Syntropy I see that you have pulled the victim card. Boring. I am done viewing this thread because I was actually reading it for your posts in particular, and you just took it to the place that these discussions always go. Therefore it has no more value.
It’s an interesting question, but as I said, I’m not interested in speculative fiction.
Entirely my fault - instead of asking the same question a mere three times, I obviously needed to go for a fourth.
I do, but your arguments haven’t been about other possible sources for the growth of compassion. You have asked me ‘what ifs’ that can have any answer the author of the question chooses to supply for it. So it is unfortunate it got mired in fictional scenarios, and if someone had some edifying insights to share as regards to some of the ‘innumerable other influences’ rather than fictitious scenarios there would be a fruitful line of inquiry.
Measure for Measure That comment about Aesop’s Fables was one of the more interesting in the thread. I will have to go back through and re-read them.
So all you want is a list of accomplishments by nonChristians?
Meh. The Italians were probably one of the most devout people in all of Western Christendom. Yet Italy was at the very heart of the Renaissance (and for that matter, most of the art was religious in nature - Michaelangelo’s David, the Sistine Chapel, the Last Supper…). I don’t think that particular point can be swept aside that easily, or be ascribed to religion, really - more of an economic thing I’d say.
While they were the first on the shores of the New World, in the end the Spanish American adventure was a huge net financial loss, and Spanish nobles just didn’t have that much spare cash to lavishly spend on pet artists and/or scientists. The other European nations did far better commerce-wise.
As for the gist of the debate, I can’t say I have much to add, save for the fact that I do believe it’s an intellectual fallacy to assert that the 17th Century Christian Church had anything in common with, say, the Church in place during the Crusades, for instance, or the early missionary Church, and to lump it all in a big “Christianity” ball. The Church was progressive at times, backwards at others, depending on the political winds, the whims of its Popes, the mentalities, the goals etc…
At this point, I’m not entirely sure what the debate is, or what it was ever supposed to be.
What? What on earth are you talking about? AFAIK, you did not respond to my evidence that there was a renaissance in China. If you did, I missed it and I apologize. But I’m no victim. I do admit to being frustrated. You have moved the goal posts on your original claim and dismissed evidence out of hand. I’ll debate til dawn but I expect honesty.
I haven’t read the original, but I understand that Fogel addressed the Trans-Continental Railroad. AFAIK, it was a small aspect of the national rail network.
Yes, there are limits to alternative histories. But I’ll defend the counterfactual technique on both logical and practical grounds: it focuses minds on some relevant issues.
In this context, I’d hypothesize that a) a compassion-religion (to use Brian Erkers’ terms) can be distinguished from that which came before it, in terms of societal effects b) urbanization made such a compassion religion inevitable and c) Christianity was but one of a competing set of compassion-religions.
Early Christian churches may have also provided certain forms of insurance against hard times, so there are substantive issues here as well. Christian charity may have been a risk-diluting institution.
Aesop: We don’t need to limit our literature review to Aesop’s fables. For all I know, they may have been the era’s equivalent to a dirty joke: the lack of compassion might have been intrinsic to that type of work, but not really a reflection of what people believed.
Googling, I see that Aidos, the goddess of shame, modesty, and humility -who restrains men from doing wrong- seems to be a pretty minor player. So, this counterexample at least seems consistent with the introduction to the Aesop’s text that I quoted.
I don’t think you can assume that. Feudalism itself was a late development, and given completely different conditions (a pagan, or Mithraist or whatever Europe), there’s no reason to assume it would have appeared at the first place, let alone survived for a long time.
Well, it depends how one defines Feudalism, of course, but the notion of land-bound serfs overseen by a local Lord or Duke doesn’t seem like that much of a stretch to me, given the limitations of communications technology - i.e. anything larger than a Feudal territory (or, historically, a Greek city-state) is too difficult to administer on a day-to-day basis. It kinda strikes me as a logical evolution of an agricultural society with an increasing ability to build fortifications.
I don’t offhand see why any particular religion need be a factor - isn’t the basic structure of local Lords overseeing a territory while paying fealty to a King/Emperor a fairly common one across historical Europe and Asia?
Ok, but I’ll repeat that the counterfactual is an accepted tool of historical inquiry.
BrainGlutton provided another influence for the rise of the compassion (if that indeed is what we’re discussing).
I think it’s fair to say that while Christianity may not have been a necessary condition for a rise in compassion, in the event it was the form that it actually took.
There are other aspects of ancient and medieval Christianity of course: personally, I wonder about its insurance mechanisms.
I understand that argument I disagree with it. For instance what would the world be like if the Crusades and Holocaust had never happened? This is just a small example of how the world might be different if Judaism proselytized. Maybe the Romans would have wiped the Jews out entirely in 70 AD, or maybe we’d all be Jews. In either case Pan-German nationalism wouldn’t have arisen in the 20th century, at least not in the form it did scapegoating the Jews like that. My view of history is that events are important and culture even more so. The little things that we are told in passing through repetition over thousands of years profoundly impact how we think. So how would life be if more people were influenced by Hillel than Augustine? I have no clue how to answer that. Maybe Counterfactuals are accepted tools of historical inquiry, but for me I’d want to start pretty early, because by the acceptance of counterfactuals you are discounting the value of human beings and that history is the story of how they lived their lives. Instead you are viewing history as a system where necessary ideas are inevitable due to the need the world has for them. It completely eliminates the idea that human beings have a will at all.
Right. That is part of my point. We cannot know whether or not it was a necessary condition, but we know that it was the way it actually occurred. Obviously the Mithraic influence that preceded Christianity was influential, and IMV also necessary to the rise of Christianity. The idea of a single God, and it may very well have been influential on Augustus’s notions of piety, right thought and right action. Something resembling compassion seems to have colored his rule, where he was concerned with the welfare of poor Romans and disgusted by Patrician decadence.
I wouldn’t argue that any aspect of the human condition was suddenly invented, more that the religious aspect is where the virtue is held as an explicit value, and inculcated through official doctrine. IE, individuals probably were compassionate in the past, the bible shows people expressing compassion for Jesus as he carries his cross, so I wouldn’t argue that it was invented in his generation, but that at that point in history it became a major factor in the process.
I’m very interested in the figure of Augustus Caesar as Emperor during the time when Jesus supposedly lived.
You want to elaborate on that?
That’s as strawy a strawman as ever I’ve seen. What exactly did you want to discuss regarding the impact of Christianity? We could all easily agree “Yes, Christianity had an impact”, but that’s boring and unproductive, so I’ll assume the real meat of the debate is how much of an impact Christianity had. Since we can’t hit a giant RESET button, we have to speculate and estimate and analyze and one of the first major tools in this direction is asking “What could have happened if Christianity had not risen to prominence in Europe?” and start with:
[ul][li]Philosophies that already existed in Europe which were similar to Christianity, including philosophies from which Christianity itself developed (i.e. were there other messianic cults in play at the time which might have filled the same role, or was there a general evolution toward monotheism already in progress, or other ideas?)[/li][li]Analyzing what power structures were displaced by Christianity and debating if their collapse was inevitable anyway (i.e. they were inherently unstable)[/li][li]Debating what nonEuropean influences, if any, could have could have gained footholds in Europe in the absence of Christianity[/ul][/li]This is no way assumes humans have no will. On the contrary, your repeated “that’s only fiction!” responses seem to assume Christianity was inevitable, public will be damned, and it is inconceivable that history could have been any different.
All counterfactuals are pure speculation, and therefore arguing for any major cultural difference in the form of a counter-factual expects us to account for trillions (or way more) of variables.
- You can argue for those and argue about their relative impact without a counterfactual.
- You can discuss their displacement and debate the causes without the need of a counterfactual.
- Again, these can all be discussed without a counterfactual.
If you went that route and brought up evidence for competing influences I’d be much more open to them. The culimination of past events in hindsight are always inevitable, because the way it happened is the way it happened and the only way it could happen if ALL those conditions were met. It is necessarily this way because the result of causes is their attendant effect. I don’t look at history monolithically, but syncretically and if you want to discuss competing ideas that had a big influence on Western Civilization early in the first millenium, then by all means do so. This doesn’t need a counterfactual that posits, “What if history happened in a way that is completely and totally different from the way it actually happened?”
I’m not and have never proposed a history that was completely and totally different. Doing so would overstate Christianity’s (admittedly significant) influence. Rather, there were many concepts already in place before Christianity came along which Christianity absorbed, and there were nonChristian cultures who independently came up with concepts Christianity now claims. Actually, I’m not sure that Europe would be all that different. A major wildcard is whether or not Islam would still have developed in Christianity’s absence and if that culture could have spread and stayed North. Since Christianity and Islam are not hugely different philosophically, and both are prone to factional division and warfare, Europe might’ve ended up with similar prominence, to eventually compete with East Asia.
I may be less ambitious than Bryan: I just want some distinctions teased out.
What’s the significance of the rise of a compassion-religion in ancient Rome?
What’s the significance of the rise of a religion that encourages literacy (so that the Holy Text can be read)?
What’s the significance of the rise of a religion that is intolerant of competing religions and heterodoxy?
None of these elements are unique to Christianity. It’s just that Christianity happened to combine all of them. There may be other characteristics.
Insurance: I’m wondering whether early Christian churches formed a sort of mutual aid society, underpinned by the ideology of Christian charity. My googling on this hasn’t helped though. IIRC, the Frontline documentary may have alluded to this, but I’m not sure.
Judaism as counterfactual. Hm. I dunno: for my purposes I consider Christianity to be a form of Judaism adapted for pagans. When discussing whether something is significant, you study the effects of its absence: substituting something closely resembling it sheds little light.
mswas: “All counterfactuals are pure speculation…”
[hijack]No. An econometric model that simulates the effect of a change in policy isn’t exactly speculative, though it does use counterfactuals. Of course, that’s not what we’re doing in this thread. [/hijack]
Then this is the source of our disagreement. I think you are understating Christian influence by an extreme amount. I mean truly extreme. It is one that does not even jive with cause and effect as I understand it. If a Totalitarian religion dominates a culture for a thousand years it is incredibly, and extremely significant. The peasants were not being taught Aristotle, Mithras or Augustus Caesar, they were being taught Jesus and Paul, every Sunday for more than a 1000 years. That is not simply replaceable. People lived and died, fought wars, became priests, were martyred for their beliefs and murdered in its name. Missionaries were the head of the spear in the conquest of the new world. Native Americans were forced to take Christian names. Cathedrals were built atop sacred druid groves.
So it would seem we are at an intractable impasse, because I think your view is ridiculously dismissive of Christian influence. Not just slight, but extreme. I am not saying this to be insulting, only to illustrate the gap in how we look at the history.
Christian salvation became a greater value than Roman Glory.
I don’t know how much literacy was encouraged in actual practice.
In this case it was quite successful until the Reformation of keeping a united doctrine across much of Europe.
Right, the characteristics need not be unique. Chicken Pot Pie and Brownies both have eggs in them. It is the combination, not the individual aspects that makes for the cultural institution.
I don’t know, but it’s interesting.
I agree, but that’s still different from straight Judaism.
Right, but that’s not quite the same as eliminating the singular dominant cultural influence across a continent for a millenium. But as far as your economic counter-factuals, I’m going to have to refer to St. Nassem Taleb for that one.
This.
I don’t think either Bryan Ekers or I are being dismissive of Christianity’s influence during the Renaissance at all. We have both admitted it had a very heavy influence. What we are saying is that it did not spawn the renaissance which is what you claimed earlier. There were far too many things already in place that helped bring the Enlightenment along to point to Christianity and claim it brought the entire era about.
If you are no longer claiming that then I don’t see any issues with agreeing that Christianity had a very real impact on Europe during the Enlightenment which were manifest in many ways.
My view is that Christianity cannot be separated from the cause, not that there were not additional factors. This is why I have a problem with the counterfactual. If you remove Christianity, there would have been no rennaisance or enlightenment as they were both reactions to Christianity.