Global Growth, Domestic Prosperity, and Wealth Creation

Early in one’s economic education, the terms “zero-sum” and “positive-sum” are presented as designating two categories of systematic understanding. The difference is significant.

The label “positive-sum” defines an outcome in which no party gains at another’s expense; i.e., one party can gain without another party’s losing, or even both parties can gain. This is often viewed as ‘wealth creation’ in political terms.

A “zero-sum” situation is one in which a party can only gain as another party loses. This is a condition in which the total amount of wealth in the system does not, or cannot, change.

Where, in real life, does one encounter either “positive-sum” or “zero-sum” circumstances? Free markets, innovation, and population growth lead to wealth creation.

If international interaction occurs on a free-market basis, then it can lead to a “positive-sum” outcome, as author David Wallace-Wells writes: “The market fabric of globalization” is “a vision of cross-national participation, imbued with the neoliberal ethos that life on Earth” is “a positive-sum game.”

Note, however, that in international trade, the labels ‘free market’ and ‘free trade’ are significantly different.

If free-market trade happens internationally, then there is “a reward for cooperation, effectively transforming, at least in theory, what had once been seen as zero-sum competitions into positive-sum collaborations.”

David Wallace-Wells calls this outlook ‘neoliberalism,’ an accurate but confusing word. Neoliberalism must be distinguished from classical liberalism, from social liberalism, from left liberalism, and from modern liberalism.

While navigating this swamp of verbiage, it’s helpful to remember that the word ‘liberal’ is related to the word ‘liberty’ - the original use of the word ‘liberalism,’ despite its later applications, spoke of making people ‘free from’ government’s regulations and taxes.

Words and phrases like ‘free market’ and ‘minimalist taxation’ convey similar views with less ambiguity.

In any case, “neoliberalism” fosters “positive-sum cooperation of all kinds.” Note that positive-sum outcomes are linked to cooperation. A voluntary trade increases value on both sides of the equation.

The person in northern Finland trades his air-conditioner to the person in the Sahara, receiving in return a snow-shovel. Each person traded away an object of low value in return for an object of high value. Each person experienced a net increase in value.

By contrast, it is difficult to find true “zero-sum” examples of trade in the real world. Imagined zero-sum transactions occur mainly in the rhetoric of populist politicians who are trying to persuade voters.

Policymakers sometimes act as if they are acting in zero-sum situations; but because zero-sum situations are in reality quite rare, what politicians see as zero-sum conditions are actually positive-sum in some hidden way.

If policies are created because a positive-sum situation has been misidentified as a zero-sum situation, then certain behavior often arise in response to policies based on misidentifications: black markets, gray markets, bartering, etc.

The fact that most situations are positive-sum situations is due in part to human ingenuity. People constantly seek value, seek ways to produce value, and seek ways to trade one value for another. Wealth is sometimes produced when new uses are found for objects or substances deemed worthless and discarded.

The positive-sum principle, i.e., the increase of wealth, makes it possible for all people in a society to enjoy a rising standard of living, and makes it possible for nations to gain wealth without depriving other nations of wealth. Indeed, when one nation gains wealth, the unintended byproduct is often an increase in wealth for other nations.

Austria on the Edge: A Borderline Nation

Both geographically and culturally, Austria is a nation on the edge.

Large parts of Europe share a cultural history. As different as Germany and France might be, they both emerged from the Frankish Empire, along with Benelux lands of Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg. This Frankish influence extended through southeastern Germany into Austria, but ends somewhere before the Hungarian border.

It’s worth noting that the name ‘France’ derives from the name of the Germanic tribe, the Franks, which moved into the region - previously known as ‘Gaul’ - as a stabilizing influence to calm the chaos which filled the ‘power vacuum’ left by the retreating Roman occupational forces.

Western Austria shows its kinship to Bavaria more clearly than eastern Austria, but both bear a Germanic stamp.

To understand the cultural genesis of these regions, the reader must think back a millennium or so, to a time when the map of Europe looked very different. Instead of the modern nation-states which now organize the continent, there were many small kingdoms, with somewhat fluid borders, organized into local coalitions, and overseen by an overarching but likewise fluid empire.

There was no “Germany” or “Austria,” but rather dozens of kingdoms and duchies filled the map.

The Frankish Empire, which metamorphosed into the Holy Roman Empire (HRE), was a loose network which united most of these small entities. These little kingdoms grew and shrank, merging in marriages, dividing in inheritances among a monarch’s children, occasionally trading bits of land back and forth, or being altered in the course of warfare.

The Frankish Empire, which began in late 400s, expanded in various directions, including eastward. The term ‘march’ is used to denote “a frontier or border area between two countries or territories,” according to one dictionary. Long before the word ‘Austria’ was used or invented, this region was known as the ‘eastern march’ - the edge of the Frankish Empire, later the edge of the HRE.

Bavaria - or Bayern - was the springboard on the eastern end of the empire from which expansion into Austria was made.

From the Germanic Osten meaning ‘east’ and Reich meaning ‘empire,’ the name Österreich emerged. ‘Austria’ is a literal Latinization of the same. Thus eventually and gradually the modern nomenclature arose, as historian Steven Beller writes:

Austria began its history in the late tenth century as an eastern march of the duchy of Bavaria. It was during this period that an area in the Danube valley came to be known as ‘the eastern land’, in Latin ‘terra orientalis’, or ‘ostarrichi’ in the local German of the time. The first written evidence of this early medieval equivalent of ‘Österreich’ dates from 996. In the eleventh century the march was sometimes referred to as ‘Osterlant’; the Latin version of ‘Austria’ first appears in a document in 1147.

So ‘terra orientalis,’ ‘Osterlant,’ and ‘eastern land’ are linguistic equivalents in Latin, German, and English respectively. Of course, the spellings have changed slightly over the centuries.

These old terms took on troubling new meanings in the twentieth century. When the Nazis took over Austria in 1938 and annexed it, they called in Ostmark, meaning ‘the eastern march.’

The Austrians regained their freedom and political independence in 1945, and rejected the name which the Nazis had placed onto their country. Since then, Austrians have found the term Ostmark to be an offensive and troubling reminded of the seven years during which their nation suffered under National Socialist domination, as Steven Beller reports:

As Austrian historians were at pains after 1945 to prove, the march was never actually called the ‘Ostmark’. Nevertheless, it was as an eastern march of the German kingdom under Bavarian suzerainty, a military district on the Germans' south-east frontier, that Austria started its career.

Prior to 1933, there was nothing troubling about being the eastern extension of Frankish or Germanic heritage. Indeed, it was a mark of high civilization.

But the way in which the Nazis perverted culture caused the Austrians in the postwar era to find ways, in this case linguistic ways, to distance themselves from twentieth-century Germany.

Tolerance and Its Role in Western Civilization

One of the distinctive features of Western Civilization is the notion of religious tolerance. This freedom of religion is one of several characteristics which defines this unique set of values which constitutes the Western worldview. But already the mention of ‘Western Civilization’ should give occasion for pause, and for clarification.

It is difficult to find a suitable name for the institutions and ways of life which now shape people in every part of the world. The term ‘Western’ was applied because Europe, which was not the source but rather the incubator of this civilization, is west of Asia, and more precisely, west or northwest of those parts of Asia which contributed essential parts of what would become Western Civilization.

Europe is west of Babylon and Mesopotamia, and west of Persia and Jerusalem. Europe came to view itself as the “West.” Yet those locations to the east are indispensable parts of the emergence of Western Civilization. The “West” could not have come to be without the “East” - without Hammurabi or Moses, without Darius or Abraham. So ‘West’ is a misnomer in terms of origin. The “West” came out of the “East.”

For a second reason, ‘West’ is a misnomer, because the ‘West’ is now everywhere. If this civilization hatched and matured in Europe, it is now found in China and India, in Africa and South America. The “West” is neither west nor east, but all around the world.

The West is in China, which no longer binds women’s feet. The West is in India, which is working to abandon the practice of suttee or sati. The West is in Africa, which seeks education and universal suffrage. The West is in South America, which works toward the recognition and freedom of the individual.

Gandhi studied in England, where he harvested ideas from John Locke, from the Magna Carta, from Edmund Burke, and from the English Bill of Rights of 1689. Mao proclaimed himself a Marxist, i.e., the follower of a German Jew. In rather non-Western places, the West is making itself felt.

So whatever the West is, it is misleading to call it the ‘West’ - it came from the East, and is now everywhere.

What else can we call it? Some historians use the phrase ‘Judeo-Christian Tradition,’ which points again to sources: Both Judaism and Christianity arose outside of Europe, in Asia. To be sure, the unique set of values and worldview which emerge from Judaism and Christianity have greatly shaped Western Civilization. To that extent, the name ‘Judeo-Christian Tradition’ might be correct.

But Judeo-Christian values have now spread widely, into many cultures which are neither Jewish nor Christian. The indignation and outcry against torture, the desire for respectful treatment of women, and a worldview which values mathematics and the observational sciences are infiltrating the minds of many who are Hindu, Buddhist, or atheist. To call this civilization ‘Judeo-Christian’ is perhaps historically correct, but ignores the fact that Judeo-Christian values have been adopted, individually and collectively, by millions of people who are neither Jews nor Christians.

The popularity of the environmentalist ‘green’ sentiment in the early decades of the twenty-first century are directly attributable to the Judeo-Christian ethic. While the Mesopotamians saw the physical world as an accidental product of the activities of various gods and goddesses, and therefore unworthy of special protection, the Hebrews saw the earth as a divinely-planned artistic creation, worth nurturing and preserving.

The observation will be made: the West has not always behaved according to Western values; Jews and Christians have not always instantiated Judeo-Christian values. Have crimes been committed by the West? Yes. Have Jews and Christians sinned? Yes.

It is in the West’s sins that we can perhaps most clearly see its distinctiveness. Occasional acts of torture, committed by the West, have called forth public furor - in the West. The harshest condemnations of the West’s sins have come from the West itself. Other civilizations expressed less outrage - even when they were the victims of the West’s crimes.

The members of other civilizations don’t protest when their own civilizations commit torture: that is simply what is expected. Torture is not merely tolerated in those civilizations: it is expected. It is institutionally enshrined.

In the West, crimes against human dignity, crimes against human freedom, provoke outrage. That is why Western Civilization began the movement to end slavery, and began the movement for women’s suffrage.

Women in Western cultures take their right to vote for granted, and are now moving toward other forms of legal and social equality. In non-Western cultures, slavery still exists; in non-Western cultures, the explicit inferiority of women is articulated and embodied in legal codes and societal attitudes.

A third candidate for a name is simply “European Culture.” For the reasons outlined above, it should be clear to the ready why this name is as insufficient as the other two.

The conclusion is reached: it cannot be “Western Civilization,” nor can it be the “Judeo-Christian Tradition,” and it also can’t be “European Culture.” But whatever it is, it nurtured and expressed distinctive ideas - ideas not found elsewhere - ideas that every human life deserves individual recognition and dignity, ideas that human beings all seek freedom, find a measure of fulfillment in it, and find further fulfillment in struggling to gain it, both for themselves, and for others.

This unique perspective has now infiltrated much of the world: in every nation, there are individuals who are ‘Western’ - ironically, on both sides of the Chinese civil war: Mao’s communism was the product of Marx, a European; Chiang Kai-shek looked to create a European-style nation-state governed by freely-elected representatives with a free market.

The West’s roots go back thousands of years, and milestones along the way can be identified. Between 311 and 313 A.D., Roman Emperor Constantine, through a series of legislative maneuvers, made the Christian religion legal. For nearly three hundred years, Christians had been persecuted: arrested, beaten, imprisoned, and executed, simply because they followed Jesus. The Romans had murdered tens of thousands of Christians.

When Christianity finally became legal, the older pagan religions of Rome were also still legal. Constantine created one of the first, if not the first, societies with religious tolerance. Side-by-side, various religions coexisted.

Constantine, himself a Christian, had established religious tolerance. But that tolerance soon encountered resistance. Some within the empire wanted one single religion to established as the official religion, and other religions to be marginalized or even outlawed. It became necessary to defend religious tolerance, as author Mark Koyama illustrates:

In the late 4th century, the Roman senator Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, a pagan, issued a plea for religious pluralism: “We gaze up at the same stars; the sky covers us all; the same universe encompasses us. Does it matter what practical system we adopt in our search for the Truth? The heart of so great a mystery cannot be reached by following one road only.”

By contrast, in the previous Persian Empire, various religions existed, but were geographically segregated. Under Constantine, Christians and Roman polytheists lived in the same towns and shopped in the same marketplaces.

Constantine is, then, an important milestone on the way to a mature version of Western Civilization. Senator Quintus Aurelius Symmachus is another. Symmachus is naively willing to embrace mutually contradictory propositions, which later Western philosophy would need to sort out, but there is a distinct seed of tolerance in his words.

Tolerance is a key ingredient to Western Civilization. Tolerance is allowing other people to carry on with ideas, words, or actions which are judged to be wrong or incorrect. Tolerance is asserting that one’s intellectual or political opponents have a right to exist, because they are human beings.

To show tolerance, a person is not required to affirm, support, accept, or welcome an idea which he opposes. Consider twentieth century American elections: Republicans and Democrats debated fiercely, and did not affirm, support, accept, or welcome either’s ideas: they opposed each other at every turn. But they demonstrated tolerance toward each other.

Western Civilization is in danger any and every time that there is an attempt to eliminate, silence, or stifle opposition.

Tolerance does not mean accepting, affirming, supporting, or welcoming opposing ideas. Tolerance means allowing someone else to believe or say what is firmly believed to be wrong. To tolerate is not to be silent; to tolerate is recognize someone’s right to say something which is confidently considered to be wrong - one person can tolerate another person’s ideas even while debating against those ideas.

Tolerance is the act of clearly identifying another person’s beliefs, words, and actions as wrong and incorrect, and maintaining that individual’s right to carry on, even while vocally and vociferously condemning those beliefs, words, and actions. In this concept of tolerance, the two key Western concepts are seen: the importance of the individual and the importance of freedom.

The End of Islamic Maritime Hegemony, for a While at Least: The Battle of Lepanto

In the early sixteenth century, the Muslim navies controlled the Mediterranean. Nearly all trade between Africa and Europe crossed that sea, and much trade with Asia was also shipped across that body of water.

Islamic fleets could demand any amount of money they wished for leaving freighters unharassed. Islamic pirates raided ships, not only taking the cargo, but also taking the crew to be sold as slaves.

Trade between Europe and other parts of the world was reduced. China and India experienced a decline in importing from, and exporting to, Europe.

Standard academic accounts tell that the Battle of Lepanto was “a famous naval engagement fought near the town of Lepanto in Greece, on the Gulf of Corinth,” on October 7, 1571.

This report of the battle, from a common encyclopedia, tells that the battle was between the Muslims “and the combined Mediterranean fleets of the” European “allies, principally the Venetian and Spanish craft.”

Those “allies” were organized by the Holy Roman Empire. The HRE, as the old joke goes, was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. It was, instead, a defensive coalition of European states. The HRE fluctuated between decades of neglect and times of critical importance.

When there was no threat of military attack, the HRE was of little importance and had little power, its emperor having little influence and being forced to placate the Electors. (The Electors were a group of princes who chose the emperor.)

But when the danger of armed offensive was real, the HRE suddenly galvanized itself and its member nations as a defensive alliance. This was the case at Lepanto.

The forces gathered at Lepanto were part of the Holy League, a special coalition which was formed principally of Spain and various Italian republics and kingdoms. Some parts of the HRE, like Savoy, were part of the Holy League, while others were not.

The Portuguese were not involved at Lepanto, their navy being committed to defend against Islamic naval attacks in the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea. The French were at odds with the Spanish, and so did not want to be in a coalition with them - indeed, the French had hired Muslim mercenaries to fight against the Spanish. Other HRE nations had signed temporary truces with the Muslims and did not appear at Lepanto.

It was, then, a somewhat unusual combination of navies that defending against the Muslims at Lepanto: “Under the command of Don John of Austria they obtained an overwhelming victory. Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote, distinguished himself in this battle, receiving three wounds.

This battle marked a clear turning-point, “destroying the” Islamic “fleet and ending their supremacy in the Mediterranean.”

Considering the primitive bow-gun weapons then in use, the loss of life was remarkable.

Exact numbers of casualties do not exist, “being estimated at 20,000 for the” Muslims, “and 8,000” for the defensive fleets.

The allies brought into the fight 200 galleys and 8 galeasses (large three-masters, carrying cannon).

The Islamic “fleet numbered 273, but of smaller size on the average and fewer cannon.” The Muslims “employed” European “prisoners as galley-slaves and 10,000 or more were liberated by the” European victory.

With the Mediterranean now open, ships could move freely between Africa, Europe, and western Asia. The economic results were mutually beneficial to all three.

Cultural Paradigms: Honor, Dignity, or Victimhood

Surveying a range of societies and civilizations, scholar Bradley Campbell hypothesizes a threefold system of categories to sort cultures. He argues that there are honor cultures, dignity cultures, and victimhood cultures.

Campbell’s system is perhaps in some ways similar to a matrix developed by Jayson Georges, which divides cultures into shame-honor, guilt-innocence, and fear-power types.

Campbell’s ‘honor culture’ is an outer-directed, other-directed framework, in which the individual is significantly concerned with how his society views him. Self-worth and self-concept are largely determined by his civilization’s evaluation of him:

In honor cultures men want to appear formidable. A reputation for bravery, for being willing and capable of handling conflicts through violence, is important. In a society like the pre-Civil War American South, for example, a gentleman who allowed himself or his family members to be injured or insulted might be thought a coward, someone with no honor, and lose his social standing. To avoid this, men sometimes fought duels. In honor cultures men are sensitive even to minor slights, but they handle such offenses themselves, possibly with violence.

By contrast, Campbell’s ‘dignity culture’ is inner-directed. The individual considers his self-evaluation to be more important than society’s opinion of him.

The dignity culture tends to be less violent than the honor culture.

In an honor culture, if an individual feels himself to be dishonored, one logical response is to kill those who’ve dishonored him, and thereby regain his honor.

The dignity culture offers the individual a different option: he can devalue the opinions of others and thereby not allow those opinions to greatly impact his self-worth and self-concept.

In dignity cultures, though, people have worth regardless of their reputations. Because an insult doesn’t take away your worth, your dignity, you can ignore others’ insults. For serious injuries you can go to the police or use the courts. In dignity cultures, then, people aren’t as sensitive to slights — they’re encouraged to have thick skins — and they’re not as likely to handle offenses themselves, certainly not violently — they’re encouraged to appeal to the proper authorities.

The individual shaped by a dignity culture was encouraged to see himself not as the passive victim of arbitrary social standards and personal snubs. Rather, he could see himself as rising above capricious societal judgments and rising above insults directed toward him.

It was this dignity culture that bore some of the sweetest fruits of Western Civilization - the abolition of slavery, suffrage for women, the Enlightenment concept of human rights as emerging from a rational natural law, etc. Free humans, acting as rational moral agents, made appeal to authority; but authority was not limited to civil governments or religious institutions. Authority was embedded in various social institutions, and in reason itself.

But admiration for reason declined with the advent of Romanticism. The very personal slights which people ignored in a dignity culture were made the focus of attention in a victimhood culture.

But the new culture of victimhood combines sensitivity to slight with appeal to authority. Those who embrace it see themselves as fighting oppression, and even minor offenses can be worthy of attention and action. Slights, insults, and sometimes even arguments or evidence might further victimize an oppressed group, and authorities must deal with them. You could call this social justice culture since those who embrace it are pursuing a vision of social justice. But we call it victimhood culture because being recognized as a victim of oppression now confers a kind of moral status, in much the same way that being recognized for bravery did in honor cultures.

The status of victim is now eagerly sought, inasmuch as it can paradoxically be the road to power. The individual needs to be offended, so that he can use that offense as his weapon. This weapon will reduce the status of others, and therefore relatively increase his status.

When no snubs or insults could be found, they could be made, either by sheer fabrication, or by reinterpreting previously acceptable discourse as now unacceptable.

The culture of victimhood finally results in the institutionalization of violence, in which the individual takes revenge against mere opinion: but the revenge taken is real physical harm, unlike the insubstantial offense which is the reaction to some perceived snub.

Thus men are fined, beaten, jailed, or worse - true physical harm - for allegedly holding ‘nonprogressive’ views or for entertaining potentially offensive ideas.

The Flow of Information in The Economy: A Major Shaper of the Market

Although in a political context, economics is often seen as hot-headed and passionate assertions, in reality, economics is about mathematical modeling. This implies that reality is something different than the impressions gained in a political context!

In economic thought, mathematical models are created to reflect, and perhaps eventually to predict, the psychology of individual decision-makers, the actions of consumers and producers, and the flow of information.

The actions of buyers and sellers are shaped by what they know: information. Those actions are also shaped by what they think: psychology. So economists ask about what the buyers and sellers know, as well as about what they think they know.

Markets will be affected, therefore, not only by changes in supply and demand, but also by changes in how much information is available to buyers and sellers.

The precise, predictable abstract economy found in equations is, obviously, never found in the real world because of inefficiencies and illiquidities in the marketplace. In addition, and equally significant, are inefficiencies and illiquidities in flow of information.

Friedrich Hayek states the basic rationale for economic reckoning:

What is the problem we wish to solve when we try to construct a rational economic order? On certain familiar assumptions the answer is simple enough. If we possess all the relevant information, if we can start out from a given system of preferences, and if we command complete knowledge of available means, the problem which remains is purely one of logic. That is, the answer to the question of what is the best use of the available means is implicit in our assumptions. The conditions which the solution of this optimum problem must satisfy have been fully worked out and can be stated best in mathematical form: put at their briefest, they are that the marginal rates of substitution between any two commodities or factors must be the same in all their different uses.

In addition to the illiquidities and inefficiencies in the flow of information is the additional complicating factor of which conclusions each individual decision-maker might draw from whatever information is at hand. The admittedly crystalline beauty of algebraic economics is quickly muddied and blurred such factors, as Hayek writes:

This, however, is emphatically not the economic problem which society faces. And the economic calculus which we have developed to solve this logical problem, though an important step toward the solution of the economic problem of society, does not yet provide an answer to it. The reason for this is that the “data” from which the economic calculus starts are never for the whole society “given” to a single mind which could work out the implications and can never be so given.

Information, then, is as important as supply and demand. A buyer or seller will act in the marketplace not only according to what is offered, but also according to what is known. This can be seen in large quantity of magazines and newspapers related to finance and investing. So it is that David Crook, editor at the Wall Street Journal, wrote in 2015 that journalists in the business press operate in the

fundamentally democratic belief that you — a regular person of modest means and no professional financial background — can take control of your money and build a comfortable future. I hope that we have helped you make your life better, more secure, more free.

Beliefs and opinions, desires and fears, ultimately play a larger role in the market than the quantities of good produced by factories. Objective information is processed into subjective perceptions by sellers and buyers. Information will have an effect on the market, but it is not always calculable.

Gender and Civilization: What Men Do

Carefully teasing civilization away from culture and society reveals interesting and universal patterns around gender roles. To disarticulate civilization from culture and society is to isolate what is intrinsically human.

Culture is taught and learned; society is a convention. Civilization centers on the physical realities of humans living together in community, as scholar David Murrow writes:

Men have always done the dangerous jobs, and they still do them. Today 94 percent of occupational deaths occur to men. Men also do most of the dying for their country. If any civilization is to survive and prosper, it needs men who will act like men when the need arises. If men are cowardly, craven, or criminal, chaos reigns.

To be sure, there are notable and worthy women who excelled in traditionally male roles: Lyudmila Mikhailovna Pavlichenko, for example, or the women soldiers in the Israeli Defense Forces. But the statistics and the reality are incontrovertible - men constitute the overwhelming majority, to the point of near exclusivity.

This seems simply to happen: there is no deliberate action or plan which leads to this arrangement. It simply presents itself.

Every society needs people to do the dangerous jobs. Throughout human history, someone has had to fight wars, travel long distances without the comforts of home, and hunt down dangerous animals. Today we need people to work in mines, rush into burning buildings, and catch bad guys.

These gender roles hold across a host of other variables: time, place, religion, language, income level, etc. With no significant exceptions, these arrangements are found in every human society.

This ubiquitous statistical pattern is not an argument for some notion of male superiority, because it has a dark side: 95% of violent crime, and 95% of those found guilty for it, are men. This is also reflected in the populations of prisons and penitentiaries.

Civilization is made possible by gender roles. These roles are distinct, but do not place a relative valuation on the two genders. On the contrary, the conclusion suggested is that both genders are absolutely indispensable.

The Thirty Years’ War: Propaganda Hides Motives

The Thirty Years’ War was a series of European conflicts lasting from 1618 to 1648, involving most of the countries of Western Europe, and fought mainly in Germany. The struggle’s direction and character were decisively influenced by various issues, including the dynastic rivalries of ambitious German princes and the determination of certain European powers, notably Sweden and France, to curb the power of the Holy Roman Empire, which was the chief political instrument of Austria and the ruling Habsburg family. Of the many rivalries at stake, perhaps the most notable was between the Hohenzollern in north-central Europe and the Habsburg in central Europe.

This war was one of the first to be accompanied by a significant propaganda effort. The royal houses on both sides of the conflict needed to generate passionate support in their subjects, and the political ambitions of leaders were not sufficient to motivate support for large-scale military action. Religion would be the center of the propaganda effort. Instead of the leadership’s desire for more land, power, and money (the real reasons), the people would be told that they were fighting a Reformation war: Protestant vs. Catholic. The success of this deception depended upon the ordinary person’s lack of information about the other countries involved in the war.

The religious differences that were used as an excuse for the Thirty Years’ War had existed for more than half a century before 1618. In large measure, this situation had resulted from the Peace of Augsburg, an agreement concluded in 1555 between the Holy Roman Emperor and the Lutheran princes of Germany. The generation of nobles who signed this agreement were serious Lutherans and Catholics, and – although they were convinced of the incorrectness of the other’s religious views – knew that their common heritage required that they acknowledge each other as serious, if erring, Christians, and were therefore willing to sign a peace treaty intended to yield a peaceful co-existence.

By 1618, a different generation of nobles was in power. Although nominally either Catholic or Lutheran, they had in fact no serious Christian faith, and were therefore willing to wage war for personal gain. But they were also willing to use religion as an excuse for war, and so they pointed to the religious differences, which had caused no conflict for 63 years, as suddenly somehow necessitating a war.

The war, which was one of the most destructive conflicts in European history, may be divided into four phases, usually styled and dated as follows: Palatine-Bohemian (1618-25), Danish (1625-29), Swedish (1630-35), and French (1635-48).

Tensions were seriously aggravated in Germany prior to the war. Seeking to extend imperial control into the internal affairs of the various German kingdoms, the emperor, who was Catholic, pointed to the fact that many of the kingdoms were Lutheran: Protestant churches in many parts of Germany were destroyed by imperial troops, restrictions were placed on the rights of Protestants to worship freely, and the emperor’s officials made the Treaty of Augsburg the basis for a general resurgence of Roman Catholic power. The emperor also tried to control the internal affairs of the Catholic German kingdoms, but in those cases, of course, he could not use religious differences as an excuse. The German kings were eager to protect their rights to govern their own territories, and to prevent the emperor’s meddling. The emperor, in turn, found allies who would help him try to gain control of the internal affairs of the German kingdoms. With the establishment (1608) of the Evangelical Union, a Protestant defensive alliance of princes and cities, and of the Catholic League (1609), the organization of those who would support the emperor, a violent solution to the crisis became inevitable. The Bohemian section of the Evangelical Union struck the first blow. Outraged by the aggressive policies of the imperial hierarchy in Bohemia, the Bohemians demanded that Ferdinand II, then king of Bohemia, intervene. The king, an ardent Roman Catholic and the Habsburg heir presumptive, ignored the appeal; the majority of Bohemia’s population was Lutheran, and religion made a convenient excuse: in reality, the emperor was concerned about his ability to exercise autonomous power. The peaceful co-existence of a Roman Catholic minority within Bohemia further weakened the emperor’s argument that his reaction to the Bohemians was founded on differences in faith. In 1618, citizens of Prague invaded the royal palace, seized two of the king’s ministers, and threw them out a window. This act, known as the Defenestration of Prague, was the beginning of a national uprising.

The Bohemian forces achieved numerous initial successes, and the rebellion swiftly spread to other parts of the Habsburg dominions. For a brief period in 1619 even Vienna, the Habsburg capital, was threatened by Evangelical Union armies. Later in 1619 the Bohemians bestowed the crown of the deposed Ferdinand on Frederick V, elector of the Palatinate. Several sections of the Evangelical Union, which consisted chiefly of Lutherans, thereupon withdrew from the struggle, because Frederick was a Calvinist. Taking advantage of Protestant dissensions - particularly a declaration of war against Bohemia by Lutheran Saxony, and a Spanish invasion of the Upper, or Bavarian, Palatinate - Ferdinand, who had become Holy Roman emperor in August 1619, quickly assumed the offensive. In 1620, a Catholic League army, commanded by the German soldier Tilly, routed the Bohemians at Weisserberg (White Mountain), near Prague. Bloody reprisals were inflicted on the Bohemians after this victory, and Protestantism was outlawed. Although the Evangelical Union disintegrated, Frederick and a few allies continued the struggle in the Palatinate. The Protestants defeated Tilly’s army in 1622 but thereafter met with successive disasters. By the end of 1624 the Palatinate, which was awarded to Maximilian I, duke of Bavaria, had been forcibly returned to the Roman Catholic fold. Frederick’s brother-in-law was a Hohenzollern, who remained neutral during the early years of the conflict; the result was that Brandenburg was ravished by mercenaries and looters from both sides.

The second phase of the war assumed international proportions when various German states sought foreign assistance against resurgent imperialism. England, France, and other western European powers were alarmed at the increasing might of the Habsburgs, but France and England, then allies against Spain, refrained from immediate intervention in the war because of domestic difficulties. The Roman Catholic and Lutheran populations were also becoming aware of the fact that this war was motivated by political ambition, and that their respective faiths – far from calling for war – required them to work for peace. The Christian writers of this era expressed their abhorrence of war and the materialism that causes it and thrives in it; they stressed the pacifistic aspect of Christian thought which makes the preservation of human life an imperative. The king of Denmark and Norway, Christian IV, however, came to the aid of the German states. Christian IV’s intervention was substantially motivated by national considerations, mainly territorial ambitions in northwestern Europe and a determination to end Habsburg control of the Danish duchy of Holstein, Germany.

Supported by German princes, Christian IV mobilized a large army in the spring of 1625 and invaded Saxony (Sachsen). The expedition encountered little effective resistance until a year later. In the meantime, the famous military leader Albrecht von Wallenstein had created a powerful army of mercenaries and entered the service of Ferdinand II, whose only other available force was that of the Catholic League under Tilly.

The use of mercenaries was another blow to the attempt to paint this war as religious: the mercenaries were notorious for their lack of any faith or morals. They often would switch sides in the conflict, seeking a better wage. Wallenstein’s mercenaries won their first victory in April 1626. In August 1626, Tilly completely defeated the main body of Christian IV’s army at Lutter am Barenberge, Germany. The combined imperial armies subsequently overran all of northern Germany, leaving numerous pillaged towns and villages in their wake. Wallenstein’s mercenaries were motivated only by the desire for wealth and adventure, and cared for neither Roman Catholic nor Protestant sensibilities. The destruction they brought upon the communities which they entered was massive, including rape, murder, torture, killing of livestock, and the burning of houses and grain fields. With Wallenstein in pursuit, Christian IV retreated in 1627. Total victory for the imperial cause was signaled when Ferdinand issued the Edict of Restitution. This document nullified Protestant titles to all Roman Catholic property expropriated since the Peace of Augsburg. This meant a massive increase of territory for the empire. In 1629, King Christian IV accepted the Treaty of Lübeck, which deprived him of numerous small holdings in Germany.

Ferdinand’s successes in the second phase of the war sharpened the anti-Habsburg orientation of the French Richelieu, chief minister of King Louis XIII. Because of recurring internal crises, Richelieu was unable to intervene directly in Germany, but he made overtures to Gustav II Adolph of Sweden. A Lutheran, Gustav had already received appeals from the hard-pressed North Germans. Because of this circumstance, as well as the promise of French support and Swedish ambitions for hegemony in the Baltic region, Gustav entered the conflict. In the summer of 1630 he landed a well-trained army on the coast of Pomerania. The rulers of Pomerania, Brandenburg, and Saxony - including the royal family of the Hohenzollern - vacillated on whether to participate in the Swedish venture, seriously delaying the start of the campaign. While Gustav marked time, Tilly, who had been given command of Wallenstein’s army, laid siege to Magdeburg, Germany, which was then in a state of insurrection against the empire. The imperial armies captured and sacked the city in 1631, and massacred the inhabitants. Much of the city was destroyed by fires that spread during the fighting and pillaging. The violence against the citizenry again violated both Roman Catholic and Protestant sensibilities; it was becoming clear that the savageness of this war was in no way motivated by any faith, but rather by the desire - on the part of the princes - for land and power, and the desire - on the part of the mercenaries - for money and adventure.

Tilly was repulsed by the Swedes on three occasions in the following summer. George-Wilhelm of Brandenburg, a Hohenzollern, was now supporting Gustav II Adolph with men and money, if not enthusiastically. In the last of these battles, fought at Breitenfeld, Germany (now Leipzig), Gustav was supported by the Saxon army. The Saxons broke ranks and fled at the first charge, exposing Gustav’s left flank and nearly costing him the battle; but he regrouped his forces and routed Tilly’s troops, about 6000 of whom were killed or captured. After the Battle of Breitenfeld the Swedish army moved into southern Germany for the winter. The spring campaign brought numerous victories, notably the defeat (1632) of Tilly, who was mortally wounded on the banks of the Lech River, and the capture of Munich, Germany. Faced with complete disaster, Ferdinand had meanwhile recalled Wallenstein to command the imperial war effort. Wallenstein, hurriedly recruiting a new army of mercenaries, invaded Saxony in the fall of 1632. The Swedish army followed and attacked the imperial force, then entrenched at Lützen, Germany. The ensuing battle cost Gustav his life, but at the end Wallenstein’s army was forced to withdraw. Bernhard, duke of Saxe-Weimar, who succeeded to Gustav’s command, overran Bavaria after this victory, but during 1633 Wallenstein struck repeated blows against the Swedish strongholds in Silesia. Toward the close of 1633 Wallenstein initiated a peace movement among leading circles of the imperial armies. Removed from his command by Ferdinand on suspicion of treason, Wallenstein then entered into peace negotiations with the Protestant leaders. His attempts to end the War aroused the enmity of his own officers, and in 1634, he was assassinated. The imperial armies inflicted a devastating defeat on Duke Bernhard at Nördlingen, Germany. Dismayed by this catastrophe, the leaders of the Protestant coalition swiftly abandoned the struggle. The Peace of Prague (1635), which formally ended the third phase of the war, provided for certain concessions to the Saxons, particularly basic modifications of the Edict of Restitution. Thus the German states regained some of the territory that the emperor had attempted to claim.

The Swedish phase of the war, thus concluded, confirmed that the conflict was not a religious one, because the Lutherans Swedes had happily made common cause with the Roman Catholic French.

In its final phase, the war became an imperialist conflict for hegemony in Western Europe between the Habsburgs and France, which was still under the leadership of Richelieu. Religious issues, which had never been the cause of the conflict, were not significant in the final phase, which opened in May 1635, with France declaring war against Spain, the chief Habsburg dominion aside from Austria. France, which was allied with Sweden and various German Protestant leaders, including Duke Bernhard, was able to quickly overcome serious difficulties that developed during the first stage of the fighting. Thus Roman Catholic France declared war on Roman Catholic Spain, and on the Roman Catholic Habsburg Empire, and allied itself with Lutheran Sweden and the Lutheran parts of Germany. It was now clear that this was not a religious war. The Swedish general defeated a combined force of Saxons and Austrians in 1636, materially damaging the Habsburg position in Germany. In 1636, Spanish invasions of French territory were repelled. The Habsburg position in Germany was further damaged by a defeat inflicted by Duke Bernhard in 1638. After these setbacks the imperial armies were forced to surrender their European strongholds one after another. Between 1642 and 1645 the Swedish scored numerous triumphs, overrunning Denmark, which had become allied with the empire, and ravaging large sections of western Germany and Austria. In the west, the French were also generally successful. Condé routed a Spanish army in France, in 1643. During the following November the French suffered a severe defeat in Germany, but thereafter the Habsburgs were not successful in the war, except in some minor battles.

The French armies badly mauled a Bavarian army in 1644. Representatives of the empire and the anti-Habsburg coalition began peace discussions at Münster and at Osnabrück in 1645, but the negotiations, primarily a concession to the war-weary peoples of western Europe, remained fruitless for a protracted period. After central Bavaria was invaded, however, Maximilian I of Bavaria concluded, in 1647, the Truce of Ulm, with Sweden and France.

Despite these and other reverses, Emperor Ferdinand III refused to capitulate. Desultory fighting continued in Germany, Luxembourg, the Low Countries, Italy, and Spain throughout the remainder of 1647. In the fall of 1647 Maximilian I re-entered the war on the side of the empire. Another army of Bavarians and Austrians was defeated in May 1648. This defeat, as well as the siege of Prague, the siege of Munich, and an important French victory at Lens, France, forced Ferdinand, also confronted with the threat of an assault on Vienna, to agree to the peace conditions of the victors.

The Peace of Westphalia, signed in 1648, fundamentally influenced the subsequent history of Europe. The Hohenzollern family gained dynastic importance. In addition to establishing Switzerland and the Dutch Republic as independent states, the treaty gravely weakened the empire and the Habsburgs, ensured the emergence of France as the chief power on the Continent, and disastrously slowed the political unification of Germany.

The economic, social, and cultural consequences of the war were vast, with Germany the principal victim. Modern estimates suggest that the total population of Germany fell by at least 25 percent; some regions suffered a loss of over 55 percent as a result of casualties and the displacement of their residents. Villages, as opposed to fortified towns, suffered the most. Except in port cities such as Hamburg and Bremen, economic activity went into decline all across Germany. Uncertainty, fear, disruption, and brutality marked everyday life and remained a memory in German consciousness for centuries.

The Moral Equivalent of Religion: Passionate Secular Ideologies

Scholars of diverse perspectives agree that religion is often the motor of history. Great social and cultural movements are commonly fueled by, and based on, those worldviews enshrined in belief systems. This is true on all six inhabited continents and through the last six millennia of chronicled human activity.

But what, precisely, counts as ‘religion’ for this purpose?

When religion is cited as the engine of civilization, it is more than simply belief in a deity.

There are many instances of a belief in God which does not carry the societal impact of a formalized religion: consider on the one hand those rationalistic assertions of God’s central role in the universe, like the views of Rene Descartes and Isaac Newton, which see God as decisive in mathematics, physics, and philosophy; consider on the other hand those intimate friendships with God, types of quietism and mysticism, which locate God as pivotal in the life of the individual but without taking on the momentum of a major cultural movement.

Contra some common usages of the word, mere belief in the existence of God does not qualify as a ‘religion,’ and certainly not as the massive historical force responsible for major social changes under that name.

Conversely, as historian Yuval Noah Harari writes, some movements which explicitly embrace atheism have managed to function precisely in the ways which scholars see as ‘religious’ motives and forces in history:

The last 300 years are often depicted as an age of growing secularism, in which religions have increasingly lost their importance. If we are talking about theist religions, this is largely correct. But if we take into consideration natural-law religions, then modernity turns out to be an age of intense religious fervour, unparalleled missionary efforts, and the bloodiest wars of religion in history.

The hypothesis that religions have lost importance over the last three centuries is one worth investigating. It is, to be sure, a contested question: there is much evidence on both sides of the debate. Such historical trends are complex, and subcurrents often run in contradictory directions.

The waxing and waning of organized religion is noncontiguous: religion can be growing in one place while declining in another. These phenomena can be cyclical: the decline of institutional religion in one century is often followed by its resurgence in the next.

In any case, the ebb and flow of organized religion is distinct from the fortitude of personal belief in God.

If one accepts the hypothesis that religions have lost importance over the last three centuries, then it is understood that belief in God has not lost its impact. These two are independent variables: the importance of institutional religion on the one hand, and on the other hand, the impact of personal spiritual belief.

It is quite possible, and in fact is often the case, for an individual to have a strong attachment to organized religion while having little or no personal belief in, or relation to, God.

Those who were inclined toward religion for its cultural and social dimensions are likely to attach themselves to other movements which offer a similar impact on civilization, as Harari writes:

The modern age has witnessed the rise of a number of new natural-law religions, such as liberalism, Communism, capitalism, nationalism and Nazism. These creeds do not like to be called religions, and refer to themselves as ideologies. But this is just a semantic exercise. If a religion is a system of human norms and values that is founded on belief in a superhuman order, then Soviet Communism was no less a religion than Islam.

Passionate blind faith in socialism or in progress can be fervent as faith in any religious institution. What is common to both situations is a desire to explain and manipulate the flow of historical events.

What is also common to both phenomena is, first, the lack of surrender to, and acceptance of, the unchangeable aspects of the world as they are. Secondly lacking is the occasional abandonment of one’s individual will.

Thirdly lacking is the overarching primacy of the concept of relationship. Those who practice a truly spiritual relationship to the deity, in contrast to those who have a passionate attachment to a religious organization, understand a relationship with God to be foundational. Because their emphasis is on that which is relational, like gratitude and affection, there is less emphasis on attempts to control or explain.

Secular movements and religious institutions are not so different: first, because they both focus on attempts to manipulate and explain; second, because they both lack emphasis on the spiritual relationship between God and the individual human being.

The surprise in all of this is that organized religion can, and often does, have little to do with God. True spiritual engagement with God can also have little to do with religious institutions.

The historical impact of religion and the historical impact of God are two different, and sometimes even two opposite, things.

Thus it is that secular movements and organized religions can lead to all manner of evil in history: injustice, wars, persecutions. Thus it is that Yuval Noah Harari can place Soviet Communism and Islam into the same category, as phenomena of similar natures.

Cultural Maturation: Shame, Fear, Guilt

In his published work, scholar Jayson Georges identifies three categories into which various cultures can fall: guilt, shame, and fear. He gives a brief explanation of them as follows:

[In a] Guilt [culture] people feel guilty internally and seek justice.
[In a] Shame [culture] people desire honor and avoid shame.
[In a] Fear [culture] people seek spiritual power over [the] unseen world.

While Georges does not assign any temporal or logical priority to these various categories, it may be that there is a chronological and developmental ordering of them.

A shame culture may correspond to an early phase of societal development, a non-religious phase. Honor or shame can be attributed without reference to any deity or divinity. These attributes are merely a subjective attitude of humans toward each other.

A fear culture may represent an advancement beyond the shame phase into a pre-religious phase. A fear culture operates on the bases of myth and magic - on the bases of attempting, respectively, to explain and to manipulate various aspects of nature. Such a culture falls short of a religious phase because there is not yet a direct relationship with the deity, but rather merely an attempt to manipulate or explain the deity. This may be called an external culture.

A guilt culture represents a stage in which civilization has explored rational knowledge, and determined its limits. Such a civilization, instead of composing myths as explanatory vehicles, is content to mark off what is knowable and what is unknowable. Likewise, it discriminates which aspects of the natural world are controllable and which are not. This may be called an internal culture, and now works to relate to the deity rather than to explain or manipulate the deity.

A further hypothesis might be made to the effect that a post-civilized phase, after some catastrophic cultural decline, would return to the non-religious shame phase.

It is perhaps in some way counterintuitive that the shame phase precedes the fear phase. One might assume that the fear phase would come first, imagining a technologically primitive society which was at the mercy of nature - storms, floods, earthquakes, etc.

It may well be, however, that technological development and societal development are not closely correlated.

A transition from a shame society to a fear society would represent a civilization’s maturation in the sense that it is escaping a purely subjective standpoint, in which it deals only with those concepts which have been projected by consciousness, and advancing to a standpoint which has some awareness of a reality which exists independently of consciousness.

Monks and Serfs: Building the Civilization of Middle Ages

When looking at the achievements of Medieval society, it’s tempting to focus on the people at the top: the scholars who laid the foundations for modern mathematics and physics; the artists and architects who created masterpieces which people today admire in museums and cathedrals; the royalty who formulated administrative patterns which freed citizens from the harsh absolutism of the Roman Empire.

But, as Bertolt Brecht would remind the reader in his Fragen eines Lesenden Arbeiters, the actual work of building a civilization is done by lots of ordinary people.

After the fall of the Roman Empire in 476 A.D., social structures would gradually emerge in which much of the creative and productive work was done by two classes of people: the serfs on the one hand; on the other hand, monks and nuns.

The monks did a wide range of tasks: brewing beer and making wine; teaching the Greek and Latin languages to preserve the texts of classical antiquity; managing great libraries which preserved the writings of Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, Tacitus, and many other ancients; distributing food and clothes to the poor; providing counsel to those facing grief or hardship; managing agriculture; caring for gardens which grew medicinal herbs; and more.

The serfs did large-scale agricultural work as well as woodwork and other basic forms of manual labor. While the upper classes often faced marriages which were either arranged or at least made with an eye to the financial and political implications of the prospective union, serfs were often free to marry for love.

As historian Irma Simonton Black notes,

Outside the monasteries of the church, where monks worked for the glory of God, fields were plowed and harvests were gathered by peasants. A few of them were free men, but by far the greater number of workers were “serfs.” The word serf comes from the same Latin word as “serve” and “servant.” The serfs were not exactly slaves. A noble could not buy and sell them at will the way he could his cows, for instance.

Although the Middle Ages are sometimes depicted as the ‘Dark Ages,’ it is documented that the scholars in central and northern Europe, as well as on the British isles, were conversant not only with Latin but also with Greek.

Medieval scholars also had the texts of Virgil, Homer, and Aristotle. The thinkers of the Middle Ages did not have to wait for the Renaissance for some alleged ‘rediscovery’ of the treasures of antiquity. Those texts were present and accessible for the medieval monks.

The serfs enjoyed a life which represented an advance of the absolute rule claimed by the Roman emperors. While the Roman system asserted an total authority for the emperors, the feudal system articulated two-way obligations: to be sure, the serfs owed certain duties or payments to their feudal lords, but the lords also had commitments to the serfs, and the serfs were even able to make claims against a feudal lord who failed to carry out his responsibilities.

Jacques Ellul and the History of … ?

In the thought and writings of the French philosopher Jacques Ellul the ambiguity of civilization and its value is clearly manifest. What is our civilization, and how is it to be labeled and assessed?

Each of the three common names for civilization contains a bit of truth, and yet each of the three is somewhat misleading: to call it ‘Western Civilization’ makes use of a geographical designator that is both incorrect and irrelevant; to call it ‘European Culture’ is to ignore that its roots lie in the valleys of the Jordan, the Tigris, the Nile, and the Euphrates; to call it the ‘Judeo-Christian Tradition’ does not take into the account that since their inception, these peculiar values and worldviews have occasionally been embraced by Buddhists, Hindus, atheists, and others.

Whatever it may be called, French historian Jacques Ellul has at least three things to say about it.

First, it’s not perfect. Although Western Civilization came up with some great ideas - social and legal equality for all races and both genders, political liberty for all citizens, human rights for all people, the value and dignity of every human life - it didn’t always follow through on these ideas. There have been times in which the worst crimes against humanity and the worst atrocities have been committed by individuals were part of Western Civilization.

Second, Western Civilization has made important contributions to the world. Despite its crimes and flaws, it is the custodian of certain unique concepts: that the dignity of each human is recognized in acknowledging and honoring that human’s freedom and individuality. Despite instances of torture or racism, Western Civilization had the distinctive insight that these things were wrong: that they were evil. Despite instances of injustice, Western Civilization developed its characteristic system of values which worked toward equality between men and women. These are the identifying marks of Western Civilization.

Third, Ellul argues that modern, and even more so postmodern, academics have been too harsh on Western Civilization. Its faults and crimes are constantly recited, but its achievements rarely mentioned. Instead of balanced study and an attempt at objective appraisal, academia has presented an unrelenting attack on the West.

Jacques Ellul wrote between 1936 and 1992, and has been called a sociologist, philosopher, historian, anarchist, existentialist, and a communist, among other labels. Given the variety of words applied to him, it is safe to say that he does not fit easily into any of the usual intellectual categories. He cited Marx and Kierkegaard as two of the biggest influences on his thought.

Religion in Iceland: Unusual Development

Many nations share this developmental pattern, that the culturally predominant religion in them changes over time. In the Near East or Middle East, this took the form of Islamic conquests in the 700s.

In Europe, it took the form of ‘Christianizing’ missionaries, many of them Irish, who wandered alone or in small groups into the forests of eastern and northern Europe. As historians E.O.G. Turville-Petre and Edgar Charles Polomé write,

The Germanic peoples were converted to Christianity in different periods: many of the Goths in the 4th century, the English in the 6th and 7th centuries, the Saxons, under force of Frankish arms, in the late 8th century, and the Danes, under German pressure, in the course of the 10th century.

The history of Iceland is in many ways different than other parts of the world. It was essentially uninhabited until sometime in the eighth century. Around 750 A.D., give or take a few decades, the first permanent settlements on Iceland were founded.

These original residents of Iceland were Christians from Ireland. In later centuries, additional Irish arrived, as well as settlers from Scandinavia, some of whom were Christians, and some of whom were not. Turville-Petre and Polomé note that

Icelanders were, in many ways, the most international of northern Scandinavians. Among those who settled in Iceland in the late 9th century were men and women partly of Norse stock from Christian Ireland. Some of these were Christians; some were mixed in their beliefs, worshiping Christ and Thor at once.

Iceland is therefore distinctly different from other territories in that it did not require ‘Christianizing’ because its initial founders were Irish monks.

Despite the occasional bloody feud, the Icelanders of varying faiths enjoyed a mostly peaceful existence. Perhaps this was caused by, or perhaps this caused, Iceland’s famed early development of freely-elected representatives.

Long before other nations, around 930 A.D., the Icelanders formed their Althing, a sort of parliament or congress, and became a republic with freely-elected representatives.

With this metamorphosis toward democracy, faith in Norse mythology declined. Again, cause and effect are not easily discerned: did democracy cause a decline in paganism, or did a decline in paganism cause democracy?

In any case, Turville-Petre and Polomé report that

Lack of faith in the heathen gods seems to have grown during the 10th century.

When the Althing eventually embraced Christianity as the nation’s religion, it did so with the explicit proviso that those who wished to remain with Norse polytheism be allowed to do so, and should not be harassed for doing so.

But within a few decades, Norse mythology had ceased to be an operative belief system for all but a few Icelanders. Traces of the Norse characters and narratives remained in folk art, but not as objects of dynamic faith.

One consequence of Iceland’s unusual developmental path is that, in terms of gaining legal, social, political, and economic equality, Icelandic women were ahead of their peers in other nations.

It’s Not Pretty: The Earliest Phase of Civilization

While the word ‘civilized’ is often used to denote cultured or polite behavior, not all civilizations were civilized in this sense of the word. In fact, the earliest phases of human civilization tend to be rather ‘uncivilized.’

With startling uniformity, civilizations in Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Americas all began with some rather savage tendencies. With no regard to race, ethnicity, or language, the earliest stages of human cultures featured practices like “exposure” or “abandonment” - historians use these words to describe the practice of leaving unwanted babies in the wilderness.

Perhaps most shocking, every known human civilization on earth practiced, in its initial periods, human sacrifice. They were under the influence of a pre-religious or proto-religious mindset which focused on myth and magic - the attempt to explain and control natural - instead of on a relationship to the deity which forms the core of a more mature religion.

Humans were sacrificed to obtain good weather, good harvests, or military victories. The best and brightest were sacrificed: young, healthy, and good-looking.

The histories of the Old World and the New World are parallel in this regard, as historian Michael Salemink writes:

Abortion, abandonment, and outright infanticide ran as rampant in pre-Columbian America, tribal Africa, the Far East, and the South Pacific as it once had in imperial lands. Ritual human sacrifice and slave trading predominated nearly universally in these cultures as well. Women and children, along with ailing, impoverished, and aged people, faced prevalent neglect, if not absolute contempt. Hindus, Scandinavians, Chinese, Maori, and some Native American communities cremated widows alive in their husbands’ funeral pyres. Euthanasia and cannibalism commonly occurred.

While Hammurabi and Homer may have been geniuses, they and their societies still had not yet developed those hallmarks - a regard for every human life as valuable, and a regard for the liberty of the individual - which mark Western Civilization and Eurocentric culture.

It would take centuries of slow progress, often against resistance, from Abraham to Moses, from Jesus to Augustine, before these concepts - the dignity and value of every human life, and the prominence of personal freedom - established themselves as central cultural edifices.

Civilization took a long time to become civilized!

This Blog’s Author is Guilty of Plagiarism!

You’re reading a post which belongs to a long series of entries dating back to April 2005. Among the earliest installments in this blog are some which contain instances of undeniable plagiarism.

By way of a halfhearted defense, it should be noted that the Internet and the World Wide Web brought about large changes in communication styles. The Oxford English Dictionary chronicles the appearances of words like repost, which appeared as early as 1983 in ‘Usenet newsgroup,’ before the emergence of WWW and the modern Internet.

The OED also informs us that ‘netiquette’ first appeared in 1982. The original context for the word seems to have, in fact, been related to the practice of posting and sharing unsigned humorous texts.

So, from the earliest years, the Internet has been wrestling with the question of how to precisely apply the concept of plagiarism.

The ease of ‘cut and paste’ technology, and the ability to forward emails or parts of emails led to an onslaught of ways to share text: reblogging, retweeting, crossposting, and more.

All of this stretched, mutilated, and challenged the understanding of ‘plagiarism’ as it existed, say, up until 1980 or so.

Without ill intent, many users pasted into their emails paragraphs from something they’d read and wanted to share with others. The ambiguity arises because it is not always clear whether the user intended to claim the text as his own creation - obvious plagiarism - or whether he merely meant to draw attention to a text which he’d seen: “hey, look at this.”

The details of the technology involved kept, and keep, changing: electronic bulletin boards, email discussion lists, FB, Twitter, blogs, etc.

This constant change made it difficult for an appropriate definition of ‘plagiarism’ to develop.

Naturally, from the very beginning of electronic communication, the more thoughtful and astute posters have worked to ensure that they attributed any texts to their true authors. But millions, e.g., have used the acronym “LOL” without citing Wayne Pearson, who allegedly authored it in the mid 1980s.

So, by way of a lukewarm confession and perfunctory admission of guilt, there are, among the earliest posts in this blog, instances of unmistakable plagiarism. These transgressions arose out of ignorance not malice.

It is, however, to be noted that these sins are limited only to the first few years of this blog’s history, and that citation of sources has been scrupulously observed in recent years.

Finding the Historical Impact of Jesus: The Struggle of Christianity Against the Church

In the course of Western Civilization, there is an ongoing struggle between two opposing forces, each of which wants to claim for itself the titles of “church” and “Christianity.”

The central presence of the church and the Christian worldview in European cultural history makes it a central project for the historian to figure out what they really are, and not merely what they claim to be, or what others label them to be.

It should be simple: ‘Christianity’ is the name given to body of thought presented by Jesus; ‘church’ is the human organization whose task is to implement those thoughts.

Jesus followers attempt to put distinctively Christian values into practice: peace, justice, equality, education, liberty, freedom, etc.

So we see, e.g., Francis of Assisi visiting Egypt to broker a ceasefire, or the Peace of Westphalia negotiated largely by clergy: peacemaking missions. We see women’s suffrage and other measures toward women’s legal equality from the Magna Carta of 1215 to the Wyoming legislature of 1869: the mission of equality. As Andrew Wilson writes,

In many ways, the story of Christianity is full of light — mission, education, art, healthcare, abolition, compassion, justice — and I have read, taught, and loved that story for many years.

A simple happy story, right?

Sadly, no. The words ‘Christian’ and ‘church’ have often been used by those who opposed the ideas of Jesus. Some who hate the church and hate Christianity often call themselves by these very words, for the purpose of undermining the credibility of them.

One need think only of the so-called “Westboro Baptist Church,” an institution which constantly works to oppose the Christian faith. The Westboro Baptist Church is a group of non-Christians, or anti-Christians, who ensure that they are publicly perceived as a ‘church’ or as ‘Christians’ and then commit outrages so that the name and reputation of both are smeared.

There are many examples of this in history. Andrew Wilson tells us that

But there is an undeniable dark side: attacking, burning, crusading, drowning, enslaving, flogging, ghettoizing, hunting, imprisoning, Jew-hating, killing, lynching, and so on.

Through the centuries, repeated attempts to discredit Christianity follow the same pattern: first, an individual or a group creates the impression of being ‘Christian’ or of being a ‘church.’

Once that false impression is firm in the minds of the public, they perpetrate all manner of evil, so that this evil is then blamed on Christianity. The church is held responsible for the misdeeds of those who actually oppress the church.

How is a historian to untangle this mess in which two opposing parties both claim the same title?

If Christianity is the collected ideas which Jesus presented, and if the church is the institution which seeks to make those ideas into reality, then we must start with those ideas.

Jesus, depending on your interpretation, is either moderately pacifistic or radically pacifistic, but in both cases, Jesus is pacifistic. By extrapolation, to be ‘Christian’ or to be a ‘church’ is to be pacifistic.

While there is some gray area regarding precise definitions, it is still clear that unprovoked aggression - that starting a war - is beyond Christianity. Nonetheless, throughout history, there are numerous examples of those who would call themselves ‘Christians’ and yet instigate conflict.

Such actions, despite the ubiquity of the label ‘Christian,’ cannot possibly be Christian. In fact, they are the very opposite: they constitute an opposition to, and an oppression of, Christianity.

History, then, suffers from a confusion of terminology on a massive scale.

Perhaps the best solution is to jettison the words ‘church’ and ‘Christianity’ altogether, and instead simply identify individuals, groups, and movements which either correspond to the ideas of Jesus or which oppose those ideas.

Rational Insight Demands Action: Plato’s Philosophers are Obliged to be Kings, Even If Against Their Wills

Human action, and the psychology which drives it, explain the course of society, culture, and civilization. An insight into the deliberate choices which people make carries with it the power to act on that knowledge.

That power, in turn, might carry with it the obligation to act: to move from the potential of acting to the reality of acting. As economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe writes:

Just as rationalism implies the desire for system and completeness, so it implies political activism. To rationalists, human beings are above all rational animals. Their actions, and the course of human history, are determined by ideas.

People self-consciously redesign their societies by means of reflection and action based on reflection.

The power of an idea is such that it creates both the desire and the moral obligation to put it into practice.

In the economic realm, this property of ideas guides the introduction of new products into the marketplace, and new technology into manufacturing. In the arts, this principle leads to new styles and genres.

In politics, it is motivates every sincere effort, and distinguishes the sincere efforts from cynical efforts toward merely obtaining power for power’s sake.

Ideas can be true or false, but only true ideas "work" and result in success and progress, while false ideas lead to failure and decline. As the discoverer of true ideas and eradicator of false ones, the scholar assumes a crucial role in human history. Human progress is the result of the discovery of truth and the proliferation of true ideas - enlightenment - and is thus entirely in the scholar’s hands. The truth is inherently practical, and in recognizing an idea as true (or false), a scholar cannot but want it to be implemented (or eradicated) immediately.

The thinker’s desire or obligation to instantiate a thought explains both every failed revolution and every successful one, because revolutions are above all ideological (a coup, by contrast, is a mere seizure of power and not a true revolution, even if its perpetrators use the word ‘revolution’).

The danger exists, however, in our hyper-Romanticist and postmodernist world, that feelings or emotions usurp the role of thought, even among scholars.

When videos, soundbites, and 144-character messages replace the art of the political essay, then passion has replaced reason and feelings have replaced thought. A fictional character in a Star Wars movie advises: “Feel, don’t think!”

The imperative for modern people who seek justice in any form, who seek what’s best in culture and society, who seek to improve government and civilization, is: “Think!”

One need not, and should not, lapse into the opposite extreme. We do not issue the imperative: “Don’t feel!”

It would be foolishness to attempt to prohibit or ignore emotion, exactly as it is foolishness to privilege passion over reason.

Knowledge and reason beget power, and power, as numerous proverbs tell us, brings with it responsibility.

Napoleon’s Army: Overextended

An analysis of Napoleon’s military activity yields the conclusion that his reach simply exceeded his grasp. To fight in Egypt, Spain, and Russia, and to contemplate an invasion of England beyond this, is ambitious to say the least.

With more modest goals, Napoleon might have succeeded and been able to retain both territory and his title as emperor. Archeologists find evidence which documents how his army faced insufficient supplies, as historian Samir Patel writes:

Between 1803 and 1805, Napoleon stationed armies along the French, Belgian, and Dutch coasts for an invasion of Britain that was abandoned after he decisively lost the Battle of Trafalgar. Recent analysis of charcoal excavated from one of these camps shows that official supplies of firewood were apparently not enough to keep the soldiers warm and fed, perhaps because sources were overtaxed by the war. Rather, the men supplemented by collecting their own locally.

Napoleon’s strategy of choice was to focus a conflict into a major battle, instead of a series of small battles. When this strategy worked well, it was a brilliant success. But it required huge armies, with massive amounts of equipment and supplies.

France’s national economy, even with whatever was commandeered or conscripted or impressed from conquered territories, was simply hard-pressed continuously to provide for Napoleon’s ever-expanding field of action.

The Emergence of Archaic Greek Peculiarities

If Greek history is displayed on a timeline, which event marks the starting point? Naturally, there will be some ambiguity and controversy around any answer given to that question.

The Greek area - Greece proper, plus the surrounding waterways and islands - was originally inhabited by other nations. A group known as the Minoans, who seem to have their origins on the island of Crete, planted themselves on the Greek mainland and became known as the Mycenaeans.

But they were not the Greeks.

Starting around 1600 B.C., several waves of invasions brought Indo-European settlers into Greece. These tribes were, in order, Achaeans, Aeolians, Ionians, and finally the Dorians.

Although the Dorians were in some ways technologically advanced, as is seen by their use of iron, they were part of a pattern of instability in area, and so civilization is often considered to have been in decline during the Dorian era.

The distinction between being civilized and being technologically advanced is worth considering.

As the social and political structures gradually stabilized, the new tribes absorbed some aspects of the Mycenaean cultures and blended them with their own Indo-European culture. The result is what might be called the beginning of Greek civilization. As historians Ralph Magoffin and Frederic Duncalf write,

During the three centuries which followed the period of invasion and settlement in Greece, the Greeks laid the foundations for their particular form of civilized life. Being self-reliant folk, they established a form of society in which the individual person had the freedom of self-expression. Wherever Greeks lived they preferred small, independent city-states. They never became cooperative enough to unite in large states.

Already at the beginning of Greek history, the characteristically Greek trait of independence appears. Greece as unified nation-state will not exist until many centuries later.

It is misleading to speak of the ‘ancient Greeks’ - it is more accurate to speak of Spartans, Athenians, Corinthians, Eretrians, etc.

The ‘Greeks’ were a handful of fiercely independent city-states, who occasionally cooperated with each other for mutual military defence, but who were as likely to attack each other.

Why did both independence and individual self-expression emerge as typical Greek qualities? There is no clear answer, but perhaps the origin of the Greeks as a sort of “melting-pot” of various Indo-European and Mycenaean influences was a contributing factor.

Wenceslaus - The Original SJW?

The Bohemian nobleman Wenceslaus is perhaps best remembered as the protagonist in the narrative contained in the song, “Good King Wenceslas” (note the variant spelling of the name).

But there’s more data about this man. His grandmother had been murdered because she had taught Wenceslaus about Jesus. In those days - he was born between 905 and 907 A.D. - Bohemia was still a largely pagan territory.

Corresponding to the territory of what is now the Czech Republic, the heathen traditions of Bohemia included human sacrifice, torture, and a general low regard for the value of human life. Women were considered as property, and could be bought and sold.

Ludmilla, the grandmother of Wenceslaus, helped to spread the teachings of Jesus into the region, and paid with her life. He would do the same. When “Wenceslaus became king of Bohemia in 922,” writes historian Bert Ghezzi,

He instituted a Christian rule over a people who were only partially converted to Christianity. Thus, a cadre of powerful pagan nobles opposed him and ultimately conspired to have him murdered.

As a follower of Jesus, Wenceslaus worked to reduce the frequency with which defendants were sentenced to capital punishment. He also reduced the amount of time which convicts were spending in prisons, instituting instead a form of ‘restorative justice.’

His efforts to stop the practice of human sacrifice and to raise the status of women angered the heathen leaders. Sometime between 929 and 935 A.D., he was assassinated.