On Middle-Class Morality

Some things never change.  One of the delights of studying the last four hundred years or so of history has been to see how so many of our current cultural obsessions are lineal descendants of identical social movements in the England of the 1600′s.  One suspects that these movements themselves were lineal descendants of older movements, obscured by the amnesia of a race that, like a child or an animal, is conscious only of the present.

Consider middle-class morality.  The Puritan movement was a reflection of a class identity.  It was most popular among what might have been England’s lower middle class.  Artisans, tradesmen, shopkeepers… these were people who worked hard, had enough money to be literate, and therefore read the Bible.  They took pride in their work, but also their independence and their liberty.  They were no peasants, or even yeomen, tied to the land.  They were free Britons.

Puritanism answered the psychological needs of this class perfectly.  First, any movement symbolizing the ethos of this class had to convey a sense of superiority.  Though the middle class was hard-working, it also suffered a constant sense of inferiority in class-conscious England.  Sure, the English artisan was proud of his work, and he was no beggar, but he still had to remove his cap and bow to the peer of the Realm, and he was constantly having his face rubbed in the prosperity of the merchant or the doctor of law.

But wait!  Because the artisan was a Puritan, he was divinely elected for eternal salvation; ultimately, he would spend aeons laughing at the Catholic/Anglican/deist/atheist/infidel upper class roasting in the pits of hell.  The Puritan was predestined and chosen.  He was God’s chosen.  Inferiority complex: solved.  What’s next?

Well, there’s the troublesome issue of money… no matter how well the green-grocer did, he would never be able to clothe his wife in extravagant raiment or entertain his friends on silver plate.  What’s more, to maintain his status, he had to work hard; he couldn’t fritter away his time or his small capital in gambling, drinking, and whoring about town.  Good thing, then, that all of these things are sins that send you to hell forever.

This is of course another nail in the coffin of the inferiority problem.  The Puritan could take endless pride in his somber, pauper-like existence, devoid of the joys and delicacies of life, because he was living according to God’s code, and all of those vulgar displays of wealth that so infuriated him were sins that would send their perpetrators straight to hell.

It’s hard for this bigot – evidently an apologist for the immoral upper class – not to see a direct parallel between the Puritans of yore and the atheistic humanists of the modern middle class.  Your average young, obnoxious member of the middle class gives up meat and hot showers because they’re bad for the environment.  He gives up white bread and soda because  they’re bad for your health.  In the ideal world, he thinks, these things should be outlawed for everyone (think blue Sundays, but every day of the week), or at least saddled with a punitive vice tax.  If you show him that local vegetables are actually more harmful to the environment than imported meat, his rationale shifts (it doesn’t matter what to, does it?).  If you point out to him that his annual plane trip wipes out all of the environmental savings of his asceticism, he shrugs his shoulders and asks how he should live without his family.

But he gets a great sense of superiority from the fact that he drinks tea instead of wine, and eats tofu instead of red meat.  He will tout the endless health benefits, and then wonder why his nursing wife is anemic.  For the greatest weapon of the Puritan, ancient and modern, was his unshakable sense of certainty in his own predestination.  He can cite to you a thousand Bible passages scientific studies that explain why his lifestyle is the one true one and all others are evil.

The eternal frustration of the Puritan is the sense of inferiority that none of his asceticism can quite erase.  His Honda Fit, though oh-so-fashionable (if you have wide-rimmed glasses, you’re still scum without a Fit), still leaves him with a feeling of unease when the bankers’ BMW purrs down the street.  Sure, he’s been happily monogamous with his girlfriend for ten years, but since they’re such excellent awesome people, they’ve waited until now to get married, not even needing to make promises to each other because they have such character.  Nonetheless, she has wide-rimmed glasses too, and he probably envies the way his buddy that went to law school bags a new secretary every week.

What really offends the Puritan, though, is the notion that anyone but he contributes to the betterment of mankind (unless it’s a minority… their mere existence improves mankind).  You see, our modern-day Puritan works for a non-profit, or maybe a hip start-up with an important message, or maybe he walks the ivory halls of academia.  Either way, his job is pure.  He hasn’t “sold out”.  That’s what the bankers did, and the lawyers.  Those reprobate souls can only pursue their own selfish good, and only through evil means.  Consider the recent financial crisis… this was a gigantic conspiracy where everyone from the lowliest analyst to the drunkest vice-president knew that they were peddling crap and that it would fall into somebody else’s backyard.

Of course, the modern-day Puritan hates the rich so much because he’s almost one of them.  He might have a sister in law school (she’s studying to become an environmental lawyer, you know, the not-sinful kind), and anyway, he himself is hoping to earn a substantial chunk of money someday ($100k isn’t that much, not enough to send you to hell at any rate).

In short, the Puritan doesn’t get out much, doesn’t have much fun.  But he’s better than you, and he hates you for it.

Titus Oates – Story of Civilization VIII.viii.v-VIII.x.iv

Following the Restoration of the Stuart line to the throne of England in 1660, there was an extended and boring struggle between the by now predominantly Protestant people of England, and the few remaining Catholic apologists, who had a sympathetic ear in the ambiguously Catholic Charles II.

In 1670, Charles signed with Louis XIV the Treaty of Dover, by which he committed himself to alliance with Catholic France and the restoration of Catholicism in England.  Meanwhile, he issued a “Declaration of Indulgence” which loosened and abated the governmental persecution of non-Anglicans, including Catholics.

This development, as well as the Catholicism of Charles’s brother James, led the English people to fear a Catholic or “Popish” plot to restore Catholicism (which, ironically, as we have just mentioned, is precisely what Charles himself intended).  The fears manifested themselves in one Titus Oates.  This man appeared before the King and testified that there was a Jesuit plot to assassinate him, elevate his brother James to the throne, and impose Catholicism on England by the sword.  Charles considered the matter absurd, and laughed to Oates’s face at some of his claims, but Charles’s Privy Council took the matter more seriously, and at the behest of Parliament, a full investigation was unfolded that lead to the execution of numerous powerful Catholics.  The prosecutions did not cease until one of the chief judges overseeing them caught Oates in an obvious contradiction.

If these events sound familiar, it is probably because of their close resemblance to the Red Scare and the McCarthy era.  What’s more, they resemble any number of spurious claims of imminent threats to our nation in the modern era, from the WMDs in Iraq to the birther movement to the efforts by gay teachers to “recruit” students.  Like all of these efforts, although Titus Oates’s testimony was completely fabricated and ultimately shown to be so, his efforts succeeded in tarring the legitimate, legal pursuit of the toleration of Catholics with the taint of treason.

What’s striking about the Titus Oates affair is that in the entire Story of Civilization, this is the first clearly documented instance in history of a fabrication of this nature, one of sufficient power and popular backing to crystallize the zeitgeist of a xenophobic, disenfranchised minority.

What’s also striking is that the people who Titus represented where an amalgam of the ascendant Puritans, Anglicans, and anabaptists (Baptists) in England, as against the Catholics.  These same populations would be some of the first to settle America, and the modern disaffected WASPs are both their intellectual and blood heirs.  Can it be that this one ethno-cultural clique, throughout recent history, has achieved and maintained power through a continuous line of hypocrisy, self-deception, and outright lies?  Doubtless, history is not so simple, but it is hard not to wonder whether Joseph McCarthy, George Bush, or even Betsy McCaughey did not learn a thing or two from Titus Oates.  It is also tempting to wonder how future historians, forced to condense the goings-on of four hundred years into two or three pages, may condense the Titus Oates affair and the Puritans of seventeenth-century England with the Red Scare and the Protestants of twentieth-century America.

Another Pernicious Doctrine – Story of Civilization VIII.ii.i-VIII.ii.viii

Chapter ii of Durant’s Age of Louix XIV is a review of the religious policies and conflicts under Mazarin and then Louis.  My first reaction to reading this chapter was “Ohforchrissake more dumb morons killing each other over crap that’s not even real.”  The chapter features such delights as soldiers grabbing a nursing woman’s baby, tying her to a bedpost, and then spitting into her mouth when she tried to remonstrate with them, not to mention plenty of rapes and murders, plus the economic suicide of France in the final persecution of the Huguenots.

But it finally occurred to me after going through the Thirty Years’ War, the English Civil War, the French Wars of Religion, and all the delights of the Spanish Inquisition, that perhaps these people were on to something.  In a way, after all, all of these conflicts – except in the inadequate degree of their brutality and insanity – map almost perfectly onto the European pogroms against the Jews.  Specifically, the conflicts were precipitated as much by ethnic, cultural, and class differences as by religious differences.

But what is most telling is what I have referred to in Judaism as the “pernicious doctrine”.  Specifically, as many a Jew will attest, the Jewish religion is a set of beliefs centered around the core doctrine that the Jews are a race of people set aside and under the special protection (or at least observation) of God.  I have always found this notion a bit frightening: if David is one of the “chosen ones” and I am not, what does that mean?  In the Torah, it means many things, but one of those things is definitely that Yahweh will glorify himself by helping the Jews to slaughter and otherwise lay low non-Jews.  The present conduct of the state of Israel seems to provide the best interpretation of what a chosen one is today… any Jew can become a citizen of Israel, provided that he has documentation that he is racially Jewish, but the non-Jews already living in Israel are not granted even the most basic perquisites of citizenship.  Never mind colonization, nuclear armament…

But perhaps it was wrong of me to restrict this line of thinking to Jews.  After all, is not any doctrine that holds that a certain class of people is the elect of God equally pernicious?  Sure, it is much easier for me to fake being a Calvinist than to fake being a Jew, but I could only do so by sacrificing my own creed and integrity.  The rabid certainty of the tiny Calvinist minorities in England, France, and the United Provinces that they alone had access to the truth, that their way was right and that all tradition and previous thought was in error… this rabid certainty, and the slaughters that it led to was a far more offensive arrogance than the arrogance of the Jews of the time, who proudly hid their worship out of sight.

Perhaps even we are no better than they were.  Would we not enforce our views on the rest of the world if we could?  Do we not abjure God with as much certainty as they affirmed Him?  Do we not see with complete clarity how we alone can see the truth among the blind multitudes?  Sure, it is no God that has chosen us, but that does not make us any less elect.

The only thing that stops men from complete mutual slaughter is the lack of the appropriate tools.

Still, let us consider the case of the French Huguenots who were murdered by the dragoons that Louis forced them to quarter at their own expense.  How foolish, how arrogant of them to believe that they had access to especial knowledge about the ways and plans of an unknown Deity!  How incredibly foolish, and incredibly arrogant, for them to stake the only goods they had ever known, their own lives and the lives of their children, on such visions!  We will not say that they deserved what they got, but only that they reaped what they had sown.

English vs. French – Story of Civilization VIII.i.i-VIII.i.viii

English vs. French here will cover the differences between the English Civil War and the French civil war called the Fronde.

Both wars were backed by similar concerns: outrage over oppressive taxation and what was felt by the business class to be incompetent management of the national economy. In both wars, the targets of popular outrage were the chief ministers of the king. For the English, these were Thomas Wentworth and William Laud; for the French, it was Cardinal Mazarin, the successor of Richelieu.

So given these similarities, why was it that the English Civil War resulted in the beheading of a king, while the French civil war ended in a pacification that led directly to one of France’s greatest eras? Perhaps we may merely list the differences, and not be condemned if we suppose that these are the answers.

First, the English Civil War had an underlying religious component that was entirely absent from the Fronde. Specifically, many of the dissidents were Puritan-leaning, as against the Anglican (almost Catholic) government. By contrast, in France, the dissident religious element, the Huguenots, had been quelled by Richelieu’s ruthless military suppression at the siege of La Rochelle. Subsequently, Richelieu broke the back of Huguenot military inclinations by granting the Huguenots terms of such generosity that, given their military defeat, they could not refuse: access to all offices in France, complete religious freedom, and the sole condition that Catholic worship be permitted in Protestant-dominated cities. Whereas in England the capital was the touchstone of Protestant discontent, perhaps because of Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre, Paris was enraged on entirely secular grounds.

Second, Louis XIV may have escaped the fate of Charles I merely by having been too young. Given the regency of Mazarin and Louis’s mother, these suffered the brunt of the popular outrage, while Louis was almost pitied for the incompetence of his regents. After the suppression of the Fronde, the streets of Paris resounded with cries of “Vive le roi!” – though perhaps this was merely out of a sense of self-preservation. Charles, of course, had been ruling intractably for many years, and could plead no such excuse.

Third, and cited by Durant as the critical element, the French revolt failed to receive the support of the most powerful noble in France, the Great Condé. Instead, this able general sided with the royalty. The greatest general of the English Civil War was Cromwell, leading the revolt.

The third element is most puzzling to us. Following Tolstoy, we are inclined to think of wars as massive and bellicose movements of people animated by some cultural or ethnic difference to shed each other’s blood. How could the whim or ability of one man have such force of the movements of a human tide? Surely the Condé was merely, again, following Tolstoy, a Napoleon-ic figurehead? Of course, our suggestion that Louis escaped Charles’s fate merely by being young is no better an explanation than that the Great Condé was great.

But perhaps there is something in that religious explanation. Protestantism, wherever it arose, was nothing more than the expression of cultural, class, and ethnic differences. In England, Puritanism, like Calvinism everywhere, was the expression of the labor, artisanal, trade, and business classes of their own peculiar ethos; in England, the fight of this class for expression took the form of the English Civil War. In France, it instead took the form of the French Wars of Religion, which were a forty-year bloodbath in which, as in England, the Calvinists revolted against the government. Because it was expressed directly as a revolt on religious principles, the resolution of the Wars of Religion brought no resolution to the other problems that the revolt expressed (oppressive taxation and incompetent economic administration).

The Reformation in Retrospect: A Lot of Killing for Nothing – Story of Civilization VI.xxxvi.iv-VI.Epilogue

The story of the Reformation, looking back, appears to be one of a lot of killing for no good reason.  Whether it was the execution of Servetus, or the burning of Huss, or the mutual suicides of the Jews, it is striking how very, very much bloodshed there was in that era over questions that would today, by philosophers, be deemed of no  importance whatsoever.

Perhaps the answer lies in the time-honored belief that religious unity is essential for the unity of the state, and that any questioning of a nation’s religious creed amounts to revolt.  Or perhaps, on a similar note, profession of theological disagreement is merely a cover for ethnic or nationalistic divides.

Still, whatever the reason, the majority of the killings resulted from individual, isolated persons refusing to deny beliefs to be declared heretical by their own communities.  After extended opportunities for recantation, these persons in essence chose death over the disavowal of their own beliefs.  We cannot know all of the reasons that these people had for doing what they did, but one factor is clear: a superabundance of certainty.  This certainty, in its time, was called faith, but one man’s faith was even then another man’s anathema.

The entire Lutheran/Calvinist set of theological beliefs shared or contributed to this sense of certainty.  In particular, the doctrine of predestination, by which some small subset of mankind was “elect” to be saved by Jesus’ sacrifice, while everybody else was “reprobate” could easily be imagined to instill men with arrogance and contempt for their fellows.  (“Of course our neighbors are certain that Jesus vested his power in Peter… they’re reprobate, damned, incapable of truth or right action, bound to believe the opposite of truth.  What’s more, since we are God’s chosen, just as the soldiers of Israel, we are justified in striking them down.”)

The Reformation marked the continuation from the time of the Crusades of vicious campaigns against German Jewry, as well as against more Christian heresies; the Jews probably suffered more than most Christian sects from the murderous and contradictory certainties of opposing faiths.  The Reformation, then, was a vehicle for one of the greatest atrocities of pre-contemporary life, the Holocaust, and so ought to provide potent lessons for the present day.

This is a wordy way of saying a general thing: what can we learn from the past to avoid its errors?

For starters, eschew murder.  The vitally important questions of one period may not even be regarded as syntactically correct by the next.

Art Prospers When Religion Suffers – Story of Civilization VI.xxxii.i-VI.xxxvi.iii

If we are to make a bold thesis and a provocative one, such as “art prospers when religion suffers,” let us first define terms.  Art is the study of the human condition.  To prosper is to develop, not merely in quantity, but to make new inroads into previously unexplored areas.  In art, to prosper is to develop new forms and methods of art, as well as new ideas for that art to express.  Religion is the monotheistic monoliths of the west, Islam and Christianity.  Suffering is suppression by starvation or removal of resources; in religion, suffering is the distraction of the people from religious studies by worldly concerns.

Having safely defined the terms to our whim, our thesis is hardly disprovable.  Perhaps it’s all a big joke played on us by the ancient Hebrews: Moses could not have known what 3,000 years would do to the commandments he had invented.

In the 1500′s, both the Christians of the Reformation and the Muslims across the board took quite literally Moses’ commandment “You shall not make for yourself any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in Heaven above, or  that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth…”

Both religions went so far as to interpret this commandment as prohibiting any artwork religious in nature, and in the Muslim case, nearly any portraiture or representative art at all.  So it was that while Renaissance Italy was enjoying a golden renascence, Persia, experiencing the good administration of the sons of Tamerlane, made no sculpture comparable to that of Michelangelo, and no paintings like those of Raphael or del Sarto.

It can always be argued that theses like mine are correlative, but the rise of the Reformation provides an opportunity to see clearly the connection between the rise of religion and the fall of art.  In painting, the works of the masters in the churches of Germany and Switzerland were thrown out and destroyed out of religious fervor, and the statues were smashed.  The reason?  The commandment against idolatry.  Likewise, while Spain, France, Italy, and even Poland were enjoying burgeoning periods of growth in their universities, the enrollment in universities in Germany and Switzerland fell to – nearly literally – zero.  The reason?  The universities had taken as their mission the preservation and study of the Greek and Latin classics, and men who took part in such studies were suspected of heresy, apostasy, atheism, and worse.  In literature, Spain – despite the Inquisition – and Portugal developed a new drama, and in Spain, Portugal, France, and England, the sonnets of Petrarch were dusted off and this literary form was adapted to new vigor in new languages, while in Germany, there was only the bluff poetry of Hans Sachs.  The reason?  While the printing presses of France pumped out the classics, and the kings of France and England dowered artists and universities, the presses of Germany pumped out pamphlets on subjects such as whether the doctrine of transubstantiation or consubstantiation was true, or what the implications of God’s foreknowledge were on His omnipotence – my oblique way of referring to the doctrine of predestination.

Alas, all this has been said before, and religion has been the whipping boy of those who mourn progress oft enough.  But still there are rhetoricians who will insist that when we lament the losses that religion has inflicted on humanity, we are exaggerating.  They are ignorant of history.

God is in the Mind – Story of Civilization V.xi.v.2-V.xviii.ii

“We have left to the last Julius’ favorite painter and sculptor, a man rivaling him in temper and terribilità, in power and depth of spirit – the greatest and saddest artist in the records of mankind.”  So begins Durant’s discussion of Michelangelo Buonarroti, and with such a beginning, who wouldn’t want to know more about this artist?

Again, Durant, on Michelangelo’s most famous work, the ceiling paintings of the Sistine Chapel.  “…taken together, they constitute the greatest achievement of any man in the history of painting.  The total effect of repeated and careful contemplation is far greater than in the case of [Raphael's] Stanze.  There we feel a happy perfection of artistry, and an urbane union of pagan and Christian thought.  Here we do not merely perceive technical accomplishment – in the perspective, the foreshortenings, the unrivaled variety of attitudes; we feel the sweep and breath of genius, almost as creative as in the wind-swept figure of the Almighty raising Adam out of the earth.”

This last refers to one of the panel’s of Michelangelo’s work in the Chapel, The Creation of Adam.  This painting is remarkable not just because it is often considered to be the finest painting in the Sistine Chapel, but also because it contains a remarkable allusion within it.  Specifically, as first noted by Dr. Frank Meshberger, the cloud that envelopes the figure of God, combined with the figure itself and the accompanying figures of angels, resembles a human brain, the shape of which Michelangelo, having dissected many human corpses, would have been one of the first men of his era to understand.

Michelangelo's "The Creation of Adam"

What is the message?  When I first saw the painting, I thought it a sublime joke.  God is in the mind. Imagine, the greatest and saddest genius of mankind painting the most atheistic of mantras atop the very citadel of Christendom, and funded by a pope!

Sadly, Michelangelo appears to have been a better Christian than the pope funding him.  In his youth, Michelangelo was an admirer of the savage Savonarola, a Florentine priest preaching the end of days.  As Dr. Meshberger (above) notes, Michelangelo’s intention seems to be to express, without irony, the importance of God’s gift of intellect to man, a subject that deeply concerned Michelangelo in some of his writing.  The pope who funded the work, Julius II, by contrast, was a man of immense worldly ambition.  Having purchased his way to the papacy over the voices of those who objected to the idea of a pope with three biological daughters, Julius spent more time waging war than in worship.

All this is not to malign Julius’ character – though it does by the standards of our time – for his behavior was typical of the popes of his time, and more typical of the temporal monarchs, among which the popes numbered, since they ruled in a secular capacity large regions of Italy.  It is merely to illustrate that the placement of God in the human mind was not meant to be so ironic as it now, to some, appears.  Michelangelo did not know the extent of his own genius.

Story of Civilization – V.i.i – V.ii.ii

We begin here the study of the Renaissance, and what a relief it is to escape the medieval mind at last!

Durant describes Petrarch, the literary successor of Dante, as the first humanist: “the first writer to express with clarity and force the right of man to concern himself with this life, to enjoy and augment its beauties, and to labor to deserve well of posterity.”  Here we see, in a nutshell, what separated Petrarch and most of those who followed him from his predecessors.  “The right of man to concern himself with this life, to enjoy and augment its beauties…”  What a far cry is this from the relentless asceticism of Bernard and Francis, and the severity of Dominic!  What productive philosophy might arise from this, now that we can leave behind the vain logic-chopping of Thomas Aquinas, and the mysticism of Duns Scotus!  And now perhaps art may imitate life, and leave Dante’s putative ethereal wanderings behind.

I sometimes imagine a giant Hegelian phylogeny of ideas wherein a single proposition formed each point of the phylogeny.  Each proposition depends on the one above it, and accepting the proposition at a point, a thinker tends toward one of two dependent ideas.  For instance, do you believe in government or anarchy?  If you believe in government, do you believe in despotism or rule by many?  If you believe in rule by many, is that many a few or most?  If most (democracy) do you believe the people should hold all power directly or should there be a republic?  Etc. etc. etc.

What’s interesting about the idea is that that you can determine how closely two people agree on a subject by how far down the tree they share the same premises; two people who accept democracy agree more than two people who only accept the necessity of government.

In any case, if we were to form such a tree from the very first principles, I think that the conflict between humanism and medievalism (for lack of a better word) would arise very high on the tree.  Do you believe that this life is man’s first concern, where in all his meaning arises, or do you believe that there is another life, more meaningful and more important, after this one?  If the former, you find yourself in a maelstrom of philosophers and ethicists, pagan and modern.  If the latter, take a one-way ticket to the Middle Ages.  You have no need to concern yourself with politics, art, or any such trivialities.  No discussion of material comforts is necessary, and no time need be wasted on anything but the salvation of your soul.

Epistemology is Cool, Vitalism is for Morons

Epistemology is cool?  What?  I’m beginning to believe that many of today’s most interesting problems boil down to epistemology.  In our age, we have an epistemological problem that the ancients never dreamt of.  To wit, we have discovered that there is really a very, very great amount of things to know.  Indeed, there are far more things to know than one puny mind, as we now understand the term, can possibly comprehend in a lifetime.

Simply put, the old epistemological questions were things like “What is knowledge?” or “How do we get to know things?”  Now, the question is “How can we get every individual member of our species to know all of the things that he needs to that, collectively, we already know?”  More briefly, the old question was “How do we get to know things?”  The new question is “How do we get other people to know things?”

It was not always so.  With the help of one or two devoted pupils, Aristotle compassed nearly all of the scientific knowledge of his age, and made the greatest of contributions in most other fields too.  Aristotle, showed that, in principle at least, the acquisition of complete knowledge by an individual was possible in his time.  Even much more recently, it was possible for an educated man to be familiar with all of the most important cultural touchstones of human history; such familiarity made the writings of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries possible.

Today, this is no longer true.  I have worked out in some detail (and a long time ago) how the proliferation of knowledge – or at least information – has created a problem in the arts, and particularly literature.  I have also discussed, in gloss, how the highly developed nature of scientific knowledge has, in a way, limited mankind’s ability to understand the grave existential threats facing it today.  Now I wish to discuss one of the most irritating consequences of our epistemological problem, the persistence of vitalism.

Vitalism is the belief that some separate principle, or essence, occupies living things and makes them distinct from “inanimate” (literally, soulless) matter.  A common vitalist proposition is something like, “You can’t create life in the laboratory, because there’s some constituent of life outside the realm of matter that you don’t know about.”  Most vitalists are actually mystics: they not only believe that there’s some principle of life that we don’t know about, they also believe we can’t know it, that the scientific method will never understand this mysterious, non-material vital principle.

Put this way, it’s obvious that vitalism is not really a much more dignified belief than the belief in ghosts or ESP.  After all, if there’s one aspect of our daily lives that can’t be understood or measured, why not others?  If I have a mystic principle animating me that I can’t detect or know anything about, why couldn’t that mystic principle exist outside of the body?  Since this mystic, non-material principle seems to be able to influence matter (for instance, by giving me life), why shouldn’t ghosts be able to talk or do whatever else it is that ghosts do?

Of course, most religious types are vitalists too.  The vital principle for a religious type is the “soul”, which, when they speak of it, is an entirely separate form and mode of existence from the body, something ethereal and mystical, but somehow capturing all of an individual’s individuality.

Most pre-modern philosophers were also vitalists.  The belief in the animating principle spawned Descartes’s mind-body duality, the inane ramblings of Aquinas, and even the more tripped-out theories of the Greek philosophers.

Now, let us imagine our philosopher, our modern philosopher.  He has a complete understanding of science, and can imagine, in broad outline, how he could construct a bacterium, or even a simple sponge.  It’s not possible yet, of course, because in a way, the smallest microbe poses the same challenge as a great mountain: we know what the mountain, or the bacterium, is made of, but we lack the extraordinary resources that would be required to create one out of nothing.  Still, the philosopher knows of what a microbe or a sponge is made, and he mostly understands humans; he’s optimistic that in a hundred years he’ll know everything.  Having this knowledge enables the philosopher to completely escape the abyss of vitalism, and in so doing, keep a cautious distance from religion, ancient metaphysics, belief in ghosts, and any number of other intellectual crosses that humanity continues to bear.

Now, the epistemological problem arises: how is he to communicate this knowledge to others?  The philosopher acquired his knowledge of the way the world works by decades of painstaking study.  It did not take decades because he learned inefficiently, or learned the wrong things; it tooks decades because there was so much to know.  In short, the philosopher can only communicate his secret with others by passing on his knowledge, in toto, to them.  For anyone to escape the trap of vitalism, decades of study are necessary.  Ironically, then, the philosopher, who believes that knowledge is communicable, that the universe is comprehensible, that laws govern the natural world, and that we can discover and use these laws, arrives at the same problem as the mystic, who believes the opposite of all of these things: the philosopher has knowledge, but its transmission is impractical – though not, as with the mystic, impossible.

There is another way.  The philosopher could resort to what would now be termed the “technocratic” solution.  He could appeal to the unknowing people to trust that his years of study have produced for him intransmissible knowledge, but knowledge that would give him the power to solve problems and help the people.  If the appeal is not taken, the same solution applies, through a longer route: build a culture of awe and respect.  Over enough generations, the philosopher and his heirs could instill in the people the idea the fervent belief that the philosopher holds superior knowledge.  He would, of course, hold such knowledge, though the years of study required to attain it make it hard to prove to the people that he does in fact have the knowledge.  That is why the priest, I mean the philosopher, would have to instill belief and trust in the people, as opposed to convincing them on merit.

And therein lies the problem: the philosopher, to receive his power, must appeal to the same devices as the priest.  Technocracy ruled our society for millenia before the advent of scientific knowledge; that technocracy was called the priesthood.  The priests could not prove to the people that they held superior knowledge, but they said that they did, and they sometimes resorted to tricks to convince people.  The philosopher would be left to the same devices, the same claims, and the same arguments that the priest used for thousands of years.  To borrow from Arthur C. Clarke (here), the people must view the sufficiently advanced knowledge of the philosopher in the same way they view the magical claims of the priest.

And so, perhaps there is no hope for humanity: the scientists are left to argue with the priests on grounds that, in the eyes of the people, are totally equal.  The only difficulty is that the scientists cannot choose their ground, their position on issues; it is determined for them by their very real knowledge.  The priests, on the other hand, are free to have “revealed” to them whatever positions the people seem to favor.

Could the scientists outline the argument I have given here, and appeal to the very fact that no one would take their position if not impelled to it by real knowledge?  For example, could we appeal to people to believe in global warming because why on Earth would a scientist choose to take the position that we have to adopt a poorer, simpler lifestyle?  (There are, actually, many reasons, which I hope to someday discuss.)  I think not; such an argument is weak because it rests on no actual information, and can be used as a defense for anyone arguing for an apparently unpopular position.

We can make heroic efforts (such as the one here), but ultimately, we must tackle our epistemological problem before we can solve any of humanity’s other problems.

Story of Civilization – IV.xxvi.iv – IV.xxxii.v

The story of the Middle Ages is in large part the story of the Roman Catholic Church.  But what exactly was the Church?  It was not a state, though at times it acted like one.  It was not merely a religious organization, as we currently understand the concept.  Nor was it a cultural or ethnic collective, for it contained within it a broad range of Western European cultures.

I would posit that there is in fact no single word that can describe the Church of the Middle Ages, that it was an entity unique to history.  It was unique both in the breadth and depth of its influence on the peoples under its control, and in the relative lack of civil control it exercised relative to what would be usual for an entity of its size and power.

Perhaps the key to understanding the nature of the Church lies in the tangled webs of the feudalistic power structure.  Feudalism revolved around lords, who controlled the land, and vassals, whom the lords permitted to use the land in exchange for allegiance.  (Cf. Wikipedia.)  A lord himself could be holding lands “in fief” from another lord, and be his vassal.  In fact, almost all lords were vassals, at least in name, to some higher lord; the Pope and a few kings were the only exceptions.  Lords were responsible for the internal peace and external security of the lands under their control.

A common practice was for a feudal sovereign to give his lands as a gift to the Pope, and become the Pope’s vassal, in exchange for Papal support, usually in the form of a declaration of the sovereign’s righteousness in a war against his neighbors.  At one time or another, it seems that nearly every sovereign in Europe resorted to this tactic (e.g. Portugal).  The consequence was that, in theory, the Pope exercised secular power over much of Europe, although the giving and taking of Papal fiefs was frequent enough that at no time did the Pope come near to complete control.

Such power was theoretical at best; it is not clear that the secular power that came theoretically with Papal suzerainty was ever exercised with much success beyond the Papal States.

This is not to say that the Pope had no power, or even little power.  If money is power, the Pope was for much of the Middle Ages the most powerful man in Europe, by far.  The Church directly owned huge fractions of land in all of Western Europe, ranging from a fifth (England) to half (Livonia), and on lands that it did not own, it received the tithe, or tenth part of the revenue.  These lands accounted for the local revenues of the Church, and may have paid the expenses of the Church’s numerous charitable works, and the building of its monasteries and cathedrals, the latter of which are perhaps the grandest cultural achievement of the Middle Ages, or perhaps any age.

But the true power of the papacy rested, I think, in the revenues that went directly to the Pope.  He siphoned from various sources of local revenue, and had his own revenues as well.  What is important, in the end, is that his income is estimated to have been greater than that of all of the lesser sovereigns of Europe combined.  It was this income that tempted so many popes into wars, crusades, and power struggles.

This was the nature of the papacy, but what was the nature of the Church itself?  The theological and ethical elements of Catholicism were as important in the Middle Ages as ever, and local priests and monks propounded constantly the doctrines of what might be called traditional Christianity; indeed, one of the few virtues of the modern Catholic Church is that it has functioned remarkably well to preserve these doctrines relatively unchanged.  The most striking figures of this local dissemination of Catholic doctrine were the mendicant saints, of whom the most prominent example is Francis of Assisi.  Saint Francis lived a life of extreme poverty and asceticism, preaching the faith both by word and example, and following what he regarded as the simplest essences of Jesus’ teachings.

Not all saints were as benign as Francis.  Saint Dominic was one of the prime movers of the Inquisition.  Perhaps it was merely the juxtaposition of two unrelated stories playing tricks on my mind, but as I read the story of Saint Dominic, I could not help but compare it to the story I had just read of the remarkable escape of a New York Times reporter from the Taliban.

Indeed, perhaps the Taliban is the closest modern analogue of the Church of the Middle Ages.  Like the Church, the Taliban, according to Mr. Rohde, exercises both secular and religious control over a large area of Afghanistan/Pakistan.  Without speaking of the higher echelons, at the lower echelons, the Taliban and the Church look remarkably similar.  The vast majority of the subjects are simple people of faith; the actual footsoldiers of the faith, be they inquisitors, monks, priests, or mendicant saints, or alternatively, soldiers, guards, and insurrectionists, have diverse motivations, but share several things in common: they are usually young men, removed from what might be regarded as the normal occupations of youth, and in particular, social intercourse with young women.  The Inquisition inflicted similar terrors in some localities that the Taliban inflicts on the civilians of its own state today, to wit constant fear and occasional violent death.

As I have remarked previously, the great sin of modern Christianity is hypocrisy; the great sin of modern Islam is the violence it commits in the name of faith.  As I have said before, in truth, Islam is a religion of violence, but perhaps hypocrisy is the lesser of the two evils.  It is to be hoped that Islam will soon mature, with wealth, from a religion of violence to a religion of hypocrisy.