” One.  You get the picture.

So what is Hitchen’s problem with religion?  Well for a start it is manifestly false.  He recalls being told as a child that God had made trees and grass green to be easy on the eye. Even the youthful Hitchens could see the glaring fallacy in that – obviously it is an adaptation and not a contrivance.  False then, but is it nonetheless appealing?  Not in the least.  Who wants to spend all eternity worshipping an all powerful but somewhat insecure God who threatens you with eternal torment if you don’t. These are not beliefs worthy of respect. 

But false as it is, does it make people behave better?  Hardly.  For the willingness of the true believer to do the most unspeakable of deeds, even to their own children Hitchens recalls the story of Abraham and Isaac. Abraham had got as far as getting the knife ready for the deadly blow, and his willingness to go through with the grotesque sacrifice is held up as virtuous.  This is just one example.  In story after story the sheer mindless brutality of what has been done in the name of God is paraded.  All faiths are guilty and all have been used to justify the worst behaviour that can be imagined. 

But surely examples like Hitler and Stalin show that the very worst behaviour comes with the atheist label.  Hitchens demolishes this argument with the relish of Billy Bunter devouring a long awaited cake.  Hitler was, as far as it is possible to tell, a practising Roman Catholic.  He certainly wrote positively about Christian culture and specifically criticises atheists in Mein Kampf.  He often portrays himself as the champion of Christian Europe defending it from the threat of the godless. If he was an atheist he expressed it in a very odd way.  And even if he were he clearly and unambiguously used Christian imagery to mobilise people behind him.  And the church was only to happy to work with him.

Stalin was at least nominally an atheist. But even here it stretches it to describe the Soviet Union as an atheist state. Communism was a secular movement, but one that had quite a lot of idealogical baggage over and above disbelief in God.  There was in any case an official church and state sponsored theological colleges. The details are interesting. It arms you well for your next discussion of this issue down the pub.  I particularly like his knock out blow.  Religion has clearly fallen from its claim to moral pre-emminence if all it can offer is being better than fascist and communist dictators.  Moral authority, as Shakespeare might have put it, should be made of sterner stuff.

Up to this point the book had been good knockabout stuff.  But as I had feared, I hadn’t really learnt anything new that challenged what I already thought.  While entertaining, the tone of the book had been resolutely negative.  But towards the end Hitchens starts to look not at the follies and excesses of the believers, but at the courage of the non-believers.  This starts in a curious place – something that seems at first sight to be a tiny insignificant detail of history.  At around Christmas the Jews celebrate the festival of hanukkah.  The significance of this particular date on the Jewish calendar has been played up in modern times by Jews living among predominantly Christian populations as it is handy to be able to fit in with everyone else’s celebrations. Fair enough, and why not.  It can’t be much fun missing out on a party. 

But the origins of this convenient excuse to join in are more interesting than you might think.  It marks events in the third century BC.  There was a struggle between Jews who had become hellenised and those that wanted to stick to traditional cultural practises.  The leaders of the traditionalists were the Macabees, who defeated their opponents so completely that it was quite a surprise to me to find that there had ever been Hellenistic Jews in the first place.

The seven armed candle stick that is associated with the festival of Hannakah relates to a miracle that occured when the temple was reconsecrated after its pollution by another faction.  They only had one day’s supply of oil, but this somehow managed to last the full eight days required by the protocol.  A fairly modest miracle by the standards of most faiths.  It is hardly parting the Red Sea.  But the real miracle is that the tight control of relgious practice by the orthodox established at this point survived for so many centuries, and even persists in some small religious groups in Israel to this day. 

Hitchens is in despair. If only the zealots had not won then, we would not have had Christianity or Islam.  Rather than a yawning chasm between us and the rationalists of the Classical Age, Europe might have developed continuously building on the foundations of Greek learning. There would have been no need for a Renaissance because the ancient knowledge would never have been lost in the first place.  Human progress could have been brought forward by 1500 years.

I imagine a Jewish reader might be beginning to get a bit alarmed here. The Catholic Church has not long ceased blaming the Jews for the murder of Christ.  Is Hitchens now trying to pin the Dark Ages on them?  Well he clearly isn’t anti-semetic.  He goes on to give an impressive inventory of Jewish achievements – all of which were the result of throwing off the shackles imposed by orthodox judaism.  Hearing praise lavished on a group you are not a member of is often tiresome, but as always it is well written and hard to argue against. 

One of the earliest Jews to whom we should be grateful is Spinoza. Spinoza is one of the first people who we can be sure really was an atheist. Or at least so scholars tell us.   I had a go at reading Spinoza and I couldn’t make head or tail of it – but apparently the meaning of what he was up to was very clear to his contemporaries. Spinoza was banished from his Jewish community in Amsterdam and was not able to publish his work in his own lifetime. We get to read the wording of the anathema against him, and scary stuff it is. It is so easy to forget in our modern world where one can express any opinion one likes without fear, that to be an atheist was a dangerous business in a world where the Church had real influence.

I have to say this is not a subject that had ever really crossed my mind before.  Faith has been steadily declining for the last five hundred years. But it has always seemed to me to be a simple natural process rather like an abandoned building slowly decaying.  But this is very condescending of me.  Why shouldn’t skeptics be found in any age. Indeed there is a psalm that expressly scorns unbelievers.  Why would they be mentioned if they didn’t exist. It is easy to see why they would keep their views to themselves.  To question the religious authorities was quite likely to get you killed.  And there isn’t much benefit to becoming a martyr for an atheist – you are hardly going to get rewarded for it in a next life.

God is not Great really comes alive in the last couple of chapters where we look at the courage of people who proposed a more rational and enightened view of the world.  Spinoza was the start of a stream that would become a flood, but at every stage there was risk.  Voltaire, Hume, and even someone as late as Darwin are all praised for being willing to stick their necks out.  Even after the religious lost the power to actually kill or punish people they didn’t like, they continued to do their best to distort the memory of more enlightened thinkers.  The imaginary deathbed recantations of Voltaire and Darwin are good examples, and continue to get wide publicity in some places.

Einstein, who Hitchens memorably and unanswerably points out deserves more thanks from mankind than every rabbi that ever lived, got this treatment while he was still alive.  Neither Hitchens, nor I, can better the great man himself’s own words on the matter. 

‘It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.’

The willingness of some people to break the commandment about bearing false witness in order to claim a non-believer into the fold against their will is a fairly mild crime compared to many that have been carried out in the name of religion and documented in detail in this book.  But sometimes it is the petty and banal things that rankle the most. It is hard to believe someone dishonest enough to pull that kind of stunt actually believes in the existence of an all knowing all judging God – maybe my 7 year old self had already grasped one of the essential truths about religion. A lot of people involved in it quite actively are nonetheless not that firm in their actual belief.

If you are religious, don’t read this book. You won’t enjoy it.  It is of course a polemic. Grudging references are made to some good things done by the religious, but it is not intended to be a balanced weighing up of the evidence.  The good that that faithful do is always suspect. Are they truly worthy people or are they simply trying to gain the favour of their imaginary friend?  But nonetheless, the best response to criticism is to live a good and honourable life and to act in accordance with your principles.  There have been some religious figures who command the respect even of an atheist like me.  I would also warn atheists to be careful when reading it too.  It is very entertaining to revel in the shortcomings of others, but it isn’t necessarily helpful.

That religion attracts hucksters and frauds is not really a revelation, and it is something that only the most dewy eyed idealistic believer is not already well aware of. The contradictions and lack of logic of their faith are also reasonably apparent to most believers. They have managed to cope with them.  Most believers don’t feel personally responsible for everything done in the name of their particular demonination.  The people they meet in their congregations are not monsters, not at first sight at any rate.  God is not Great is much too wide in scope to dent the beliefs of any particular person.

And this is the weakness of God is not Great. Most people are not that attached to their particular faith.  They pick and choose what they want to believe from it.  Some reject more than they accept. They don’t regard themseleves as part of a block of believers.  The representitives of their faith they meet in person are not thorougly evil men like Torquemada or Pope Benedict.  The atheists they know aren’t Einstein or Spinoza either.  The polemics against the evils or religion, no matter how well founded, simply don’t resonate at an everyday level.  Somebody should tackle the subject from the other side.  I can even offer a working title.  God is not only not great, but boy does he make Sundays boring and do you really need someone to tell you right from wrong at your age?

  
In the meantime, God is not Great is a good read and very educational. I don’t think you will find yourself giving up half way through, but if you are short of time the last two chapters are the best.