My claim is that the civilisation shared by most Prospect readers is humanist, a relatively young global civilisation based on the post-medieval, Italian-Dutch-Anglo-American tradition of the constitutional, commercial society. Needless to say, this definition of humanist civilisation differs dramatically from conventional catechisms about the “rise of the west.”
For example, the familiar idea that there is a unitary liberal “west” that is defined by the RRE tradition-Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment-is untrue. Renaissance humanism is incompatible with Reformation Protestantism, while Enlightenment rationalism is alien to both. The fact that these three traditions have coexisted in Britain, the US and other countries does not mean that they are three phases of the same tradition.
Another version of the “rise of the west” story, more sympathetic to Catholicism than the RRE approach, holds that the “west” is a synthesis of the “Greco-Roman” and “Judaeo-Christian” traditions. In fact, the “Judaeo-Christian” tradition has little to do with the tolerant, individualist, commercial society.
Consider the claim that Christianity is responsible for the liberal ideal of political equality. In reality, early-modern liberal republican theorists derived this from Cicero and the Stoics. Christians and Muslims believe in the equality of believers before God, a conception which was not interpreted until recently to mandate equality. Indeed, Paul admonished slaves to return to their spiritually-equal masters. The Christian churches only turned against chattel slavery after secular philosophers like David Hume had begun denouncing it. Southern Protestants in the US defended slavery throughout the civil war, and the Catholic church defended it until it was abolished decades later in Catholic Cuba and Brazil.
Popular sovereignty, republicanism, democracy, the rule of law rather than the rule of men, the idea of a natural law transcending the conventional law of nations-these, too, are part of a pre-Christian, Greco-Roman heritage familiar to educated Europeans and westerners from the Renaissance until the 19th century. Credit for these concepts can no more be given to Moses and Jesus than to Muhammad.
But didn’t Protestantism produce capitalism? The intellectual historians who vulgarise Max Weber’s nuanced discussion of the affinities between Protestantism and capitalism into a cause-and-effect relationship are easily refuted. Commercial capitalism, in a remarkably familiar form, evolved in Catholic Europe, particularly in northern Italy, for half a millennium, between the 1100s and the 1500s. Only the political repression of Italy by counter-Reformation Spain gave the lead to northwestern Europe-and there capitalism and industry burgeoned in pluralist Holland and in Britain after the invasion of “Dutch William” in 1689. It did not happen in Puritan societies like Calvin’s Geneva or Cromwell’s England or the Scotland tyrannised by the kirk. In the US, the centre of capitalism has been not Puritan New England or the Southern Bible Belt, but polyglot, secular, permissive Manhattan-formerly known as New Amsterdam.
What about natural science? Christian apologists nowadays claim that Christianity cleared the way for natural science by demythologising the world. This would come as news to Pope John Paul II, who in September 2000 performed a 30-minute exorcism on a 19-year-old woman who began shouting at him during a public audience. Evangelical Protestants, as well as Catholics, believe in demons and engage in exorcism. The conservative Protestant JF Cogan says that the growth in the human population, relative to the fixed number of fallen angels, means that some overworked demons are forced to commute among a number of possessed individuals at “the speed of electricity.” Even more innovative is the Rev Jim Peasboro of Savannah, Georgia, who in his book The Devil in the Machine: Is Your Computer Possessed by a Demon? explains that “any PC built after 1985 has the storage capacity to house an evil spirit.” All this is justified by reference to Jesus whose many successful exorcisms are recounted in the New Testament.
Modern natural science was built in the last several centuries on the surviving foundations of ancient Hellenic science-the atomism of Leucippus and Democritus in the 5th and 4th centuries BC, and the heliocentric theory of Aristarchus (310-230 BC). Like Muslims, Christians repeatedly have tried to repress science when it threatened their dogmas, from the days of Galileo until the present, with Protestant fundamentalists in the US still waging a campaign to ban discussion of Darwinian biology from classrooms or to pair it with Biblical “creation science.” According to Stephen Hawking, who attended a 1981 Vatican conference on cosmology, “the Pope told us that it was fine to study the evolution of the universe after the big bang, but we should not inquire into the big bang itself because that was the work of God.”
So, does liberty of conscience have Christian roots? It was only after they failed to create theocracies on the territories that they controlled in the wars of religion that Catholics and Calvinists resigned themselves to the idea of a secular state (to this day, ultramontanist Catholics and Protestant theologians dream of theocratic government). After Mussolini came to power in Italy, Pope Pius XI declared: “if there is a totalitarian regime, it is the Church regime, given that man belongs wholly to the Church.” (The Vatican did not make its peace with liberal democracy until the 1960s.) The major Protestant reformers were just as tyrannical. “Those who object to the punishment of heresy are like dogs and swine,” Calvin thundered. Martin Luther was moderate by comparison, writing in 1528: “I can in no way admit that false teachers should be put to death: it is enough that they should be banished.” Of the Jews, the relatively tolerant Luther wrote: “Burn down their synagogues… force them to work, and deal harshly with them, as Moses did in the wilderness, slaying 3,000 lest the whole people perish… There it would be wrong to be merciful.”
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In the interest of social peace, political elites in the English-speaking world, as well as in continental Europe, have abandoned intellectual consistency by assigning each of these three rival secular traditions authority in a different sphere. When discussing politics, Americans use the language of Renaissance humanist republicanism; when discussing business, science and technology, they are Cartesian rationalists; when discussing morals and religion, they tend to speak a Calvinist language of public confession and repentance; and in the arts, they use the German romantic categories of genius, originality and inspiration. Now and then there are collisions as when, every year or two, an exhibit of “blasphemous” art illustrates the conflict between Christian and romantic conceptions of creativity.
;j