Persecution: Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Chapter 16

Christ’s Death must have been hard to cope with for his followers

“Imagine no religion, it’s easy if you try.”

So sang John Lennon.  I miss you John.  It would be really nice to think you were up there somewhere and could know how much we all love you.  I imagine that the followers of Jesus felt much the same.  Their much loved charismatic leader was dead.  Who can blame them for wishing him back to life, in some form or another.  It is very human and very understandable.

So that is how I think Christianity got started.  Jesus was a man who inspired a lot of love, and deep down that is what it is all about.  It has been twisted into some pretty evil forms since then, but there is still something good and wholesome buried extremely deeply at its core.  But why was this originally harmless cult persecuted so ferociously from its very origin?

It isn’t as if the Romans were routinely intolerant, far from it.  They were happy to respect other people’s Gods.  New ones acquired abroad could often become very fashionable.  You were welcome to embrace as many or as few as suited your taste.  You could have none at all if you wished like many Epicureans. The philosophic emperor Marcus Aurelius chose to believe in them all, but thought that they had better things to do than bother with the affairs of puny humans.  Religious persecution was not so much rare as simply not really something that would occur to anyone.  And yet as soon as Christianity appeared its adherents fell foul of the authorities, if the Acts of the Apostles detailed in the Bible are to be believed.

But perhaps they aren’t to be believed.  They were written a long time after the event, and have been extensively modified over the years.  Gibbon starts his history of the impact of Christianity with the first independent accounts of persecution in the reign of Nero.  These by contrast to the Bible, seem reliable enough.  Rome had burnt down, there were mutterings that Nero had been behind it.  Nero looked around for a scapegoat and the Christians fitted the bill.  The problem is that it is hard to believe that only some 30 years after the death of Christ there were already enough Christians in Rome to make them viable scapegoat material.

Gibbon comes up with an ingenious theory to get round this.  Nero’s wife Poppaea may have been Jewish. If so, she might have been aware of the Christians in their capacity as a troublesome Jewish sect.  There were plenty of Jews around and they would have made much more credible scapegoats.  Maybe Poppaea diverted Nero towards the Christians as a way of saving the Jews.  But although Nero’s persecution is attested to by Tacitus and others, we don’t really know too much about it.

The fire in Rome took place in 64 AD.   We hear very little about the Christians for the next couple of centuries.  Pliny corresponded with Trajan about how to deal with the Christians in Asia Minor.  Gibbon wrings the maximum amount of information from the account.  Pliny was a man of the world with plenty of contacts and experience of the legal system but nonetheless he had no precedent to draw on to deal with the new sect.  They must have been pretty rare.  (This kind of inference is what historians call reading the unwitting text.  Gibbon worked it out himself without any professional training, but he was a natural.)

There is some very dubious evidence that Philip the Arab might have been a sympathiser, but he was pretty discrete about it if he was.  It was only in the reign of Decius that there was any unambiguous and systematic persecution of Christians.  This started in January 250.

As persecutions go, it was on the mild end of the spectrum.  This is evident by looking at the career of Cyprian, the bishop of Carthage.  As the leading Christian in North Africa he was obviously going to be a target.  When things kicked off he was faced with the choice between martyrdom or dishonour.   Luckily he was spared this by some divine inspiration in the form of a vision telling him what to do.  So as instructed, he went into hiding but carried on running his diocese via letters.  His exile wasn’t very long lived and he was soon back with his flock.  Some of them had bowed to the authorities, but others had stuck to their principles.  This led to an argument, but the fact that there were enough of them to fall out at the very least shows that they hadn’t been massacred to a man.  And it is strongly suggestive that they felt pretty secure too. You don’t have internal arguments when you feel yourself under threat.

Cyprian did get martyred in the end, but let’s have a quick look at his character first.  He was an upper class Roman who converted to Christianity as an adult, after some success in public life.  He was well educated and an able writer many of whose writings have survived.  He seems to have been a very able leader – certainly according to his own writing but also by the position he held in the face of a lot of competition.  He was also pretty political taking a position in the internal arguments of the Christians at the time.

Cyprian’s martyrdom seems to have been a surprisingly dignified and well ordered business when it finally came about. The persecution of Decius did not continue after his death battling with the Goths.  This enabled Cyprian to return to his Bishop’s role in Carthage.

A few years later Valerian started it up again. Now Cyprian had been able to deflect criticism of his less than heroic tactics in the face of the earlier persecution.  But he couldn’t get away with it twice.  There are only so many times you can pull the ‘I had a vision’ line.  This time he was going to have to accept martyrdom.

But the whole affair seems to have been run almost as a publicity stunt on behalf of Christianity.  Okay he was to be beheaded – but by Roman standards that was a pretty civilised version of the death penalty.  But with the possible exception of the getting his head cut off bit, most of the circumstances must have been pretty much just how Cyprian would have wanted them.

Cyprian was held under house arrest for about a year while the authorities decided what to do about him.  They don’t seem to have been particularly anxious to get rid of him, and even when the final instructions came through, they gave him the option of a last minute recantation.

This set up a great dramatic scene. The officials’ visit to Cyprian’s villa became a public occasion with crowds of onlookers.  When he refused to recant a huge cry went up.  The sentence was carried out, and that very night the body of the newly made martyr was borne in a torch lit procession by his followers to be buried in the Christian cemetery.

To our modern media savvy brains the whole thing just cries of ineptitude. The emperors never seemed to realise what they were dealing with. The rules for dealing with the Christians were designed to encourage them to desist not to drive them underground.  Torture was used not to extract confessions or information but to encourage them to recant.  Witnesses risked punishment themselves if they didn’t make the charge stick.

All in all, the risk of embracing Christianity was not particularly great.  If you did get caught, a quick sacrifice to a god got you off the hook.  There were certainly not a steady stream of Christians being thrown to the lions.  The Roman Empire was a shockingly brutal and violent place which showed scarcely any respect for human rights and dignity, yet somehow faced with this huge internal threat to its traditions and its internal order it turned into a cute little pussy cat rolling over and waiting for its tummy to be tickled.

You feel like yelling, get a grip!  These guys are going to take over if you don’t get real about your persecuting practices.

Like a lot of other issues, it took Diocletian to take a calm look at the situation and get some kind of plan into operation.  With his organisational skill and awareness of human nature, he was the first emperor to finally get the persecution set up on a reasonably effective basis.  Like most his activities his good sense can be detected.  He ended the legal protection of the Christians. He also took action against the organisation – it was the organised nature of the Christians that was after all the basic problem.  He had churches destroyed, Bibles burnt and funds seized.

Even now, actual killings were still a rarity. And Diocletian seems to have limited the early stages to the Nicomedia area where he could personally supervise it.  You can’t help thinking that his heart wasn’t really in it.

Shortly after the programme was initiated the imperial palace caught alight.  Twice.  Diocletian’s life itself was at risk.  Was this revenge by the fanatical Christians?  It is a possibility.  It was certainly seized on as a justification by Galerius, who had taken a deep dislike to the cult.  It has even been suggested that he may have been behind it as a justification for stiffer measures. Galerius was to continue Diocletian’s persecutions with more enthusiasm during his own short reign.

At this distance in time we’ll never know if the fire was the work of the Christians. It seems most likely that the fire was an accident.  These things usually are but conspiracies are so much more fun aren’t they.

But even Galianus gave up his crusade against the Christians in the end.  He carried on despising them but he did issue a general pardon.

Not long afterwards the newly minted emperor Constantine, who seems to have been a sincere if maybe somewhat flexible Christian himself issued the famous edict of Milan formally allowing religious freedom.  It is tempting to imagine relieved Christians emerging from their places of hiding blinking in wonder at a world that they were finally safe in.

But it wasn’t really like that at all.  By this time active persecution in the West of the empire was a distant memory. And it had been over for several years in the East.  It seems a lot more significant with hindsight than it must have done at the time. Christians were now safe from persecution by pagans. I dare say the majority of pagans were probably glad that religious strife was now over and were looking forward to a more peaceful era ahead where nobody would be killed simply because of what they believed.  If only.

The idea that the Christians in the Roman Empire suffered continual and relentless persecution is a deep seated one, and one which was still being taught even when I was at school.

Well as we have seen it wasn’t like that at all. One view you hear quite a lot from non believers is that religion always causes war and conflict.  But the Roman Empire was full of religious diversity and even though there was plenty of violence, religion was rarely the pretext for it.

You could make a case that the Jewish rebellions were motivated by religious zeal, but given that the Jews were tolerated before and after them, it clearly was possible to get by in the empire even with a very extreme aversion to the official cult.

But there were people killed.  How many were killed in the persecutions initiated by Diocletian?

Gibbon has tried to come up with a figure.  He uses some figures by Constantine’s friend and biographer Eusebius.  He says that 92 Christians were martyred in Palestine.  As Palestine was 1/16 th of the Eastern Empire this gives a total number killed over the whole 10 years of the period of persecution of about 1500.  Or as Gibbon puts it, an annual consumption of around 150.

Looking at the way he makes his calculation it is pretty clear that Gibbon has, quite deliberately, overestimated the true total.  But his number is low enough to justify his next point.  The violence perpetrated by Christians on other Christians has a body count vastly greater.

It still feels controversial to say it, but the facts are stark.  The pre-Christian world was full of religion, and it was full of wars.  But there was no particular connection between the two.  The link between violence and religion first emerged during the persecution of the early church, when some Christians chose to start dying for their faith.

It was a short step from dying for it to killing for it.  With the arrival of Christianity a new level of fanaticism enters history.  Men had fought, killed and carried out unspeakable atrocities before, and would continue to do so.  But now, in addition to killing to take away other people’s property and sometimes their liberty, they would additionally be killed for having the wrong ideas in their heads.

We will be seeing a lot of this gruesome addition to history in the chapters ahead.

Aerotropolis by John Kasarda and Greg Lindsay

In the past Empires were built on the demand for spices. What was so special about spices?  Basically it was that they were valuable, imperishable and portable.  Before modern technology, in particular modern transport, they were just about the only commodity which it was technically feasible to trade on a global scale.  But as technology has developed what can be traded has changed.  And it is still changing.  This book looks at the implications.

It is a very modern book, despite the old fashioned Simcity-like cover. Its a mixture of an economic analysis, a travel guide and an exercise in futurology.   But above all, it is mine of anecdotes and observations around the way the world is changing.  You can dip into it profitably, or you can read it as narrative.  You can basically tune into it with whatever attention span you have available.  If this is done deliberately, it is done with great skill. But I have a feeling that is just the way the authors’ heads are wired.  They are comfortable in the world of timezone hopping travel where time is parceled out to you in variable length dollops and you have to adopt to it in whatever way you can.

The pace is fast, the tone is clear.  Like air travel itself, time is of the essence and an international audience is anticipated.  The authors happen to be American, but their nationality is about the least relevant thing about them, as I’m sure they’d agree.  They are defined not by the country in the world that they live in but by the way that travel about the world.  You would be hard put to place their politics either.  They are clearly in favour of free trade though they feel no need to state it explicitly.  They are clearly in favour of state intervention, again by implication.  But really they are in favour of things that get things going and keep them moving.  I suspect that they would agree with Deng Xiaoping.  The colour of the cat is unimportant, so long as it catches mice.

Aerotropolis – changing world trade

It looks at two of the technologies that emerged in the  twentieth century and which are set to dominate this one.  The Internet has revolutionised the way you can find and buy a product, and air travel has revolutionised the way that product can be delivered.  These things mesh together to create the ‘physical internet’.  Airports become the hubs not just for travellers but for good that are ordered online and transported by air.  Like the spices of a former age, only goods that meet the criteria.  They should be light and high value.  Wheat is out.  Ipods are in.  They are made anywhere in the world but easy access to an airport is essential.  In effect, the manufacturers of these high value goods, along with providers of more basic services like sandwiches are drawn to the environs of the large airports of the world.  An Aerotropolis is born.

Memphis is the world’s biggest aerotropolis, handling nearly 4 million tonnes of cargo a year.  This is very big business indeed. Some 1 in 3 of the jobs in the region are linked to airport, including the head office of Federal Express.

In some ways this is just geography as usual with businesses locating to where it makes sense for them to be.  So if you are Fed Ex, locating near a large aerotropolis like Memphis does make perfect sense, just like a blacksmith setting up shop at a crossroads.  But the spice traders of the past profoundly changed the culture and politics of the world they lived in.  And they were just doing what made commercial sense as well.

The combination of the internet offering an almost infinitely long shop window, and the network of huge airport hubs across the planet able to meet consumer demands for high value goods only a few days after a  mouse has been clicked is unprecedented.  The volume of the goods being traded is not huge.  But the value is.  What will the effects be?

One example catches the way common sense and even logic are undermined in the world of the aerotropolis.  Roses grown in Kenya are on sale all over Europe.  Surely a gross misuse of the Earth’s scarce resources.  Or maybe not – they are cheap because they grow quickly and easily in the equatorial sun without the need for the pesticides and fertilisers necessary in France or Bulgaria.  And even the low prices they command, translated into Kenyan living standards makes their growers wealthier than their neighbours growing food.  Should we begrudge the Africans an income purely for the sake of the fuel the journey to market consumes?

Kenyan Roses – A good thing or a bad thing?

Or will this be a temporary phenomena.  The book doesn’t shy away from the sustainability issue.  The fact that the actual flying bit of the equation only accounts for 2% of world carbon emissions is slipped in, but the whole point of the book is that impact of air travel is much greater than just moving people from one place to another.  Widespread air travel is only possible because of cheap oil.   As the oil runs low and prices creep up, will the aerotropolis continue to be viable?  The way the energy is obtained to run the system today is unsustainable and things will have to change.  Possibly the increasing cost of fuel will choke off air travel and globalisation will go into reverse. 

But there is a lot of money involved in air based trading.  Although the actual physical volume is still trivial, the value of goods traded by air is already close to a third of the total.  So research and development into new fuel sources can be afforded.  Perhaps solar powered fermentation vats directly converting the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere back into energy rich fuels to pump into the planes will soon be another distinctive feature of the aerotropolis.  I wouldn’t bet against it.  Governments around the world are betting on the aerotropolis as the motor of economic growth.  Last March the Chinese government announced plans for a second Bejing airport.  It is intended to open in 2015.  Bear in mind that the current Bejing airport has just taken over from Heathrow  as the world’s second busiest airport.

A world awash with high value goods traded using feats of organisation and technology is already upon us.  The figures indicate that it is growing. What happens next?  In the late Middle Ages towns, with their concentrated wealth, came to first rival and then to overtake the feudal economy based on agriculture.  Eventually this led to the decline in power of the aristocracy and the rise of new forms of state.  Global trade was enabled by ports that allowed countries like Britain and Japan to prosper despite their lack of resources. Railways shaped whole towns and allowed suburbs to be created.

What will hugely profitably and obviously internationally focused airport complexes do to the societies in which they are growing?  What will happen to countries that don’t develop an aerotropolis – are they destined for the backwaters?  And what will happen to national consciousness in a world where all the rich and successful people spend all their time travelling from one country to another.  In fact, will nation states continue to have a meaningful existence?

Aerotropolis doesn’t answer these questions, but it does pose them in an engaging if slightly breathless way.  They do predict that the rise of the aerotropolis will alter the global pecking order.  That at least is likely enough.

A Socialist Reads the Hobbit Part 4

Where Bilbo lives is a very comfortable and law abiding place.  As we get further away from home things get wilder.  The Hobbit is of course a children’s book and Tolkien makes things as simple for his youthful audience.  He designates this area as ‘the Wild’.  This is fairly easy on the brain and gets us to the right place mentally with minimal effort.

We aren’t far into the book before we get to the first adventure. Gandalf has disappeared without explanation – he does this a lot – and the dwarfs have run short of food after an unfortunate incident where the pony with the supplies falls into a river.  We have already worked out that Bilbo is a novice adventurer but we now begin to realise that the dwarfs are not a lot better. But as luck would have it, as night falls they see a fire in the distance.  Bilbo in his capacity as the burglar is sent ahead to try and locate some food.

It turns out that the fire is a troll camp.  Trolls are evil creatures so there is no moral problem with stealing their property which Bilbo proceeds to do by pick pocketing a purse.  He very consciously regards this as a start to his career as a burglar   But as Bilbo might have been expected to know already we are in a world where magic needs to be allowed for.  The purse has both a level of consciousness and loyalty to its owner, and on being stolen it announces the fact. This provides both a convenient plot device and prefigures the invention of the car alarm. Bilbo is captured.

This gives us a chance to get to know the trolls.  There are three of them and they are called Bert, Bill and Fred.  These names sound a bit old fashioned now, but would have been perfectly standard at the time Tolkien was writing.  We even get one of their second names.

The language the trolls use is reminiscent of working class stereotypes from the time Tolkien was writing.  To get an idea have a look, or more particularly a listen, to the way the great Stanley Holloway talks in this clip from My Fair Lady.

One of Elmore Leonard’s rules for writing fiction is to avoid the use of regional accents or patois.  It’s a sound enough rule most of the time, but Tolkien does it with such great skill he has to be forgiven.  I love the way the trolls’ conversation is dealt with.  “Yer can’t expect folk to stop here for ever just to be et by you and Bert. You’ve et a village and a half between yer, since we come down from the mountains. How much more d’yer want?”.  The well meaning liberal in me wants to disapprove of this apparent mockery of lower class diction, but I am obliged to respect how well he captures it.  And of course nobody speaks like that any more.

It is easy to imagine the origin of the trolls in Tolkien’s mind as big grown ups from his own childhood.  In fact his conception of trolls is rather different from how I remember thinking of them as a child.  Trolls were not large and lumbering, but small and vicious. They would hide in particular places and would be ready to eat you if you failed to meet a particular formula.  For instance there was supposed to be a troll that lived under a footbridge over a nearby railway.  If you tried to get across the bridge on your own this particular troll would eat you if you didn’t know its name.  (I didn’t).    Another one lived in some gooseberry bushes and would eat you if you ate unripe gooseberries. So trolls were sort of agents of instant retribution for misbehaviour.

Given how popular Tolkien’s works have become, I wonder if the traditional view of trolls has now changed to match his.  The trolls in the Hobbit are unpleasant but in a comical way.  They will eat you, but they will have a debate about the best way to cook you first.

And although they are tough, tough enough to deal easily with the Thorin Oakenshield even when he is armed with a flaming branch, they aren’t all that bright.  Despite this the dwarfs’ rescue attempt is a total disaster with all of them being captured.  It is only Gandalf’s return that saves the dwarfs.   By imitating the trolls’ proletarian voices he keeps them arguing until the sun comes up.  It turns out that sunlight turns trolls to stone.

Luckily the trolls were not only too stupid to notice that the sun was about to rise, they also had relatively poor security measures on their troll cave.  Bilbo had found the key to it enabling the party to ransack it for vital supplies for later in the quest.  In fact the troll cave really does provide everything that is needed.  It is well stocked with food to replace what was lost in the river.  They also pick up a couple of handy looking swords.

This short incident brings out several of the recurring themes of Tolkien that can be seen in a lot of his work.  First off, the tendency of evil to be self-defeating.  At the end of the day the trolls undo themselves by being argumentative.  A good bit of socialist co-operation and comradeship would have had the dwarfs minced and half way to being made into pies well before the trolls had to take shelter from daylight.

Also, setbacks have a habit of proving to be great advances in disguise. The swords are to prove very useful later in the quest.  But above all, we see the characters growing as a result of adversity.  The dwarfs and Bilbo will be a lot more professional and hardened when they run into their next adventure.  It is almost as if there is some plan afoot by a higher being to train them for some higher purpose.

The Church as a Franchise

I am indebted to the highly followable  @TLockyer on Twitter for drawing my attention to a fascinating paper available via the marvelous Medievalist.net resource.

http://www.medievalists.net/2011/05/01/franchise-conflict-the-tide-of-antipopes-in-the-aftermath-of-the-eastern-schism/

This looks at the idea that the Church can be thought of as a franchise in quite a lot of detail and uses this idea to interpret so key historical events.

I have done a very quick and unscripted podcast on it, that is not up to the normal standard of my more regular ones.  The big problem with doing podcasts is finding the time to write the scripts.  They are much harder work than just doing a quick bit of writing and the hours just disappear.  I am toying with the idea of doing more unscripted ones just to keep the volume of material in the podcast stream up.  But please let me know if you’d rather I didn’t do this.  I do realise that listening to people saying um a lot can be a bit tedious.

Sorry folks, but the original draft of this blog post got lost in the problems on Blogger around the 13th of May.  I didn’t realise until the podcast was already out on iTunes.  I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to recreate the beautiful one paragraph summary I had written.  Now it is lost for ever I have become convinced it was a truly great if short bit of writing.  I tend to think that about most of what I write unless I make the mistake of rereading it, when I discover all the flaws that somehow crept in during the transcription from my brain into actual words. 

The Satires – Juvenal

 

First off – they may by satires but they aren’t really laugh out loud funny.  There are a few mildly funny stories, but nothing that a modern stand up comedian could do anything with.  But there are times when they bring a smile to your face, and as you read more and get to know the author better you do start to find his approach to life amusing.
You get to know Juvenal pretty well from reading the Satires.  He is a bit like the co-worker you can’t stand to begin with, but who you warm to after a while.  You realise he isn’t as bad as he seems.  Its just a shame he never stops moaning.  The satires are are basically one prolonged moan.  He moans about everything but mainly people.  We can divide the moans into two broad categories.  There are the specific failings of individuals, and there are generalised moans about whole groups of people.

In the world of Juvenal there are no heroes.  There is no nobility.  There is no justice.  Everyone you meet is out for themselves.  Everyone is vain.  Nobody comes out looking good.   Women are unfaithful.  Men are misguided at best, stupid routinely and pretty often downright dishonest.  Greeks are too clever by half and are even less trustworthy than the Romans – and given how bad the Romans are that is saying something.

The stories such as they are, barely count as stories. They don’t have much in the way of plots or punchlines.  They are just tableaux to display Juvenal’s misanthropy.    It would be easy to   et the impression that he is xenophobic and homophobic.  But in reality his hatred of foreigners and homosexuals isn’t really much worse than than his hatred of everyone else. He  really  isn’t a people person.  At first he just gets on your nerves, but you do get to like the miserable git with time.  He does from time to time show his softer side.  He has some pity for a few of the poor fools whose own stupidity has undone them.  And his continual lashing of the immorality of his time at least suggests that he has some morals himself, even if they are buried deep.

But I can’t honestly recommend the Satires as entertainment.  They are worth reading to remind yourself that human nature hasn’t changed that much and that the people who inhabited the Roman Empire were not so different to us.  And they give you an idea of what the place was like that no textbook or archeological study can do.  You realise what they found important, what they ate, what their motivations were (money mainly as it turns out).  Don’t expect too many belly laughs, but there is  a certain pleasure from hearing so directly from someone writing so long ago who seems so modern in his outlook.

There are many things that Juvenal says that you can imagine someone saying today.  Above all, I can’t help but agree with him that in an age like this, who would not be a satirist?

Modern translations of which there are a few are much better than the public domain ones.  You really need the full rudeness and use of slang to get Juvenal’s true level of savagery.  I recommend the Audible audio book for example. 

Audible Edition of the Satires

But having said that, I don’t really think there is much point in looking to Juvenal for entertainment, so if you are just interested for academic reasons the free text on the Amazon link is fine.

Naill Ferguson – Civilization Is the West History, the whole series

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I have given quite a lot of coverage to the individual episodes of Niall Ferguson’s series Civilization, Is the West History?, so I thought it made sense to round it all off with a review of all six programmes as a whole.   Each of them explores a particular aspect of how the West has come to dominate the world for the last 500 years.  But the title, the tone and even the advertising of this series project lay claim to a high ambition. The aim is surely not just to explain how things got to be this way, but to tell us where things are going.  And we do surely need an answer to the question in the title.  Has domination of the world by the West now run its course and possibly be going into reverse.

So what are we to make of the series as a whole?   Is the case it makes believable?  Is the West in fact history and destined to lose its predominant position in the world fairly shortly?  And perhaps most important of all, is it worth plowing through six hours of video to find out.

But before I start, just a quick note about the spelling of Civilization.  Ferguson has chosen to spell it the American way.  As he spends most of his time in the States, this might well have started out as a simple accident.  No doubt he has an American spell checker on his word processor.  But to have kept the American spelling throughout production at Channel 4 in the UK, including in the titles for the broadcast episode must have been a conscious decision.

At first I thought that it might simply be that the producers had an eye on future sales.   Fair enough – America is a big market so the commercial logic is sound enough.  But on reflection I don’t think that can be the real reason.   It isn’t as if Americans wouldn’t understand the Anglicised spelling and I have a feeling that Americans would not be particularly bothered and some may even quite like the foreign spelling. In any case it would hardly have been much trouble to have different labels for the different audiences.

I think it is more likely that Niall Ferguson is sending out a message to his fellow Brits that he is comfortable positioning himself in the mid-Atlantic.  Okay, okay – we’re impressed.  You are an international celebrity.   Well done.   I don’t get to jet about as much as Ferguson does, but I can spell things the American way too, and have done so on my blog.  I feel more important already.

So, on to the series.

My first thought is that although nearly all the episodes worked very well as individual television programmes, I am not sure that all six hung together that well overall. Some went completely off topic – the one about medicine for example hardly covered the nominal subject at all.  Others, like the one on science in particular, were a bit superficial. They were all a bit disjointed and didn’t really tell a single story.  This is a bit surprising because there was a pretty conscious effort to set the programmes in different locations that carried the whole series around the world from China at the beginning back to China at the end.  But the trouble is I think simply that to fit the format, you have to get an hours worth of telly out of each individual factor.  This isn’t an easy thing to do.

But enough of the generalities, did the approach of identifying six killer apps work?  ( I will call them factors from now on if you don’t mind, killer app is a neat aphorism, but it gets to grate after a while.

So the basic question of the series is why did the countries of Europe, particularly Western Europe, come to dominate every measure of world power from around the end of the fifteenth century?  It wasn’t something that anyone at the time would necessarily have predicted.  China, India and the Ottoman Empire were all more advanced in 1500.  It would have been a brave punter who would have bet on the divided and often poverty stricken Europeans even retaining their independence let alone achieving a leading position.

And yet it was the Europeans who would create the industrial and commercial revolutions that would then enable them to create worldwide empires and dominate with ease almost the entire planet.  At the start of the Twentieth century almost the whole globe was either occupied by European powers or was settled by European colonists.   Of significantly sized countries only Japan and China bucked the trend.  And China was far from being in a good state.  Japan made the situation even clearer. It avoided Western domination by adopting Western methods wholesale.

What had happened?  It was just about the biggest event in history since humans left Africa.  The world for the first time had become a single interlinked culture, with the West in the driving seat.  We are still working through the implications today.  So looking at the factors that gave rise to it does sound interesting.  But were there six?

I can’t help thinking that six was a number chosen to fit the format.  Six does sound like a nice round number for a series.  Is it really likely that there were six distinctive advantages all of which were equally necessary? It doesn’t seem to me that that is at all the way the world works.  And can they simply be identified and adopted by other cultures consciously?  Again, that doesn’t seem very likely either.  And is it at all likely that what works in one century in a particular set of countries will continue to work for ever?  Again, it seems a bit unlikely.  My feeling is that it can’t possibly be six separate factors.  I bet that if the answer to this question is ever known it will turn out to be just one factor, or two at the most.

And there was one very notable omission. Throughout the six programmes there were very few references to Japan. Any serious examination of the issue surely ought to look into how, uniquely outside the European tradition, Japan was able to become one of the World’s great powers in the space of a couple of generations.  How did Japan pull this off?  And why did no other country?  This seems to me to be a key question and one that can hardly be ignored in any serious examination of what it is that makes a country powerful.   And yet, ignore it is exactly what this series does.  Was this because it didn’t fit in with some of the conclusions?

But lets look at the six factors and see what we think.

Competition was the first he identified.   The series opens with a comparison between London and Shanghai. The comparison is not flattering to London.  In the fifteenth century, China was much more advanced.   It was also much larger.  A casual visitor would find China a lot more impressive.  But they wouldn’t have seen that beneath the surface China was more monolithic, stiffling trade and exploration.  London was run by, well, it is hard to say really.  China had an emperor and was surrounded by a huge professional bureaucracy.

Large highly bureaucratic organisations are neither efficient nor dynamic.  And they tend to be stable only for a certain period of time.  Their inability to adapt leads in the end to collapse when conditions change or simply when the cost of the bureaucracy becomes too great to be borne.  Surveying history provides plenty of examples of this, but Ferguson’s can’t be faulted.  Nowhere was as organised, bureaucratic and generally big and unwieldy as Imperial China.  By contrast the Europe of the Renaissance was a patchwork quilt of small kingdoms all desperate to find the knack that would give them the edge. It is little wonder that they were came up with more innovations.

But the really crucial difference was how they used their seafaring technology.  The Chinese, when the emperor took it into his head to do so, built large technologically sophisticated ships and put to sea in a big well organised fleet.  The admiral Zheng He commanded ships that may well have been 200 feet in length, dwarfing anything else in the sea, and traveling as far abroad as Arabia, Africa and India.

This fleet was designed to impress.  It can’t have failed to do exactly that.  Any port it approached would have been overawed by the power and prowess of the emperor of China.  It projected prestige.

The much smaller vessels put to sea by the Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish and later the English and the French were not out to impress anyone.  They were engaged in trade and were looking for commercial opportunities rather than photo opportunities.  They didn’t want to turn heads, they wanted to turn a profit.  The desire for riches kept them coming back year after year, and the riches they took back home transformed their society.  Meanwhile, the emperor lost interest in his fleet and disbanded it.  An opportunity to rule the world was missed.  But then ruling China is a big enough job for most people.

This whole story really rang true.  Governments throughout history right up to the present day have loved projects that make them look good.  They are less interested in more bread and butter activities that keep the economy turning.  Bragging rights often been more important to rulers than the welfare of the people they rule. Had the emperors unleashed the trading instincts of its people they would probably have circled the globe in search of opportunities.  But by suppressing competition, they effectively sentenced their empire to stagnation.

Science is the next factor to come under the microscope.  It was encouraged in Europe, but neglected in the Islamic world.  As a result the Ottomans went from being the terror of Europe, able to lay siege to Vienna as late as 1683, to the sick man of Europe.  Their fall from power and influence was largely because they fell behind technologically.   It is a plausible enough story, but it seems to me that this is simply a subset of the competition story in the first episode.  It wasn’t as if the Turks in particular, or Muslims in general were inherently any more opposed to science as a culture than the western Europeans were.

Ferguson illustrates his point by referring to a story about a state of the art  astronomical observatory in Constantinople which was built 1580 but later destroyed at the behest of a muslim cleric.  Is that so different to the trial of Galileo only 50 years later in Rome?  It seems to me that this could easily have gone either way.  The observatory was built in the first place after all – in a truly anti-scientific culture it would never even have been conceived of.  It wasn’t that European leaders early on were huge fans of science, they were just looking for anything that could give them the edge in a conflict.  I remain unconvinced that the rise of science was a cause of the West’s success, I think it was much more like a consequence.

The third programme moved to the Americas.  The thrust of this one was that property rights were the key reason why the United States became powerful and wealthy while the states of South America fell behind despite having more natural resources available to them.  This one stands up pretty well.  When you see a valley where the land is still owned by the same Spaniard families that acquired it at the time of the conquest, with Indian inhabitants living in much the same poverty that they have for centuries, it isn’t hard to buy the idea that the land tenure system in South America is the reason for economic stagnation.  Interestingly Ferguson gave a lot of emphasis to the way the legal system protects property rights but fails to consider the role of the distribution of that property.  You have to wonder how the peasants in the Andes valley would benefit from more strongly established property laws if they themselves don’t actually have any property.

Medicine, according to the fourth programme, allowed Europeans to live longer and conquer Africa.  This was an interesting and thought provoking episode.  But it didn’t really have much to say about the actual premise.  The programme we did get about how Darwinism laid the foundations for the Nazi genocide was an interesting one, but completely irrelevant to the question in hand.  So lets have a go at filling the gap.  Medicine to me seems to be, ultimately, a product of economic power not really a source of it.  People in the West live longer and enjoy better health than people in undeveloped countries.  I don’t have any figures to back this up, but I wouldn’t mind betting that as the West has got richer they have spent more money on their health.  I don’t doubt it helps to be healthy, but I think it isn’t the key to why the West dominates the world.

In what was the most convincing episode of the series we were introduced to the consumer society.  In fact none of us need to be introduced to it because it is a huge part of our everyday lives.  We live in a world where producers vie with each other to make things we want so they can make a profit selling them.  The example given was jeans.  Jeans started as straight forward working clothes for American farm labourers.  But thanks to films and marketing they became cool and desirable all around the world.    Economies of scale made them cheap.  The well developed consumer market made them ubiquitous.   Everyone wanted them, even Communists.   Communists in the West wore them on demonstrations.   Communists behind the Iron Curtain had to bring in special measures to deal with crimes provoked by a desire for jeans – the planned economy never managed to replicate them effectively.

The point Ferguson is making is that the consumer society created a stimulus for innovation and gave Western society goods that people wanted, and it turns out that people in other societies want as well.  Everyone around the world now dresses the way people in the West dress.  Everyone wants the goods the consumer society produces. and are willing to go to some lengths to get them.  And it is the desire for the goods that Western civilization produces that is pushing more and more for the Western way of doing things to become the simply the way of doing things.

It isn’t until the last episode that we finally get to the provocative question that the whole series is based around.  Is the West history?  Have we turned a corner that means that after 400 or more years of continually growing power and influence are we now looking at a future where the West will go into reverse?  We see Ferguson standing in the ruins of an Inca city and referring  grandly to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  What is the significance of the comparison?  It turns out, just to show that it is possible for Western civilisation to decline. It has done so before.

What is the mechanism by which the West might lose its position?  This brings us to the sixth and final factor that led to the rise of the West.  The Work Ethic was originally associated with protestant sects leading them to work hard and save a lot.  This gave an impetus to early industrialisation.   Americans and Europeans have now lost this solid virtue.  We’d rather go shopping.  Meanwhile others, particularly the Chinese, have acquired it and are beavering away to replace us.

I felt a bit let down.  Is that all he could come up with?  If nothing else it sounded a bit like what every generation that has ever existed has said about the good for nothing youngsters it has had the misfortune to give rise to.  I can remember hearing that sort of thing from older people when I was young. Now I am old I can’t help thinking I can sort of see how they must have been thinking.  But I have to say I was hoping for something a bit more profound.  It isn’t really surprising that richer people don’t work as hard.  That is sort of part of the benefits of being rich.  I don’t suppose that poor people work hard to acquire riches with the intention that once they have got them they plan to carry on working hard.

In the end I found myself wondering if for all his studies and his undoubted energy and skill at presentation, that Ferguson himself has actually got no more idea of whether the West is in decline or not at the moment than I or anyone else has. I am glad for the journey he has taken me on.  It must have been hard work.  I am really grateful for six hours of top notch entertainment.  I enjoyed watching it and I learned a lot. The thing is though, I  find there are still plenty of unanswered questions I want to find out more about. But I think I need to look elsewhere for answers.

How the Church Won: Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Chapter 15 Part 4

The rapid rise of Christianity has often been considered to be a remarkable event in itself, and the fact that it acquired so many adherents so quickly is often held to be a miracle in its own right that further confirms the truth of the message. Recent calculations are a bit more sober.  Prior to its official adoption growth was impressive but far from unbelievable.   In fact it is in line with and if anything  even a bit slower than the the much better documented recent growth of Mormonism.

If the numbers of followers increased by about 3 percent a year from an assumed 250 starting point, the rules of exponential growth predict about two and a half million by the time of the Edict of Milan.  And they make clear why Christians were so obscure in the early years after the death of Christ but seem suddenly to be everywhere by the middle of the third century.  But even so, it was a cracking pace of conversion.  Although we can dismiss divine intervention the rapid rise does need some explanation.

Obviously it is very difficult to assess accurately just how many Christians there were at any particular time, but they do seem to have been very thin on the ground at first.  There are very few references to them in the literature of the early empire.  If anyone was going to talk about Christians it would be the arch conservative satirist Juvenal.  His trademark was finding fault with whatever was new in his society, but writing between 100 and 128AD the new sect simply did not figure.  Had he been writing a hundred and fifty years later they would no doubt have attracted his scorn.

By this time, in the reign of Decius they were numerous enough to be worth some serious persecution.  They had become a significant if still small section of society.  Their distinctive features were well known enough for the authorities to be able to come up with a test to trap believers.  Decius required his subjects to carry out a sacrifice to the Gods for the well being of the empire by a certain day. Carry it out and you got a certificate recognising your patriotic contribution.   Failure to comply with what for most people would have been a simple enough civic duty got you into trouble.  And by trouble this meant confiscation and/or torture.  Law and order was very much one of the things the Romans held close to their hearts.

This provided the Church with some of its early stories of martyrdom .  It also naturally produced a set of Christians who decided that this was probably one of those render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s moments.   There aren’t any statistics but I imagine this was quite a large group and more than likely a majority. Tension between people who stood up to oppression and those that backed down was later to serve as yet another source of the internal disputes that were a prevailing characteristic of the early church – but that was still a long way off.

The obvious question is why did Decius, and later emperors, devote scarce resources to the persecution of an apparently harmless if slightly barmy sect?  The general approach to religion was, as we have seen, pretty tolerant.  It is very unlikely that it was the beliefs themselves that were the problem.  There was nothing in Christianity that the cosmopolitan Romans wouldn’t have heard before.

Rather than answer this question the persecutions are often portrayed as irrational and slightly disreputable activities that blighted the names of the emperors involved.  But I can’t help thinking that by doing so we are falling into the easy trap of thinking we know better than the people at the time.  It wasn’t at all obvious that Christianity was soon destined to take over the empire.  I think there was something that the emperors would have been quite right to be  bothered by.  The the thing about the Christians that alarmed those in authority was their organisation.  The empire itself was becoming steadily more bureaucratic and centralised – especially during and after the reign of the control freak’s control freak Diocletian.  The Christians too were highly organised, but they were outside state control.  This was bound to cause trouble sooner or later.  Autocratic states are usually suspicious of power structures outside their control, and from their point of view they are wise to be so.

So let’s look at the organisation of the Church.  Its basic unit hasn’t changed from the earliest days so we still recognise it today.  Believers joined together in congregations for a range of activities but in particular to worship together in designated buildings on Sunday.  Each congregation would either select a leading figure, or more likely be set up by a particular individual.  I think of a lot of the liturgical paraphernalia that has survived to this day must have worked at first a bit like a fast food company franchise.   My suspicion is that the basic origin of many individual early churches was someone spotting an opportunity and setting themselves up with all the kit. They then went out and found themselves some followers. This would have been the origin of the first line of pastors.

There was a natural tendency for congregations to have contact with other like minded groups.  The pastors of large congregations in big cities naturally tended to become leading figures.  And so bishops came into existence. As the movement grew these eminent positions became more lucrative and more appealing.  It wasn’t long before the doctrinal differences became mixed up with political intrigues – if indeed the doctrinal differences were ever more than pretexts for individual ambition.  So the church acquired both leaders and heretics.

A significant feature of the early Church, one that has not continued, was giving a big role to women.  Gibbon hints that there were female pastors.  I haven’t come across any definitive evidence of that.  Life is unfortunately too short to do as much reading on the subject as Gibbon did.  But there is a reference to a woman as a deacon in Romans – female deacons still seem to be a novelty in the Church of England today.  It would be fascinating to know more details but it is clear enough that women did have leadership roles during the very early growth phase.

This widened the scope of potential Christians, and opened another path to gaining converts since they would be in strong position to influence the next generation.  The most celebrated example of this would be Constantine himself.  His conversion to the cause may well have been down solely to the influence of his Christian mother.

The competition between factions probably helped considerably.  It gave a personal motivation to the general injunction to spread the word.  Later in history we see conscious efforts by rival factions to get to potential converts first – it must have happened on a smaller scale more locally earlier.  We see a similar effect today where the decline in church attendance is much less precipitous in the United States than it is in Europe.  Most European churches have, at least historically, been supported by the state.  The Church of England was even set up by an act of Parliament.  They have therefore tended to be near monopolies and have been quite centralised.  They have also always been able to tap the government for funds.

In the US the separation of Church and state has meant that there is a lot more free enterprise in the world of worship.  There has not been the option of raising cash from the public purse. This has meant that individual pastors have had to tailor their message to their local congregations’ needs in order to survive.  They haven’t been able to cosy up to the people in power, and so haven’t been tainted by association with failed governments.

With this spirit of competition to spur them on, it wasn’t long before Christians were operating in most of the more populous parts of the empire and even beyond it.  Estimates of the total numbers of adherents have to be very sketchy, but it seems very likely that in one of its earliest outposts, Antioch, the Christians must have been at least 20% of the population by around the time of Constantine.  They were certainly a force to be reckoned with in Rome and particularly Carthage.

As the influence of Christianity grew the rewards for landing a plum job in the hierarchy grew. Conflict wasn’t far behind.  It wasn’t long before the patriarchs of the larger cities became significant figures in their own right, and inevitably jostled for position.  Five became unquestionably more significant and tended to be regarded as having special influence: Rome, Antioch, Alexandria, Jerusalem and Constantinople.

Needless to say there was jockeying for position and prestige.  Rome emerged as the overall leader, a position it still holds today in the west. But there was plenty of history behind how it got there – much of which will be documented in future volumes of Decline and Fall.

Gibbon was writing at a time when the role of the Church was still central to everyday life and had no need to explain it to his readers.  But in the modern world where so much is available from the market and the government, it is easy to let slip from our minds just how big an impact organised religion used to have.  There was no mass media.  Information came from only a handful of sources. Books were rare, newspapers non-existent.  The ability to spread news and views quickly that the early Church possessed made it formidable.  Additionally it had a social welfare role.  In a world with no services provided by the government the mutual support network provided by the congregation was no doubt highly appealing, especially in a world where the prosperity of earlier times was fading.  Many supporters of the Church were also supported by the Church.

But it was definitely more than a support network.  The Christians adopted particular ways of behaving.  They were notably well behaved and law abiding – apart from when someone like Decius was trying to catch them out.  This was all the more remarkable because they tended to draw support from the less affluent sections of society.  When they did get an adherent who was wealthy, he or she or their family would often end up less affluent by the time the Church had finished with them.  There are complaints of people losing their inheritances when new converts bequeathed their money to the Church rather than their family.  The world was going to end soon after all.  In the meantime, it increased the wealth, power and prestige of the faith on Earth.

There were restrictions on what believers could and couldn’t do,  some of which seem quite eccentric.  Beards could not be shaved – that was trying to improve on the work of the Almighty apparently.   It was just as well the circumcision issue had already been resolved.  Music was to be avoided.  Over luxurious furniture was suspect as well.  The whole issue was one of isolating themselves from the influence of the world and creating a separate society.

One aspect of society that the more zealous Christians were opposed to was philosophy.  Philosophy covered a wide range of things that we would think of as being quite separate.  It certainly included what we would think of as science.  But it was also influential in the way people lived their lives.  As such it was in direct competition for the role Christianity sought to take as a guide to everyday actions.

The study of philosophy was deep rooted though, and one of the early fathers complains that it is diverting Christianity from its true irrational roots.

They presume to alter the Holy Scriptures, to abandon the ancient rule of faith, and to form their opinions according to the subtile precepts of logic. The science of the church is neglected for the study of geometry, and they lose sight of heaven while they are employed in measuring the earth. Euclid is perpetually in their hands. Aristotle and Theophrastus are the objects of their admiration; and they express an uncommon reverence for the works of Galen. Their errors are derived from the abuse of the arts and sciences of the infidels, and they corrupt the simplicity of the gospel by the refinements of human reason.

Christianity was to have a painful relationship with reason for most of its history.  We can see that the trouble started early.  If you are claiming divine inspiration it is not easy to concede that others know more than you do about the workings of the Universe.  This is both a theoretical issue – you are supposed to have a hot line to the Creator after all.  You also don’t want to give away any prestige to people outside your group.  This is a huge problem when you come up against the likes of Aristotle and Galen who manifestly did know much more than the Christians did.  This problem is going to be a recurring theme throughout the rest of Gibbon’s history, and indeed history in general.  

The tendency to reject the realities of the world continued in later times and would later turn into fully fledged monasticism. In the meantime there was an unworldly quality to some of the adherents of the new religion.  They would refuse to serve in the army, heedless of the need for somebody to fight off the barbarians.  It doesn’t seem like it made much practical difference to the ability of the empire to keep an army in the field.  The professed pacifism of Christianity has rarely been strong enough to prevent war.  And when I say rarely, I mean rarely.

But while the new sect did not have enough influence to actually deplete the ranks of the armed forces, it may well have still had an effect.  Rather than join the army or the administration, it was now possible to devote your life to ecclesiastical affairs.  As time went on, this became the route to power, prestige and even riches.  By diverting people of talent into a non-productive activity it may well have weakened the empire.

It is often said that Gibbon blamed Christianity for the fall of the Roman Empire.  He never makes the connection as clear as some commentators seem to suggest, but I think that in so far as he does make that accusation this is the means by which it had that effect.  Some very able men devoted themselves to matters of interest to the Church but which did not benefit the empire at all.  Maybe, just maybe, had they not been distracted then the final catastrophe that engulfed the Western Empire might have been avoided.

But that has to be pure speculation.  That the empire was likely to regard this organised and increasingly numerous and wealthy sect as a threat was much more predictable.  Indeed given the threat it could pose to its well being and given the numerous external enemies the empire faced,  it is perhaps surprising that the level of persecution was not more robust.  The Church was winning.  It steadily acquired wealth and power and diverted resources away from the central government.  Some kind of response was needed, and that is what we will look at in the next show.

References

http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=95 – This article is good for putting the growth of Christianity in perspective, but overeggs the custard a bit when it talks about the growth of atheism.

Romans 16.1 is the reference to Phoebe, the female deacon.  Translations and interpretations vary. I am content to let people who actually believe decide what significance it has.

Durruti – Ever heard of him?

Durruti was a well known name able to induce panic anywhere in Europe in the 1930s.  He was a prominent Spanish anarchist dedicated to the violent overthrow of bourgeois society.  He really came into his own during the Spanish Civil War where he led troops in fighting against the Fascists in the battle for Madrid.

While he was a terror to the establishment everywhere, he was an inspiration to the downtrodden.  When he was killed in 1936 it was predicted that Durruti’s nobility while living would cause ‘a legion of Durrutis’ to spring up behind him.

There is a feeling that you can kill people but you can’t kill ideas.  So if you kill an influential person all you will achieve is making a martyr of him so enhancing the appeal of the idea. So a lot of the coverage of the death of of Bin Laden comes with the health warning that although the man is gone his ideas live on and will continue to trouble us for many years to come.

It does sound plausible doesn’t it.   And a bit scary too.  But is it true?  Well maybe, but it didn’t work for Durruti after all.  Eighty years after his I don’t suppose one person in a thousand has ever even heard of him.  And I can’t think of a single other case in history where a dead person’s ideas have had much impact.  It is live people with lots of resources at their disposal that make the difference in history.  This is almost always people with the support, in some way, of a state.

Bin Laden is often portrayed as some kind of ideological genius who works in an area outside state control.  The facts don’t support this.  He was sponsored indirectly by the US, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.  That he remained in hiding with at least some level of collusion from the government of Pakistan seems, at least, a possibility.

Violence is expensive.  To do serious damage takes serious resources.  Very few organisations apart from governments can sustain a threat for any length of time.  Although Bin Laden may have started out as a relatively rich individual he wouldn’t have been able to fund decades of struggle from his own pocket.  Semtex doesn’t grow on trees.  You need to eat while you are training.

I have a feeling that far from being a figure of huge historic significance Bin Laden will, like Durriti, be forgotten pretty quickly.

Wikepedia entry on Durruti

Niall Ferguson: Civilization – Is the West History? Religion and the work ethic

I had watched the rest of the series when it was broadcast and blogged it instantly.  I couldn’t do that for the last episode because I was away at a conference to do with my work.  Not many people work on a Sunday evening, but I think Niall would approve.  In the West we used to work hard, and now most of us don’t any more.  And this may be our undoing.
Niall Ferguson’s accent is a bit odd.  It has strands from Scotland, England and America.  But his attitude to work is distinctly in tune with his protestant Scottish heritage.  The idea that protestant Christianity has a specially positive attitude towards hard work is well known hypothesis.  It originates from the work of Max Weber and the phrase Protestant Work Ethic is used far outside the circles of history and sociology.

So the thesis is that the protestant form of Christianity has an ethic that makes hard work Godly and leisure and enjoyment sinful.  It also creates networks of people who are honest and trust one another.  Put that together and the effect is strong enough to promote economic growth.  It was certainly the case that early industrialisation was very closely associated with places which were also protestant- America, Germany and Britain.  And within these countries there did seem to be an association with the most protestant parts being the most industrial.

But has theories go, it is very easy to find counter-examples.  You might just look at catholic France and compare it unfavourably with protestant Britain.  But it is a pretty marginal difference really.  If the island of Britain had for some reason sunk in 1750 it is hard to imagine that France would not have rapidly filled its place as the world superpower of the nineteenth century – and in fact even with competiton from Britain it did a pretty good job of developing a highly successful sophisticated modern economy.  And the undeniably protestant Boers of South Africa are hardly an example of economic success.

But there is one huge exception to the rule that Ferguson more than anyone else is only too aware of.  For the most remarkable example of sustained economic growth in the history of the world comes not from a protestant country or even a Christian one.  Since 1978 China has grown consistently and at a faster rate than any other country has ever achieved for such a long time.  And it continues to do so.  How does this fit in with the idea of protestantism being a key economic advantage?

Well lets not give up on an idea without looking into the details.  There obviously aren’t many protestants in China.  But are there enough?  It turns out that there are rather more than you might imagine, and Ferguson finds some and interviews them.  In large Chinese cities churches are flourishing and growing, and some of these Christians are playing a big role in the development of the businesses that form the basic cellular unit of the astonishing growth in the Chinese economy.

It is surprising to learn that proportion of Christians in China is around 3-4%.  Given that the population is huge this translates to many millions, perhaps even 100 million if the most generous interpretation is given of the data.   But even so, it is hard to imagine that such a small group could have such a disproportionate impact on the country as a whole.  One thing is for sure, Chinese economic development has been carried out with explicit support and approval from the government which remains hostile, or at least not particularly positive about Christianity.   Interviewing a few local Christians doesn’t really enlighten the situation much.  And again, given its size it isn’t all that surprising that the world’s biggest manufacturer of Bibles is situated in China.

But it is something to ponder.  Unlikely as it seems that one particular variation of a pretty widespread religion is particularly adept at encouraging its adherents to get on in the present, it isn’t totally inconceivable.  It could be a side effect of some feature for example.  Maybe the emphasis on reading the Biblical texts yourself which is one of the features of protestantism encourages literacy which in turn encourages the adoption of new ideas and technology. I would have been interested if this aspect had been pursued.

Instead Ferguson, who towards the end of the programme admits to having imbibed deeply the protestant work ethic himself, goes in a different direction.   Is the work ethic vanishing in the West and does it matter?   Yes it is and yes it does is the answer we get.  I was a bit uncomfortable with that conclusion.  Most generations view the succeeding generation with a mixture of contempt and despair.  Things, after all, didn’t happen like this in my day.  We knew what was what and these youngsters don’t even knew they are born.  But is this in fact the case?  The Chinese certainly do work harder than modern Americans and Europeans.  But they are still a lot poorer.  The benefit they get from getting even slightly richer than they are is pretty large.

So is it a problem that the Chinese are working hard to catch up?  I suppose it could be but I think it is simply the way the world is.  If I was in their position I would do the same.  But the object of all economic activity is consumption.  The Chinese no doubt will slow down a bit when they have some money to spend.  I don’t think that anyone is behaving any differently to how you would expect them to.  I dare say there are some people who would rather the Chinese stayed poor and powerless, but if you don’t then it is hard to see how things could be any different.

So the final suggestion in the form of a question that the West is in decline basically because all the factors that led to its rise were now available to the rest of humanity and we are too lazy to do anything about it.  Well maybe this is true, but I can’t help thinking that the case has not really been made.  We haven’t actually lost anything other than advantages we used to have.  This might make it harder to feel superior, but it is hard to see how it actually makes us any worse off.

So another good programme that kept my attention to the end.  Ultimately, I didn’t buy into the pessimism.  I don’t think that protestants are really the key to economic growth.  Lots of people who aren’t protestants seem to be quite capable of managing the trick. And I don’t think that somebody else doing well in any way undermines the achievements of the West. At the end of the day, it is just an abstract idea after all.  Life is lived by individuals, and it is what they do that history is made up of.

Miracles: Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Chapter 15 Part 3

Jesus turns water into wine

Gibbon has an issue with miracles.

By the eighteenth century miracles were off the agenda.  Galileo and Newton had provided detailed descriptions of the laws underlying what was making the world go round.  European sailors had sailed around the globe and while they revealed new lands that hadn’t been known before, none of them turned out to be magic.  Turning the newly invented telescopes on the skies the movements of the planets around the sun followed the same rules that governed the movement of canon balls on Earth.  The development of clockwork technology gave a neat analogy for the mechanisms that ran the Universe.  It all worked automatically, like, well like clockwork.  Subtle and hard to fathom maybe, but not beyond our understanding.  Gibbon and his contemporaries could look back on the Middle Ages as a time of ignorance and superstition compared to their own of science and reason.

I think it was this that was at the root of Gibbon’s problem with Christianity in general and miracles in particular.
  The Church was backward looking and heavily associated with the ignorance of the Medieval world. But for all that, it was still a very powerful institution.  It must have seemed not so much like the relic it seems to us and more like a dead weight.

The comparison of his own time with that of the peak period of the Roman Empire, was not nearly as flattering.  In straight economic terms it wasn’t until the eighteenth century that the wealth and population of modern Europe actually exceeded that of the empire under the Antonines.  It was still not possible to travel any faster than the Romans.  Arguably, Gibbon’s Britain was not yet able to match the engineering feats of Ancient Rome. James Watt was still doing his experiments on steam power while Gibbon was writing his book.

So it is not surprising that Gibbon would take an interest in the religious developments in the Roman world.  Seeped in classical literature Gibbon was well aware of the elite Roman’s approach to their culture’s traditional beliefs. In all the political machinations of the republic and later the empire it is hard to pick up any indication that any of them anticipated a life after death.  Vespasian is famous for joking that he was becoming a God on his deathbed. Religion was strictly for show and was only taken seriously by the people who lacked learning.  In what I think must be the most quoted lines from Decline and Fall he notes that pagan superstitions were regarded by the educated as equally false, by the ignorant as equally true and by the administrator as equally useful.  That quote is almost always taken out of context and applied to religion in general.  It isn’t hard to imagine Gibbon doing the same.

Although he never states it, I am pretty sure that Gibbon was indeed an atheist.  He has certainly be accused of being so in his own time. It was a pretty serious accusation with serious consequences but more on that later.  I would go further and hazard a guess that it is the issue of miracles that led him to lose the faith that he was, like everyone else at the time, brought up in.

In the modern world our communications are so good that we can be pretty confident that miracles don’t happen. If one did it would be on Youtube in no time.   But even in Gibbon’s time the miraculous had been pretty much squeezed out of people’s mental view of the world. Claiming miraculous powers was no longer credible.

So how could the miracles directly reported in the Bible and the subsequent ones attributed to saints and other similar interventions be accounted for.  This was a rather practical problem for Gibbon when he got to the point in his book where he had to mention them. And I think it speaks volumes that he puts it off until the last minute.  He has got past the Edict of Milan before he even brings the subject of Christianity up.  I can’t help thinking that part of him wanted to ignore it all together.

He obviously did not want to appear credulous in the eyes of rational skeptics like his friend the philosopher David Hume.  Peer pressure can rarely have come in so elevated a form.  But equally there were drawbacks to portraying the holy book as a fraud as well.  What to do?

He had two strategies.  One was to continually refer to the Church as the Catholic Church.  This played well in Protestant England. Portraying his sources as Catholics made rubbishing them much much easier.

The other was to use sarcasm.  That way all his clever chums would see what he meant while the less enlightened would take him at face value.  Neat, eh?   If he seriously thought this would work, then he was being optimistic.  Believing something stupid doesn’t make you stupid.  Indeed some stupid things are so stupid it really does take a lot of hard work and brain power to actually believe them.

But Gibbon had to contend not only with the genuinely faithful. It is easy to forget just how powerful a vested interest the church was in European society even this late in history.  At the time the assembly in France was divided into three interest groups, the people, the nobility and the clergy.  That is some level of influence. In Britain the Church was slightly less dominant, but even so Bishops sat in the House of Lords.  If Gibbon thought he could sneak a sideswipe at religion past an unsuspecting public he was wrong.  The reaction to the publication of Decline and Fall is probably worth a blog post to itself so I will leave off this train of thought for now.   But whatever the motivation behind it, the result was one of the greatest and most sustained bits of sarcasm in the English language.

Gibbon gets in early.  He points out how strange it is that the Jews have stuck to their religion so steadfastly in the face of persecution and without any support from a state.  And yet in Old Testament times the Jews were always falling away from the true path, despite all the miraculous evidence that Moses and others provided them with.  Most curious behaviour – the more evidence they had to believe, the less inclined they were to do so.

But strange as this might seem, the position with regards to miracles in the early church was even weirder.   Contemporary accounts make clear that the early Christians were not only witnesses to the miraculous, they routinely claimed to possess miraculous powers themselves.  They would often be able to speak languages that they had never learned – a handy and enviable skill in the multicultural Roman empire.  This gift doesn’t seem to have been bestowed purely pragmatically by the Almighty to help promote his message when language difficulties arose. The man who brought the Good News to Gaul for instance complained of the difficulties posed by not knowing how to speak with the natives.  The only conclusion is that it was a sort of party piece.

Expelling demons was routine, with the demons often confessing to being well known gods on departure.  But the most remarkable miracles were raisings from the dead.  This was a reasonably common event, common enough for a philosopher to tell a Christian friend that it would take only the sight of one of these resurrected individuals to secure an immediate conversion.  It was a reasonable offer, but for some reason it went unanswered.

Now, if you accept that the numerous miracles claimed by the early Christians are genuine there is an obvious historical question.   Miracles no longer take place.  So when did they stop?  Was there a specific cut off date like the end of the trial period of Microsoft Office when all the marvels you had got used to suddenly ceased to work?  Or did it slowly fade away until one day it just crossed your mind that it wasn’t there any more, like the career of Steve Martin?   In either event, how come the Christians at the time didn’t notice and make some kind of comment about it?

This concentration on the lack of plausibility of the miracles sounds like a bit like a debating point, and may well have started out as one.  But it does seem to be something that troubles Gibbon a lot.  He goes into great detail, and returns to the point later in the chapter.  Again going into industrial grade sarcasm mode he asks, with obviously bogus outrage,  how philosophers at the time of Christ could have failed to notice the miraculous augers of the new era that the crucifixion had initiated.  This was an age of science and history after all.  And even Pliny, who was in the region and took a special interest in astronomical phenomena failed to even note the event of the sky being darkened let alone pick up on its significance.

If anyone had any doubt that this was a thinly veiled attack on Christianity earlier, this final bit would have dispelled it.  How could the account of the Crucifixion given in the Bible possibly be true.  The Romans were extremely interested in what was going on in the sky.  The death of Julius Caesar was marked by a remarkable absence of light, which was duly documented.   Jerusalem was a large city in a populous part of the empire.  If a bolt of lightning could end a campaign against Persia, surely someone would have noticed several hours of darkness in the sky.

Of course, as Gibbon knew full well the darkened sky detail was added later because it was a literary cliche to mark the death of someone of significance.  It was as clear a sign that the whole thing had been made up as it is possible to imagine.  And no doubt plenty of people at the time were just as aware that it was a fiction.  How many of the early Church fathers colluded in this pious fabrication?  Who knows, but it would have been fascinating to know the opinion of someone as well read on the sources as Gibbon.

Three hundred years later this all seems mild enough.  Eloquent and well written, but hardly shocking. We’ve all heard a lot worse.  But this was heady stuff for the time.  Knocking the miracles performed by saints was bad enough, but for protestants that might be accommodated.  But even today, there are relatively few Christians who won’t defend the actual historical fact of Jesus actually coming back to life after being crucified.   A bishop of the Church of England, David Jenkins, who suggested that God hardly needed to do a conjuring trick with some bones attracted an outcry.  The traditionalists position hardened after York Minster was struck by lightning a few days later, a clear sign of divine displeasure.

There was some discussion of using the blasphemy laws against David Jenkins.  It was clear enough that technically he was in breach of them – though it was highly unlikely a jury would have found him guilty.  It is possible that Gibbon’s use of sarcasm might have been intended to keep him clear of charges under what are in effect exactly the same laws still nominally in force today.  If so he pushes his defence to the limit as the chapter closes.  Taken as a whole the chapter is no less than a devastating and highly successful attack on the history of Christianity.

It might be thought that by being evasive he was lacking in courage.  Why not come out and say what he really meant?  In reality I think that he stood a very real risk of ending up in court even with what he did say.  Taking an outright atheistic position would have been indefensible.  And to an atheist, martyrdom has not got much to be said for it.

He stopped just short of saying the story of the crucifixion was made up after the event.  Gibbon must have known it was going to stir up trouble.  And he was right.

As I have said, that I think, is another podcast.