Sometimes Teamwork isn’t the Best Way: Luther Alone

There can be no doubt that the ability to publish and distribute Martin Luther’s ideas on paper was a key factor in the Reformation. His pamphlets and leaflets often made their way hundreds of miles in all directions within a few days of their production.

The writings of Luther, an isolated thinker in an isolated town, appeared quickly in Switzerland, Italy, Denmark, Holland, and other nations.

Luther’s predecessors — other would-be reformers — didn’t have this technology, and worked in obscurity.

But there’s more to the Reformation than merely Luther’s access to mass communication. The printing press was a revolutionary invention, no doubt, which changed the world. But many people had access to printing presses. Why did Luther become so prominent? Because he had something to say.

The medium is important, but so is the content. Historian Jonathan Kay writes:

A simplified version of the Reformation that many people hold in their heads typically goes something like this: Disgusted by the corrupt sale of indulgences, Martin Luther rose up against the practices of the Roman Catholic Church. And thanks to Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press, he was able to get his message out quickly and widely.

“In this way” Luther’s Reformation was “as much about a communications revolution as it is about a phase shift in Christian theology.”

“All that is true,” grants Kay, “but” scholars who “study the process by which Luther developed, refined and published his ideas,” find “another, overlapping truth.”

Luther had more to offer than contempt for a handful of dishonest priests who were exploiting the Roman Catholic system. Luther had a thought-out, systematic, articulated worldview.

While Luther was indeed able to leverage a communications technology unavailable to his reform-minded predecessors, he did the vast bulk of his work in isolation at the friary of the Hermits of St. Augustine. And even once he’d gone public, it took years for religious authorities to fully digest the importance of his ideas.

Luther spent hours, days, weeks, and months reading and reflecting. The Reformation was not a reflexive reaction to a corrupted system. It was the emergence of a new thought system, based on a careful analysis of the old thought system. Luther knew the Roman Catholic system well, and even admired parts of it. He could often explain it better than its defenders.

But he’d also analyzed its faults and flaws. He’d traced the ripple effects of those errors as they affected other parts of the system. He understood that systematic thought has to be rigorously and carefully thought out. Such thinking takes time, isolation, and long periods of silence.

Modern professional culture encourages collaboration through instant communication and globalized networks. But Luther’s legacy as one of history’s most influential thinkers shows us that there are certain epic projects — such as the systematic rethinking of foundational dogmas — that require time to mature and space to germinate before they are safe for universal exposure. Without that window, they die.

Luther was not obsessively quiet. He delivered insightful lectures and stirring sermons to large groups. He did not hide his thoughts: he published more handbills, fliers, broadside, songs, poems, and flysheets than any other person of his time or earlier.

His voluminous production was, however, the fruit of contemplation: hours spent alone, reading and thinking.

From Isaac Newton to Immanuel Kant to Albert Einstein, this pattern can be seen.

The lesson for the twenty-first century is this: collaboration is good, communication is good, but it is a necessary precondition for individuals to be able to clear their desks and minds, to focus without interruption, and to thoroughly explore their thought and their thought’s objects.

That is one of the many lessons that Luther’s Reformation still offers, five centuries later.

Germany’s Measured Steps Toward a Nation-State: Why Hurry?

The world, in modern times, is organized mostly by nation-states. What is a “nation-state”? A “nation” is an ethnic or cultural group; a “state” is a defined geographical territory with its own government. A “nation-state” is a combination of the two.

In ordinary language, the word “country” usually describes a nation-state. Examples include Japan, Norway, Poland, and Greece.

In previous millennia, however, nation-states were not the primary ordering structure of the world. Dynasties, i.e. royal families, were often the principle defining factor in geopolitics. The authority over inhabitants was not mainly decided by their ethnicities and cultures, nor by defined geographical boundaries and institutional governments, but rather by an inherited right to rule, passed down from one generation to another in the dynasty. Likewise, a citizen’s allegiance was not principally to his people, to his geographical home, or to the political ideals of his government; it was to the dynasty.

An overarching trend in the history of the world is the transition from dynasty to nation-state. The pace at which this change happened varied from place to place. In many cases, this transition included a consolidation and centralization from smaller territories into a larger unit, as historian William Hagen writes:

In 1789 the German-speaking lands were, with few exceptions, encompassed within a sprawling geopolitical entity aniquatedly named the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. They were, strange as it may seem, divided into some three hundred and twenty-five separate principalities.

At first glance, the independence of the many small German states might seem to place the Germans at a disadvantage. Other European nations moved quicker to form nation-states, William Hagen reports:

Comparing Germany with France, England, or Spain, the question arises: why did the medieval and early modern German lands not evolve, as these and many other European countries did, from the condition of a loosely strung together medieval feudal kingdom into a stoutly forged centralized “national monarchy,” such as that of France’s might Louis XIV, the seventeenth-century “Sun King”? Premodern monarchies on the French or British model created unitary frameworks for subsequent political democratization, such as preliminarily began in England with the Purity and Glorious revolutions of the seventeenth century and in France with the revolution of 1789.

But was the race to form nation-states truly an advantage? Perhaps a more measured pace of construction had benefits. France, England, and Spain did not “evolve” as suggested. Their change of political structure was deliberate and conscious. To say that they “evolved” makes the formation of a nation-state seem the inevitable product of unconscious and random processes.

Likewise, the Germans refrained from the formation of a nation-state knowingly and as the result of reflection. The notion of national identity, often packaged with the Romanticism movement, had appeared prior to 1789 in, e.g., the writings of Johann Gottfried von Herder. That notion, however, was challenged by anti-national sentiments. The Congress of Vienna, organized by Klemens von Metternich, resisted the trend toward nation-states.

Rather than ask why the Germans didn’t “evolve” more quickly into a nation-state, one might ask where, among the English, Spanish, and French, were the reflective voices which might moderate the rush into nationalism?

There were advantages to being a “loosely strung together” entity. Retaining a hint of feudalism emphasized the mutuality between governed and governor. In the Middle Ages, the vassal’s oath to the lord was reciprocated by the lord’s oath to the vassal. Each owed the other. By the late 1700s, feudalism was long gone from German-speaking lands, but the distant echo of feudalism shaped societal thinking and reminded rulers that they had obligations to their subjects. The modern nation-state, on the other hand, could subject the individual to the “General Will,” in Rousseau’s phrase.

It is also debatable whether or not the advent of the nation-state was salutary to the process of democratization. It would be odd to regard the reign of Louis XIV as being somehow a forward movement toward democratization. By contrast, Germany without a nation-state was able to maintain and expand participation by means of elected town councils and regional assemblies.

To be sure, England and France enjoyed some advantages by forming nation-states before Germany did. They had more military might and more diplomatic clout. National policies facilitated industrialization. But the hasty formation of nation-states was not unambiguously salutary. Germany’s more measured progress toward a nation-state allowed it to retain a more flexible and responsive regional structure for a longer time. While Germany’s industrialization lagged, its development of mathematics and science excelled, as did its global reputation for academic excellence and artistic achievement.

Threads of Political Thought Converge: Millennia of Civic Philosophy Produce the American Revolution

Over several thousand years, patterns of thought about society emerged, developed, and intermingled with each other in the course of civilization. Many of these strands of thought came together in the creative fusion of the American Revolution.

In a wealth of texts produced during the second half of the 1700s, the significant thinkers of the previous centuries, and previous millennia, contributed concepts about government and civic virtue. The names of those thinkers form a list which looks like a good syllabus for a class in the history of civilization.

Starting with Hammurabi and Moses, the list includes the writers of Greco-Roman classicism, the medievals, and the Renaissance thinkers. A synthesis and distillation of those works was produced by the political thinkers of the Enlightenment, including those in North America.

The work of John Locke, Edmund Burke, and Adam Smith rested upon foundations laid by Thucydides, Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, Tacitus, Augustine, Aquinas, Ockham, and dozens of others. All of which led to Thomas Paine, Sam Adams, James Otis, and Patrick Henry.

The courageous authors of the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights were educated in both ancient and modern history, and among them were those who could read Greek, Latin, Hebrew, German, Italian, and French.

Having mined the world’s classics for ideas, these authors set about fitting them intricately together. The political tradition of the Enlightenment was based upon abstract reasoning about human nature, and rational reflection about the nature of human intelligence. The result fit together well, sometimes congruing and sometimes complimenting the spiritual treasures of the Judeo-Christian tradition, as scholar Harvey Cox writes:

In the United States, there was a combination of biblical Christianity and of Enlightenment virtue. So you have in the early founding documents the famous phrase, “We hold these truths to be self-evident” (an Enlightenment phrase) “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights and that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” (a religious phrase). This constituted a wedding of two not completely separate traditions, because some of the founding fathers were mild Calvinists with Enlightenment leanings, some were stricter Calvinists, and others were Episcopalians.

Thus it was that Thomas Paine, who rejected most or all forms of organized religion in favor of a rationalist deistic concept of God, was part of the same movement as the passionately spiritual George Washington.

The phrases and ideas woven together in the founding documents of the United States, as well as in the tracts and pamphlets which surrounded them, appeal to the rationalist and the mystic, the cynic and the idealist, the Jew and the Christian, the deist and the pietist.

Together, the texts which gave birth to the American Revolution, composed during the second half of the eighteenth century, form a catalogue or compendium of civic thought spanning five millennia. To understand the documents of the American Revolution is to survey political philosophy from its earliest moments onward.

Explore the Canon, Don’t Discard It: The Forgotten Treasures of the Deep Canon

It has become fashionable among certain people to pointedly reject the canon of Western Civilization’s various cultures. Some academics are generously paid and build entire careers by libeling, slandering, and defaming the canon.

The canon — with one ‘n’ not two! — is a collection of works, usually artistic works, i.e., paintings, musical compositions, sculpture, architectures, but most commonly literary works. The “canon” is a list of texts considered to be of enduring value, high quality, and worth studying.

One feature of the canon is that its boundaries are indistinct: its edges are not precisely defined. There has never been a precise and exhaustive list of what is in the canon. There is a feel or intuition about what is in the canon: a casual consensus about which types of things belong in the canon.

The Oxford English Dictionary explains this particular use of the word ‘canon’ as follows:

A body of literary works traditionally regarded as the most important, significant, and worthy of study; those works of esp. Western literature considered to be established as being of the highest quality and most enduring value; the classics.

The OED goes on to note the existence of sub-canons, like a ‘comedy canon’ or a ‘Norwegian canon,’ and the use of canon with other artforms like music or architecture.

This usage of the word ‘canon’ seems to have appeared in the early twentieth century, and become common in the jargon of literary criticism after the middle of the century.

The canon is broad and deep. The genres, centuries, authors, cultures, ethnicities, and spiritual traditions represented in it are numerous. Some who attack the canon imagine it to be narrow, but this is not the case. Even if there is some ambiguity at its margins, it can easily fill vast libraries.

It would be good to devote increased attention to what might be called the “deep canon.” There is a small subset within the canon of material which is often studied. The frequent texts occupy too much space, and thereby edge other texts into the shadows of neglect.

Shakespeare wrote more than thirty plays, but five or ten of them monopolize much of the high school and university reading lists. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is well known, but her The Last Man languishes. John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men are often assigned, but what about his The Moon is Down?

Given the institutional habit of assigning repeatedly a limited number of works from the canon, a student may be forgiven for gaining the mistaken perception that the canon is shallow and narrow. When that student later becomes a published scholar, she or he may attack the canon based on that impression.

Not only would the exploration of the full canon demonstrate more creative and more rigorous scholarship, but it would also defend the canon from its detractors.

Despite some vagueness about its borders, the canon still serves the valuable purpose of directing students and instructors to significant texts. To be sure, there is some small element of subjectivity in assigning value to texts — perhaps this bit of subjectivity is responsible for the equivocation about the canon’s boundaries — but it is clear that some texts are of more value than others.

There are different ways to measure a text’s value, and that fact that there may be a little subjectivity in that measurement is no reason to abandon or ignore the larger idea that some texts are worthy of inclusion in the canon and others are not. Bluntly stated: some texts are better than others, objectively.

To explore this notion of objective worth, knowing that there is a bit of subjective evaluation of the objective worth, a number of metrics are in play. One of them is the oft-cited notion of ‘critical thinking.’

Ironically, “critical thinking” is frequently mentioned by those who attack the canon. Yet the canon is the continual and continuous source of critical thought. The notion of ‘critical thinking’ arises from, and is fed by, the canon. The creative tension between Plato and Aristotle, between Augustine and Aquinas, and between the Rabbis in the Talmud is the source and essence of critical thought.

Whoever might wish to arouse critical thought in a student does so best by directing the student’s attention to a text which has value in this regard. A student may learn the skill of critical thought better by examining a text by Raymond Chandler than by examining a text by Laurie Halse Anderson: which is to say that The Big Sleep, as a text, has more intrinsic and inherent value than Speak. Simply put, Chandler offers more to think about that Anderson does.

These two propositions are related: (a) The canon is deeper and broader than is commonly supposed, and (b) the attacks on the canon are ill-founded or unfounded.

Many who assault the canon do so with charges of its alleged narrowness, its alleged shallowness, and its alleged homogeneity. A more rigorous exploration of the canon reveals that that such allegations are untrue, and that therefore such attacks on the canon are baseless.

Ironically, many who assail the canon do so with calls for more or better efforts at teaching students how to “think critically.” The irony is two-fold: First, such assaults on the canon dissolve under the scrutiny of the very critical thought demanded by the assailants; second, the practice of critical thinking is best carried out within the context of the canon.

To think critically, one must have something about which to think. There must be an object toward which critical thinking is directed and on which critical thinking operates. Critical thinking is a form which needs content.

A student who wishes to exercise critical thought will find more and better opportunities to do so with the texts of Hildegard of Bingen than with the texts of Toni Morrison.

A student will learn the skill of critical thinking better from Immanuel Kant than from Frantz Fanon — and as an added benefit, Kant’s critique of imperialism and slavery is more rigorous than Fanon’s.

Simply put, some texts are better and more valuable than others. The canon collects those texts. The fact that there is some ambiguity at the perimeter of the canon, and the fact that there is a bit of subjectivity in discerning this perimeter, cannot be used as arguments against the canon. The canon is not purely arbitrary and subjective.

The task, then, is this: to honor the canon by exploring it and allowing it to nurture critical thought, and in the process, to discover the hidden riches of the obscure neglected corners of the canon.

What Voltaire Did Not Write: Does It Matter 250 Years Later?

In a high-profile case of misattribution, the French author Voltaire is often cited as the author of a sentence which he never wrote.

In 1758, Voltaire was informed that a book, written by Claude-Adrien Helvétius, was being publicly denounced. Copies of it were being burned. While Voltaire disagreed with the book and its author, he did not endorse the abuse. While the following sentence captures Voltaire’s sentiment, he never wrote it:

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

Yet centuries later, this quote is often credited to Voltaire.

The sentence was actually written by Evelyn Beatrice Hall. She wrote it while describing Voltaire’s attitude. Her words captured his spirit so well that people quickly confused her words for his.

Hall’s words and Voltaire’s ethic both summarized one aspect of the Enlightenment. The ‘Age of Enlightenment’ is a phrase used by historians, but it is difficult to precisely define when it began or ended. But it is safe to say that there were common threads which connected a series of philosophers, thinkers, and writers who lived during the 1600s and 1700s.

Whatever, and whenever, the Enlightenment was, it included a political philosophy which has since been called ‘classical liberalism’ and includes Voltaire’s ethic of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of belief, and freedom of religion.

The high value which the Enlightenment placed on free speech shaped not only that era, but also subsequent eras. The values of ‘classical liberalism’ were foundational to Western societies during the twentieth century. The phrase ‘Western societies’ can refer to the nations of Europe, as well as the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. ‘Western societies’ can also refer to much of Central America and South America.

During the late twentieth century, however, ‘Western’ culture ceased to be limited by lines on maps. All parts of Asia, Africa, and the rest of the world began to absorb distinctively “Western” ideas. These Western concepts that now are felt in all nations include an emphasis on the individual human’s dignity and value, an emphasis on freedom and liberty, and an emphasis on equality across economic classes.

Another Enlightenment concept asserted that all human beings are rational, and that their desires for freedom, peace, justice, and prosperity transcend the superficial differences of race and gender. All people desire peace: in light of that fact, gender and race are irrelevant. All people desire prosperity: that desire is not peculiar to any race or to either gender.

But as the twenty-first century unfolds, a challenge is being posed to humanity: will society continue to value freedom of speech? Will Western Civilization continue to hold Voltaire’s view, expressed in words which Evelyn Beatrice Hall wrote? What will become of the ethic which demands that the individual respect the freedom of others to write or say nearly anything?

There are movements afoot in various nations to limit freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of belief, and freedom of religion. There are political trends to label certain beliefs as unacceptable, and to punish those who express such beliefs.

To be sure, the individual has a responsibility to voluntarily self-limit her or his own utterances. This may fall under the simple heading of ‘politeness’ and is a way to show respect for the sensibilities of others. But in no way can this responsibility be externally imposed. One person’s responsibility to refrain from offensive speech does not equal another person’s authority to silence or intimidate the speaker. While the speaker has a responsibility to never say things which are hateful, the audience has a responsibility to allow the speaker to say those very things.

Of course, the audience also has the right to simply stop listening.

If a nation loses the fundamentally human view that each person is primarily a rational being, seeking peace, liberty, prosperity, and justice, and that therefore race and gender are at most secondary to personhood — if a nation loses that view, then it loses its ability to full recognize and acknowledge the humanity of each individual.

One component of this view is the notion that freedom of expression is essential to the human community.

Western Civilization preceded the Enlightenment by many centuries. The Enlightenment is a product of Western Civilization, and reveals some deep essential parts of Western Civilization. At the same time, the Enlightenment exists in a tension with some other aspects and products of Western Civilization.

The Enlightenment, as one arm of Western Civilization, gradually crept into the thinking of every continent. One sees everywhere, then, Western concepts like universal suffrage, legal equality for women, the dignity and value of every individual human, and a desire for freedom. Ironically, when non-Western nations criticize the West, they do so on an intellectual basis composed of Western concepts.

What is at stake, then, if society ceases to value freedom of speech? It would lose one piece of a system which expresses what it means to be human.

By the same token, if society ceases to value an individual’s moral responsibility to limit her or his own speech — a responsibility which may never be external imposed or enforced — it also loses an important aspect of humanity.

The fact that there will always be a small number of individuals who fail to limit themselves -— who say something hateful, hurtful, or offensive — never justifies limiting the freedom of speech.

A limitation placed on free speech is as destructive and dehumanizing as any hateful utterance.

In the new millennium, would a pro-abortion activist give his life in war so that a pro-life activist could publicly speak? Or the reverse?

The challenge to the nations of the world, then, in the twenty-first century is to recommit to words which Voltaire never wrote. The existence of many modern nation-states, the places in which humanity finds a chance to flourish, is due to patriots who were willing to fight — willing to risk their lives — for the rights of people to speak freely. They died fighting for the rights of people with whom they passionately disagreed.

The Word That Brings Peace, The Word That Brings War: Nationalism

Nationalism has been a feature of the world since the early 1800s. For almost 250 years nationalism as an ideology, and the word ‘nationalism’ have made an imprint on history.

Both the word and the ideology have given rise to fear, confusion, and war. But both have sometimes been used as labels for thoughts and movements which contribute to global peace. Why this confusion?

Different authors use this word in different ways. In the 19th century, we can see at least three successive versions of nationalism. In the early 1800s, it was a liberating movement to throw off the oppressive yoke of Napoleon. In the mid 1800s, it was an ethnic movement allowing people to group themselves with those who shared their cultures and languages, to ask for written constitutions, and to de-emphasize the hereditary influence of dynasties and aristocracies. By the end of that century, it had become a appeal by authoritarian governments to persuade the masses to submit.

In the 20th and 21st centuries, two additional meanings for the word ‘nationalism’ have arisen. The uglier of the two refers to a value system which requires the individual to rank the existence, power, and growth of the nation-state as the highest value; if that does become the highest value, then it follows that any other potential value — family, friends, relationship to God, art, music, science, duty, honor, etc. — is at best subordinate to the nation-state, and at worst must be sacrificed for the cause of the nation-state. It is this warlike version of nationalism that is responsible for violence, destruction, and death.

Yet, at the same time, different authors have used the same word for something salutary and beneficial. This type of benign ‘nationalism’ is a synonym for a gentle patriotism. It is a fondness for one's own nation, and an appreciation for the nation’s accomplishments. This friendly version of nationalism is actually a factor in promoting cooperative relationships between nations. It allows the individual to cherish her or his own nation, while at the same time admiring the achievements of other nations.

These two sentiments — one, warlike and aggressive; the other, peaceable and harmonious — are paradoxically known by the same word: ‘nationalism.’

There are sinister forces which will deliberately exploit this linguistic ambiguity. One need only to consider the rise of Naziism in the 1930s. The word ‘Nazi’ itself is an abbreviation for ‘National Socialism’ and stands for a movement which hijacked decent patriotism and turned it into a violent force.

The National Socialists, like the Soviet Socialists, played on the vocabulary of patriotism and nationalism, as historian Jill Lepore writes:

Confusing nationalism with patriotism is not always innocent. Louis Snyder, a City College of New York professor who witnessed the rise of Nazism in Germany in the 1920s, once explained why, in a book called The Meaning of Nationalism. Nationalists, he observed, “have a vested interest in maintaining a vagueness of language as a cloak for their aims.” Because it’s difficult to convince people to pursue a course of aggression, violence, and domination, requiring sacrifices made in the name of the nation, nationalists pretend their aims are instead protection and unity and that their motivation is patriotism. This is a lie. Patriotism is animated by love, nationalism by hatred. To confuse the one for the other is to pretend that hate is love and fear is courage.

It might seem pedantic to examine the definitions of words. Those accustomed to the rough-and-tumble rhetoric of popular politics might call it “hairsplitting” to analyze terminology at this microscopic level.

Why bother?

Danger lies in a lack of analysis. The example above shows how the National Socialists played on the ambiguity of words, and counted on readers and listeners not thinking too carefully about definitions, as they unleashed one of the most deadly and destructive wars in history.

There are two types of nationalism. One type of nationalism is a necessary precondition for peace — for harmony in the community of nation-states who must first respect themselves if they are to respect each other. Jill Lepore identifies this as “patriotism” in the quote above.

The other type of nationalism leads to war.

It’s worth the effort to sort them out.

A Cartesian Paradox: Descartes and Piety

With only slight exaggeration, Renee Descartes can be said both to have started modern philosophy and to have founded one of the major approaches within modern philosophy. Allowing that this is a slight overstatement, it is nonetheless true that historians of philosophy give Descartes an importance which is attributed to few other philosophers.

In his work, Descartes is a sincere and motivated theist. God plays a role in Cartesian metaphysics. Descartes also contended that the soul is immortal. He considered himself to be a faithful Christian and a devout Roman Catholic. He took pains to show that his philosophy could be harmonized with the teachings and philosophy of the Roman Catholic church.

Yet the church of his day found fault with Descartes. Some scholars accused him of deism, while others asserted that by deducing foundational truths rationally, he had made God contingent upon reason.

Not only the Roman Catholic church, but rather also other Christians as well, objected to various aspects of Cartesian thought. Diatribes against Descartes became a staple in folk piety and popular religion. The following passage from Mike Breen is an example:

We have become so acculturated in our Cartesian, Western world that we believe knowing about something and knowing something are the same thing. What we have managed to do is teach people about God. Teach them about prayer. Teach them about mission. The point isn’t that they would just know about it but to know it.

The irony is, of course, that Descartes seems to have understood himself as a sincere Christian, and seems to have thought that he had found a way simultaneously to serve the church, to serve the faith, and to serve theology. What was the disconnect? Why wasn’t Descartes enthusiastically embraced by his church and by his fellow Christians?

To be sure, there were some Christians who did eagerly espouse Cartesian thought. A number of philosophers, theologians, and other scholars saw Cartesian philosophy as thoroughly compatible with conventional Christian faith, and these thinkers adopted Cartesian philosophy.

But Cartesianism never quite established itself in the mainstream of popular Christianity.

The reason for Cartesianism’s lack of acceptance is found, not necessarily in what Cartesianism is, but rather in how it was and is perceived.

The image of Cartesian thought in the public may be more of a caricature and less of an accurate reading of Descartes and his texts. The concerns of folk piety saw Cartesianism as lacking, or at least de-emphasizing, the personhood and agency of God. The Cartesian God was seen as something of an abstract principle, a bundle of logical axioms and mathematical equations, and an impersonal force.

Descartes did not seem to meet the need for a God with emotions, desires, memories, intentions, and other aspects of personhood. While Cartesianism certainly included God’s actions, it seemed to omit the centrality of God’s volitional action.

How accurately did the popular imagination grasp Descartes? While his philosophical writings don’t emphasize God’s personhood and agency, they also do not exclude it. It would be possible to subscribe to Cartesian metaphysics and at the same time endorse a theology which featured a fully personal God.

In his writings, Descartes seems to concentrate on God’s existence and God’s role in the metaphysical principles of the universe. What were his own private thoughts or beliefs on the matter? Did Descartes conceive of God as having personhood and agency, and simply omit to mention this in his texts?

Distinguishing Between Peaceful Nationalism and Malignant Nationalism

The word ‘nationalism’ is both provocative and confusing. The term is ambiguous because it is used in different ways — even contradictory ways.

On the one hand, ‘nationalism’ can refer to a sentiment which is not only peaceful and salutary, but which is necessary to promote friendly relations between the world’s nations. This beneficial and healthy form of nationalism is often called ‘patriotism’ and the two could be construed as synonymous.

The dangerous form of nationalism is a value system: it asserts that the growth, power, and existence of the nation-state is the ultimate value. The potential harm that lies in this use of the word ‘nationalism’ is that, if it is considered to be the ultimate value, then any other competing value — the types of things which people normally value — can be sacrificed for the sake of this one supreme principle: family, friends, religious faith, duty, honor, art, science, music, etc.

The wholesome form of nationalism is simply a patriotism which encourages the individual to appreciate her or his own nation, to value its achievements, and to be fond of its people, while at the same time being able to appreciate other nations and have a fondness for them.

This amiable form of nationalism promotes peaceful relations between nations, and is even necessary for harmonious relations between nations, because it is impossible for an individual to appreciate, and have a fondness for, another nation if she or he does not appreciate and treasure her or his own nation.

Another way to express the distinction between these two uses of the word ‘nationalism’ is that, in the context of the nation-state, one emphasizes the nation, i.e., the people who share an identity based on a common language, culture, religion, or history, while the other emphasizes the state, i.e., a territory and a government with its political, economic, and military power.

To further explore the confusing use of this word, historian Jill Lepore notes that its use has varied over the centuries.

Sometimes people confuse nationalism with patriotism. There’s nothing wrong and all kinds of things right with loving the place where you live and the people you live with and wanting that place and those people to thrive, so it’s easy to confuse nationalism and patriotism, especially because they once meant more or less the same thing. But by the early decades of the twentieth century, with the rise of fascism in Europe, nationalism had come to mean something different from patriotism, something fierce, something violent: less a love for you own country than a hatred of other countries and their people and a hatred of people within your own country who don’t belong to an ethnic, racial, or religious majority. Immigration policy is a topic for political debate; reasonable people disagree. But hating immigrants, as if they were lesser humans, is a form of nationalism that has nothing to do with patriotism. Trade policy is a topic for political debate; reasonable people disagree. But hating globalists, as if they were fiends, is a form of nationalism that has nothing to do with patriotism.

Thus, the word ‘nationalism’ used by the nations of central and eastern Europe who rose to defend themselves against Napoleon’s invasions is different than ‘nationalism’ used by the anti-monarchical, anti-dynastic, anti-imperial, anti-aristocratic, and anti-royal leaders who were demanding written constitutions, and the formation of nation-states, in the immediate post-Napoleonic era.

Once those nation-states were established in response to the demands made during the immediate post-Napoleonic era, their leaders used ‘nationalism’ in yet another sense.

All three of these saw ‘nationalism’ as something desirable, but all three meant something slightly different by that word.

A healthy affection for one’s own nation provides the best foundation for a peaceful appreciation of the achievements and cultures of other nations. Nationalism as a wholesome form of patriotism is the basis for world peace. Nationalism as hegemony lays the foundation for war.

When There Is No Nationalism: The Habsburg Ideology in Central Europe

The Habsburg Monarchy, which for much of its existence was formally a subset of the Holy Roman Empire, was a collection of lands in central Europe. It lasted from 1273 to 1918, but was significantly redesigned at several different times during those years.

Historians also refer to the Habsburg Monarchy as the ‘Habsburg Empire,’ but by any name it was truly ‘cosmopolitan’ in several senses of the word.

During the first few decades of the twenty-first century, some political leaders have called for an end to nationalism and patriotism. Leaving aside the difficulty of securing a precise definition for ‘nationalism’ and ‘patriotism,’ how would the world look without those two concepts?

The answer might be found in an examination of the Habsburg dynasty, which is arguably non- or pre-nationalistic, and non- or pre-patriotic.

If patriotism and nationalism have something to do with one’s enthusiasm about, and allegiance to, a country or land or nation, then, by contrast, the ideology in the Habsburg territories was an enthusiasm for, and an allegiance to, a dynasty.

Although Austria and Bohemia were parts of the Habsburg Empire, the residents of those lands did not identify themselves as Austrians or Bohemians, but rather as subjects of the Habsburgs. While these, and other, territories within the Habsburg Empire retained their languages and other aspects of their cultures, they did so not in a nationalistic or patriotic sense, as historian A.J.P. Taylor writes:

Francis I, told of an Austrian patriot, answered impatiently: “But is he a patriot for me?” The Emperor was needlessly meticulous. Austria was an Imperial organisation, not a country; and to be Austrian was to be free of national feeling — not to possess a nationality. From the battle of the White Mountain until the time of Maria Theresa “Austria” was embodied in the territorial aristocracy, the “Magnates.” These, even when German, thought of themselves as Austrians, not as Germans, just as the Prussian nobility regarded themselves solely as Prussians. In Bohemia, home of the greatest estates, they were especially divorced from local feeling; for these great lords were purely Habsburg creations in the period of the Thirty Years’ War.

The psychology of the Habsburg Empire was partially shaped by lingering attitudes from feudalism. Although the Habsburgs had, by the later years of their reign, a modern industrial economy, they still in some ways considered themselves as lords, and expected that their subjects would consider them that way, too.

Dynastic feudalism may be the alternative to nationalism.

There are parallels between the Habsburgs and some other situations, e.g., the British monarchs. Prior to the advent of modern political nationalism, an English soldier most likely thought of himself as serving ‘his majesty’ instead of serving the nation.

There is some parallel, too, between the Habsburgs and the English rule in Ireland, as A.J.P. Taylor notes:

Even the Hungarian magnates, Esterhazys, Karolyis, Andrassys, had little traditional background: their greatness, too, rested on Habsburg grants, made when Hungary was recovered from the Turks and Rakoczi’s rebellion was subdued. A native nobility existed only in Galicia and in Italy: the Polish magnates did not owe their greatness to the Habsburgs and never forgot that they were Poles — though they denied this name to their peasants; the Italian nobles were cosmopolitan, but Italy was their world. Apart from Galicia and Italy, the Austrian Empire was a vast collection of Irelands, except that — unlike the Irish landlords, who had at any rate a home of origin in England — the Austrian nobility had no home other than the Imperial court.

The conception and self-conception of the Habsburg Empire may have relevance for exploring the etiology of the First World War: many history textbooks have pointed to ‘nationalism’ - however defined - as one of the factors which led to the war.

If the Habsburg Empire was devoid of nationalism, then there is less likelihood that nationalism was a cause of World War One. If both the subjects and the rulers in the Habsburg Monarchy did not harbor nationalism in their conceptual frameworks of the world, then it is improbable that nationalism fueled the start of World War One.

Caring for Human Dignity: Culture and Education

The thinkers of the Enlightenment - John Locke, Edmund Burke, et. al. - bestowed a trove of wisdom on subsequent generations. Among such insights are those related to the eternal questions about society and government.

For centuries and millennia, people have asked about the best way to organize a society, and about the proper relationship between society and government. Attempted answers to such questions are based on some concept of human nature.

What does it mean to be human? The answer to this question will imply answers to the other questions about society and government. Larry Arnn formulates the Enlightenment insights about “the principle, and therefore the essence, of the human.”

Humans are meant to know, to be free, and to love the best things. These things are not automatic: they must be cultivated.

In order to gain the benefits which come from Enlightenment thinking - in order to gain liberty, knowledge, and judgment - traditions, institutions, practices, and disciplines are necessary. “This cultivation gives” to these cultural artifacts, “as it gives” to “all human life, the purpose that makes it what it is.”

This is not an elitist message: those who have the opportunity to engage with culture are not more human; they are not better humans. They are as much and as little human as anyone else, but they have had to the opportunity to explore their humanity in a way, and to a depth, unavailable to people who do not have access to culture.

People obtain benefits from having the opportunity, not merely to read, but to wrestle with, engage, and debate about texts by Schopenhauer or Kierkegaard; the opportunity, not only to hear, but explore the musical structures found in the works of J.S. Bach or Robert Schumann.

Anyone who is a friend of humanity will want to offer these experiences to as many people as possible.

Concert halls and art museums, classrooms and libraries, the architecture of cathedrals and the historical development of linguistics — all of these are more than simply bodies of knowledge and opportunities for critical thinking. They are the experiences by which people can investigate and exercise their own humanity.

Larry Arnn argues that to deny such culture is to abuse those to whom it is being denied:

We think we and all others have a right to pursue this cultivation. It is the ultimate human right, and it must be defended.

Education is both a part of, and a transmitter of, culture. School, colleges, and universities can either facilitate or withhold chances to engage texts or other cultural artifacts.

Sadly, these institutions do sometimes deny such chances, and do so increasingly under the banner of ‘multiculturalism’ - a misnomer which is often used to label a lack of any culture, instead of the study of several cultures.

Happily, there are still many chances for the individual to find and explore culture — and thereby find and explore himself. The essence of the individual’s humanity is found “in relation to” someone or something else.

As the individual explores humanity, so also the community, and the benefits to the community are tangible, as Thomas Jefferson writes:

I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves ; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.

Herein lies one connection between education and liberty, between culture and freedom: a nation-state with a written constitution and with a limited government composed of freely-elected representatives must have an educated citizenry, if it is to retain individual political liberty.

It is for this reason that universities have so often posted on their walls the words from the Northwest Ordinance of 1787:

Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.

Knowledge, freedom, and “love” for “the best things” are the result of caring for, and tending to, humanity. Etymologically, ‘culture’ is ‘cultivation,’ and the cultivation of both the community and the individual, i.e., the cultivation of the mind, leads to the freest, most powerful, and best expression of humanity.

The Cultural Influence of Christianity in Western Civilization

Whatever name scholars may give it — Western Civilization, Eurocentric Culture, or the Judeo-Christian Tradition — there is no doubt that Christianity has played a major role in shaping this way of life.

From Shakespeare to Kafka, from Mozart to Beethoven, from Michelangelo to Rembrandt, from Hobbes to Locke, the individual and collective creative processes which constitute this civilization have been nourished by some aspect of the Christian faith.

To be sure, Christianity was not the only factor in forming this culture: Judaism played a large role, as did ancient Greco-Roman civilization. Ironically, Western Civilization has managed to absorb and synthesize both Judeo-Christian influences and elements of the Greco-Roman culture which were quite hostile to both Judaism and Christianity.

The word ‘Christianity’ is subject to use, misuse, and abuse. For historical purposes, its definition must be focused. A starting point for defining ‘Christianity’ will be the individual named Jesus, a Rabbi who lived in a territory occupied by a Roman military government. A second major point will be the texts collected and preserved under the title ‘The New Testament.’

This one individual, and this one slim collection of texts, define for historical and scholarly purposes what ‘Christianity’ is. The reader will need to jettison a large number of impressions gained from a multitude of other sources, both contemporary and past.

Given this definition, what is the net impact of Christianity? Timothy Keller writes that Christianity

is the most unsentimental, realistic way of looking at life. It does not say, “Cheer up! If we all pull together we can make the world a better place.” The Bible never counsels indifference to the forces of darkness, only resistance, but it supports no illusions that we can defeat them ourselves. Christianity does not agree with the optimistic thinkers who say, “We can fix things if we try hard enough.” Nor does it agree with the pessimists who see only a dystopian future. The message of Christianity is, instead, “Things really are this bad, and we can’t heal or save ourselves. Things really are this dark — nevertheless, there is hope.”

The contribution of Christianity is, then, a view of human nature and of the world. Humans are essentially flawed and imperfect, and yet there is reason for hope. The world is essentially a broken and imperfect place, and yet there is reason for hope.

Informed by Christianity, a culture can then have realistic expectations of people and of the world, and can also look for hope. Hope is, in the terminology of philosophy, something ab alio — something from beyond one’s self, from outside of one’s self. The Christian

message is that “on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned.” Notice that it doesn’t say from the world a light has sprung, but upon the world a light has dawned. It has come from outside. There is light outside of this world.

Keller goes on to explain that, in the Christian worldview, “Jesus has brought that light to save us; indeed, he is the Light.”

The Christian worldview is therefore both transcendent and immanent. It is transcendent inasmuch as the source of hope is categorically outside of humanity, and as such, hope must break into our world from the outside. It is immanent inasmuch as this hope arrives in the here and now of life.

The influence of Christianity can be seen in Wordsworth and Longfellow, in Brahms and Bach, and in Dürer and Cranach. This influence includes notions such as the value of each and every human life, regardless of its rank or station; it includes a respect for both the individual and the community; it includes an acknowledgement of individual freedom.

The Time Freedom Almost Won: A Near-Miss in Obtaining a Bill of Rights

The long struggle for freedom includes great milestone achievements over the centuries and millennia: Hammurabi, Moses, Greco-Roman legal thought, the Magna Carta, the Tübinger Vertrag, the English Bill of Rights of 1689, the United States Declaration of Independence, The United State Constitution, The United States Bill of Rights, and the Emancipation Proclamation, to name merely a few.

But there were also some great failures along the way.

In 1628, the British Parliament created a document called the ‘Petition of Right.’ It incorporated many of the ideas from the Magna Carta, and anticipated many of the ideas of the later ‘Bill of Rights’ documents. Both houses of Parliament approved the petition and sent it to King Charles I.

Previously, Charles had promised to honor the already-stated rights enumerated in the Magna Carta; but at the same time, Charles had warned that Parliament should not question, or infringe upon, what he considered to be the absolute authority of the monarch. Parliament was unwilling to rely merely on the king’s assurance, especially when the king limited that promise with his claim to absolute authority.

Sir Edward Coke led the effort of drafting and obtaining passage through Parliament for the document. Coke championed the rights of the people against the crown during the reign of James I, the predecessor of Charles I. His surname is pronounced ‘Cook’ despite its spelling.

The petition was a brilliant move, as historian John Barry writes:

Parliament would not rely on his word, especially with that limitation. Coke suggested that Parliament require the king to acknowledge English liberties in a legislative way. He proposed sending a “Petition of Right” to the king to define the rights of his subjects and Parliament and limits on the royal prerogative. Though called a “petition,” it was not to be a request granted by the king’s grace; it would be a resolution voted by Parliament and assented to by the king. King and Parliament together, representing a unified nation, would give it the strongest possible legal force and make it binding upon the crown.

Had Charles signed the document, it would have confirmed and acknowledged due process, property rights, and a slew of other freedoms. It would also have probably avoided the English Civil War, and thereby saved many lives — including the king’s: Charles was beheaded in the uproar which he partly caused by at first failing to agree to the petition, then by begrudgingly agreeing to it, and finally by reneging on his agreement to it.

1628, then, was the year in which freedom almost triumphed. But almost triumphing is actually losing.

It would require the bloody English Civil War (1642 to 1651) and the abdication of James II (1688) to finally bring about the English Bill of Rights. An additional 61 years were needed to implement the ideas of the Petition of Right.

Civilization’s Most Impressive Developments: ‘Natural’ Does Not Mean ‘Good’

In the early twenty-first century, many people have come to have positive associations with the word ‘natural’ and with the concept it represents. There are, however, circumstances in which ‘natural’ is bad.

To organize a society around the belief that every person should have equal rights and be afforded equal opportunities is unnatural. What is natural, and what comes naturally to people, is to treat people unequally, to give people unequal opportunities, and to assume that people have unequal rights.

Human nature leans toward the organization of systems in which some people receive preferential treatment, have disproportionate influence, and exercise favoritism in their treatment of others.

The organization of a government composed of freely-elected representatives — which corresponds to an intuitive notion of ‘fair and just’ — is unnatural. It is also the way in which civilization has managed to achieve its greatest accomplishments.

The benefits of this unnatural pattern are relatively new in history, as scholar Jonah Goldberg writes:

Capitalism is unnatural. Democracy is unnatural. Human rights are unnatural. The world we live in today is unnatural, and we stumbled into it more or less by accident. The natural state of mankind is grinding poverty punctuated by horrific violence terminating with an early death. It was like this for a very, very long time.

The achievements of the last century or two are significant: both in terms of percentage and in terms of absolute numbers, fewer people are living in poverty around the world. Average lifespans are increasing worldwide. Literacy is rapidly expanding around the globe.

Humans are experiencing the benefits of free market economics and free enterprise system — what is generally called ‘capitalism,’ although strictly defined, ‘capitalism’ is something broader than free markets and free enterprise.

The growth of market economies correlates to, and parallels, the growth of the arts, the expansion of civil rights, and better standards of living even for the poorest of people.

Economics is the best way to tell the story of humanity’s quantum leap out of its natural environment of poverty. Until the 1700s, humans everywhere — Europe, North and South America, Asia, Africa, Australia, and Oceania — lived on the equivalent of one to three dollars a day. Since then, human prosperity has been exploding across the world, starting in England and Holland with the rest of Western Europe and North America close behind. Debate climate change all you like. This is the most important “hockey stick” chart in all of human history.

The natural status of humans is poverty, disease, violence, and ignorance, as fans of Thomas Hobbes know. Advances and developments in civilization occur despite human nature, not because of it. It is by opposing nature that benefits are accrued for people in general, and for the most vulnerable of people in particular.

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.