Rewriting history for the Bush cabal
by Joe Palmer
[ bookreviews ]
The public be damned. I am working for my stockholders. - WH Vanderbilt, railroad chief
Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing. - HL Mencken
The historian Rodney Stark in a remarkable work of theology, The Victory of Reason, writes that Christianity is responsible for our great leap forward, for freedom, capitalism, and Western success. The wealthy monasteries and Italian city-states of the Middle Ages showed us the way to get our material blessings of free enterprise and world domination. The Christian commitment to “rational theology” and even Locke’s plea for democracy are based on the statements of church scholars such as Tertullian (160-230), Augustine (354-430), and Aquinas (1225-1274).
The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success (2005) must be compared to Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) and to Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), the best-known explanations of the ascendancy of the West.
Weber’s ideas lend support to the notion that capitalism must have begun long before the Reformation. He argued simply that the virtues of Protestantism - individualism, frugality, moral vision, planning, and the injunction to work - informed the institutions of capitalism, bank credit, stocks, bonds, and mercantilism. However, profit, reinvestment, and self-aggrandizement, the tenets of capitalism, have little to do with religion, and Weber did not fully account for Catholic and Jewish capitalists before invoking Protestantism. Furthermore, we could as easily argue that it is in spite of Christianity in any of its forms that many today enjoy freedom, capitalism, and success. We assume today that wealth comes from the earth itself and from surplus value confiscated from coffles of slaves through legal devices taught in MBA courses.
Weber’s argument became a truism. Of course the Reformation and the Enlightenment have shaped the modern world. But what do Protestantism, science, and technology rest on? In answer Stark asserts like a preacher: reasonable Christianity produced liberal capitalism, science, technology, excess capacity, and investment, and it all started long before Luther and Calvin, predating the Reformation by a thousand years. Capitalism, coming before Protestantism, had its start in the rich medieval Christian monasteries and trading city-states of Europe.
The Dark Ages is a misnomer, according to Stark, the Dark Ages is a name used by proud writers ashamed of the Middle Ages, the thousand years between the fall of Rome and the expulsion of the Jews and Moslems from Spain. “During these, which were rightly called the Dark Ages, the clergy were supreme,” (Buckley, Civilization, 1857) and the supreme clergy were presumed to be oppressive of humane values when they bought and sold with profit, extorting land from the laity.
On the other hand, Diamond’s thorough and realistic account of the rise of the West Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997) is scientifically true. It was through the domestication of animals and plants, through agriculture and record-keeping leading to the invention of the alphabet, science, technology, rational government, modern war, and so on, that the West got the jump on the rest of the world: it was geography, ecology, demography, and plain old fate that gave us the edge, not capitalistic abbots and Venetian merchants.
Western hegemony came from the power of Western technology and debilitating diseases. Our magic worked with the geography and environment of unexploited territories. Jared Diamond explains that we gave the natives smallpox, shot them, and ran them over. We took what we wanted and gave them pestiferous blankets.
The Reformation and the Enlightenment freed the West from social control formerly maintained by the Church, producing modern Humanism, our way of life devoted to the glorification and happiness of mankind, as if we become the purpose of Being by our own faith in ourselves.
Stark’s ideas show just how much Christian piety can be debased when it mixes with Humanism, when personal moral autonomy and theological interpretation can be put on like a suit of clothes. Stark is a professor now at Baylor University in Texas, a Baptist school.
The Baptist heritage is “a devotionally focused pietism that de-emphasizes the intellectual dimensions of faith.” Baptists “have historically tended to remain sceptical of higher education’s value for the Christian life,” according to Collin Hansen in Christianity Today: 6/13/03. Like all Protestants they are caught between secularism and pietism. They are “saved” by faith alone, not by the laws of the Church, good works, or the grace of God. They hold to the doctrine Sola Scriptura: there is no authority beyond the literal Bible.
The traditional Christians, the Romans, Anglicans, and Orthodox hold that God’s word is to be known not only in scripture, but also in living tradition, and in the authority of the Church. God and life are present in the Eucharist, in Communion, not only in the silence of grace. In Scripture they find metaphor, not fact. It is not a simple, literal matter, as some would have it. Traditional Christians are not literalists of the imagination.
The Evangelicals are saying among themselves that finally in The Victory of Reason, an authentic, professional historian has come out with a rationale that fits their belief in the End-Times, the world coming to a screeching halt in the culmination of God’s plan.
The Victory of Reason is at first a confusing revision of received wisdom concerning the origins of the modern liberal world. Why must the middle ages be invoked as the source of our current flood of so-called freedom and dignity? We were happy with Greece and Rome as the motherlands. We knew that Constantine [converted in 312 CE] created the Church of Power, of riches and commerce, in which he melded the clergy of wealthy, married priests with powerful families and the nobility through materialism, slavery, and usury. When Jared Diamond added guns, germs, and steel to the story of the West, it satisfied most of us, but for some there is not enough religiosity in history and anthropology. Some people need to wear their faith like a uniform, advertising their piety like the Pharisee.
Obviously Stark is lending support for the popular belief that Christianity is [somehow] the culmination of worldly aspirations, that the Gospel is true on the physical plane.
In today’s fanatical interpretation of the book of Revelation (the Apocalypse), the End Times are now arriving with Jesus and the New Jerusalem triumphing over evil in Armageddon. Originally intended as a palliative for Christians about to be eaten by lions, these prophecies are analogous to the cabbala, the mystical interpretations of scripture from Constantine’s time. Cabbalistic notions based on reincarnation and magic, so-called theosophy and thaumaturgy, are interpreted to mean that we, the good guys, are soon going to dominate the world or go to Heaven, or both.
There is some truth in this madness. It looks as if Christ and His kingdom will return metaphorically because Science has improved the art of war so completely that the next big one will be the end of history for sure.
Economics is, simply put, the study of how prosperity is shared. The slave economy, serfdom, bondage, indenture, forced labor, and the centralized control of agriculture and industry were the bases of civilized life in the West. Capitalism is much the same as generalized, rationalized slavery. The surplus goes to the owners in a roundabout way instead of directly to the masters as in chattel slavery.
The morality of commerce is legal theft and slavery: corporations are money machines that pay the owners first in spite of how poorly the machine performs. When a corporation breaks down, it discharges its penniless workers before it sells itself off in order to pay its managers and owners whatever it can. In this the blessing freedom is said to reside, the freedom to die poor, or rich. You can’t have one without the other; wealth and poverty are the two sides of the same coin, like Nike running shoes made in Brunei in a sweatshop, or a Ford car made in Detroit.
If you think that in every way we are getting better and better, that man is the measure of value, that all individuals deserve freedom, dignity, and respect, that a world without suffering is our goal, and that Jesus wants you for a sunbeam, then you must believe that God intentionally created the world for mankind to rule, and that our purpose in life is to serve Him in perfecting our world. Creationism, called Intelligent Design, by the way, fits well with Humanism, for Humanism is as much a belief in the future as is Christianism, for Humanism is the American Religion, watered-down Christianity, in disguise.
Jesus was not a pacifist, a philanthropist, or a social worker. He did not preach freedom, capitalism, success, happiness, or a day at the beach. He came with a sword, not with peace (Matthew 10:34-35). Human happiness is not the purpose of existence.
The secret of happiness lies in renouncing the right to be happy. - Christopher Lasch
As Giovanni de’ Medici, Pope Leo X, 1513-1521, prayed in the Papal Bull Exsurge, Domine: Arise, O Lord, plead Thine own cause; remember how the foolish man reproacheth Thee daily; the foxes are wasting Thy vineyard, which Thou hast given to Thy Vicar Peter, the boar out of the wood doth waste it, and the wild beast of the field doth devour it.
Christianity did not cause capitalism. Rodney Stark’s The Victory of Reason (2005) is as faulty as Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905).
Those of us who think and feel a lot deserve better than Stark’s book.
Some words that Stark uses in a meliorist, positive way necessary to his argument, are here defined starkly and realistically, without the connotations of improvement, progress, growth and advancement that Stark gives them:
Reason, the power of thinking, is a whore who leads us to believe we are loved, if only for a little while.
Christianity, mankind’s hope, is a mystery cult like all the ancient religions, full of contradictions, absurdity, and ambiguity.
Freedom, the absence of necessity, is cyclical or random, coming and going, depending on varieties of totalitarianism, dictatorship, oppression, despotism, terror, and brutality on the one hand, and the degree of anarchy, chaos, confusion, lawlessness, and revolution on the other [Gray].
Capitalism, competition in a free market, is legal theft, voluntary slavery, the unequal sharing of blessings [Churchill], exploitation, and robbery with a fountain pen [Guthrie].
Western Success, our attainment of eminence, is corporate fascism, the bitch goddess, the big time, according to Dick Cheney, and hollow victory.
Stark’s assumption is that we should be proud of the euphemistic connotations of these abstract words, while the truth hides its face in shame.
