Israelite King, British Museum, Assyrian Stele

The united Israelite monarchy had a short lifespan: after 400 years of existence as a tribal confederation, the nation of Israel restructured itself into a monarchy shortly before 1000 B.C.; by around 931 B.C., the country was split into a northern half and southern half in a civil war. The united monarchy lasted only around a century.

The northern half likewise has a short duration. It was occupied and otherwise absorbed into the Assyrian Empire around 732 B.C.; for the two centuries that the Northern Kingdom lasted, it was ruled by a series of monarchs, most of them corrupt, many assassinated at the end of their reigns.

Confusingly, the united monarchy was known as Israel, and after its split, the Northern Kingdom was also known as Israel. The Southern Kingdom was known as Judah. Historian Jonathan Kirsch tells us about archeological details of the Northern Kingom:

On a stele of polished basalt in a gallery of the British Museum, the image of a kneeling man can be discerned among the dozens of other figures inscribed into the cold black stone. He is believed to be Jehu, an obscure monarch who sat on the throne of the northern kingdom of Israel in the late ninth century B.C., and he is shown in a gesture of obeisance to the Assyrian emperor who subjugated him, Shalmaneser III. "Silver, gold, a golden bowl, golden goblets, a golden beaker, pitchers of gold, lead, sceptres for the king and balsam-wood I received from him," goes the inscription on the so-called Black-Obelisk, which offers the only contemporary image of an Israelite king ever recovered from the archaeological record.

A stele - or 'stela' - is an upright stone slab or column typically bearing a commemorative inscription or relief design. Sometimes a stele can serve as a gravestone. In this case, it did not.

Biography as Philosophy

When Einhard decided to write a biography about his personal friend and employer, Karl the Great, he did so in a reflective and self-conscious manner. The introduction he wrote to the book is more a document about the philosophy of history than about Karl.

A linguistic aside: you probably know Karl the Great as 'Charlemagne' and Einhard's name was originally spelled 'Eginhard' - corruptions resulting from history being rewritten in French, English, Latin, and various Germanic dialects. Karl's native tongue was Frankish, a southeastern Germanic dialect. Although the political leaders of the era all spoke Frankish, most royal records were written in Latin.

Einhard begins his biography - written sometime after Karl's death in the year 814 A.D., and before Einhard's death in 840 A.D.; scholars date the probable writing to somewhere between 817 and 836. Einhard, a theologian and philosopher, begins the introduction to his book with subtle ironic self-contradictions:

I have undertaken to report as briefly as possible about the private and public life, and above all also about the actions, of my master and benefactor, the felicitous and very famous King Karl. In this I took care to leave out nothing that I could discover, and not to scare away by means of lengthiness such readers who have something to criticize about everything modern - i.e, if it is possible at all to satisfy them with a new work, when they really dismiss even the masterpieces of the most learned and ingenious authors.

Einhard hints at paradox by packing together opposites: "private/public" and "briefly/leave out nothing" - the irony of the latter pair is compounded by his concern to avoid wordiness! Although irony and paradox are hallmarks of great authors from ancient times, Einhard understands himself to be modern, making ironic his appeals to classical authors like Cicero.

Indeed, I know exactly that there are learned men who consider current circumstances not so unimportant, that they believe that everything contemporary would earn contempt and should be omitted silently without any attention; they want rather, in their enthusiasm for things past, to describe somehow the famous deeds of others, and hope thereby to avoid that their own name be forgotten by posterity because of authorial inactivity.

In this confusing maze of double negatives and clauses, Einhard makes his plain meaning rather unclear. Perhaps he has done this to mock those who sense of self-importance is derived from their prose styles; perhaps he does this to hint at the ambiguity - another hallmark of great writers, ancient and modern - of the narrative which he is introducing. Yet his the narrative which he is allegedly introducing is barely mentioned in the selfsame introduction, yet another irony.

Nonetheless, all these causes hinder me in no way from beginning with my work, because I am certain that nobody aside from me can depict more exactly the events, which have, so to speak, befallen before my eyes, and to whose veracity I can attest.

Suddenly, Einhard's prose becomes rather clear. When attention is turned away from meta-level considerations of how one does history, or how one does the philosophy of history, and when attention is turned toward the activity of simply making a first-person report, Einhard's language becomes much more direct. Although engaged in a Lockean empirical project - reporting what he has seen - Einhard does so with Cartesian rational certainty. Yet, despite this sudden clarity, we have not yet gotten to the point: Karl's name has been mentioned only once, and then without any concrete content; Karl's name will not appear again for several more lines. Einhard is making it clear to the reader that he is first engaging in the philosophy of history, before to begins to deliver the material substance of history.

Time

Time has fascinated philosophers throughout the ages: geniuses like Isaac Newton, Gottfried Leibniz, and Immanuel Kant have written about it. But not only philosophers have studied time. From a more sociological and anthropological point of view, authors like Alvin Toffler have examined how cultures process time.

In his book The Third Wave, Toffler examines the difference between the "first wave" civilization of agriculture and the "second wave" industrial society. In the ninth chapter of his book, he contrasts their understandings of time.

He examines the mainstream of the agricultural worldview found in the “First Wave” pre-industrial societies, and contrasts it with the industrial worldview found in the “Second Wave” societies. Toffler posits that, despite the appearance of a diversity of ideologies – communist vs. capitalist, faith vs. religion, internationalists vs. isolationists – there is an underlying common conceptual framework which is shared by almost all “Second Wave” societies. He calls this a “super-ideology.”

One part of this set of omnipresent assumptions is a group of three core beliefs.

The first core belief is that “nature was an object waiting to be exploited.” Both capitalist industrializers and Marxist industrializers see mountains as places from which to mine iron and copper; they see oceans as sources of fish and salt. Rivers can be rerouted or dammed; swamps can be drained as locations for future houses or factories. Mechanization has made this possible on a large scale.

The second core belief was evolution. The political implications of Social Darwinism gave industrial societies a sense of superiority regarding agricultural societies. This rationalized both militaristic imperialism and economic imperialism, enabling industrial nations to view themselves as having a natural right to extract raw materials from regions belonging to less developed nations, and enabling them to see those nations as natural markets for exported manufactured products. The Marxists and capitalists “shared the view that industrialism was the most advanced form of society.”

A third core belief was progress, defined as “the idea that history flows irreversibly toward a better life for humanity.” Toffler sees this notion of progress as having “linked nature and evolution together.” Again, both communists and capitalists saw progress as inevitable and irresistible.

Having outlined the three core beliefs of “Second Wave” industrial society, Toffler continues, positing that these beliefs are themselves based upon a quartet of still deeper, more fundamental concepts. These are the concepts which people use to understand the world, and more specifically, these are the particular versions of those concepts which peculiar to “Second Wave” societies. These are time, space, matter, and causation.

All cultures have time, but the notion of time embrace by industrial civilizations differs from that of the “First Wave” societies. In agricultural settings, time had been measured primarily in large spans: seasons and years. Smaller cycles of time were noted, e.g., the daily milking of the cows. But there was no need to measure minutes or hours, and any reference to small units of time were imprecise. By contrast, the mechanization of processes demanded precise measurements of small amounts of time: minutes and seconds became important. In addition, there arose the need to synchronize events, so standardization of timekeeping meant that 9:30 in New York was also 9:30 in Miami. In addition to precisely measuring small units of time, and synchronizing them across ever larger distances, a third aspect of time is associated with the “Second Wave” industrial worldview: that time is linear. Many ancient societies in an agricultural, or pre-agricultural, phase conceived of time as circular. The notion of linear time allows for the possibility of significant progress.

The second concept which assumes a distinctive form during the industrial phase is space. Pre-agricultural societies – the “hunters and gathers” – understood themselves as roving through the universe’s vastness. Farming families and their neighbors, by contrast, were rooted to a specific piece of land, and in sociopolitical systems like feudalism, often spent their entire lives within a few miles of their birthplace. Industrialization returned greater degrees of mobility to people, but in a different form than the mobility of the hunters and gatherers. This new type of mobility was characterized by precision. While the ancient wanderers roamed the landscape in search of food, the industrial traveler left Chicago and knew not only that he was going to Omaha, but he knew exactly which building, and often even which room, was his goal. Railroads lent this great precision to man’s movement through space. A journey of a thousand miles was plotted accurately – one’s point of arrival could be calculated to within a couple of feet: a man knew not only that his train would arrive on track thirty-two of the Union Station, but he could even count on stepping out onto the front, the middle, or the back of the platform. In addition to precise journeys, the industrial concept of space is specialized. Architects and engineers design spaces for specific purposes. A large stone castle built during the reign of Charlemagne might have many rooms, but they were interchangeable in use. Designs of the industrial age feature rooms constructed for specific activities. Beyond the scope of a single building, towns and cities are also now organized in their use of space. A medieval town is a jumble of structures, placed in no particular pattern – houses, bakeries, carpenter’s shops, schools, churches – no clear residential zone and no clear business zone, and winding streets which grew organically without premeditated designs. Industrialization brought with itself urban planning, zoning laws, and cities whose streets from a Cartesian grid on a map. On a still larger scale, boundaries and borders between nations were now surveyed with great precision. On both the smaller level – individual rooms in buildings – and on the larger level – borders stretching hundreds of miles – the Cartesian plane’s right angles and straight lines made themselves felt. The medieval house often had walls which gently curved, and its rooms were randomly trapezoidal, quadrilateral, or merely closed figures. The modern homeowner, by contrast, expects all the angles in his house to be ninety degrees, and walls and floors to be straight lines.

The third concept used by the “Second Wave” worldview to process reality is the concept of matter. The industrial perception of nature reduced matter to interchangeable units to meet the needs of mechanization. All of matter was reduced to the known elements – approximately one hundred in number. Every atom of a particular element is chemically interchangeable with every other atom of the same element, e.g., we can substitute any carbon atom for any other carbon atom. This physical atomism quickly expanded to shape a general worldview and led to social, political, and economic atomism. Just as one atom can be substituted for another, one worker can be substituted for another, one dollar for another, one customer for another, one vote for another, and one voter for another. The interchangeability of automobile parts, computer parts, airplane parts, and steam engine parts led to the interchangeability of human beings. This detachable notion of the individual was different than the “First Wave” concept of society, in which the individual was an extension – an organic limb – of society: in the “First Wave” conception, neither society nor the individual could exist without each other, and severing the connection would destroy both. The “Second Wave” society is a complex whole, constructed of many individuals – but individuals who can be replaced and who are interchangeable. As the paradigm of atomism was transferred from chemistry to society, individuals could become more useful to the industrialization process, because they could be torn loose from their families, towns, and religions. If you needed one more accountant in your Toledo office, and had one too many accountants in your Milwaukee office, you simply relocated an accountant. Because the individual was seen as an atom, it didn’t matter whether the accountant’s cousin or grandmother lived in the Milwaukee area, or if the accountant had formed attachments to the local church or community.

The final concept needed for a “Second Wave” worldview is a notion of mechanistic causation. The laws of chemistry as formulated by Boyle, and the laws of physics as formulated by Newton, offered a paradigm which would be generalized to all of reality. Every phenomenon – every event seen or heard – could be explained in terms of, and reduced to, a series of causes and effects occurring with law-like regularity and predicability. This understanding of reality led to similarly-structured attempts – often successful – to control reality: to make things happen. While this mechanistic conceptualization of the world led to amazing achievements in science and technology, it also was dismissive of that which it could not quantify, dismissive of imagination and creativity, and attempted to reduce people to oversimplified units. It sought an engineering solution to every problem, and caused human suffering by ignoring those human needs which could not be expressed in mechanistic quantification.

The completed “Second Wave” worldview, then, has three core values – nature as something to be exploited, evolution, and progress – and understands reality through the lens of four concepts – time, space, matter, and mechanistic causation. This “super-ideology” provided a framework in which both capitalism and Marxism would produce their self-justifications. It created a society of organizations, cities, bureaucracies, and economies. According to Toffler, it is also a worldview that is now on its way out, is being disassembled, and will be replaced by a “Third Wave” worldview.

Plague Reveals Heroism

The suffering inflicted by The Black Death between 1346 and 1351 is difficult to imagine: from region to region, between 10% and 90% of the population died in less than a year. Some towns were utterly erased with 100% fatalities. Historian Barbara Tuchman writes:

The disease was bubonic plague, present in two forms: one that infected the bloodstream, causing the buboes and internal bleeding, and was spread by contact; and a second, more virulent pneumonic type that infected the lungs and was spread by respiratory infection. The presence of both at once caused the high mortality and speed of contagion. So lethal was the disease that cases were known of persons going to bed well and dying before they woke, of doctors catching the illness at a bedside and dying before the patient. So rapidly did it spread from one to another that to a French physician, Simon de Covino, it seemed as if one sick person "could infect the whole world." The malignity of the pestilence appeared more terrible because its victims knew no prevention and no remedy.

The societal response was amazing. Although some fled to the relative safety of the countryside, and others exploited the occasion for looting, most people saw their duty to provide comfort for the sick or dying. The notion of a 'hospital' in the modern sense hadn't yet developed, so makeshift infirmaries were set up wherever possible. The first line of caregivers were monks and nuns - Benedictines, Dominicans, Augustinians, and Franciscans. But it became clear that more would be needed, especially as caregivers were more likely to be infected, and more likely to die.

True heroism was seen among the ordinary laypeople - farmers and townspeople - who risked their lives, and in some cases almost ensured their deaths by enlisted to care for the ill. This desire to help revealed something profound in Western Civilization: an ethic of service toward one's fellow man. Centuries of culture and tradition had taught this principle, and when European culture faced one of its worst humanitarian disasters, this principle was securely in place among the people.

Science vs. Scientists

"Confidence in scientists has declined the most among the most educated" of America's politically active citizens, reports the Los Angeles Times, citing a report from The American Sociological Review, which noted that "discontent with science was not attributable to the uneducated but to rising distrust among educated" voters. It is important to sort out whether it is science or scientists being questioned.

Noting that this is a change from previous years and decades, Gordon Gauchat, the report's author, indicates that scientists have become increasingly politicized. Summarizing him, the L.A. Times wrote that, in the past,

the role science played was mostly behind the scenes, creating better military equipment and sending rockets into space. But with the emergence of the Environmental Protection Agency, for example, scientists began to play a crucial and visible role in developing regulations.

The voters began to see scientists not as doing science, but as doing politics - as authoring arguments to support various political views.

The study also found that Americans with moderate political views have long been the most distrustful of scientists, but that

such distrust was now spreading to other parts of the political spectrum. The study suggests that the public sees a disconnect between science and scientists. This perception is fueled by the fact that funding for various types of research has become increasingly politicized, by the fact that an increasing percentage of this funding is from the government, and by the fact that scientists are seen as mouthpieces for political views rather than agents conducting neutral inquiries into the nature of the universe.

Scientists have come into conflict with science in recent years in the climate debate about "global warming", in the debate about embryonic stem cell research, in debates comparing different sources of energy, and in debates about whether there are genetic causes for deviant social behaviors.

An Emotional Time

The era called the 'Renaissance' was a time of emotion - a time when logical thinking was abandoned, and introspection on one's feelings were preferred. Musicologists call the compositions of the Middle Ages 'objective' because of their mathematical and structural aspects; the tunes of the Renaissance are called 'subjective' because orderly calculation was abandoned.

The writers who lived during the Renaissance praised their own generation, calling it a time when learning flourished. In fact, it was quite the opposite. Those who seriously investigated mathematics or physics during the Renaissance were lonely souls, ridiculed by their contemporaries. Historian John H. Plumb writes:

The frequency of assassination, the perennial plots, the constant vicissitudes, encouraged superstition and a romantic view of Fate. Men felt themselves to be the prey of strange destinies and turned to astrologers and magicians to strengthen their hope, to check despair, and to help them meet the uncertain future with confidence. The stars were studied as intensely as diplomatic dispatches, as a guide to action; and superstitious dread threaded the daily course of men's lives.

A narcissistic age, filled with ambitious grasping at reputation or power, is a more accurate description of the Renaissance. Those who wrote often wrote to emote or to impress, and rarely to attempt a crystallization of truth. Historian Lynn Thorndike writes that

Italian humanism produced relatively little of scientific or philosophical importance from its investigation of the classical past: Leonardo Bruni of Arezzo said that the subtleties of arithmetic and geometry were not worthy of a cultivated mind. In any case, most available works of Greek science had already been translated into Latin before 1300.

Who was this Leonardo Bruni? He was an author who wrote about political intrigues in the city and republic of Florence; he served for a time in the Vatican as a bureaucrat and later in the government of Florence; and he translated Greek literature into Latin. He was known for having a rather artistic style in his Latin prose. The point is this: He was not a mathematician, a philosopher, or a scientist in the sense of the modern observational or natural sciences. He was more interested in political machinations than in calculating the force of gravity; he was more interested in peddling influence than in applying the quadratic equation. A man of his time, born in 1370 - a Renaissance man - he was little interested in the powers of reason. Frederick Maurice Powicke writes that modern science was

made possible by the earlier, medieval belief in the reasonableness of the world.

The underlying notion that algebra can describe the natural laws of the universe - that objects act in accord with rules which can be expressed in equations - arises from the Scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages. The medievals understood that chemistry and physics describe processes in terms of laws:

the belief in law was at the root of the new investigation into facts.

The birth of modern chemistry and physics during the Middle Ages, this "new investigation into facts," would have to wait out the Renaissance before it could resume the rationalism which it began. The scholasticism of the Middle Ages - Aquinas, Anselm, Abelard, Ockham - led to the rationalism of Descarte, Leibniz, and Spinoza - and to the modernism of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. The Renaissance constituted a pause in this development of human reason. As Thorndike writes,

The fact that Valla's treatise on novelties unknown to the ancients has not survived indicates that his age was more interested in classical antiquity than in recent inventions. Of the three inventions that used to be associated with the Renaissance, namely the mariner's compass, gunpowder, and printing with moveable types, only the last can still be ascribed to the period, since the other two are now known to date back at least to the 13th century.

Lorenzo Valla died in Italy in 1457, his best work unappreciated by his contemporaries - a man interested in technological innovations living during the Renaissance's studied ignorance of such applied science.

Although many older history textbooks still recite the fairy-tale of the Renaissance as an era of learning, scholars have seen that the main achievements of the Renaissance were taking credit for the accomplishments of the Middle Ages and publicizing itself as an era far more rational than it actually was.

Ancient Laws in Modern Times

The case of a 16-year-old girl, Amina Filali, who killed herself after she was forced to marry her rapist has drawn attention Morocco's Islamic law code.

Article 475 of the Moroccan penal code allows for the "kidnapper" of a minor to marry his victim to escape prosecution, and it has been used to justify a Muslim practice of making a rapist marry his victim to preserve the honor of the woman's family.

The victim's father said in an interview with an online Moroccan newspaper that it was the court officials who suggested from the beginning the marriage option when they reported the rape. According to the CIA's World Factbook, the population of Morocco is 99% Muslim.

In Islamic societies, the loss of a woman's virginity outside of wedlock is a huge stain of honor on the family. In Muslim nations, there is a tradition whereby a rapist can escape prosecution if he marries his victim, thereby restoring her honor.

Even though Morocco updated its law code as recently as 2004, in cases of rape, the burden of proof is often on the victim and if she can't prove she was attacked, a woman risks being prosecuted for debauchery, a serious crime in Islamic law.

The Moroccan court pushed the marriage, even though the perpetrator initially refused. He only consented when faced with prosecution under Muslim law. The penalty for rape is between five and 10 years in prison, but rises to 10 to 20 in the case of a minor. Amina complained to her mother that her husband was beating her repeatedly during the five months of marriage but that her mother counseled patience.

Steinbeck vs. FDR

Novelist John Steinbeck is famous for capturing the mood of the Great Depression. The title of one of his most famous books, The Grapes of Wrath, expresses his anger at the situation, but also at the people who created the misery.

The wording of the title itself is an allusion to the fourteenth chapter of the biblical book of Revelation. At the end of chapter 25 in Steinbeck's story, the characters look on as food is destroyed - crop are burned, or dumped into rivers; millions of pigs are killed and buried.

This willful destruction of food that could have nourished people was a part of FDR's plan to help the economy. By destroying crops and livestock, Roosevelt hoped to increase the market price at which farmers could sell.

Whatever the New Deal intended, Steinbeck saw hungry people who were forced to watch as food was destroyed. Records indicate that six million pigs were killed and buried; crops were left to rot in fields rather than be harvested; other crops were burned.

Steinbeck saw a horrible injustice, carried out in the name of helping the poor, but actually inflicting a man-made food shortage on society's most vulnerable members. The wrath in The Grapes of Wrath is directed at FDR's progressivist New Deal plan of destroying food in order to help the hungry.

Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury's famous dystopia ranks with 1984 and Brave New World as a crystalizing moment in Western Civilization's literary protest against Stalinism, Maoist totalitarianism, Naziism, and other related mid-twentieth-century forms of repressive governmental structures. Bradbury recalls his youthful literary personality, and the internal revulsion to intellectual oppression. Writing in 1966, he recalled writing the book almost twenty years earlier, and his learning, a few years earlier still, about Nazi who burned books:

It followed then when Hitler burned a book I felt it as keenly, please forgive me, as his killing a human, for in the long sum of history they are one and the same flesh. Mind or body, put to the oven, is a sinful practice.

Bradbury started writing Fahrenheit 451 in 1947; at that stage of development, it was a short story called "Bright Phoenix" and it would be reworked into a somewhat longer novella called "The Fireman" and finally into the novel we know today. As Bradbury was writing in 1947, Hitler was gone, but other socialist parties were still burning books, shocking him, and filling him with horror:

Of course. There was Hitler torching books in Germany in 1934; rumors of Stalin and his match people and tinderboxes.

So it was not Hitler alone, but Stalin explicitly, and perhaps Mao and others implicitly - although Mao would not fully emerge until 1949, after the basic setting of Fahrenheit 451 had taken shape. Bradbury correctly comprehended the nature of these regimes, and did so very early, long before the standard images and cliches about the Cold War would be ossified.

Pagans and Christians Agree?

It is difficult to imagine many areas of agreement between the Pagans of ancient Rome and the early Christians, especially because those pagans were busy killing Christians in large numbers. Contrasts were numerous: pagans were polytheists, Christians are monotheists; pagans saw little or no connection between ethics and religion, Christians saw morality as a way of showing gratitude for unearned blessings; pagans saw human life as expendable, Christians perceived that each human life is valuable and has an innate dignity. The early Christian leader Augustine wrote around 400 A.D., sharply critiquing the Stoic philosophy which the pagan aristocracy embraced. Yet, despite the fact that Roman pagans beat, tortured, and executed Christians by the tens of thousands, there was one area of agreement.

A philosophical principle which has captivated most, if not all, human civilizations is the concept of Natural Law. This idea is appealing because of its intuitive correspondence to our usual perception of the way things are, and because it is flexible enough to adapt to almost any worldview or value system. One of the earliest expressions of Natural Law theory was given, a few decades after 100 B.C., by Cicero.

Natural Law, in its simplest form, simply indicates that somethings are good, and others are evil. It is a way of moving past opinions, beliefs, and perceptions. Rather than ask, "what do you believe is good?" Natural Law asks, "what is good?" For example, we can get move beyond a statement like "most people believe that it is good for the rich to share their wealth with the poor," to a more real statement like "it is good for the rich to share their wealth with the poor." Natural Law explores the structure of the universe.

Formulated by the pagan Cicero, it also appealed to the early Christians. The famous New Testament author Paul, writing to a group of Christians in Rome, stated that when those people,

who have no knowledge of the Law, act in accordance with it by the light of nature, they show that they have a law in themselves, for they demonstrate the effect of a law operating in their own hearts. Their own consciences endorse the existence of such a law, for there is something which condemns or commends their actions.

Paul is here saying that even if one has not had formal instruction in law, i.e., reading it from a text, there is nonetheless an internal, a priori, awareness of law

The First University

Schools have been around for a long time. Archeologists have found schools dating from 2000 B.C. in the city of Ur, Abraham's hometown.

But a university is something different and more than a school. The world's first university began around the year 1088 A.D., in the city of Bologna, Italy. How and why did it start? The answer will take us a few centuries earlier, into the institutions of Medieval education.

Prior to the appearance of universities, the Middle Ages had three main educational institutions. The first of these was the cathedral school. Even the smallest villages had churches, but only larger towns and cities had cathedrals, which were organizational centers for church activity. One major function of the church in society at that time was record-keeping. Every birth, marriage, and death was carefully recorded; these were of personal interest to families, but also important legal records: they helped to determine who inherited which property. To keep these records, the institutional church across Europe needed a cadre of able scribes, people who could read and write well. Literacy rates back then weren't as high as they would be in some later centuries, so build this group of record-keepers, cathedral schools arose as a way of teaching reading and writing. Over a few centuries, this gradually contributing to an increase in literacy.

The second educational institution which existed prior to the universities was the monastery. Around Europe, monasteries formed the literary and intellectual backbone of the continent. They preserved the literary, historical, and philosophical wisdom of ancient Greece and Rome. They sharpened the academic discipline of learning the grammar of various languages: Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. A monk working in one of these monasteries would become familiar with a long list of major texts: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Cicero, Virgil, Homer, Marcus Aurelius, and many others. It is important to note that the one missing piece in the early Middle Ages was a portion of Aristotle's works. Monasteries at that time had most, but not all, of Aristotle's books. When Europe received the missing pieces of Aristotle in the High Middle Ages, it further energized intellectual life in the monasteries and later in the universities. The monasteries were also the source of commentaries: the monks had become experts in the texts of Greece and Rome - they had, after all, copied them by hand, and learned Greek and Latin grammar to a refined degree - and began to write commentaries and interpretations of them. They also began to pose sharp questions about philosophical issues. The monks learned to read, understand, and analyze various languages and grammars. This ability to do 'close reading' will be the intellectual spark which lights the fire of the universities.

Finally, law schools arose as the third major educational institution prior to the university. With the end of the Western Roman Empire in 476 A.D., there began an erosion of systematized legal thought. The first few centuries of the Early Middle Ages were dominated by local feudal lords, who often acted as judges in various matters, but without the benefit of a law code or standardized legal processes. As the Middle Ages progressed, Charlemagne formed a large empire, which in turn required a formalized legal system. Charlemagne was, of course, known as 'Karl der Grosse' or 'Karl the Great' in his own era; the name 'Charlemagne' was applied to him only by certain historians who wrote in Latin, not in Frankish, the Germanic dialect which he spoke. The rise of laws schools - part of the Carolingian Renaissance - began with the study of the laws of Rome's republic and empire. Since Karl was forming a similar empire of his own, he reasonably thought that he could model his laws of those of Rome; when Karl was crowned in 800 A.D., there hadn't been a major empire since Rome fell. The law schools fostered, first, the careful reading of Roman legal texts, second, the careful analysis, evaluation, and discussion of them, and third, the debate about which changes were necessary to update Roman law for an empire operating four centuries later.

These three educational institutions - the cathedral school, the monastery, and the law school - created a vibrant intellectual atmosphere in the Middle Ages, and set the stage for the birth of the university. In fact, the university could be interpreted as the merger of these three institutions.

Bologna, Italy, was the first city to create a university. The exact date is unclear, but we know that Bologna's university existed by 1088 A.D. at the latest. The name 'university' comes from the Latin phrase studium generale - general studies. (General studies included the study of everything, i.e., universal studies.) The structure of Bologna's university was loose, compared to modern standards. There was a 'school of the arts' into which most students first entered. The prerequisite was that one could prove mastery of the Latin language - 'mastery' construed as a reasonably large vocabulary and a basic knowledge of general. Once admitted, a student worked at the first level: the 'trivium' - studying grammar, rhetoric, and logic. Upon demonstrating mastery - the word 'mastery' is used often here, and led to the modern "Master's Degree" and complemented the use of the Latin magister for those who taught in the university - a student advanced to the second level, called 'quadrivium' and consisting of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. Seeing music nestled among mathematics and observational physics (which is astronomy) gives us a clue about why Medieval music is often called "objective" in contrast to "subjective" form into which music decayed in the Renaissance era: for the Medievals, music was treated mathematically - the study of intervals and rhythms. Upon completed this second level, students could proceed, if they wished, into professional schools: law and medicine. There was no fixed timetable for progression through this system; a student attended lectures and studied until he felt ready to take an exam. If the student did well in the exam, he moved on to the next level; if he didn't, he stayed at the lower level a while longer and took the exam again.

Death, Judgment, Afterlife

For students in various Humanities classes, or courses in ancient civilizations, the essay question about death, judgment, and afterlife is assigned so regularly that its predictability makes it ready material for a joke. Yet it remains a central question in modern cultures and ancient cultures.

The Egyptian concept of "maat" (transliterated into English with various spellings) is a good example. The concept is sometimes personified into a goddess of sorts, and other times treated as an abstract principle. In either case, the fiction of weighing the human heart against a feather on a balance remains a powerful metaphor, and crystalizes not only the Egyptian notion of judgment, but also that of numerous other cultures, ancient and modern.

By contrast, the New Testament offers a complex and confusing idea of judgment, which - however interpreted - is rather different from the Egyptian one. Jesus offers us a tension between his famous dictum "Do not judge, or you too will be judged" and his willingness to judge: he tell a woman caught in adultery, "Go now and leave your life of sin." Whether one agrees or disagrees with Jesus, an interpretive challenge presents itself as we seek to create some harmony out of this tension: how do we find the consistency in the apparent, but merely apparent, contradiction?

A follower of Jesus, named variously Saul and Paul, gives us a clue in a letter he wrote to early followers of Jesus living in Rome:

Now if you feel inclined to set yourself up as a judge of those who sin, let me assure you, whoever you are, that you are in no position to do so. For at whatever point you condemn others you automatically condemn yourself, since you, the judge, commit the same sins. God’s judgment, we know, is utterly impartial in its action against such evil-doers. What makes you think that you who so readily judge the sins of others, can consider yourself beyond the judgment of God?

We see here the same tension: a command not to judge, and - in the same breath - a clear judgment that some are, in fact, sinning. The determination that someone is sinning is itself a judgment. So how can we reconcile Paul's command not to judge, delivered in a bundle with a clear judgment. The irony is compressed: we are commanded not to judge those who sin. By identifying them as those who sin, has not Paul already judged them?

We can resolve the tension existing in Paul's words - and the words of Jesus - by noting a careful distinction: We are commanded not to judge people. We are left free to judge actions, indeed, encouraged to judge actions. In this distinction, not only can we resolve the internal tension within the New Testament, but we can also capture the exact nature of the different between Jesus and the Egyptian concept of maat.

If I judge a man's actions as evil, I am still prohibited from judging the man himself as evil. Here introduced is a distinction between agent and action, between the person and the what he does. If everyone who does an evil act is reckoned as evil, then all humans would be evil, because all humans, sooner or later, do the wrong thing. If all who do something right are reckoned as good, then all people will be called good, because everybody, sooner or later, does something right. Paul and Jesus are acknowledging the ethical reality that every human performs a mixture of actions - some good, some bad. We can sort out the actions, but we cannot label the individual.

Instead of sorting humanity into two groups - as the Egyptian maat does - the New Testament places all people into the same boat: morally equivocal, committed both virtuous deeds and sins. The Egyptian worldview creates two classes of humans, with the inevitable if unintended result that they will be pitted against each other; the New Testament offers a unifying notion, that all humans find themselves in the same ethical predicament - a morally ambiguous nature - and looking to the same solution - to cast themselves upon the mercy of a deity.

What History Can Tell Us, And What It Can't

It is clear that religion is one of the driving forces of history; many significant events and trends are fueled by faith: the abolition of slavery in America, the right of women to vote, the environmental movement to protect the earth, freedom of speech and of the press, various forms of aid to developing countries, and international negotiating organizations seeking to avoid war. Many other examples could be added. Some of these are obviously more religious than others, but historical investigation will find that all of them originated in a worldview shaped by faith and by sacred text.

But what can history tell us about religion? We are instructed to strive ever more for a neutral objectivity - studying religion in history, and the history of religion, can be done in this way - but for someone who is the product of American popular culture, it is a foreign notion. History can describe for us those events and trends, and their emergence from a particular spiritual tradition. Indeed, history is obliged to do so. History cannot, however, evaluate truth claims made by specific religions, because those claims are sometimes about things bigger than history, beyond history, and embracing history from without. Walther Eichrodt writes that

history can say nothing about the final truth of a matter; that is, it is unable to make any claims concerning its validity for our current existence or its significance for our worldview. To the extent that historical research is able to view and to describe more precisely any event - also anything of an intellectual scope - only within a system of relations, its assertions about a historical entity always remain relative; that is, they have meaning only in relation to other entities and only in this sense command assent. To judge regarding what is true and what is false, what has an absolute claim to validity and what is worthless, continues to be reserved fundamentally to the science of values, to philosophy or to dogmatics.

History can tell us, for example, which religions lead more often to war, and which ones lead more often to peace; history can tell us which religions are inclined to expand the dignity and rights of women, and which ones are inclined to minimize women and their social roles; history can tell us which religions see an essential value in every human life, a value which demands recognition, and which religions see some human lives as worth less than others, and therefore expendable.

But history cannot tell us which religions are true, and which are false; history cannot tell us which beliefs are good, and which are evil. These determinations belong to a higher academic discipline. The historian may narrate the roles of various spiritual traditions in history, but he may not make value judgements about those traditions. Those judgements are to be made by the philosopher and the theologian.

History shows us that religion is the engine of history, that faith propels great historical movements; but history must refrain from deciding which religion is ultimately the true religion. Determining what is 'true religion' - this cannot be left in the realm of mere opinion: this is the task of rational investigation, close textual study, and academic theology.

The Era of the Castle

The Middle Ages was a time of creativity and innovation - and certainly not "The Dark Ages" or reign of superstition and ignorance which old history books tell it to be. The inventiveness of scientists and rulers, of philosophers and bankers during the Medieval centuries was born of necessity. The fall of the Roman Empire (at least the western half of it) created a power vacuum, and even an environment of personal danger, until the institutions and concepts of the Middle Ages could offer a better social organization principle to replace it. Historian Irma Simonton Black sees the emergence of a safer, and intellectually more stimulating, culture symbolized in the castle,

a large stone structure surrounded by walls and topped with towers. The castle might be built up on a hill so it could be defended easily, or it might be encircled with a wide ditch, called a moat, which had to be crossed to reach its gates.

Such a structure was not a family home for the royals: it was a small village unto itself. A community which included the various crafts and skills needed to be relatively self-reliant and sometimes even isolated.

A castle was home to many people. Inside its walls, in a large central building made of stone, lived a noble, his family, and his knights. Servants and soldiers belonging to the noble lived outside in the courtyard or bailey, in a cluster of small wooden buildings. Here food was prepared, tools and arms were made and repaired. If the people who lived inside the castle walls wanted to go outside them, they crossed a drawbridge which was kept lowered by day, except in times of war.

The legal concept of 'citizenship' as we now know it arose during this time, and the technical term for citizen literally meant "one who lived inside the walls of the castle" (Bürger). Some large castles would have well over a hundred permanent residents, and thus truly be societies unto themselves. This arrangement arose from the defensive needs immediately after the fall of the Roman Empire in the year 476. When the Middle Ages fully emerged, the actually need for this physical security diminished, but the castle remained as a symbol. Yet the society of those who lived in the village surrounded by the protective walls interacted with those who lived in the less secure world beyond:

Outside the castle walls lived peasants in their huts. If there was an attack, they protected themselves by fleeing over the drawbridge and inside. These peasants were known as serfs and they worked the noble's land.

Indeed, the noble was obliged, by common law and by sacred oath, to offer protection to the serfs who lived outside the walls. Here we see a truly Medieval notion: the moral and legal duty to assist in the defense of others. Although this setup may seem strange or romantic to us, "such a way of life" was

the only sensible arrangement. It came about because of events that happened hundreds of years before, when the Roman Empire collapsed.

Determined both to rescue themselves from the chaos of a power vacuum, and to build a more reasonable society than the Romans had, the people of central Europe observed first-hand the fall of the empire, and took from the old Roman structure the few ideas which were practical; abandoning other, less useful, Roman patterns, they fabricated the remainder of their new social order from their inherited Germanic traditions. (By way of explanation, most of the cultures of central and western Europe were Germanic, but not German: France is named after the Frankish dynasties, the Germanic royal families who ruled it; England's language and culture were nearly identical to those of central Europe until the invasions of 1066 A.D. and later.)

The northern tribes that settled on the Roman lands in Europe were bands of fighters who followed one leader in battle. In return, the leader or chief supported his fighting men with what he took from the people he conquered. This system of personal loyalty to a chief was the basis for a way of living called feudalism.

Feudalism sometimes has a bad image in older history books: the word 'feudal' is even sometimes used in a negative sense. In reality, the feudal system offered a vast improvement over the political structures of the Roman empire. A centralized system, the old empire was unapproachable for those living out in the countryside; the emperor gave absolute commands, and no questioning or negotiating was possible. In feudalism, a de-centralized system, a local 'lord' was approachable - you could negotiate with him, and his authority was based on negotiation with those below him and those above him: a flexible system.

In this way, feudalism was also superior to the absolute monarchies which would follow it in later centuries. An autocrat like Louis XIV would not have been possible in a feudal system.

Feudalism, or the feudal system, as it was often called, grew gradually. In the very beginning, each lord had his vassals, or followers, who lived in his castle as a kind of personal bodyguard. Maintaining his vassals was very expensive for the lord. So when his vassals wanted lands and castles of their own, the lord was glad to assign holdings to them.

In this way, the lord's vassals got their own estates, could support themselves, and so relieved the lord of significant expenses.

Demographic Grids

Sorting things into categories is a simply skill we all learned quite young: I can sort a child's building by color - red, blue, yellow - or by shape - square, triangle, circle. I can sort them by both at once, creating a nine-by-nine grid. The same is true of people: we can sort by age (young, middle-aged, old), or we can sort by height (short, medium, tall); and we can sort by both at once.

This simple technique is put to interesting use in a complex situation by author Joel Rosenberg. Looking at the population of various Middle East countries, and analyzing the political and military conflicts there, he first found three categories based views of religion:

The Radicals, who say that "Islam is the answer, jihad is the way."

The Reformers, who say that "Islam is the answer, but jihad is not the way."

The Revivalists, who say that "Islam is not the answer, and jihad is not the way."

Each of the three groups above are a significant factor inside the various Islamic nations in the Middle East. But within each of them, further subdivisions can be made, leading to our nine-by-nine grid.

The Resisters are leaders of Muslim-majority countries who show little evidence of wanting serious social or ideological change of any kind. While Muslims themselves, they do not want the kind of fundamental, sweeping changes advocated by the Radicals, Reformers, or Revivalists. To the contrary, they resist change; generally speaking, their mission is to hold power for as long as possible.

The Reticent include leaders of Muslim-majority countries or territories who have leanings toward one movement or another but have not fully committed. They do the two-step, dancing for a season with one partner, then shifting to another.

The Rank-and-File, finally, comprise the vast majority of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims. They do not run countries. Individually, they generally have little or no wealth or power. But they are enormously important.

We see, then, that any analysis of the Middle East which accounts for fewer than nine major categories, and presumably numerous other smaller categories, will fail to do justice to the complexity of the situation.

Understanding Islam

Although we may think that the world's attention has been more directed toward Islam since the attacks of September 11, 2001, this is far from true: long before that date, the world began to consider the nature of Islam: as far back as 1979, headlines around the world announced that Americans in Iran had been taken hostage, where they would be held prisoner for over a year with no legal or diplomatic remedy. Between these two dates is a long series of bombings and attacks around the world.

In the face of this radicalism, however, author Joel Rosenberg offers a shocking opinion:

The vast majority of the 1.3 billion Muslims on the planet are not Radicals. They do not believe in waging jihad against the West. They do not condone sending their sons and daughters to be suicide bombers to kill Christians, Jews, and apostate Muslims, among others. They do not want to annihilate Judeo-Christian civilization as we know it or take over the world. They are, by and large, quiet, peaceful people. They want to raise their children in decent schools to get decent jobs and live respectable, productive, God-honoring lives.

Despite the images in the daily news of Islamic terrorists, Rosenberg is telling us that most Muslims are not fanatics who insist on following every directive in the Qur'an. This is a radically different image of Islam than that offered by, for example, U of M's Professor Ed Sareth, who writes that Islam is "fueling conflicts that could threaten humanity." Rosenberg disagrees.

Western leaders should be commended - not condemned - for affirming the peaceful nature of most Muslims. Why insult Muslims who are unengaged in jihad?

Rosenberg would side, then, with President George W. Bush's numerous comments that Muslims are peaceful friends. Bush was widely criticized in the weeks following the attacks on the World Trade Center for not voicing more anti-Islamic sentiments. But he continued to point out that millions of Muslims live peaceably in the United States; he said that our argument was not with Islam, but with terrorists. These distinctions grow more complex, however, when we remember that the difference here is between orthodox Islam, with its insistence on a literal faithfulness to the Qur'an and the physical violent jihad it entails, and nominal Muslims, who are not interested in any form of violence or terrorism at all, but rather exhibit the civil virtues that any society desires.

Critics should keep in mind that Western leaders are making these points, in part, both to build and to strengthen political and and military alliances with government leaders throughout the Muslim world who are willing to side with Western governments against the Radicals.

Cultural understanding becomes all the more complex with mixed with diplomatic agendas. Discussions of these complex interactions between religions, cultures, societies and government are necessary, while at the same time frustrating: they will, of necessity, raise more questions than they answer:

While it is certainly accurate to say that the vast majority of Muslims are peaceful people, is it also true that Islam itself is an intrinsically peaceful religion? In other words, are Muslim and Western leaders accurate in asserting that Islam is a religion of peace, not a religion that calls for jihad against the infidels? Are Radicals, in fact, "hijacking" Islam and in the process "smearing" its good name? If so, how can the Radicals claim that "Islam is the answer, and jihad is the way" if there is no basis for their beliefs in the Qur'an, the guidbook for all Muslims?

The world will probably be watching the interaction between peaceful, moderate, nominal Muslims and orthodox, violent, radical Muslims for decades to come.

Moderates vs. Radicals

Although the attacks on September 11, 2001 brought a new intensity to the study of Islam, the world's attention had already long been directed to the political impact of radical Muslims: the 1972 attack on the Munich Olympics and the 1979 attack on the U.S. Embassy in Iran being merely two of many examples.

One question lingers: what about the moderates? We know that there are many peaceful and friendly people in America who call themselves Muslims - people who would never dream of attacking or killing. We know that a moderate form of Islam exists in the United States. But what about in the Middle East? Is there a chance that moderates live in places like Saudi Arabia or Iran?

Joel Rosenberg, from Syracuse University, offers evidence that moderates exist, even in the Middle East:

A ferocious battle is raging for the heart and soul of the Muslim world.

One side is the theology of the Radicals, which as we have seen teachers that true Islam requires violent men to wage violent jihad against apostates and infidels in the name of Allah.

On the other side is the theology of the Reformers, which teaches that true Islam is a religion of peace, that the Qur'an is a book of peace, and that the Radicals are perverting Islam to their own fascist, power-hungry ends.

Do we believe Rosenberg? Is there a chance that moderate Muslims exist, not only in America, but also in the Middle East? Are there individuals and groups willing to depart from the militant heritage of Islamic traditions? And if they do exist there, are there enough of them to make a political difference?

The world will spend a few years pondering these questions; we don't know the answers yet, but those answers will influence the lives of millions, for good or for evil. We know that there are moderate Muslims in America. Let us hope that they exist elsewhere, and in large number.

Counterfeits Damage Economies

Fake money has always been a problem, ever since the first coins were minted thousands of years ago. The legal principles and economic harms are the same today, but the technology is different. Dr. Levon A. Saryan, a materials scientist in Wisconsin, reports that

fake U.S. Trade dollars [were] recently shipped from China to a recipient near Chicago, bring[ing] into sharp focus a growing epidemic.

Counterfeits have traditionally been difficult to make and easy to detect; advances in technology, however, are reversing that situation: fake coins are now easy to make and difficult to detect:

Most of these fakes are not hard to identify in a crowd; they have certain diagnostic features that give them away. Gradually, however, the quality of these fakes has improved to the point that experts are being routinely deceived.

These sham coins are not the work a few lone criminals, hiding in basements or abandoned warehouses. They are being produced in a sophisticated manner by entire factories. There are multiple such operations, including

one of the largest fake coin factories in China, the Big Tree Coin Factory in Fujian Province, owned and operated by Lin Ciyun. The presses in this factory were originally used in a U.S. Mint facility, then transferred to China in the early 1900s for their coinage production needs. Later, in the mid 1950s, the Chinese government scrapped the presses and sold them to private buyers. Mr. Lin bought at least some of the presses and now uses them to produce (by his admission) over 100,000 forged coins per month. With the assistance of a handful of expert machinists, he is able to strike coins at exactly the same pressure and technical specifications as those used in 19th century U.S. mints.

Remember, these coins are worth hundreds of dollars each. These aren't the quarters and dimes we use in everyday vending machines to buy Coke or Pepsi. These are also highly illegal, because such coinage is the legal tender of the land. These operations are, then, both damaging to the U.S. economy, and a direct serious violation of national and international law.

Nature, Nurture, and ... ?

The ancient psychological debate, which aspects of our mind are primarily formed by genetics and heredity, and which aspects are mainly formed by our experience of objects and events in our environment, is being renewed by developments in the field of prenatal psychology. A recent book by Annie Murphy Paul, with the title Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives, explores how everything from our taste in music to our body weight is influenced neither by our gene pool, nor by our life experiences, but rather by our prenatal encounters.

The fact that babies can hear, and hear well, long before birth, and through an inch or two of maternal flesh, means that children are born having already heard much: music, voices, etc. Psychologists have long known that infants are able, upon birth, to recognize the voices of their mothers. But it is now clear that familiarity with, and tastes in, music are also so formed.

Separately, experiences in the womb also act as switches, turning on or off various individual genes. Thus the diet of the mother with shape the metabolism of the child. An adult's weight problem may due, not his psychology and environment, nor strictly to his genes, but rather to events which activated some of his genes, but not others, in the nine months he spend in the womb.

The field of prenatal psychology will cause much re-thinking of various sub-disciplines within traditional psychology and psychiatry.

Multiculturalism Creates Hatred

In accord with the law of unintended consequences, official efforts to promote harmony and tolerance actually foster the very opposite: attempts to generate acceptance instead give rise to bigotry and hatred. Although this occurs mainly in America, we can see it in other nations too, as Anthony Daniels writes:

Of course, a large part of the problem is that patriotism in Britain has been left to the brutes: the kind of ignorant savages who tattoo a bulldog on their biceps and “Made in England” round their nipples, and who in equal measure revolt and terrorize the cheaper resorts of the Mediterranean. The intellectual’s equation of patriotism with xenophobia, and pride in past achievement with an arrogant superiority complex, has left a population demoralized and without any belief in its own nation. George Orwell saw this happening a long time ago; it has created a vacuum for the English Defence League to fill. Multiculturalism is the other side of the English Defence League coin.

In a well-meaning attempt to discourage a nasty form of nationalism, multicultural gurus have instead inhibited a healthy type of patriotism. Multiculturalism has deterred the educated classes away from a nuanced and intellectually perceptive appreciation of one's native land - which is healthy patriotism and never excludes a sincere appreciation of other nations. While the intellectual classes are embarrassed to point out anything remotely good or positive about their native land, the brutes and bigots rush in to claim superiority for the homeland over others. The growth of a healthy patriotism would have prevented the expansion of nasty nationalism. Multiculturalism

is a sentimental and harmful doctrine that turns the mind to mush, is evidence of an underlying indifference to the real lives of people, and is a provider of pseudo-work for lots of people such as community organizers.

Those who allegedly promote multiculturalism are, themselves, both ignorant of culture in general, and lacking in the desire or the ability to cure that ignorance:

Multiculturalists are seldom really interested in the culture of others. Very few of them read book in foreign languages, for example, let alone immerse themselves in the Pali scriptures or the writings of the Sufi. I don't blame them for this: it is the work of a lifetime to be able to do so, and we each have only one lifetime, to say nothing of the limitations of ability and inclination. But let us at least not pretend that our interest in other cultures extends much beyond their cuisine.

Not only does multiculturalism, then, promote a brutish form of nationalism among those who perceive themselves as "on the defensive" or "host cultures," but among those who view themselves as "immigrant cultures," it promotes a cynical view that those who claim to understand them in fact do not understand them. Those who claim to speak on behalf of an immigrant ethnic group are discounted by the majority of that group, who see the lack of cultural understanding, and exploited as dupes by a minority of that group, who see them as useful fools. Modern multiculturalism is largely an ideology of those who lack precisely that cultural understanding which they claim to promote.

The net effect is that a greater distance is created between cultural groups: instead of a coming together, more obstacles to community are created.