The Australian-born Hollywood film director Phillip Noyce built most of his career on thrillers and action adventures, but this year he has simultaneously released onto the market two highly political films. One is his adaptation of Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American set in Vietnam in the 1950s. In Noyce’s hands, the film outdoes even the novelist’s anti-Americanism and support for the Communists then trying to take control of the country.
The second film, Rabbit-Proof Fence, is ostensibly an adventure story of female bravery and ingenuity in which three Aboriginal girls escape from an oppressive institution in Western Australia and make a fifteen-hundred-mile journey back to their home. In reality it is a work every bit as politically committed as Greene’s. If anything, the anti-Australianism of the latter film outdoes the anti-Americanism of the former.
Rabbit-Proof Fence opens by declaring it is “a true story.” Its script is a combination of a fictionalized memoir written by Doris Pilkington, whose mother was one of the three runaways, plus the 1997 report of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, entitled Bringing Them Home. The latter is possibly the most contentious government document ever published in Australia. The commission claimed that Aboriginal child-removal policies from the 1930s to 1970 amounted to “genocide” and that the Australian government owed those affected a public apology plus large amounts of monetary compensation. Writing in The Washington Post on February 2, 2003 the Melbourne academic Robert Manne endorsed the report and commended the film: “No episode in the country’s history,” Manne wrote, “is more ideologically sensitive than the story of what are now called the ‘stolen generations.’”
The film depicts a typical scene portrayed by the report. In 1930, a policeman forcibly removes screaming children from their mother at Jigalong in the north-west of the continent. They are conveyed under brutal conditions to the Moore River Native Settlement, an institution resembling a concentration camp. The children are half-caste Aborigines and the rationale for their removal is justified by the chief protector of natives in Western Australia, an English-born public servant named A. O. Neville, played in the film by Kenneth Branagh. He explains to a group of white ladies that his objective is to “breed out the color” by separating half-caste children from other Aborigines.
He believes the declining full-blood Aboriginal population is doomed to die out. The number of half-castes, though, are rapidly increasing and threatening the political ideal of a White Australia. Half-caste children who remain with their mothers in blacks camps are likely to breed back into the Aboriginal population. If, however, they can be removed while children and then reared in institutions, they will marry other half-castes, quarter-castes, or whites. Eventually, this eugenics-inspired policy would see the Aboriginal race virtually eliminated. According to the Human Rights Commission report, between 1910 and 1970 these policies caused from ten to thirty per cent of all Australian Aborigines to be forcibly removed from their families. Using definitions adopted by the United Nations, it said this amounted to genocide.
The three girls who star in the film represent Aboriginal resistance to these plans. They escape the settlement and are pursued by the authorities, who use all the modern world’s communications and transportation technology at their disposal. By following the rabbit-proof fence, however—which was built to keep a rabbit plague in the east from spreading to the farming and grazing lands of the west coast—and by trusting their native ingenuity and knowledge of their environment, two of the girls eventually make it back home.
Australian audiences for the film have been invariably moved by the girls’ plight, made angry at their white oppressors, and left in tears at the heroism of their great trek. This summer, the film has been the major box office success and won the Australian Film Institute award for best picture. Noyce used his acceptance speech to criticize the conservative government of Prime Minister John Howard for refusing to apologize to the Aborigines and also for exploiting fears of illegal Muslim immigrants. The government’s last election victory, Noyce said, was based on “an exploitation of race hatred.” As a result, Australia had “lost its humanity.”
Despite this, a number of influential critics of the “stolen generations” report and of Noyce’s film have emerged. They have argued that the only exploitation involved has been of the credulity of the public who, in both cases, have been fed gross misrepresentations of Australian history. Rather than being stolen from loving parents to fulfill a nationalist policy of racist eugenics, the only cases where Aboriginal children were removed involved serious parental neglect. In many of these cases, the parents were alcoholics who were not providing proper nutrition or health care and the authorities would have been culpable had they not acted. In some Aboriginal communities, half-caste children were treated as outcasts, especially the girls who became easy sexual prey for both whites and blacks. In some tribes, half-caste children were commonly subject to infanticide.
Forcible removals, like that depicted in the film, were rare. Indeed, the scene Noyce created is pure fiction since, according to the book, Molly was taken without a struggle and with the acquiescence of her stepfather who was present at the time. Moreover, institutions like that depicted in Rabbit-Proof Fence usually housed Aboriginal children placed voluntarily by their parents to be educated. Evidence from a 1934 enquiry showed that of the 1,067 admitted to the Moore River Native Settlement, only sixty-four were unattended or orphan children. That is, only 6 percent could possibly have been removals from their mothers. Yet the film depicts them all as stolen children.
The Human Rights Commission based its entire report on claims made by Aborigines themselves and did not test their evidence by calling witnesses from among the officials who allegedly removed them. Three test cases subsequently came before the courts, accompanied by claims for compensation. The evidence of the litigants contrasted dramatically with the records of their removal. In one case, a baby boy had been placed in a rabbit burrow by his grandmother and left to die. He was rescued later by his aunt. His teenage mother subsequently agreed to place him in an orphanage. Despite sympathetic judges, none of the three claimants could demonstrate they were forcibly removed, and no government policies were found to support a racist or “stolen generation” thesis.
Documentary evidence also emerged to show that some high-profile Aborigines who claimed to have been stolen had invented their stories. Fabricators included the former head of the Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander Commission, Lois O’Donoghue, whose white father had placed her and her sisters in a Catholic boarding school where he paid for their upkeep.
At the same time, descendants of A. O. Neville sprang to his defense, producing a biography and a string of documents from his career to demonstrate that, far from being a racist who wanted to see the Aborigines die out, he had dedicated his life to their well-being. When he died, his wife received about 500 letters from Aborigines praising his efforts to rescue abandoned children and protect them from exploitation.
In other words, rather than demonstrating that Australia had “lost its humanity,” Aboriginal policy has consistently been based on humanitarian intentions. This is not to say these aims have been uniformly successful. While 70 percent of people of Aboriginal descent now live in urban areas where large numbers are socially indistinguishable from other Australians, the 30 percent who still live in remote outback communities suffer endemic poverty, poor health and education, as well as rising incidences of alcoholism and domestic violence. Humanitarian intervention, which has usually involved Christian missionaries trying to provide health and education services in these remote areas, has a poor record of success compared to that of the gradual, individual, and unassisted assimilation of Aboriginal people into mainstream society.
When Phillip Noyce recruited the three girls who were to star in his film, he chose them from outback communities in Western Australia. He found the eldest, Everlyn Sampi, who was to play fourteen-year-old Molly in the film, living with her mother at Broome on the north-west coast. A striking number of parallels emerged between the young actress and the character she played. Both had white fathers who had left their mothers. Neither was educated. Molly had attracted the attention of the authorities because of reports she was “running wild with the whites” and was being abused by the full-blood members of her tribe. Everlyn had reached puberty but could not read or write, was regularly truant from school, and Noyce himself became worried about her return to Broome and the life she would lead after the film was made. During rehearsals, Everlyn emulated her character and ran away twice. She was found in a telephone booth trying to book a ticket back to Broome. She was caught and returned to Noyce, who told a journalist her behavior “makes you want to protect her, adopt her.”
Noyce decided to do just that. With her mother’s consent, he arranged for her to enter a boarding school near Perth. But again, just like Molly, she hated it and demanded to be flown home. Last year a television reporter, James Thomas, confronted Noyce with the parallels between his own actions and those of his film’s chief villain, the Aboriginal protector Neville.
Thomas: Picture this: a white man enters a remote Aboriginal community with the best intentions, takes three girls out of their community and promises them fame and fortune. Does it sound familiar?
Noyce: Mmm-hmm.
Thomas: Are you aware of the irony that exists in what you are doing with this film and the actual topic of the film itself?
Noyce: Well, I suppose in one way you could say that in a different context, in a different time, I’m A. O. Neville promising these young Aboriginal children a better life, asking them to do things that are against their instincts, perhaps because it’s for their own good. But we do live in a slightly different world.
While we obviously do live in a different world, Noyce himself succumbed to an instinct that is as old as the British settlement of Australia: the desire to offer Aboriginal people the benefits of civilized life and to educate their children in the ways of the modern world.
If this is true, though, why would Australia’s artists and intellectuals have become so uniformly intent on portraying their own country in such bleak terms, regularly comparing Aboriginal policy to the intentions of the Nazis towards the Jews? Among the most visible of the symbols of this attitude is the new National Museum of Australia whose central construction—shaped as a lightning bolt striking the land—is borrowed from the Jewish Museum in Berlin in order to signify that the Aborigines suffered the equivalent of the Holocaust. The museum’s director described its opening, which coincided with the centenary of federation, as “a birthday gift to Australia,” but symbolically to accuse the nation of the most terrible crime possible was a strange present. Yet, apart from a handful of conservative objectors, the country largely accepted it without demur.
The reason is the consensus reached by the university-based historians of Aboriginal Australia over the past thirty years. This consensus now commands an overwhelming majority of support in the media, the arts, the universities, and the public service. In addition to inventing the “stolen generations” thesis—which originated in 1982 in a book by Peter Read of the Australian National University—academic historians have created a picture of widespread mass killings on the frontiers of the nineteenth-century colonies that not only went unpunished but had covert government support. Some of these colonies engaged in what the principal historian of race relations in Tasmania, Lyndall Ryan, has called “a conscious policy of genocide.”
In 2000 I began a project to re-assess the evidence for this frontier warfare and the massacres that purportedly accompanied it. The project began in Tasmania, or Van Diemen’s Land as it was known until 1855, about which I originally expected to write a single chapter. In re-reading all the archival evidence and double-checking all the claims by historians, however, I found such a wealth of material, including some of the most hair-raising breaches of historical practice imaginable, that Van Diemen’s Land has become the subject of the first of what will eventually be a three-volume series entitled The Fabrication of Aboriginal History. The first book was published in early December by Macleay Press and has ever since been part of a virulent and frequently vicious debate in the press.
Van Diemen’s Land is widely regarded as Australia’s worst-case scenario, indeed, one of the few cases of outright genocide in the British Empire. International writers now routinely compare the British in this colony with the Spaniards in Mexico, the Belgians in the Congo, the Turks in Armenia, and Pol Pot in Cambodia.
My own reconsideration of the evidence comes to a completely different conclusion. In all of Europe’s colonial encounters with the New Worlds of the Americas and the Pacific, Van Diemen’s Land was probably the site where the least indigenous blood of all was deliberately shed. In the entire period from 1803, when the colonists arrived, to 1834, when all but one family of Aborigines had been removed to a sanctuary on Flinders Island, racial conflict resulted in a plausible death toll of one-hundred and eighteen of the original inhabitants, less than four deaths a year.
It is true the original 2000 full-blood Tasmanian Aborigines did die out in the nineteenth century (although they left a trail of mixed-blood descendants who today number about 16,000 out of a total population of 500,000). The demise of the original inhabitants was almost entirely a consequence of two factors: their ten-thousand-year isolation since the last ice age that had left them vulnerable to introduced diseases, especially influenza, pneumonia, and tuberculosis; and the fact that the men traded and prostituted their women to white stockmen and sealers to such an extent that they lost the ability to reproduce themselves.
None of this involved genocide, which requires murderous intention against a whole race of people. The ruling ideas of the age, both in England and the colonies, favored the conciliation of the Aborigines. Van Diemen’s Land was colonized at a time when British society and politics were strongly influenced by a revival of Christian Evangelicalism, expressed in the successful campaign to end slavery, and by the philosophy of the English and Scottish Enlightenment, which emphasized the unity of humankind. The colonial governors and leading settlers not only held these ideas, they publicly expressed and acted upon them. While they suspected their convict lower orders of abusing the Aborigines, their main aim was to prevent this from happening. Their intent was to civilize and modernize the Aborigines, not exterminate them.
On the Aborigines’ side, despite the claims of academic historians, there was nothing that resembled frontier warfare, patriotic struggle, or systematic resistance of any kind. What historians call the “Black War” of Van Diemen’s Land from 1824–1831 began as a minor crime wave by two Europeanized black bushrangers, followed by an outbreak of robbery and murder by tribal Aborigines.
In both Tasmania and the mainland, many Aborigines willingly accommodated themselves to the newcomers. They were drawn to and became part of the new society. Many others, however, were subject to a policy that kept them separated from the white population. The system of segregated missions and reserves that emerged in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries was, in my view, the worst crime that Australia committed against the Aborigines. The missionaries and government officials who initiated this strategy claimed it was to protect them from white violence and white exploitation. They originated this thesis in order to provide a rationale for their own institutions and to provide themselves with a captive audience.
There is no doubt that the segregation was often undertaken with the best of intentions. The missionaries saw themselves fulfilling the evangelical and humanitarian traditions of their own culture. In exaggerating the conflict that did occur, however, and in accepting as true a range of myths, rumors, and frontier yarns about violence, they left a legacy of assertions which academic historians have seized upon over the last thirty years in order to construct their own bleak portrait of the nation’s beginnings.
The leading figures among these historians were educated in the 1960s and were influenced by the politics of that radical decade. In particular, they accepted the Sixties slogan that everything is political, a notion that went a long way to justify the overt politicization of their work. Although several started out as Marxists, they soon welcomed “interest group” politics, in which women, gays, blacks, and ethnics were all portrayed as oppressed by the prevailing social structure. They replaced the class struggle of Marxism with the “gender, race, and class” liberation movements. After the fall of Communism in 1989, many of them abandoned the cause of the workers to take up that of the Aborigines.
Nonetheless, the underlying impetus of those many well-educated, middle-class Australians who have accepted their story has been not so much their politics as the Enlightenment humanitarianism and evangelical Christianity that has been present since the country’s founding. They have inherited a self-critical, morally sensitive culture that readily becomes incensed at breaches of its own ethical rules. This is why they are so willing to believe authors who discover injustices such as those alleged to have been perpetrated against the Aborigines. And this is why those who become the accusers, like Phillip Noyce, often share so much in common with those they accuse, like A. O. Neville.
The obvious problem for such a self-critical moral outlook is its vulnerability to exploitation by those who would mislead and deceive for their own ends. Every now and again such a culture needs a cold bath of factual analysis to bring it to its senses. The time for such a shock to the system in Australia is now well overdue.
This article originally appeared in
The New Criterion, Volume 21, March 2003, on page 12
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Friday, April 20, 2007
Friday, September 22, 2006
And the Gates of Hell will not prevail against you . .
There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church. The history of that Church joins together the two great ages of human civilisation. No other institution is left standing which carries the mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and when camelopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian amphitheatre. The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday, when compared with the line of the Supreme Pontiffs. That line we trace back in an unbroken series, from the Pope who crowned Napoleon in the nineteenth century to the Pope who crowned Pepin in the eighth; and far beyond the time of Pepin the august dynasty extends, till it is lost in the twilight of fable. The
MacCaulay, Thomas Babington
On Ranke’s History of the Popes. 1840.
Saturday, August 26, 2006
The Dark Ages?
"There is something odd in the fact that when we reproduce the Middle Ages it is always some such rough and half-grotesque part of them that we reproduce . . . Why is it that we mainly remember the Middle Ages by absurd things? . . . Few modern people know what a mass of illuminating philosophy, delicate metaphysics, clear and dignified social morality exists in the serious scholastic writers of mediaeval times. But we seem to have grasped somehow that the ruder and more clownish elements in the Middle Ages have a human and poetical interest. We are delighted to know about the ignorance of mediaevalism; we are contented to be ignorant about its knowledge. When we talk of something mediaeval, we mean something quaint. We remember that alchemy was mediaeval, or that heraldry was mediaeval. We forget that Parliaments are mediaeval, that all our Universities are mediaeval, that city corporations are mediaeval, that gunpowder and printing are mediaeval, that half the things by which we now live, and to which we look for progress, are mediaeval."" -- "The True Middle Ages," The Illustrated London News, 14 July 1906 - G. K. Chesterton
Thursday, August 24, 2006
How Christianity (and Capitalism) Led to Science
When Europeans first began to explore the globe, their greatest surprise was not the existence of the Western Hemisphere, but the extent of their own technological superiority over the rest of the world. Not only were the proud Maya, Aztec, and Inca nations helpless in the face of European intruders, so were the fabled civilizations of the East: China, India, and Islamic nations were "backward" by comparison with 15th-century Europe. How had that happened? Why was it that, although many civilizations had pursued alchemy, the study led to chemistry only in Europe? Why was it that, for centuries, Europeans were the only ones possessed of eyeglasses, chimneys, reliable clocks, heavy cavalry, or a system of music notation? How had the nations that had arisen from the rubble of Rome so greatly surpassed the rest of the world?
Several recent authors have discovered the secret to Western success in geography. But that same geography long also sustained European cultures that were well behind those of Asia. Other commentators have traced the rise of the West to steel, or to guns and sailing ships, and still others have credited a more productive agriculture. The trouble is that those answers are part of what needs to be explained: Why did Europeans excel at metallurgy, shipbuilding, or farming?
The most convincing answer to those questions attributes Western dominance to the rise of capitalism, which took place only in Europe. Even the most militant enemies of capitalism credit it with creating previously undreamed of productivity and progress. In The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels proposed that before the rise of capitalism, humans engaged "in the most slothful indolence"; the capitalist system was "the first to show what man's activity can bring about." Capitalism achieved that miracle through regular reinvestment to increase productivity, either to create greater capacity or improve technology, and by motivating both management and labor through ever-rising payoffs.
Supposing that capitalism did produce Europe's own "great leap forward," it remains to be explained why capitalism developed only in Europe. Some writers have found the roots of capitalism in the Protestant Reformation; others have traced it back to various political circumstances. But, if one digs deeper, it becomes clear that the truly fundamental basis not only for capitalism, but for the rise of the West, was an extraordinary faith in reason.
A series of developments, in which reason won the day, gave unique shape to Western culture and institutions. And the most important of those victories occurred within Christianity. While the other world religions emphasized mystery and intuition, Christianity alone embraced reason and logic as the primary guides to religious truth. Christian faith in reason was influenced by Greek philosophy. But the more important fact is that Greek philosophy had little impact on Greek religions. Those remained typical mystery cults, in which ambiguity and logical contradictions were taken as hallmarks of sacred origins. Similar assumptions concerning the fundamental inexplicability of the gods and the intellectual superiority of introspection dominated all of the other major world religions.
But, from early days, the church fathers taught that reason was the supreme gift from God and the means to progressively increase understanding of Scripture and revelation. Consequently Christianity was oriented to the future, while the other major religions asserted the superiority of the past. At least in principle, if not always in fact, Christian doctrines could always be modified in the name of progress, as demonstrated by reason. Encouraged by the scholastics and embodied in the great medieval universities founded by the church, faith in the power of reason infused Western culture, stimulating the pursuit of science and the evolution of democratic theory and practice. The rise of capitalism also was a victory for church-inspired reason, since capi-talism is, in essence, the systematic and sustained application of reason to com-merce — something that first took place within the great monastic estates.
During the past century Western intellectuals have been more than willing to trace European imperialism to Christian origins, but they have been entirely un-willing to recognize that Christianity made any contribution (other than intolerance) to the Western capacity to dominate other societies. Rather, the West is said to have surged ahead precisely as it overcame re-ligious barriers to progress, especially those impeding science. Nonsense. The success of the West, including the rise of science, rested entirely on religious foundations, and the people who brought it about were devout Christians. Unfortunately, even many of those historians willing to grant Christianity a role in shaping Western progress have tended to limit themselves to tracing beneficial religious effects of the Protestant Reformation. It is as if the previous 1,500 years of Christianity either were of little matter, or were harmful.
Such academic anti-Roman Catholicism inspired the most famous book ever written on the origins of capitalism. At the start of the 20th century, the German sociologist Max Weber published what soon became an immensely influential study: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In it Weber proposed that capitalism originated only in Europe because, of all the world's religions, only Protestantism provided a moral vision that led people to restrain their material consumption while vigorously seeking wealth. Weber argued that, before the Reformation, restraint on consumption was invariably linked to asceticism and, hence, to condemnations of commerce. Conversely, the pursuit of wealth was linked to profligate consumption. Either cultural pattern was inimical to capitalism. According to Weber, the Protestant ethic shattered those traditional linkages, creating a culture of frugal entrepreneurs content to systematically reinvest profits in order to pursue ever greater wealth, and therein lies the key to capitalism and the ascendancy of the West.
Perhaps because it was such an elegant thesis, it was widely embraced, despite the fact that it was so obviously wrong. Even today The Protestant Ethic enjoys an almost sacred status among sociologists, although economic historians quickly dismissed Weber's surprisingly undocumented monograph on the irrefutable grounds that the rise of capitalism in Europe preceded the Reformation by centuries. Only a decade after Weber published, the celebrated Belgian scholar Henri Pirenne noted a large literature that "established the fact that all of the essential features of capitalism — individual enterprise, advances in credit, commercial profits, speculation, etc. — are to be found from the 12th century on, in the city republics of Italy — Venice, Genoa, or Florence." A generation later, the equally celebrated French historian Fernand Braudel complained, "All historians have opposed this tenuous theory, although they have not managed to be rid of it once and for all. Yet it is clearly false. The northern countries took over the place that earlier had so long and brilliantly been occupied by the old capitalist centers of the Mediterranean. They invented nothing, either in technology or business management." Braudel might have added that, during their critical period of economic development, those northern centers of capitalism were Catholic, not Protestant — the Reformation still lay well into the future. Further, as the Canadian historian John Gilchrist, an authority on the economic activity of the medieval church, pointed out, the first examples of capitalism appeared in the great Christian monasteries.
Though Weber was wrong, however, he was correct to suppose that religious ideas played a vital role in the rise of capitalism in Europe. The material conditions needed for capitalism existed in many civilizations in various eras, including China, the Islamic world, India, Byzantium, and probably ancient Rome and Greece as well. But none of those societies broke through and developed capitalism, as none evolved ethical visions compatible with that dynamic economic system. Instead, leading religions outside the West called for asceticism and denounced profits, while wealth was exacted from peasants and merchants by rapacious elites dedicated to display and consumption. Why did things turn out differently in Europe? Because of the Christian commitment to rational theology, something that may have played a major role in causing the Reformation, but that surely predated Protestantism by far more than a millennium.
Even so, capitalism developed in only some locales. Why not in all? Because in some European societies, as in most of the rest of the world, it was prevented from happening by greedy despots. Freedom also was essential for the development of capitalism. That raises another matter: Why has freedom so seldom existed in most of the world, and how was it nurtured in some medieval European states? That, too, was a victory of reason. Before any medieval European state actually attempted rule by an elected council, Christian theologians had long been theorizing about the nature of equality and individual rights — indeed, the later work of such secular 18th-century political theorists as John Locke explicitly rested on egalitarian axioms derived by church scholars.
All of this stemmed from the fact that from earliest days, the major theologians taught that faith in reason was intrinsic to faith in God. As Quintus Tertullian instructed in the second century, "Reason is a thing of God, inasmuch as there is nothing which God the Maker of all has not provided, disposed, ordained by reason — nothing which He has not willed should be handled and understood by reason." Consequently it was assumed that reason held the key to progress in understanding scripture, and that knowledge of God and the secrets of his creation would increase over time. St. Augustine (c. 354-430) flatly asserted that through the application of reason we will gain an increasingly more accurate understanding of God, remarking that although there are "certain matters pertaining to the doctrine of salvation that we cannot yet grasp ... one day we shall be able to do so."
Nor was the Christian belief in progress limited to theology. Augustine went on at length about the "wonderful — one might say stupefying — advances human industry has made." All were attributed to the "unspeakable boon" that God has conferred upon his creation, a "rational nature." Those views were repeated again and again through the centuries. Especially typical were these words preached by Fra Giordano, in Florence in 1306: "Not all the arts have been found; we shall never see an end of finding them."
Christian faith in reason and in progress was the foundation on which Western success was achieved. As the distinguished philosopher Alfred North Whitehead put it during one of his Lowell Lectures at Harvard in 1925, science arose only in Europe because only there did people think that science could be done and should be done, a faith "derivative from medieval theology."
Moreover the medieval Christian faith in reason and progress was constantly reinforced by actual progress, by technical and organizational innovations, many of them fostered by Christianity. For the past several centuries, far too many of us have been misled by the incredible fiction that, from the fall of Rome until about the 15th century, Europe was submerged in the Dark Ages — centuries of ignorance, superstition, and misery — from which it was suddenly, almost miraculously, rescued; first by the Ren-aissance and then by the Enlightenment. But, as even dictionaries and encyclopedias recently have begun to acknowledge, it was all a lie!
It was during the so-called Dark Ages that European technology and science overtook and surpassed the rest of the world. Some of that involved original inventions and discoveries; some of it came from Asia. But what was so remarkable was the way that the full capacities of new technologies were recognized and widely adopted. By the 10th century Europe already was far ahead in terms of farm-ing equipment and techniques, had unmatched capacities in the use of water and wind power, and possessed superior military equipment and tactics. Not to be overlooked in all that medieval progress was the invention of a whole new way to organize and operate commerce and industry: capitalism.
Capitalism was developed by the great monastic estates. Throughout the medieval era, the church was by far the largest landowner in Europe, and its liquid assets and annual income probably exceeded that of all of Europe's nobility added together. Much of that wealth poured into the coffers of the religious orders, not only because they were the largest landowners, but also in payment for liturgical services — Henry VII of England paid a huge sum to have 10,000 masses said for his soul. As rapid innovation in agricultural technology began to yield large surpluses to the religious orders, the church not only began to reinvest profits to increase production, but diversified. Having substantial amounts of cash on hand, the religious orders began to lend money at interest. They soon evolved the mortgage (literally, "dead pledge") to lend money with land for security, collecting all income from the land during the term of the loan, none of which was deducted from the amount owed. That practice often added to the monastery's lands because the monks were not hesitant to foreclose. In addition, many monasteries began to rely on a hired labor force and to display an uncanny ability to adopt the latest technological advances. Capitalism had arrived.
Still, like all of the world's other major religions, for centuries Christianity took a dim view of commerce. As the many great Christian monastic orders maximized profits and lent money at whatever rate of interest the market would bear, they were increasingly subject to condemnations from more traditional members of the clergy who accused them of avarice.
Given the fundamental commitment of Christian theologians to reason and progress, what they did was rethink the traditional teachings. What is a just price for one's goods, they asked? According to the immensely influential St. Albertus Magnus (1193-1280), the just price is simply what "goods are worth according to the estimate of the market at the time of sale." That is, a just price is not a function of the amount of profit, but is whatever uncoerced buyers are willing to pay. Adam Smith would have agreed — St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) did. As for usury, a host of leading theologians of the day remained opposed to it, but quickly defined it out of practical existence. For example, no usury was involved if the interest was paid to compensate the lender for the costs of not having the money available for other commercial opportunities, which was almost always easily demonstrated.
That was a remarkable shift. Most of these theologians were, after all, men who had separated themselves from the world, and most of them had taken vows of poverty. Had asceticism truly prevailed in the monasteries, it seems very unlikely that the traditional disdain for and opposition to commerce would have mellowed. That it did, and to such a revolutionary extent, was a result of direct experience with worldly imperatives. For all their genuine acts of charity, monastic administrators were not about to give all their wealth to the poor, sell their products at cost, or give kings interest-free loans. It was the active participation of the great orders in free markets that caused monastic theologians to reconsider the morality of commerce.
The religious orders could pursue their economic goals because they were sufficiently powerful to withstand any attempts at seizure by an avaricious nobility. But for fully developed secular capitalism to unfold, there needed to be broader freedom from regulation and expropriation. Hence secular capitalism appeared first in the relatively democratic city-states of north-ern Italy, whose political institutions rested squarely on church doctrines of free will and moral equality.
Augustine, Aquinas, and other major theologians taught that the state must respect private property and not intrude on the freedom of its citizens to pursue virtue. In addition, there was the central Christian doctrine that, regardless of worldly inequalities, inequality in the most important sense does not exist: in the eyes of God and in the world to come. As Paul explained: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor fee, there is neither male nor female, for ye are all one in Christ Jesus."
And church theologians and leaders meant it. Through all prior recorded history, slavery was universal — Christianity began in a world where as much as half the population was in bondage. But by the seventh century, Christianity had become the only major world religion to formulate specific theological opposition to slavery, and, by no later than the 11th century, the church had expelled the dreadful institution from Europe. That it later reappeared in the New World is another matter, although there, too, slavery was vigorously condemned by popes and all of the eventual abolition movements were of religious origins.
Free labor was an essential ingredient for the rise of capitalism, for free workers can maximize their rewards by working harder or more effectively than before. In contrast, coerced workers gain nothing from doing more. Put another way, tyranny makes a few people richer; capitalism can make everyone richer. Therefore, as the northern Italian city-states developed capitalist economies, visitors marveled at their standards of living; many were equally confounded by how hard everyone worked.
The common denominator in all these great historical developments was the Christian commitment to reason.
That was why the West won.
Rodney Stark is university professor of the social sciences at Baylor University. This essay is adapted from The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success, to be published in December by Random House. Copyright © by Rodney Stark.
http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 52, Issue 15, Page B11
Tuesday, February 07, 2006
Millenial Tragedy:Act 2
Comedienne Julia Gorin with biting wit sums up the spirit that operates in much left wing thinking today. Without communism to support, whither do they go?
"In a classic schoolyard scenario, instead of facing up to the bully, Foxman and Eric Yoffie — the Union for Reform (i.e. Liberal) Judaism president who the following week compared Christians to Hitler — are taking their frustrations out on their friends."
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/julia/gorin120105.php3
"In a classic schoolyard scenario, instead of facing up to the bully, Foxman and Eric Yoffie — the Union for Reform (i.e. Liberal) Judaism president who the following week compared Christians to Hitler — are taking their frustrations out on their friends."
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/julia/gorin120105.php3
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