Modes of Production.
Air, Water, Food; these we must have, else we die. Air is all about us, and is free. Water goes with territory, and is cheap, since it is there, having fallen from the heavens; the main cost is that of distribution. Food, for the most part, is not free; it usually has to be produced. Archaeologists and Anthropologists say there have been three main Eras, with characteristically distinct modes of Production -- of food, and all the rest -- in the long span of Human Life on this planet:--
Hunting / Gathering;
Agricultural / Horticultural / Pastoral;
Industrial.
The first Era, Hunting / Gathering, covers by far the longest stretch of time. Hard to say just how long, but certainly hundreds of thousands of years. Agriculture, the second mode of production, was established between ten to fifteen thousand years ago, and gradually became the norm. Industry, the third mode, is recent. It came into being, and became the dominant mode, in England, around 1750 AD, and thereafter spread across the Globe.
In an agrarian society the Warriors, Thugs and Legitimators (Priests and Scribes) -- not the Merchants and Peasants -- are the ones who call the shots. Naturally so, since Peasants -- the indispensable group -- are tied to the land, and Merchants are tied to their commodities and capital. Peasants are wide open to hit-and-run raids, and need a competent squad of specialists in the use of brute force to defend them and their crops. And those specialists normally end by using their expertize for their own advantage. In such a society the Warriors control the surplus. They are the ones who can dispense gifts. And therefore it is mainly their lives which will be celebrated by the storytellers. The underlying mechanics of class relation -- patron / client -- are set down in the Odyssey with characteristic Ancient Greek precision. Besides the Warriors some of the others get a bit of a look-in -- a few centuries after Homer there are pretty-pretty Arcadian versions of rural life (Theocritus; Longus) -- but nothing serious.
An agrarian society has a surplus, but quite a small one, and fluctuating. Such a society is vulnerable to famine, and therefore it values order and stability above all. It is inherently conservative: all innovation is suspect, and radical innovation is proscribed.
All past Civilizations known to us have beeen built on the backs of the peasantry -- for the most part without acknowledgement of the debt. But those days are gone; the peasant is no longer seen as necessary. Modernity, with its giant surpluses, seemingly limitless, and its networks of impersonal coercion, is against him, and against his reflex conservatism -- everything he stands for. He is an anachronism, a vestige.
Natural Science; Industrial Society.
Industrial Society is the social realization of European Natural Science; it is the Laboratory writ large. Together European Science and Industry make up one of the more remarkable expressions of the human spirit. However, there are big gaps, and limitations. To a few persons these limitations were clear from the start, hundreds of years ago. By now, at the opening of the 21st Century, they are obvious to anyone with eyes to see, but to transcend them will not be easy.
Industrial Society is a New Thing: it did not exist anywhere before the 18th Century AD. Of course there were hints of possibility a long way back. The specialist craftsmen, for example, notably the nomadic smiths, the metal workers, who have been around for several thousands of years. But an Industrial Society is far more than the odd strand: it is a Society where the Industrial way of thinking and acting permeates everything.
Industrial Society constitutes a sophisticated and formidable -- sometimes dangerously formidable -- way of relating to the external world. In his leisure time a factory worker drives about in his motor car, and communicates with his friends, using a hand held mobile telephone. The technology is superior to anything possessed by the most privileged Rulers of the past. Alexander the Great of Macedonia in the 4th Century BC used horse drawn chariots in his conquests; the Postal System of the Ancient Romans was deservedly famous, but it still took several days for a letter from London to reach the Emperor in Rome.
Art; Politics; Religion.
A recurrent implicit theme of these Essays is that, whereas Industrial Society is new, our Art, our Politics, our Religions are, in the main, not new. They are merely modifications -- and usually not impressive ones; sometimes little better than caricatures -- of their counterparts in Agrarian Society. Nor is this surprising; there is no inherent necessity for different strands of human activity to culminate at the same time. Unevenness of development is not a reason for self-castigation. But what is not acceptable is the strident and premature celebration of Modernity (usually taken to date from around 1850 AD) as one integrated and compelling Mode of Being, and equally splendid across all Dimensions. I'll exemplify my doubts and disagreements.
The soulless painterly virtuousity of Picasso (1881 AD - !973 AD) does not stand up well in comparison with the Christian religious paintings of Duccio of Siena (d. 1319 AD), or in comparison with the joyful and sensitive celebration of the Hearth in the pictures of Jan Vermeer of Delft (1632 AD - 1675 AD).
The astonishing magnificence of European Classical Music from, say, 1550 AD to 1850 AD -- Palestrina, Monteverdi, Bach, Handel, Scarlatti, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin ... -- is daunting for those musicians who come after.
The Odyssey of Homer remains, to this day, the best adventure story ever written; and only a few anti-poetic know-alls (Bernard Shaw), smug ignoramuses (George Orwell), and overbearing narcissists (Leo Tolstoy) dispute the power and extraordinary intelligence of Shakespeare as playwright.
We moderns have the Camera (nowadays Instant and Digital), 24/7 recorded Music via earphones, Radio, Television, Cinema. The Art which is mediated to us by these instruments is easily accessible to us; it is expressed in a language we understand. For the most part the mass of the People in our time know nothing else. At its best it is interesting, entertaining, and almost satisfying. But there is an intangible, inexpressible something that is missing. However, it is a vital something, a sine qua non; and after more than a hundred years of waiting one begins to suspect that perhaps it will always be missing from any Art so intimately tied in with the artefacts and processes of a Machine Society.
Of course the contrast, and the lack -- these have been studied, and occasionally analysed well. I am not talking about Theory and Hypotheses, but about immediate response, the Empirics of the matter.
So much for Art. Although, in that domain, at least there still remain large numbers of persons who are able to discriminate, and recognize the obvious gap between present and past. However, in the domains of Politics and Religion the situation is much worse. In these two (closely related) domains the Ideologies rule, and many proclaim them as the last word in insight and guidance in how to live. [The main ones: Darwinism, Marxism, Freudianism, Environmentalism, Feminism].
These Ideologies, Weltanschauungen, have been dominant throughout the West for a large part of the last one hundred and fifty years.
Taken as a whole each and every one of these Ideologies is, not worthless, not a zero, but actively harmful -- a negative effect; and an insult to the common sense, intelligence and sensibility of any person of integrity and maturity. Within each of these Ideologies true statements will occur, but usually truisms, or crude restatements of ancient wisdom. Otherwise pernicious falsity.
Most people will read the above as an outrageously intemperate summation. Collectively these Essays -- present, prior and subsequent -- will constitute the justification.
Some Histories are Chronological. Major events, minor events, but all in strict chronological order: earlier followed by later. Other Histories are more thematic: the Classical Period, the Mediaeval Period... And, most common of all, Histories that are a mixture of the two. Which, in the main, describes this set of Essays. However, in the current subset (The Modern Age) I shall be dodging back and forth even more than usual. Like a lively dog out for a walk, there will be a directional tendency, but no more than that.
Constituencies
Christianity, Naturalism and Gnosticism have been the perennial Religions of the West. Each has an abiding Constituency: a core of supporters, plus some more loosely affiliated followers -- floating voters. As the generations come and go, relative numbers wax and wane, and prominence and power also change accordingly, but none of the three groups ever disappears. I indicate below how I see the division into Constituencies, according to temperament plus biological and cultural placement. Attachment is not always lifelong: many individuals change as they grow older:--
- Christianity.
Parents, and Grandparents; they accept birth, ageing, death. And amongst them the Mothers especially. As Women they are attuned to people rather than things; as Mothers they know the necessity of boundaries, not to be crossed, and the deep reassurance, for the children, of unchanging ritual; the need for structure, and the daily routine. Western Christianity was at its peak in the High Middle Ages. As the Religion of Love, and Forgiveness, it is not surprising that it had the Madonna and Child as one of its two main icons.
- Naturalism.
Appeals to many of the doers and maintainers; to a section of the more aggressively articulate of the practical Men. There will be devotees amongst the farmers, plumbers, carpenters, mechanics, engineers; and also amongst their more intellectual counterparts, the scientists. Naturalists work with objects and processes rather than with people, whom they see as poorly designed mechanisms, cluttered with obsolete junk sub-systems within ramshackle structures crying out for the attentions of a good engineer. Naturalists are at home in a World of cause and effect; they are problem solvers. They understand half of the Truths of the World very well; to the other half they are tone-deaf. About Metaphysics and the Ultimates of Existence they are either simply crass, or else uneasy and evasive. Dialogue is pointless.
- Gnosticism.
The World of Wish; a turning aside from Reality. If only, or Imagine, as John Lennon suggests.
Gnosticism -- and all of the modern Ideologies are variants of Gnosticism -- is the Religion of teenagers, of the intransigently self-righteous ones who see themselves as 'Idealists': all those who are determined to remain emotionally and spiritually adolescent forever. It is the Religion of Rebels, addicted Fantasists, and Outsiders; those who are prone to Envy, but not to Gratitude; those who reject responsibility, and don't pay their debts -- the disaffected, the idle, the bored, and all those who can afford, or are permitted, to ignore Necessity; also, amongst the racial and cultural groups, many within the Anti-assimilation Minorities, permanently parasitic on the social surround.
In a mature modern Industrial Society the proportion of Gnostics can be substantial, since production is guaranteed by the ingenious and deceptively generous machines. In such a Society, of easy Affluence, Entitlement, Welfare (the Masses), and the sickly pleasures of Guilt and Masochist Self-Criticism (the Highly Educated), this bloc of spendthrift Constituents -- living off a laboriously accumulated inheritance of moral, material and financial capital, which they ignorantly and carelessly take for granted -- will be numerically large, and eventually may become preponderant in power. The modern Gnostic, whatever party label he uses -- Republican, Democrat, Labour, Liberal, Conservative; it makes no difference -- will always, whenever it counts, be on the Left, since he believes in Rights; also in Magic, and Utopia. He is attracted to Groups and the Collective, seeing them as natural; he finds the constraints, barriers and deferred gratifications of Western Individualism alien, and the social life unbearably solitary. In the matter of possessions, and access to facilities, he leans towards Equality and Fairness -- especially for others -- being unable to comprehend the impersonal rigour of Justice, with its objective criteria. Nor has he any notion of the discipline, craft and joys of Making and Maintaining.
Unlock the Forces of Production, he says, and goods will appear, inevitably; the only problems are those of Distribution.
An affluent Western Society, where the Establishment is Gnostic, lacks ultimate staying power, since it doesn't reproduce the conditions for its continuance. There will be either Racial and Cultural Death or Regeneration. When, as in the case of Britain, Racial and Cultural Death is being actively facilitated by the Establishment, the situation can be viewed either as a movement towards Suicide (Killing of the Self) -- if you see the Establishment as the bearer of the Culture; or as attempted Murder (Killing of the Other) by the Establishment -- if you see the People collectively as the bearers of the Culture.
As yet there are only a few signs of Regeneration. Extrapolation from social and demographic trends suggests that the West is moving rapidly down the road to Racial and Cultural Death; and this trend is accompanied by the surface symptoms of Chaos. (They go together. Things fall Apart: Mortality is preceded by Morbidity.) But trends can change, sometimes quite fast; they can occasionally reverse. Even long-term trends are not reliable long-term predictors when, as here, beneath an apparently quiescent exterior the smouldering forces and passions are potentially so extreme that even vast infrastructures may be brushed aside, disabled or obliterated. What is clear at the moment (AD 2008) in Britain is that the current Establishment is Culturally murderous and Racially suppressive, intensely and persistently so -- they are trying to wipe out their own Culture and Race -- and that the Society is moving, in surface manifestations, from Gnostic Affluence to Chaos.
The cognitive experts -- based in London, which is becoming, more and more (and not accidentally) a Transnational City -- are being used for increasingly trivial jobs, merely increasing the assets and collective influence of the Global Oligarchy, the Wielders of Financial and Political Power across our Planet. A technical wizard, a Corporation Lawyer, negotiates a merger of two Global companies -- a net worth of £50 billion, say. Navigating amongst the clumps and banks of man-made legal and administrative pollution -- in the form of entanglements of senseless Government Edicts designed to distract and placate interest groups -- he earns a large sum for his expertize in charting a clear channel. But all this expenditure of cleverly focussed energy is usually either frivolous or sinister -- often both. Frivolous, in that it is a waste of human talent, since it seldom results in any improvement in well-being for the main parts of the populations of the several Nations affected. Sinister, because it usually results in a diminution of the aggregate of freedoms available to those same populations.
There is more and more dysfunction. The Institutions are becoming ramshackle. There is less and less relation -- sometimes almost none -- between ostensible function and actual performance.
The Function of Schools: to train the young to become competent; to enable them to take over responsibility for the stability and continuation of Society. Is this what happens now? Answer: training in complex technology is sometimes good. As for the rest -- Virtue, Citizenship, and the first steps along the road to Wisdom -- the young receive confusing mixed messages: they are as like to be guided towards the opposites. The Media emphasize the Glamour of Vice; Self-Expression and Narcissistic Rebellion; Emotional and Spiritual Delusion. But most of the Schools -- well placed to exert influence, if they had the will -- do almost nothing to counteract this baleful, anti-educational package.
The Function of Police: to prevent crime; to catch criminals. Is this the reality now? No, since they are not permitted to spend more than a small part of their time on these two activities.
The Function of Courts and Prisons: to protect the law-abiding majority by convicting and isolating wrongdoers; to punish criminals, occasionally to rehabilitate them. Is this what happens? Again; hardly at all.
The Function of Border Controls: to prevent illegal entry. No comment needed.
The Function of Parliament: to Represent the People of the Nation and, after mature deliberation, to respond to those problems of the day that can be usefully affected by State action. I doubt that, since that time when the core of the Nation was first formed about eleven centuries ago, there has ever been a period when the supposed Representatives of the British People were so isolated from their Constituents, and so indifferent to their needs. There is no longer much to be gained by watching these 'Representatives', in their Toy Parliament, year by year, pirouetting and chattering their way towards irrelevance.
As in the West generally, the Gnostics still have predominant power in Britain -- in some domains (e.g. Parliament) almost 100% representation. They maintain a tight grip on all the social levers although, in order to hold on, they are being driven to become increasingly illiberal and overtly brutal, to mouth gibberish and jargon that neither they nor anyone else can understand, and to devise myriads of constraints -- piled feverishly one upon the other -- that are so detailed and multifarious, so incoherently ad hoc, as to be unworkable. (Post Modern Discourse; labyrinthine Taxation Schedules; vast compendiums of Regulations, which inhibit initiative and creativeness, and many of which mutually conflict; the assault on Free Speech; ID Cards.) It may be that the Gnostic preponderance will gradually diminish. However, by the time these Middle Aged Adolescents, these disillusioned burnt-out hedonists with their vacuous bureaucratic yob speech, have finished their orgy of self-indulgence, the damage and corruption may have become too great. Then it really will be a case of Death of a Race and its Culture, since both Biological Genome and Cultural Genome will have been swamped. It may be that there will not be enough of either of them left for the small number of Makers and Preservers, however tough-minded and joyful, to repair and regenerate the Society, in order to keep at bay the internal and external predators: those Demons of Darkness and Violence, always waiting in the wings, always ready to move in. We shall see.
The West and the Rest
An isolated tribe is a fairly stable entity. Over time it changes little; the fixity of the gene pool, the collective biological genome, is matched by the equally persistent collective cultural genome: language, customs, manners, morals.
Larger societies, living in a more crowded world, try to achieve a degree of this stability and persistence by articulated social means: the biological genome is held steady by restricting immigration, the cultural genome by conservatism in legislation, by censorship of media, etc. The more extreme practitioners of a programme of stability have been the countries of East Asia: China, Japan ...
All large societies have this tribal strand to some degree -- without it they would soon fall apart. But the West is notable -- there is the West, and there is the rest -- for the mildness of this strand, this element. On the one hand this mildness made possible the permeability, the openness to the shock of new ideas, and the amazing creativeness of the West over so many centuries but, on the other hand, only the West could have given house room, in recent decades, to the self-annihilating, suicidal doctrine of Multiculturalism -- actively promulgated by the Globalist Exploiters and by some (not all) of the Minorities.
A stable and creative Culture will be a fairly homogeneous Culture. The Majority needs must be statistically heavily preponderant, and self-confident. Creativeness depends upon an intense focussing of energies, necessitating a rock-solid foundation. Such a Culture will be based upon a set of commonly held, unarguable Absolute Presuppositions (Values, if you like). Consequently it is obvious that Multiculturalism (Diversity, it is sometimes called) imposed upon a formerly homogeneous Culture -- in practice the imposition of rapid and large-scale immigration of Alien Cultural Groups (always against the wishes of the great Majority), and the legislative privileging, by the governing élite, of the resultant Alien Minority Groups above the Majority -- will have large negative effects. It is a precursor of loss of creativeness and adaptiveness (below even that bare minimum necessary to handle inevitable flctuations), near certain Civil Disorder, perhaps even of Civil War. On the face of it the doctrine of Multiculturalism is an inane contradiction in terms, an oxymoron to beat them all. However, if you ignore the words, and instead watch what happens, you will soon see that the inanity is only superficial. In spite of the eloquent protestations and the deafening noise none of this is about Principle; it is about Power. This kind of Movement has become the standard modern procedure for an attempt at takeover: the use of the Rhetoric of Equality -- resulting in bamboozlement, vacillation, hesitancy of the Majority -- by a small Power Group (or Coalition of such Groups) to flood the Cultural channels, in order to establish a new System of Inequality: Some are more Equal than Others -- with the new Power Group at the top, and most of the former Majority Group near the bottom.
I'll set down briefly the non-tribal characteristics which, a few centuries back, so markedly distinguished the West -- especially North Western Europe, and above all England -- from the main body of Asia and which, altogether, made it possible for England to become so astonishingly innovative in so many ways and, eventually, the Creator of Industrial Society.
True Creation -- the real thing -- is rare and difficult but, once a Creation exists, it is not hard for any other High Culture to copy it successfully. I agree with those Economic Historians who see the Creation of Industrial Culture in England -- and contemporaries everywhere were astonished by it: some were impressed; some were repelled -- as a unique event, dependent upon many mutually reinforcing cultural qualities and circumstances. It was neither foreseeable nor inevitable.
Modernization -- based upon an integrated system of commerce and banking -- occurred in Western Europe. By the mid 18th Century Holland was in the lead, but fading, and it was only in England -- from around 1770 AD to 1830 AD-- that the second stage, Industrialization, occurred to any degree. The key elements were the improvement of the Steam Engine, High Quality Steel, the Railways and Coal Mining. (Resulting in a huge increase in the quantity of energy -- horse power -- available to the average industrial worker. Later also the agricultural worker.) These developments made possible, ultimately for everyone, a continuously rising standard of living. Although I doubt that any of this would have been able to happen without the political and social developments which had been going on in England for several hundreds of years.
To return. It was the set of Western non-tribal characteristics which helped several millions of British settlers to shoulder the gigantic burdens involved in the creation of the nations of the Anglosphere: USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Other highly disciplined Cultures -- the Chinese, perhaps -- might have handled the physical problems, but the extended emotional deprivation (especially in that terrifyingly bleak and empty continent, Australia) would have taxed, and probably to destruction, any but a Western Individualist Culture.
Herewith the list:--
- Simple Household.
In the West, a single married couple and their children. In Asia the typical setup was a household consisting of several related couples, usually brothers and their wives and other members of the extended family. [The Old Testament Patriarchs: Abraham, Job, etc.]
In Britain, before the Industrial Revolution, unmarried young people were used as servants. This applied to rich and poor alike; wealthy farmers would send out their children in this fashion.
- Non-kinship Interactions.
In Asia people were surrounded by blood relatives; much less so in the West, where non-relatives were ubiquitous: genetic relatedness was far less significant within the household. This implies a much lower level of ethnocentrism (tribalism) in the West. With, of course, vast political implications, as we see so clearly today. It is only the West which neglects to seal its borders -- allowing mass immigration, with the near certainty of dangerously large unassimilable minorities.
- Individualism; Collectivism.
Individualism goes with the Western type of simple household. The oddball, the eccentric -- including the rare creator -- is not seen as socially sick, or as a threat; he is not ostracized or exiled. As a consequence there is sometimes an exhilarating freedom; but also the risk, for some, of debilitating loneliness.
Collectivism is the rule in the rest of the world, and notably in the Asian type of extended kinship household. There is cosiness: one belongs; the constraints can be stifling, but one is never lonely.
- Marriage, and Love.
They have often gone together in the West, but elsewhere not usually. Monogamy, individual choice and consent (rather than arrangement), conjugal affection and companionship, the comparatively high status of women; these are Western characteristics of long standing.
- Ethnicity.
The tendency to form simple households may be ethnically based. It has been most prevalent in Northern Europe: Scandinavia, the British Isles, the Low Countries, German-speaking areas, and Northern France. It is possible that it dates back many thousands of years, but we don't know much; the evidence is sparse.
Transitions.
The Mediaeval Order (Western Christendom) was always turbulent, and various. Nevertheless from, say, 900 AD to 1450 AD there were many widespread common characteristics; a summary is possible.
There was one Religion, Christianity, headed by the Pope, and centred on Rome. There were regional vernacular languages, but one unifying language (Latin) for Religious Ritual and Learned Discourse. Most people lived in the countryside, in villages. The social structure was feudal and hierarchical, with the local aristocrat at the top. Obligations and 'Liberties' (precisely delimited freedoms of action) were clear and definite. Everyone knew his or her place, which could be read off by the observer at a glance (clothes, speech, mannerisms). In the towns the structure was more fluid, but only by a little, since economic action (making, maintenance and marketing) was governed quite strictly by the Guilds. [In modern parlance: a variety of monopolies, each controlling one section of trade or manufacture; closed shops, but without the sharp split between Capital and Labour.] Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (ca. 1380 AD) gives an idea of the setup.
By 1450 AD it was obvious that the Mediaeval Order was cracking up; the signs were everywhere. The rest of this Essay, and the next two, are mainly about the Modern Order which supervened.
But first to consider what was left behind, what faded away, with the Transition from the Mediaeval to the Modern Order. The Transition itself is easily summarized: a profound shift in emphasis, more and more definite as the centuries passed, from the Inner World to the Outer -- from the Soul to the Body. Nowadays, when a Western billionaire retires from command of his commercial or industrial empire, he leaves huge sums of money for 'Good Causes'; all to do with the Body and material well-being -- the eradication of AIDS in Africa, say, or the delivery of clean water. His counterpart in Europe, eight hundred years ago, typically left equally large sums for the saying of masses for his Immortal Soul after his own death, and for the construction of hospices for those making pilgrimages to the Holy Land.
On the intellectual front, take these typical judgements, selected from the greatest of Western Theologies, the Summa Theologica (ca. 1270 AD) of Thomas Aquinas:--
OF MAN'S LAST END ... And since the last end of human life is stated to be happiness, we must consider (1) the last end in general; (2) Happiness.
After fifteen closely reasoned pages -- Articles, Objections, Replies -- Thomas concludes: Man and other rational creatures attain to their last end by knowing and loving God ...
After another thirty pages he further concludes that: For perfect happiness the intellect needs to reach the very Essence of the First Cause. And thus it will have its perfection through union with God as with that object, in which alone man's happiness consists ...
To all this the response of many persons in the 21st Century would be: Happiness: Yes. But God ... Who he? They are lost, confused. Two hundred years of relentless one-sided indocrination have had their effect. Since, of those individuals with emotional and spiritual disorders -- disorders of the Soul, they used to be called, before the word was proscribed -- few nowadays have the resources and vocabulary to describe their spiritual emptiness, they cannot protest the collective inadequacy of the diagnostic instruments: the scopes and probes of the Physician, the 'conversations' with the Psychotherapist, the pills collected from the Pharmacist. Altogether that should be sufficient, they are told. Nothing necessary has been omitted, and all archaic redundancies, mystifications and quackeries have been eliminated: at no time did the Neurologist Researchers in their laboratories discover any trace of a Human Soul; and likewise the Russian Astronaut Yuri Gagarin, in his pioneering flight in 1961, found no evidence of God in the Heavens.
[Of course, being the 20th Century, the peak period of the Total State, this aggressive claim was made by Nikita Khrushchev, the Leader of the USSR, not by Gagarin himself: "Gagarin flew into space, but didn't see any God there." Inside an immaterial envelope made out of this kind of sordid intellectual rubbish, an envelope of verbal pollution, Gagarin pursued his life as a Celebrity, a valuable Property of the State. In spite of it all he seems to have remained a decent young man. From out in space he radioed down: "The Earth is blue. It is wonderful."]
The active programme of spiritual disinheritance of European Man, the spiritual lobotomy, began a couple of centuries ago, but the warning signs occurred long, long before this.
The 13th Century AD in Europe was a period of great spiritual and intellectual vitality. The Franciscan and Dominican Orders were founded; Albert the Great in Cologne, and Roger Bacon in England were laying the Methodological foundations of European Natural Science; Aquinas wrote his integrated Summa Theologica -- Faith and Reason mutually reinforcing each other. But almost immediately things began to fall apart; the bonds holding together the Mediaeval double order -- temporal and spiritual; Civitas Terrena / Civitas Dei -- these bonds started to tear. There were already signs of bifurcation: on the one hand the beginnings of an autonomous order of the world, political/economic and entirely non-Christian; on the other a Christian order that was monastic, ascetic, and with little to say to the worldly. Of course, again and again there arose those who tried heroically to repair the damage, to knit together, but they were a dwindling band; the forces making for division proved to be inexorable, and ultimately overwhelming.
But first, a further note on Christianity itself. In the previous Essay (History 19) I concentrated on distinguishing Christianity from Naturalism and Gnosticism. Here I go into more detail, mainly in order to illuminate those issues which were especially important in the 16th Century (Indulgences, etc.)
The central doctrines of Christianity together constitute an explicit system of ideas, a framework for illuminating much of Western History over the last two millennia; and ignorance of this framework makes the main line of Western History pretty confusing, often incomprehensible -- a random sequence of events. However, most Modern persons are ignorant in this respect, because they have been warned off, told -- by indefatigable Enlightenment propagandists over a couple of centuries -- to avert their eyes from such barbarous, superstitious, mind-corrupting rubbish. As a consequence most people cannot take seriously, and therefore cannot take in as meaningful, the words of any of the central Christian Dogmas (Absolute Presuppositions). When they do hear them enunciated the words seem little more than sound devoid of sense, like the proverbial Tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing. By contrast, not having been warned off them, they have no trouble in going along with the far less coherent Presuppositions characteristic of modern Ideologies, and also of modern Fantasy novels.
[Examples:--
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: The Communist Manifesto; (1848) .
The Gnostic Trilogy of Philip Pullman: Northern Lights; The Subtle Knife; The Amber Spyglass (1995, 1997, 2000).]
Below is the core of Christianity. Most of the Presuppositions are not explicitly articulated: they are implicit, embedded within a Narrative. There are one or two obscurities, some minor inconsistencies and gaps in explanation, but the main line is clear enough:--
Part I: Origins; Paradise; Paradise Lost.
The Nature of Man:--
Man is not like the animals; he is special, being made in the image of God.
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness ... So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. [Gen 1:26, 27]
[Darwinists, ignoring Mind, deny that Man is special. A Cutworm, a Cockroach, a Manta Ray, a Man -- they are all of equal value.]
God to Man: Permissions and Injunctions:--
Let them [Men] have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air and over the cattle, and over all the earth ... Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it ... [Gen 1:26-28]
[Environmentalists reject Man's dominion. They say that Animals are People, too. And members of the Animal Liberation Front act out this belief.]
God to Man: Prohibition:--
Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it ... [Gen 2:16, 17]
[Naturalists are followers of Prometheus, the Titan (Greek god) who brought Fire to Man. They reject any limitation on Man's quest for knowledge. Humility, they say, is contemptible, and the thirst for knowledge is a divine attribute.]
Man's Disobedience (Sin):--
And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food ... and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat. [Gen 3:6]
From then on, as a result of this primal disobedience, Man becomes inherently Sinful, inherently corrupt; he has acquired an inbuilt tendency to Sin. In modern language we would say that Man's Spiritual corruption is genetically transmitted, to all of his descendants, down the generations.
[Modern Ideologies vary in their attitudes to Sin.
Darwinists.
Since they deny Mind there is no place for the notion of Sin. They use only one criterion of judgement: Fitness. Which is Darwinspeak for Reproductive potential, as measured quantitatively. This could also be translated as Life Force, Viability. Greater Fitness leads to more Life (more Individuals, more Phenotypes); diminution of Fitness leads to fewer and fewer Individuals: eventually to Death of the Species.
Marxists.
They do not use the actual word 'Sin', but the notion plays a big part in the Ideology. Sin is associated with Class position, and is transmitted via the Cultural Genome. In the Feudal Period the Bourgeoisie was a 'Progressive' social class -- for the time being, therefore, a Good Thing. By the 19th Century the Bourgeoisie, having fulfilled its Historical Destiny, was becoming increasingly Sinful, increasingly Reactionary. By then the Proletariat -- destined to be the final social class -- was the one infused with Grace. In the 20th Century, under the leadership of Lenin, and then Stalin, the Marxists developed a notably pitiless version of Sin and Evil. Counter-revolutionaries -- Kulaks, Trotskyites, etc. -- were all to be 'liquidated': i.e. murdered.
Freudians.
Original Sin is replaced by the less dramatic category of Pathology. We are all Sick. And there is no real Grace; but a muted half-Salvation is possible via the laborious process of self-transformation over several years within the consulting room of the Psychoanalyst.
Environmentalists.
These people are thoroughgoing. With them Original Sin is very much alive and well. All Humans are innately sinful: pollutants on the surface of Sacred Gaia. Environmentalists are a bit like Calvinists, driven by the demon of doubt, in that no one can ever be quite sure that he/she is saved. The wisest course is to live so that one's days are bound each to each by purifying Acts of Ecological Piety.
Feminists.
In the eyes of the Feminist only Men are sinful. Women are good. The best a Man can do is to aspire to a second class Dhimmi status by continuous grovelling, by denying his masculinity.]
God's Punishment of Man: Hardship, Suffering and Death:--
The woman shall have sorrow in childbirth; and she shall be subject to her husband.
The man shall labour and suffer to procure food -- In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread. No longer will the getting of food be effortless -- merely to reach out; no longer will there be continual largesse from the Garden of Eden.
Man and Woman are no longer immortal -- they shall know death: For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return ... And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever; therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the Garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. [Gen 3:19,22,23]
Part II: Incarnation.
Birth:--
And the angel said unto her, Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favour with God. And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name JESUS. He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest ... The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God. [The Annunciation. Luke 1:30, 31, 32, 35].
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. [John 3:16].
[Note: For the Christian, one who believes, the Incarnation -- God becomes Man, for a time -- is the most momentous of all events that have ever occurred.]
Part III: Life and Death of Jesus Christ.
Jesus grew up and became a Prophet, preaching to those few who would listen. For the Christian, His actions and responses serve as a model of the sinless life (Imitation of Christ).
His sermons offended the contemporary Religious Establishment; as a result he was condemned to death by Crucifixion.
Part IV: Crucifixion as Ransom.
Christ's death was a blood offering. By His acceptance of suffering Christ made possible, for each and every individual, the annulment of the consequences of the primal sin (of disobedience) -- i.e. the genetic chain could be broken. The necessary self-transformation, for each individual person, is bound up with Faith, with Belief in the Incarnation and all that goes with it. Baptism is the public symbolic ceremony which recognizes and ratifies the change, the birth of the New Man.
Part V: The Church.
It is the Institutional continuator, down the generations, for the promulgation of Christ's Message. It has many functions. Three of the main ones:--
Its buildings (Chapels, Churches, Cathedrals) serve as Temples for the Christian Rituals, whose forms evolved over the centuries, and which are celebrated daily, weekly, monthly throughout the Christian year.
It trains and authorizes the specialist personnel, the Priests, who serve in various ways as intermediaries between God and the common people.
It acts as final arbiter in cases of disagreement amongst the Theologians -- those who articulate intellectually the Christian Doctrine.
I'll try to illuminate some of this, chronologically.
A civilization is informed by a multiplicity of particular customs binding upon the individual: table manners; rules of conversation and address; rules of behaviour to kin, and to strangers; codes of competition and violence, etc. It has also, in harmony with these customs, a superstructure of formal institutions. Responses of the individual to this superstructure range from conformist obedience -- the Respectables -- to varying degrees of dissidence, deviance and revolt: the oddball, the eccentric; the permanently recalcitrant; the troublemaker; the criminal; the principled rebel; the terrorist.
Within Christian Scriptures there are strands which can be drawn upon by both extremes: Respectable and Deviant.
On the one hand there is the famous injunction of Christ: Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and unto God the things which are God's.
On the other hand there is the fact that Christ habitually moved amongst the lower classes; he did not reject the dregs of society, and some of his sayings need only an emphasis to be useful to the revolutionary and the leveller. Speaking to the virtuous rich man Jesus said:--
Sell all that thou hast, and distribute unto the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, follow me. And when he heard this, he was very sorrowful: for he was very rich. And ... Jesus ... said, How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God! For it is easier for a camel to go through a needle's eye, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God! [ Luke 18: 22-25.]
These kinds of tension -- between Wowser and Anarchist, as the Australians say -- are present in every social order, but the level of strain in a Christian social order is always high, because of the intensity of the central idea of the Christian person -- each one of them of equal worth, and each one in continuous relation to God: no queueing for an interview. There is the pervasive awareness of God's presence -- God takes note of everything, including the fall of a sparrow. In cases of personal anxiety it is literally true that, in a Christian Culture, every individual has a Hot Line to God, which needs only a determined will to be activated. ('Prayer' is the word.) This central idea functions as an agent of revolt -- but also, fortunately, as an agent of regeneration, reformation. No Christian society will ever have the kind of stability desired, and sometimes achieved, by Ancient Egypt and China.
The Christian Scriptures can be used as a set of benchmarks for judging the performance of the Christian Clergy. If the gap between promise and performance is large, and persists, sooner or later there will be trouble. I'll give four instances.
Albigenses. (Albi: a town in Southern France; near Toulouse.)
The Albigensian movement arose, at least partly, because the Clergy of the region were seen as living in flagrant violation of the Christian rule of poverty, of restraint and moderation in the matter of worldly goods. The Albigenses were at the height of their popularity and influence around 1200 AD. The formidable Saint Dominic was despatched to debate with them, and to show them the error of their ways, but they were unconvinced. Finally he told them: In my country [Spain] we have a saying: Where words fail, blows will avail. In 1208 AD the Pope (Innocent III) unleashed a full Crusade against them. They were forcibly suppressed: many blows were delivered, and a lot of blood was spilt.
The Albigenses (often known as Cathars) constituted a fully articulated Gnostic Movement. Cathars were thoroughgoing dualists. The physical world, everything material, was evil. It was created and ruled over by Rex Mundi, the King of the World, the God of matter, disorder, conflict. The second ruler was the God of pure spirit (love, order, peace). The higher life, according to many Cathars, consisted in transcending matter, avoiding and renouncing everything connected with power and the material world, thereby attaining union with the God of Spirit. According to other Cathars, man's purpose was to redeem matter, spiritualizing and transforming it.
The élite, the spiritual athletes amongst the Cathars, were extreme ascetics. And, of course, they did not eat meat. Cathars have become quite fashionable in modern times, especially amongst Vegetarians and proponents of Animal Welfare. In the last fifty years many historical novels -- plus some Pop songs -- have been written, glorifying the pure and sensitive Cathars, and castigating the coarse, carnivorous and brutal Crusaders.
Catharism is often described as a Christian Heresy. This seems to me a misnomer; the gap is too large.
John Wycliffe (1320 AD - 1384 AD).
He was an English Cleric, educated at Oxford. Like most of the great English Mediaeval thinkers he was interested in mathematics, natural sciences, logic. However, he is best known as theologian and political theorist. Most of the doctrines associated with what was to become known as the Reformation were first enunciated by Wycliffe, one and a half centuries before the rise of Martin Luther. But it was the latter who was able to carry the day and succeed in making these doctrines institutionally dominant, amongst many peoples and over a substantial territory. Here are the the main items in Wycliffe's doctrines:--
The Bible.
He emphasized Scripture, the Bible, as the central guide for Christian thought and practice.
Even though there were a hundred popes and though every mendicant monk were a cardinal, they would be entitled to confidence only insofar as they accorded with the Bible. In accord with this belief he initiated, and did much of the work, in the translation of the Bible from Latin into the English vernacular. This translation became known as Wycliffe's Bible. This was the start of the movement in England to make the Bible available to the common people.
Justification.
He formulated the (extreme and anti-institutional) doctrine of Justification by Faith.
In Christian Theology, to be justified means to be Righteous, to be at one with God, to walk in the way of the Lord. Justification by Faith emphasizes the Inner World, the subjective element of Belief, and ignores the outer, objective categories of Action and Behaviour. By contrast to Faith, activities and deeds are referred to as Works.
If a man believe in Christ, then the promise that God hath made to come into the land of light shall be given by virtue of Christ, to all men that make this the chief matter.
[The Bible as ultimate criterion, and Justification by Faith -- these are the two main doctrines of the Protestant Reformation inaugurated by Luther, much later, in 1517 AD.]
Poverty.
He was critical of all tendencies within the Church to accumulate property. Priests should have a bare minimum of possessions.
Church and State; Spiritual and Temporal.
The Church, said Wyciffe, is the totality of those who are predestined to blessedness in the hereafter.
[Note:-- A recipe for endless controversy. Who is to decide beforehand, on this earth? What are the signs, here and now, of blessedness? Who are the Elect, the Chosen of God? This doctrine, of Predestination, was to become, with the Calvinists a couple of centuries later, of huge social significance.]
According to Wycliffe temporal power belongs to the king; it is a sin to oppose him. (Render unto Caesar...)
However, the king is God's Regent on earth; and his laws must be formulated in harmony with heaven. Wycliffe emphasized both the Christian obligations of the king, and also the superiority of the king to the Pope in temporal matters.
Preaching.
Wyclliffe aimed to abolish the existing Church hierarchy, replacing it with 'poor priests' who lived in poverty and went about preaching the Gospel to the people.
[This is more revolutionary than anything in Luther's programme. But not really surprising from the man who first formulated the slogan (later used by Abraham Lincoln): Government of the people, by the people, and for the people.]
Such itinerant preachers did come into existence. They went about, barefoot, in pairs. They were known as Lollards, and persisted for several centuries. In England the most famous of Wycliffe's followers was John Ball (d. 1381). He was a roving preacher of some talent. For a short time -- before he was beheaded -- he was the spokesman of a peasant uprising. Below, his most famous lines:
When Adam delved and Eve span
Who was then the gentleman?
From the beginning all men by nature were created alike, and our bondage or servitude came in by the unjust oppression of naughty men.
In 1415, several decades after his death, John Wycliffe was officially declared a heretic; his remains were dug up and ceremonially burnt.
Wycliffe was a critic and reformer, but he was not a farsighted political thinker. He promoted two central doctrines: dogmatic adherence to the words of Scripture -- with their variable, often contradictory, implications -- plus the totally subjective, extravagantly individualistic, and therefore potentially disruptive, doctrine of justification by faith. It was an age when there was beginning to be access to the actual Bible -- not just as mediated by the priest up there in the pulpit -- and also an age when there was no Television Screen to counter the words of the Holy Book. In such an age the Bible as criterion plus subjective Justification comprised a recipe for political turmoil. It was an age which is not easy for us to understand, since there was both extreme freedom of speech and, along with this, extreme repression of such freedom.
Jan Hus of Bohemia (1372 AD - 1415 AD).
From 1378 AD to 1417 AD the Papacy was in serious trouble. There was a schism, with two claimants to the throne of St. Peter -- for a short while there were even three -- one of the claimants residing in Rome and the other in Avignon (Southern France).
The career of Jan Hus took place during this schismatic period. Prominent in Prague University, he was a theologian and political theorist. Doctrinally he was a follower of Wycliffe. Even more than the Lollards (Wycliffites) in England, the Hussites had great popular support in Bohemia, and in other parts of Central Europe. Here, in his own words, are the main reasons why:--
One pays for confession, for mass, for the sacrament, for indulgences, for churching a woman, for a blessing, for burials, for funeral services and prayers. The very last penny which an old woman has hidden in her bundle for fear of thieves or robbery will not be saved. The villainous priest will grab it.
For a while he had support from some of the local Princes. But these were alliances of convenience; ultimately they betrayed him. He was tricked into going to a Grand Council meeting at Konstanz (Germany). He was imprisoned, condemned as a heretic, and burnt at the stake (1415 AD). To this day he remains a popular hero in the Czech Republic.
If a society is not both very homogeneous and very well integrated -- a rare condition -- unlimited freedom of speech will often produce not public opinion, pressure on government, and consent, but a degeneration of the society into a nightmare of distrust, disloyalties and revolutionary chaos. It is not surprising that political theorists as acute as Plato and Aristotle had a low opinion of Democracy. As did the framers of the American Constitution in 1787. Many of their structures and procedures were designed to mitigate the above kinds of danger; and at least for a while -- say up until the election of Abraham Lincoln -- the Constitution worked as intended.
Typically -- with, fortunately, a few honourable and invaluable individual exceptions -- élites dislike and distrust unruly populations. Most of them -- active pursuers of Power, or comfortable as well-rewarded associates -- prefer the lower orders to be docile. For the last hundred years the élites of Modern Western Societies have used a simple technique to handle the problems of thought control, of mental guidance of the People (in the interests of the élites). Freedom of speech will lead to variety of opinion, in turn making cooperation more difficult and obedience less likely. The technique used, to avoid the drawbacks of Freedom amongst the proles, is that of statistical dominance: ensure -- by ownership of the media, bribery, threats, etc. -- that the 'correct' line is promulgated by 95% of media outlets, and don't worry too much about the dissident 5%. It's a simple flooding technique, less burdensome on the manipulators, and also more stable (5% is a safety valve) than the method of 100% Total control. It usually works well enough since, outside of a narrow range of their own personal affairs, not many people give a high priority to factual accuracy. Most of them find factual accuracy a dull business; and so it is, when purveyed by the usual mediocre, unimaginative expositors. People prefer to be entertained by the facile melodramas and pseudo-insights of the lazy journalist, skilfully manipulating his set of templates and formulas, untroubled by the unpredictability and awkwardness of reality and actual personal experience.
Modern developments.
The statistical dominance technique is mechanistic -- a method which uses what is essentially a bureaucratic machine, applying a few simple formulas, to handle a multitudinous variety of human situations. Since machines -- like the lazy journalist above -- when used inappropriately, are crude simplifiers, they can yield only pseudo-solutions to human problems, and the results are exactly as you would expect: an increasingly dumbed down, dimwitted population. Starting out a couple of centuries back, with deliberate mass starvation of the Soul by an 'Enlightened' élite of spiritual paraplegics, we now have also -- the sequence is predictable, inevitable -- starvation of the Heart and the Head. This all-round stupefying of the people is most advanced in the West, but the rest of the World seems determined to follow the same path and catch up as fast as it can.
The statistical dominance technique is less effective when either of the two following conditions hold: when the institutions operate so badly -- and not just intermittently -- that the gap between ostensible function and actual performance becomes so large that no amount of spin can conceal it (crime, immigration, education, health); secondly, when the material standard of living (housing, food, fuel) starts to deteriorate noticeably for a lot of people. In Britain at the present time (AD 2008) we are at least close to a situation where both of these conditions hold.
The well-known adage is wrong: Necessity is often the Mother of Makeshifts but not often the Mother of Invention. However, Necessity does make at least a few people a bit more open to Truth. They are less likely to bury Truth under layers of comfortable eiderdowns, or discard it into a corner along with a pile of outmoded distractions.
Nicholas of Cusa (Germany: 1401 AD - 1464 AD).
He was philosopher, theologian, mystic, jurist, diplomat, mathematician, astronomer: the last truly great all round thinker that Europe produced. (Leibniz comes closest, but doesn't quite make it. As well as other deficiencies he lacked the mystical element. His Head was wonderfully efficient, but Heart and Soul were undeveloped.)
The Catholic Church had the wit to make Nicholas a Cardinal. He acknowledged the appeal of Wycliffe and Hus --accepted the essential accuracy of their criticisms -- but pointed out the limitations, and laboured hard to reconcile to the Establishment the Hussites, and other dissidents. He also reached out to the Eastern Orthodox Church. But there were not enough likeminded persons around. The times were not propitious: the savage delights of conflict were beckoning, and most were happy to go along.
Mysticism and the Common Life.
My Kingdom is not of this World, said Christ. On the one hand there is the material world of creation, and on the other hand the eternal, spiritual world -- the Kingdom of Christ. Accepting this, quite literally, the Mystic is one who attempts, within this life, to go beyond, above, out of this world; at least for a time.
In the Middle Ages there were many people, especially in the towns, who were obsessed with God, and only a small minority of them were members of the Clergy. The Church tried to contain these persons institutionally but, not surprisingly, was generally unsuccessful. Below some quotes, to give an idea of the flavour of their thinking.
People ask: While still in the body could the soul possibly attain some insight into eternity and thereby have a foretaste of eternal life and eternal bliss? ...
Saint Dionysius [6th Century AD] considers it possible ... "As far as beholding a divine mystery is concerned you have to be detached from ... all that the senses can grasp and reason may comprehend and know, including both created and uncreated things. Then you rise in a going-out of yourself, unconscious of the sense-bound and reason-founded and move into union with that which is above all human existence and knowledge."
[Theologia Germanica. Ch 8. This book came out, anonymously, around 1350 AD, and is associated with the city of Frankfurt am Main, in Germany. It was a guide to the spiritual life in a time of great turmoil. (The Black Death, for example, commencing in the 1340s, killed about 45% of Europe's population.)]
Next, some quotations from Meister Eckhart (1260 AD - 1328 AD), a prominent theologian of his time. A profound thinker, and gifted expositor -- one of the greatest. Born in Germany, he studied in Paris. Much of his life was spent in Cologne and Erfurt.
Let everyone begin by denying self and in so doing he will have denied all else. Indeed, if a man gave up a kingdom ... and still was selfish, he would have given up nothing. If, however, he denies himself, then whatever he keeps, be it wealth, honour, or anything else, he is free from it all.
The more he regards everything as divine .. the more God will be pleased with him. To be sure, this requires effort and love, a careful cultivation of the spiritual life, and a watchful, honest, active oversight of all one's mental attitudes towards things and people. It is not to be learned by world-flight, running away from things, turning solitary and going apart from the world. Rather, one must learn to penetrate things and find God there, to get a strong impression of God firmly fixed in his mind.
A man has little reason to be afraid of anything if he knows his will to be good ... if you have good will, you shall lack for nothing, neither love, humility, nor any other virtue; what you will with all your strength you shall have, and neither God nor any creature can deprive you -- if, again, your will is sound, divine and wrapt in God ...
Good will is not less powerful for good than bad will is for evil. Be sure of it, that even if I never do evil and yet, if I hold bad will, I shall have sinned just as much as if I had done this deed. With a will that is purely bad, I commit as great a sin as if I were to murder all the people in the world, even though I did not lift a finger toward the crime. Why should not the same power reside in good will? It does -- and much, incomparably more.
If a man withdraws into himself, with all his powers, mental and physical ... he comes at last to a condition in which he has no ideas and no limitations and in which he exists without activity of inner or outward life ... If he finds that he has no urge to get back to work or responsible activity, then he should break loose and get to work of some kind ... Not that one should give up, neglect or forget his inner life for a moment, but he must learn to work in it, with it and out of it, so that the unity of his soul may break out into his activities and his activities shall lead him back to that unity. In this way one is taught to work as a free man should ... If the outward life interferes with the inner, then follow the inner; but if the two can go on together, that is best of all and then man is working together with God.
Some people despise the little things of life. It is their mistake, for they thus prevent themselves from getting God's greatness out of these little things. God is every way, evenly in all ways, to him who has the eyes to see ...
[Meister Eckhart: pp 5, 9, 13, 37, 249.]