[link] Relative angels and absolute demons
I wanted to bring attention to two posts from Razib Khan’s Discover magazine gene expression blog (some of you may have been readers of the still active original gnxp) on the polemic surrounding Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature.
Faced with the ceaseless stream of news about war, crime, and terrorism, one could easily think we live in the most violent age ever seen. Yet as New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker shows in this startling and engaging new work, just the opposite is true: violence has been diminishing for millennia and we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species’s existence. For most of history, war, slavery, infanticide, child abuse, assassinations, pogroms, gruesome punishments, deadly quarrels, and genocide were ordinary features of life. But today, Pinker shows (with the help of more than a hundred graphs and maps) all these forms of violence have dwindled and are widely condemned. How has this happened?
This groundbreaking book continues Pinker’s exploration of the essence of human nature, mixing psychology and history to provide a remarkable picture of an increasingly nonviolent world. The key, he explains, is to understand our intrinsic motives- the inner demons that incline us toward violence and the better angels that steer us away-and how changing circumstances have allowed our better angels to prevail. Exploding fatalist myths about humankind’s inherent violence and the curse of modernity, this ambitious and provocative book is sure to be hotly debated in living rooms and the Pentagon alike, and will challenge and change the way we think about our society.
Relative Angels and absolute Demons (and the related But peace does reign! )
There are two separate points to note here; a specific and a general. I suspect Steven Pinker knows more history than Elizabeth Kolbert. I’ve talked to Pinker once at length, and just as in his books he comes across as very widely knowledgeable. I’ll be frank and say that I don’t feel many people I talk to are widely knowledgeable, and when it comes to something like history I’m in a position to judge. Ironically Kolbert is repeating the Anglo-Protestant Black Legend about the Spaniards, rooted in the rivalries and sectarianism of the 16th and 18th centuries, but persisting down amongst English speaking secular intellectuals. The reality is that the Spaniards did not want to kill the indigenous peoples, they died of disease and the societal destabilization that disease entailed. Europeans who arrived from Iberia in the New World ideally wished to collect rents from peasants. The death of those peasants due to disease was a major inconvenience, which entailed the importation of black Africans who were resistant to the Old World diseases like malaria which were spreading across the American tropics. The violence done to native peoples was predominantly pathogenic, not physical.
...
I suspect that Kolbert’s emphasis on the European colonial experience of much of the world is influenced by the ubiquity of the postcolonial paradigm. Those who take postcolonial thinking as normative sometimes forget that not everyone shares their framework. I do not, and I would be willing to bet that Steven Pinker would also dissent from the presuppositions of postcolonialism. That means that the facts, the truths, that many take for granted are actually not taken for granted by all, and are disputed. One of the issues with postcolonial models is that they seem to view Europeans and European culture, and their colonial enterprises, as sui generis. This makes generalization from the West, as Pinker does, problematic. But for those of us who don’t see the West as qualitatively different there is far less of an issue.
I generally agree with some of his arguments, but found this quote especially as summing up some of my own sentiments:
A postcolonial model is ironically extremely Eurocentric, with a total blindness to what came before Europeans.
For those who don’t have the book, I suspect a lot of the meat could be found in Pinker’s previous essays on the topic of historical violence:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker07/pinker07_index.html
http://edge.org/conversation/mc2011-history-violence-pinker
We no longer draw and quarter people, but we imprison far more people.
State repression that was once considered extraordinary is now routine. Before the French Revolutionary Red Terror, the Spanish inquisition, which killed a dozen or so people every year, was the standard evil example of repression, and Queen Bloody Mary, who murdered a couple of hundred and caused a thousand or so to flee, the classic tyrant.
Today, however, Prince Sihanouk, however, who murdered twelve thousand, many of them in ways colorful, dramatic, and extraordinary, is however sainted for his extraordinary peacefulness and tolerance.
Pinker pats progressives on the back because we no longer draw and quarter people, but Aristide murdered his political enemies in grotesque ways as vile as any medieval despot, and yet, like Prince Sihanouk, is sainted for his peacefulness and tolerance. Aristide personally gouged out the eyes of one of his goons, a job that any medieval despot would have given to a masked executioner.
We civilized white people no longer gouge out people’s eyes, nor burn people alive, the way we used to, and the way our pet despots like Aristide still do , but we imprison a hell of a lot more people than we used to, in part because of increased underclass criminality, but in part because so many things that respectable white middle class people do have been criminalized.
Over the past hundred years, state and private violence has increased massively—the private crime rate has risen, and the imprisonment rate has risen faster, which arguably constitutes increasing state crime. The World Wars were worse than Napoleonic wars, and modern repression has been spectacularly and enormously more severe than medieval repression. Queen Bloody Mary was a tyrant for killing two hundred, but Tito not a tyrant for killing two hundred thousand.
That’s probably attributed to the parochialism of Bretons of the era—they couldn’t know about the Yangzhou massacre in China where 800,000 people were slaughtered, and the Massacre of the Latins in the 12th century in Constantinople wouldn’t stick in their minds.
But I’m sure they remembered St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre in the 16th century—and in Central Europe “Vlad Tepes the Impaler” who killed tens of thousands people was known too.
Oh, please, sainting monsters has a long tradition, a tradition atleast as old as Theodosius “The Great”, proclaimed the Great, and revered by the Orthodox Church, because of how greatly he butchered thousands of pagans back in the 4th century AD.
This comment of yours has got me thinking:
I’m not sure what exact atrocities attributed to Theodosius you have in mind with this comment (there were certainly many). However, it is significant that after the most notable of his atrocities—the massacres following the suppression of the rebellion in Thessalonica—Theodosius was openly rebuked by Ambrose, the bishop of Milan and the foremost intellectual authority of the church at the time, and was forced to repent publicly. The incident was left as a permanent stain on his record, and even in Christian traditions that recognize him as a saint, the event is recognized as a reminder that great and saintly men can be fallible to the point of committing horrible sins. (Also, the title “Great” for a select few rulers has traditionally referred to the extraordinary magnitude of their historical impact much more than to the general righteousness of their character and deeds.)
In my opinion, this perspective compares rather favorably with the 20th century custom of utter idealization of ideological movements and leaders. (This includes the still ongoing idealization of the predecessors of the current U.S. regime, especially those from the New Deal/WW2 era, but also the later ones.)
(I’m not pointing this out in order to side myself against you in the ongoing discussion, but because it does seem to me that this trend of, for lack of a less ugly term, ideologically motivated idealization of political gangsters and swindlers really has reached extraordinary levels in recent history.)
Those incidents were war, not repression. You need to compare twelfth century repression with twentieth century repression, and twelfth century war with twentieth century war.
Modern repression is enormously more violent than ancient repression. Modern wars are larger and bloodier than ancient wars. Incidents where the populace of a vanquished city were massacred may be less common in modern wars, but if so this may be because we can accomplish the same effect more efficiently by such means as were employed at Dresden and Hiroshima. If you flatten a city before you take it, this discourages resistance more effectively than slaughtering a city that stubbornly resisted for an unreasonably long time.
You recall the crimes of the revered Theodosius, but overlook the crimes of the revered Che Guevara. Seems to me that modern times has a larger supply of revered bloody monsters.
Don’t strawman me, I don’t appreciate it. It’s you who seemed to argue that we only revere monsters nowadays. I on the other hand argued that we’ve always been revering monsters. Nowadays some people revere monsters like Che Guevara, other people revere monsters like Ronald Reagan, etc, etc...
“Bloody Mary” wasn’t called a tyrant because of the horribleness of her actions, she was called a tyrant because she persecuted the Protestants and the Protestants ended up winning the United Kingdom—in short she ended up on the losing side of history. It’s politics, not morality, that determined her legacy.
If you want to determine whether the violence level has been increasing or decreasing, one good measure is to compare religious persecutions of the past, with political persecutions of the twentieth century. There is no comparison. Political persecutions were enormously bloodier, and the political persecutors were generally admired in their time, whereas their religious equivalents were condemned in their time.
Someone who executed two hundred religious heretics does deserve the title Bloody Mary.
You say she only got the title for being a Catholic. Well then, who is is the protestant King or Queen of England who better deserves the title?
You say the Spanish inquisition was demonized merely because it was Catholic. Well then, what protestant inquisition executed a dozen or so heretics a year for a few centuries?
The fact is that Bloody Mary and the Spanish Inquisition were pretty much as bad as it got, and that is why they have the bad name that they do have. But modern leftists who only murder a few thousand or so get sainted, because the usual thing a few hundred thousand.
Hmm… It’d be an interesting project to calculate P(Violence) (the likelihood a person will have significant violence inflicted on them) for various time periods, and also the equivalent P(Violence|Activity) for various activities (religious disagreement, disagreement with your nation’s war, proclaiming the ruler of your nation to be a nincompoop, etc).
Not quite, I said she got it for persecuting the Protestants while the Protestants ended up winning. If she had been a Catholic but not persecuted them, she’d not have gotten the title, same way she wouldn’t have gotten it if she had slaughtered them wholesale and they ended up losing.
Evidence for the above claim: That the slaughter of St.Bartholemew’s day didn’t bestow a similar title to Charles of France—the Catholics in France defeated the Protestants afterall. So no “bloody” title for Charles of France.
Charles I of England conducted war against his own nation—he was so bad a king that he got himself beheaded. But he’s now a saint of the Anglican church.
I didn’t say that either.
The destruction of the Cathars had Arnaud Amalric brag to the Pope “Today your Holiness, twenty thousand heretics were put to the sword, regardless of rank, age, or sex.”.
Where was the condemnation for that? The monk got made archbishop.
P(Violence) is a lot easier to calculate than P(Violence|Activity) for various activities. It also gets into definitional issues (is being born to a certain racial group an activity?).
But P(Violence) has definitely gone down. That’s a major part of Pinker’s point and is pretty uncontroversial. However, there have been specific spikes. For example, the introduction of efficient fire arms and longbows made casualty rates go up during the Hundred Years War. Similarly, right before World War I, there were about 1.8 billion people worldwide. About 17 million people died in the war so that’s about 1% of the world’s population. In contrast, the population around 1800 was around 1 billion. But in the various Napoleonic wars around 4 million people died. So if one compares specific wars one does get some jumps.
If however one looks at the overall number of violent deaths even from just 1700 to 2000 one sees a general decline. The last sixty years have been especially peaceful by this metric, but that’s partially just due to the population boom.
If one wants a real contrast, note that of early homo sapiens skeletons, about 5-10% show signs of violent death.(I’ve seen this statement before but don’t unfortunately have a source on hand for it.) That’s almost full order of magnitude more than the general violent death rate at the worst times in modern history.
Charles I was, like Louis, and Tsar Nicolas, a good King. Reform is dangerous, not repression. Tsar Nicholas suffered revolution and execution because under him the state swerved left, and Charles I suffered revolution and execution because under him the state swerved Whig. Charles I’s position was libertarian: That a good King is a King whose subject’s lives and property are their own.
It is probably not true that he reported that to the Pope. It is true that he wiped out a town of thousands of people, possibly twenty thousand people. It is probably true that he said of the people in the town “kill them all, God will know his own”, or words to that effect if not those exact words.
This however, occurred in a holy war, against armed resisting people, not a peacetime persecution, therefore needs to be compared with modern political civil wars and revolutions, not modern political repressions. Similarly for the Saint. Bartholomew’s Day massacre.
For religious repressions, the best you have got is the Spanish Inquisition and Bloody Mary, which is by modern standards, nothing. When a modern leftist regime kills on that scale, you think them liberal democrats.
Let us compare repression of heretics under Queen Elizabeth, with repression of conservatives today: Every play by Shakespeare expressed a worldview that was Roman Catholic, pagan, or atheist/materialist. No Hollywood movies express a worldview that is politically incorrect
Ah, Tsar Nicolas, the guy who involved his country in the nonsensical World War I, and thus caused 3.3 millions of his people to die needless deaths. The seeming pattern I observe is that you like certain rulers just because you happen to hate the people that deposed them.
“To raise revenue without reconvening Parliament, Charles first resurrected an all-but-forgotten law called the Distraint of Knighthood, promulgated in 1279, which required anyone who earned £40 or more each year to present himself at the King’s coronation to join the royal army as a knight. Later, Charles reintroduced obsolete feudal taxes such as purveyance, wardship, and forest laws”
I don’t think that’s the libertarian position. Excessive taxation seems to be one of the chief complaints against him.
Modern “leftist” regimes that I consider liberal democratic ones have abolished the death penalty, and they don’t kill, period—my examples of liberal democracies would be countries like Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Netherlands; not Cuba or Venezuela.
First of all, your selectively chosen comparisons become tiresome.
Second, you’d have to identify what you mean by “conservatives”. Does Bush Jr count as a conservative? If yes, then conservatives nowadays can become Presidents of America, and Catholics back then couldn’t become prime ministers.
Do you mean things like “Aaron is an atheist, and he’s the most evil person that ever walked on earth” (Titus Andronicus), or “Joan of Arc is a catholic, and she’s an evil witch justly executed” (Henry VI, Part 1)
Shakespeare was notoriously politically restricted in what he could display. My favourite example is Macbeth where he had to portray Macbeth as a cowardly murderer, and the previous king as a good one, just because the current lineage of kings was believed to descend from the slain king. That’s extreme historical revisionism: In actual reality Macbeth had led an open revolt against king Duncan—Duncan died in battle. Macbeth was considered a good and generous king—“Marianus Scotus tells how the king made a pilgrimage to Rome in 1050, where, Marianus says, he gave money to the poor as if it were seed.”
“Unlike later writers, no near contemporary source remarks on Macbeth as a tyrant. The Duan Albanach, which survives in a form dating to the reign of Malcolm III, calls him “Mac Bethad the renowned”. The Prophecy of Berchán, a verse history which purports to be a prophecy, describes him as “the generous king of Fortriu”″
But according to Shakespeare, Macbeth must be a villainous murderous tyrant, and Jeanne D’arc must be a witch. Because that’s what the political reality of his time demanded.
Say what you will about Hollywood, but they’ve not portrayed Gandhi as a bloodthirsty serial killer yet, nor have they portrayed Stalin or Che Guevara as heroes either. Shakespeare did do the equivalent thereof.
I haven’t seen it, but judging from the trailer and Wikipedia entry, The Motorcycle Diaries portrays Guevara positively.
It isn’t a Hollywood movie (the production companies are British and Argentine), but it was distributed by a division of Universal Studios.
It’s about Guevara as a young man, before he became a revolutionary.
That’s a pretty bold claim.
Especially since the political correctness people routinely complain about Hollywood movies.
I’d be careful with this line of reasoning—complaining about lack of political correctness could be a matter of attempting to push “political correctness” further or signaling continued relevance.
People have different standards for offense—sam0345 may be upset that there aren’t more conservative worldviews in Hollywood while leftists may be upset that there aren’t more progressive worldviews in Hollywood. To the Left there are lots of movies that express worldviews that are politically incorrect to them. To sam0345 maybe all the movies in Hollywood are too politically correct. What fact is actually under debate here?
Pinker is certainly much above the typical academic of today, but reading his arguments, I can’t help but conclude that even an exceptional figure such as him is nowadays incapable of discussing matters like these sensibly. He simply lacks an adequate and broad enough knowledge of history and other relevant fields, as well as a reasonably unbiased view of the modern world, and ends up constructing arguments based on a naive and cartoonish view of both history and the present.
On the whole, Pinker is great when he sticks to topics where arguments based on particular solid scientific findings suffice, like for example in The Blank Slate. However, his attempts at grand theories such as these, where a sensible argument would require a very broad knowledge of a great many things that is not offered by today’s elite education, as well as many insights into the modern world and modern history that go significantly beyond the cartoonish textbook accounts, strike me as painfully naive and misguided.
One one hand I agree (facially the claim about the Enlightenment fostering resistance to slavery is particularly bizarre, or at least lazy.) On the other hand there’s frequently great value in works that painstakingly document an empirical trend, even if the causal explanations they offer inspire skepticism—the work of Gregory Clark comes to mind.
I agree that documenting empirical trends is valuable, but only as long as the limitations of the data are not forgotten. A neat graph often makes things look misleadingly simple.
For example, the historical murder figures are already problematic for Pinker’s thesis considering that the trend has, according to his own graphs, reversed at some point during the the 20th century—but they are absolutely devastating whey you consider that the present murder rate would be at least several times higher without the 20th century advances in medicine, thanks to which most of the once lethal wounds are now easily treated. (And all this is without even considering that what is expected as regular behavior nowadays when it comes to precautions against crime would have struck people from not so long ago as utterly paranoid siege mentality, and so on.) Generally, arguments based on simple plots of historical trends are likely to overlook all sorts of relevant confounding variables.
As for the particular cartoonish and bizarre historical and political claims by Pinker, I wouldn’t even know where to start. Most of his article would be deserving of a good fisking.
Edit: According to Murder and Medicine: The Lethality of Criminal Assault 1960-1999 by A.R. Harris et al. (ungated link here):
Note also that the ceteris paribus assumption doesn’t take into account the effect of the enormous changes in people’s lifestyle since 1960 that have been prompted by the increased danger of crime.
I’m curious why you think this, looking at the history to strikes me as fairly obvious. The meme that slavery is wrong in principal, as opposed to only being wrong when it happens to you, is definitely a product of the enlightenment.
That’s true only under a highly contrived definition of the Enlightenment, which defines it more or less as the set of all intellectual trends in the 18th century that are in sufficient agreement with today’s respectable opinion. (Admittedly, this is more or less how the term is used in today’s standard cartoon history.)
In reality, the modern anti-slavery attitudes are due to the political (and military) victories of the abolitionist movements in the English-speaking world in the period 1807-1865. These were strongly religious in character, and influenced by the Enlightenment only insofar as all major intellectual trends influence each other to some degree.
The French First Republic abolished slavery in 1794 -- and that one was explicitly anti-Christian. Spain abolished slavery in 1811.
I don’t really disagree with you factually about the role of England or of Christians… but Christianity had been around for about 1800 years by that time. Christianity wasn’t a new thing that we can therefore attribute the end of slavery to its coming.
In short: P(Abolitionist ideas|Christian Ideas) < P(Abolitionist ideas|Enlightenment Ideas)
You seem to be assuming that my goal is to make a point that would somehow be in favor of Christianity in general. My writing was not motivated by any such goal, and lumping all historical Christians (under whatever definition) together on an issue like this is meaningless, given the diversity of their views. Moreover, it is clear that the concrete people and denominations who stood behind abolitionism were on the outer fringes of Protestantism, and motivated in their activism by their peculiarities much more than any universal Christian beliefs.
My goal was merely to clarify the historical origin of the concrete anti-slavery laws and attitudes that are in force in today’s world, not to speculate on what exact circumstances are likely to give birth to anti-slavery ideas.
Well … it’s a little more complicated than that.
Slavery was abolished for the first time in England in 1102, though it kept coming back; it was abolished again in Cartwright’s case of 1569, for instance. However, when people refer to “abolition of slavery” today, they usually mean the abolition of the African slave trade and then of slavery in the New World, notably the Caribbean colonies and the United States.
In Great Britain, many Enlightenment philosophers including Locke and Mill were significant opponents of slavery and the slave trade — although so too were many religious dissenters, notably Quakers, who tended to be better organized and more committed. The mainstream Church of England, in contrast, held many slaves itself; so this wasn’t a case of religion vs. irreligion. For that matter, religious toleration, which led to the legalization of the Quakers and other dissenting churches, was itself arguably an Enlightenment project. The Enlightenment was never an expressly atheistic movement in Britain or America; English Freemasonry, rather deeply involved with the Enlightenment, to this day does not accept atheists.
Meanwhile in France and the French colonies in the New World, slavery was abolished by the “Enlightenment” (and “rationalist”!) French Revolution, then shortly re-established by Napoleon. That didn’t work out so well for Haiti …
Well, yes, it is a lot more complicated if you want to get into all the details. However, the concrete political movements that led to the abolition of British slave trade in 1807, the subsequent British commitment to stamp out the slave trade globally with the Royal Navy, the Empire-wide Abolition Act in 1833, and the American struggles over slavery that culminated with the Civil War, were overwhelmingly instigated and promoted by religiously motivated people coming mostly from Quaker and certain other Dissenter groups. The modern anti-slavery attitudes draw their ideological origins primarily from these people and their work.
Also, some of your details are not quite right. Locke was by no means a principled opponent of slavery—he considered slavery legitimate in certain cases (“state of war continued”) that he outlined in his Second Treatise. (Also, I have read, though never seen conclusive evidence, that he had some financial interest in the slavery business and participated in drafting a strongly pro-slavery constitution for the Carolina colony.) Mill can’t be classified under the Enlightenment unless its definition is made absurdly overbroad, and even regardless, he was a latecomer to the whole issue.
It is true that the British and American Enlightenment was never as atheistic as the French. (This was to some degree because of its representatives’ actual beliefs, but also because atheism was more dangerous for one’s reputation and career in Britain and America than in France.) However, the leading British and American Enlightenment figures—from Locke to Hume to Smith to Gibbon to the U.S. founders -- were definitely not among the leading anti-slavery activists of their day, and I’m not sure if any of them even made a principled condemnation of it. Whatever we make out of it, the people who actually started and promoted abolitionism as an ideological and political force were first and foremost religious Quakers and other Dissenters, for whom the Enlightenment was at most a side influence.
Back before 1940 progressivism was nominally Christian and protestant.
The new testament takes an extreme socially conservative position on sex and marriage: Marriage should be patriarchal, a woman should never divorce her husband, no matter what, and a divorced woman should never remarry while her husband lives. It takes a moderate position on alcohol, suggesting one should drink socially at meal times, and an alarmingly moderate position on slavery. It is desirable to free one’s own slaves, at least if they convert to Christianity, but by no means required, and one should not free anyone else’s slaves by any pressure stronger than moral suasion.
That branch of Christianity that was in substantial part a political movement, the ancestor of today’s non communist left, found the new testament inconvenient, and tended to demote Jesus from God to major community organizer, since the politics of the new testament imply no role for Christian political activists—Christians are supposed to do good, but, if they take the new testament seriously, none of the good they are supposed to do is appropriate to being done through the state. A theocratic Christianity is a absurd as a non theocratic Islam, so to the extent that Christians have been active in politics, they tended to ditch the New Testament, (Christians on the left) or else claim with varying degrees of plausibility to be defending the Church from state intervention (Christian conservatives)
RETRACTING: I missed the Pauline quotes from Corinthians, which makes my whole post irrelevant.
You’re right about one of these, that the new testament (specifically Paul) says marriage should be patriarchal. The other words you spoke are the exact other way around. The exact New Testament quotes are:
“Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason at all?” ” After a long passage Jesus at the end responds “What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate.” and also Mathhew 5:32 “But I say to you, That whoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causes her to commit adultery: and whoever shall marry her that is divorced commits adultery.”
And also Luke 16:18: “Everyone who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery, and he who marries one who is divorced from a husband commits adultery. ”
--
In short, in complete opposition to what you said, the new Testament says that a man should never divorce his wife, and that a divorced man should never remarry after a divorce (or marry a woman who was divorced) -- it’s the man who is committing adultery in both these cases, or who is causing the woman to commit adultery (and thus is portrayed as ultimately responsible for this sin).
I want to be charitable in my interpretation of your words, but these factoids seem way too reversed to have been an honest mistake in your part.
It’s easy to google the quotes up. Here’s one.
Here’s another:
Let us compare. Romans says:
1 Corinthians says:
sam says:
Sounds like it’s saying the same thing in different words.
Let us compare. Romans says:
1 Corinthians says:
sam says:
Sounds like it’s saying the same thing in different words.
Source.
Ah, you’re right, I somehow missed those Pauline quotes from Corinthians when I was looking up quotes about divorce, and I thought sam had deliberately mangled the Jesus quotes instead.
I’ll retract my earlier comment. Thanks for the correction.
The history of Europe strongly suggests otherwise. There’s a reason that the Catholic Church in the 19th century labeled the idea of separation of Church and State a heresy dubbed “Americanism”.
Excuse me? Most left wing Christians make a big deal about how they care about the New Testament and not the old. The second claim is simply wrong. The whole modern return of evangelicals to the political sphere (starting in the 1970s) was explicitly to put religion back into government. Jerry Falwell is one example of this approach. More extreme are the Christian Recontructionists. And even the fairly moderate Mike Huckabee has explicitly said that if the US Constitution is not in keeping with God’s law that it should then be modified to fit it.
It’s a subtle point, but theocratic doesn’t mean “rule according to religious dictates”; it means “rule by the clerical arbiters of religious dictates.” Medieval Christian states, with the notable exceptions of the Papal States and Montenegro, were not theocratic. In other words, Iran is a partial theocracy; Saudi Arabia, at least de jure, is not. Nevertheless, official religion is probably a more oppressive force in Saudi Arabia than it is in Iran.
The Christian Reconstructionists give me the willies just as much as anyone else around here, but it is probably not correct to label them theocratic (and the fact that they aren’t theocrats doesn’t make them less dangerous).
Voting your comment up for being a valid point. That said, while that may be the intended use of theocratic, but in context here it seems that the poster intended to mean theocratic in a more general sense. I
Note that given the historical existence of the Papal States, the claim is, even when interpreted in the narrow sense, still wrong.
This also runs into the problem that many governments in the Islamic world did not generally have a theocratic element in this narrow sense. The Ottoman Empire for example did not have clergy members involved in politics (although technically speaking the sultan was officially considered to be the heir of the caliphate, I think.).
So while you’ve made a good point about the technical meaning of the word, I don’t think it saves the poster’s remarks.
I think Sam is generally correct about Western Christianity. Yes, historically many church officials have simultaneously held secular power, and this was by no means limited to the Papal States—as the most notable examples, in the Holy Roman Empire there were a great many sovereign abbeys and prince-bishops. These were theoretically under imperial authority, but in practice, except for the occasional appearance of strong medieval emperors, they were fully sovereign for all practical purposes. (Interestingly, besides the Vatican, another historical relic nowadays is Andorra, whose co-sovereign, in an odd arrangement, is the bishop of Urgell in Catalonia.)
However, in all these cases, the simultaneous secular and ecclesiastical authority was considered as two separate functions exercised by the same person or institution, not as one and the same. The closest modern analogy would be when a bishop as an individual, or an abbey as a corporation, is also the owner of some business enterprise. (Indeed, before the rise of the modern nation-state, the line between sovereignty and private property was much less clear.) The claim to the secular authority over a piece of land could be gained or lost by conquest or a legal transfer independently of the ecclesiastical title, even if they were often held and passed together for many generations. The secular issues would be under the jurisdiction of the local secular legal system, typically derived from some mix of the local customary law, Roman law, and sovereign statue, while the ecclesiastical issues would fall under the canon law.
This is very different from a real theocracy, where religious leaders claim secular authority by virtue of their religious status alone, and where religion is considered as the sole, or at least primary, source of law—something that was never true for any legal system under Western Christianity. Even in the Papal States, the religious office of the Holy See and the sovereign office of the monarch of the Papal States were considered as separate. (And foreign powers could deal with either of these separately.)
This is not to say that popes never claimed theocratic secular authority. However, such claims were typically unsuccessful, and even their occasional temporary and limited success would backfire badly. Insofar as real theocracies ever sprang up under Western Christianity, it happened among peculiar fringe groups, such as the New England Puritans.
You also say:
However, the heresy of Americanism was about principled opposition to having an established church. But an established church is very different from theocracy. The fact that a particular church is awarded particular legal privileges, or even some kind of special representation in the government, doesn’t mean that religious leaders are claiming secular sovereignty by virtue of their religious position, or that religious law is being enforced. England, for example, has had an established church throughout its history (there are still bishops in the House of Lords), and it was never a theocracy in any meaningful sense of the term.
Similarly, the idea that secular law should incorporate values dictated by the predominant or established religion is not theocratic either, as long as the law originates from legislators whose office is not religious, and doesn’t claim a religious basis for its authority. Of course, a principled secularist may consider any legal privileges awarded to religious groups and any religious influences on the law as unacceptable. But claiming that any such things automatically constitute theocracy is an abuse of the term.
Also:
Ironically, for Christians living under the Ottomans, the millet system) forced a much greater blending of religious and secular authority than anywhere in the West. It is in fact one of the main reasons why I had to make the qualification about “Western” Christianity in the above paragraphs. (Though not the only one, as things were somewhat different in Eastern Christianity even before the Turks.)
That aside, the Ottomans were indeed a peculiar period in the Islamic history, and their rule was long and widespread enough that these peculiarities should be taken into account when making general statements about the Islamic world. On the other hand, it is undeniable that the basic theocratic notions, such as law derived straight from religious authority and lack of clear de jure separation between religious and secular offices, have indeed been much more characteristic of Islam than of Christianity—especially Western Christianity, whose historical tradition of such separation is in fact the root of the modern notions about the separation of church and state.
Theocracy has a lot of meanings, and one can argue that Elizabethan England was a theocracy in that the head of state was the head of the religion, and that the official religion was compulsory, but I was contrasting Islam and Christianity, and Elizabethan England was not a theocracy in the sense that Islam is a theocracy, one difference being that law in islam supposed to be religious, that secular law is supposed to be subordinate to religious law and priestly authority, while England had truly secular law independent of priestly authority, another difference being that Queen Elizabeth the first was under no obligation to make holy war to extend the true religion, whereas the Caliph was under obligation to make holy war to extend the true religion.
The biggest difference of course is that every Shakespearean play was written from a Roman Catholic, materialist, or pagan point of view, whereas you could not get away with that sort of thing under Islam—and indeed you cannot get away with it in today’s England where no television program or movie will written from a politically incorrect point of view. In this sense, Elizabethan England was not a theocracy, and today’s England is a theocracy.
In the original context, the implied definition of the theocracy for that post is that in Islam, the ruler’s authority comes from the true religion: The ruler must be a true Muslim, and his law must be subordinate to Shaia law. In Christianity, Caesar’s authority does not come from the true religion, he need not be a true Christian, and his law is not subject to priestly authority.
In another post, I might well use a different implied definition of theocracy, under which most of the Christian past was theocratic, or all states are theocratic in some sense, some being more theocratic than others.
But in other contexts, other definitions are defensible.
You’ve claimed that before, and I’ve challenged that position, and you’ve not provided any evidence to support it.
EDIT TO ADD: Also, to make proper comparisons with modern-day political correctness (i.e. following what is considered the limits of acceptable political discourse), you need to show where a Shakespearean play ever attacks Queen Elizabeth or her politics.
Elizabethan England did not enforce a political view, in large part because in those days religion was politics., it enforced a religious view. Religious issues where what was controversial back then, were what people argued over, and frequently killed each other over. The divine right and natural right of Kings was like motherhood and apple pie, not an issue.
Which official religious beliefs Shakespeare with great regularity doubted, and sometimes attacked—his plays imply the existence of purgatory, doubt the existence of an afterlife, and doubt the existence of a God that cares about humans, or pays much attention to them.
Modern politics asserts several political views that have distinctly religious characteristics, such as that all humans are equal, and then enforces equality in the in sense of interchangeability. Modern films, plays, and books not merely refrain from doubting such views, but actively uphold them. Not one black who is a significant character is stereotypical, a quite improbable number of them are actively counterstereotypical. Almost all heroines and love interests are actively counter stereotypical, for example in that they quite improbably successfully beat up bad guys, the most notorious example being princess Leia improbably and unbelievably throttling Jabba the Hut.
You keep talking utter falsehood about past eras, which you predictably and utterly fail to substantiate with evidence.
I’ve already told you about Shakespeare needing to present Macbeth as a tyrant, and Jeanne D’arc as an evil witch. Here’s some more direct evidence of political censoring: Quotes from http://www.family-source.com/cache/144244/idx/0
“The best-known case of political censorship is that of Richard II. The play’s first edition had a scene that showed the deposition of Richard II, which “so infuriated Queen Elizabeth that she ordered it eliminated from all copies”
“In Henry IV, the name Oldcastle was changed to Falstaff after the intervention of the Cobham family, Sir John Oldcastle’s descendants, who were powerful in the Elizabethan court (”
Are you kidding us? With half the released movies being superhero flicks where people of special heritage and/or power have the fate of the whole world resting on their shoulders (X-Men, Superman, Batman, Spiderman), or other Messiah/Mighty Whitey types (e.g. Avatar, The Last Samurai, Dances With Wolves, The Matrix)?
She’s a princess. From a family of Jedis. You bring up Star Wars in the same paragraph that you claim that modern films portray all humans as equal and interchangeable, and you don’t even notice the fricking irony? Is Luke Skywalker interchangeable with Stormtrooper #4, or even with Lando Calrissian? Is Anakin Skywalker interchangeable with even Random Jedi #52?
Look, nearly every single sentence of yours ends up unsubstantiated, and disproven ludicrously easily. Can you just try to think of an obvious counterexample to your claims before you press “Comment” next time, so that you don’t waste our time typing said obvious counterexamples?
While the donation of Constantine was fraudulent, the donations of Charles the Hammer and Charles the great were real enough, but the church ruled those states under the holy Roman emperor, like a baron under a king—hence arguably not a theocracy. At least that is what they argued, though as the authority of the holy Roman emperor declined, the argument became less credible, and was accordingly condemned.
The very fact that papal secular authority was justified by the alleged Donation of Constantine reflects a profound lack of theocratic thinking. In a theocracy, a religious leader claims secular authority as inherent to his religious office—yet the popes and their champions considered it necessary to present their claim as inherited from a purely secular sovereign, despite the ultimate papal religious authority.
I don’t agree with his point at all. I’m just trying to preempt possible confusion if this thread ends up continuing—it’s helpful if everyone actually uses the term the same way.
The pope at least pretended not to be a theocracy. Theoretically the Holy Roman Emperor was Caesar, in “render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, render unto God that which is God’s” To the extent that they actually were a theocracy, they were criticized for it, and denied it. The Spanish inquisition was supposedly answerable to the King of Spain, and theoretically the Pope’s minions were supposedly merely advising them, much as Harvard theoretically merely advises the federal bureaucracy.
Most left wing Christians in the protestant line are in practice indistinguishable from Unitarians, and Unitarians don’t give a tinker’s damn about either testament.
If one testament is less right wing than the other, it is the old testament that is the less right wing, since the old Testament places limits on debt and slavery, The old testament position on slavery is markedly less reactionary than the New Testament position on slavery—not that left wing Christians read either one.
The very fact that papal secular authority was justified by the alleged Donation of Constantine reflects a profound lack of theocratic thinking. In a theocracy, a religious leader claims secular authority as inherent to his religious office—yet the popes and their champions considered it necessary to present their claim as inherited from a purely secular sovereign, despite the ultimate papal religious authority.
To add a related data point, the same thing happened in the rest of Latin America. Abolition of slavery was of the first measures of many of the revolutions against the Spanish in the early 19th century, which were heavily inspired by the Enlightenment. Brazil held out a few decades more, because slavery was a lot more integral to its economy.
From what I’ve heard, the enlightenment played into making American slavery as bad as it was. Since the enlightenment said that it was bad to enslave people, but slavery was very profitable, a pattern of rationalizations were built up that Africans were innately inferior and slavery was good for them.
The religious progressives were the predecessors of today’s progressives, so today’s progressives can take credit for abolitionism, though they are embarrassed to do so, since they do not wish to recall their Christian past. They were already ditching the New Testament for its horribly reactionary position on slavery and marriage, and while they purported to say “Jesus is Lord”, they were already demoting him from God to chief community organizer. As Mencius argues, as recently as the 1940s, the predecessors of today’s progressives identified themselves as explicitly Christian, though when they finally threw Jesus under the bus and allowed the Jews in to join them, it was in fact less of a change than one might expect.
Mencius argues that they finally openly ditched Jesus so that they could impose their religion in the schools without running afoul of the first amendment, though perhaps letting the Jews into an explicitly progressive establishment also had something to do with it.
Why is this so heavily downvoted without a counterargument?
The notion that modern American progressivism is sociologically or memetically speaking the descendant of various Christian religious groups seems plausible and several points speak in its favour (including the heavily upvoted father of this comment).
I find this voting pattern especially strange considering that Mencius Moldbug is read by quite a few people on Lesswrong so the theory shouldn’t be that shocking in itself and people are generally quite detached and reasonable when discussing even controversial issues here (with the exception of gender relations).
What counterargument? What factual point is sam actually making? That today’s progressives (I don’t know how he defines the category—everyone who voted for Obama or Nader?) are embarrassed to take credit for abolitionism because they don’t wish to recall their Christian past?
How does one argue against that, by showing electroencephalographs of progressives that reveal the embarrassment zones of the brain don’t light up when progressives think about the abolitionist movement? It seems to me that the person making the claim should provide the evidence for this “embarrassment”.
sam doesn’t make arguments, he just sprays insults all over the place. Even when he makes specific claims, (perhaps progressive organization did stop identifying as Christian at a specific point of time, perhaps it was politically motivated) he uses the most insulting manner of expressing himself he can think of. “threw Jesus under the bus”—and he still doesn’t offer any actual evidence that can be discussed or analyzed, he just makes the claim.
sam has to learn to be civil, and provide evidence.
I downvoted sam’s comment above.
These aren’t mutually exclusive. I upvote many of his comments. Perhaps one in thirty simply deserve upvoting, one in fifteen because I have lower standards for him.
Probably.
Voting with lower standards makes sense if you think he is salvageable and want him to stick around—but that is not usually how we deal with extremely irrational posters.
He’s also provided me with enough evidence that he is not in the business of seeking truth that I have little reason to think even is reasonable-sounding points correlate with the truth. Even outside sources can be cherry-picked. If it were the case that everything here got fact checked or that we could effectively discount the evidence he provides proportionate to our estimation of his reliability this wouldn’t be a problem. But as time is a limited resource and we are not perfect Bayesian reasoners it is bad epistemic hygiene to encourage him to stick around. It is worse epistemic hygiene to lower our voting standards for him.
Not to mention the fact that people can’t seem to keep themselves from feeding the troll so we end up spending our time talking about whether or not conservatives have ever reinvented language to benefit themselves—as if that wasn’t already obvious to everyone who hasn’t been turned into a memetic zombie.
Sources are OK evidence, people bringing sources are better evidence. When those advocating banning chimp testing focus on cases decades old, that tells me no similar case has happened recently. I don’t assume that that case is typical of all chimp experiments, past and present, instead I learn the contrary.
If I find some study indicating that colleges discriminate against high school ROTC members, I don’t really have much of an idea if what I stumbled upon is the strongest evidence for that. If sam tells me about it, I am confident no reliable study showing more discrimination has been conducted.
This requires a model of the poster that not everyone reading comments will have. That can be solved by downvoting such posters to indicate their untrustworthiness.
But as I said humans are not perfect Bayesian reasoners and are not good at adjusting for unreliable speakers. We almost always either adjust too far and reverse stupidity or don’t discount enough and let cherry picked sources or skewed interpretations sneak into our brains. We’ll update without even noticing.
This seems like a selective application of a universal objection. “We almost always either adjust too far and reverse stupidity or don’t discount enough,” makes your reason technically not a universal objection, just an objection to learning anything from badly biased people, but this might be a confabulation added to the universal “humans are not perfect Bayesian reasoners”.
There is a difference between suboptimal updating and updating in ways that don’t correlate with the truth. My point is that badly biased posters may cause us to do the latter. But this is really tangential to the main thrust of my argument. Even (if) you can learn things (from) the occasional source Sam cites that seems very unlikely to make up for the rest of his noise. Well-Kept Gardens Die by Pacifism.
To be read: Even if you can learn about things from the occasional source Sam cites?
WKGDbP would be squarely on point if I had implied there was anything bad about condemning, downvoting unto hiddenness, censoring, banning, or the like, that Sam had net negative value, and that the evils of censorship were what was preventing me from harsher criticism of his comments.
As it is only the first few paragraphs of that are applicable. I concede I may be succumbing to the bias of valuing known, tangible gains over unknown, intangible but probably greater losses. I think Sam has net positive value here, but your argument he is deterring more valuable people from joining is important.
I think the most important landmark in the failure scenario described is “then another fool joins, and the two fools begin talking to each other...”
That’s where I draw the line, personally.
Correct. And edited.
I’m not sure you’re thinking about your information diet economically. Any minute you spend reading sam0345 or an indignant but obvious reply to him is a minute you could have spent reading something better. What make Less Wrong a special place is the ratio of good comments to bad not the total amount of insight gained by reading every single comment.
Yes, I’ve upvoted a couple of his comments too. A couple others got downvotes from me instead. It basically depends on whether he can focus himself on the argument, instead of the insults.
Generally I do agree with this assessment, though to be fair the average LW commenter dosen’t provide much evidence for their claims (unfortunately).
I agree both on the memetical relation between Christianity and progressivism, and on the likely receptiveness of LW to this idea. My guess is that most of sam’s downvotes are not for the intellectual content of his/her postings but for their style, that seems intent at scoring political points as opposed to finding truth.
I’ve down voted sam0345 before for similar reasons. This post didn’t strike me as that bad. My intuition puts bad style and good ideas to be somewhere on the −3 to +1 scale karma wise.
I suppose LW is sensitive to repeated misbehaviour. Either that or we let ourselves be affected quite strongly on how any particular comment is judged by who wrote it.
I downvoted it because because very little of it was actually relevant.
This varies, of course, with the postcolonialist in question, but I wouldn’t characterize it as ironic. The modern world arose as a result of a particular (Western) imperial/colonial long event—or at least it did if postcolonialists are anything close to correct—and people living in global south are just as much the inheritors of that legacy as those living in the north. So postcolonialism certainly does take a modern perspective, not those of imperial Malinese bureaucrats, Nahua mercenaries, or for that matter Carolingian knights. But it doesn’t pretend to, any more than characteristically “northern” ideologies like liberalism do.
I have to run to class, but I can expand on this later if it’s at all unclear (which self-calibrating has taught me my writing is oftentimes.)
Expand, please. Assuming the modern world stems from a colonial long event, why would that imply that “a total blindness to what came before Europeans” is only to be expected? Or, say (if we tone down the hyperbole a little) a large degree of blindness.
A large degree of blindness is a better way to phrase things, certainly.
At the risk of tautology, post-colonialism isn’t centrally concerned with pre-colonialism, because, well, it’s post-colonialism, not pre-colonialism. It’s concerned with a very particular world, our modern world, and the interlocking parts within it.
Now, what I think Konqvistador (heh) meant—although I could of course be wrong—is that post-colonialists are always going around denouncing Europe and never the Celestial Empire or Four Regions or Triple Alliance or what have you, which were not so different than Europe in its heyday, after all, and that this reflects an obsession with Europe that belies their claims to draw attention to the colonized and their accusations that Europe sees itself as unique. This would be a mistake, but a very understandable one, because some of the implicit assumptions that postcolonialism sees itself as challenging is the idea that there are more or less independent, coherent nations stretching through history and which are in a process of, albeit at unequal rates conditioned by their internal characteristics and contact with more advanced nations, acquiring progressively greater degrees of modernity. (Like Sid Meier’s Civilization, you might say.) If something like this forms your basic model and you don’t read post-colonialists carefully (who has time to read everyone carefully?) it looks like they’re complaining about Europeans doing what everyone else has been since the dawn of agriculture, just sucking less at it.
But in fact they’re operating from a very different set of assumptions. Modernity, in this view, consists of incorporation into a (the) capitalist world-system, something that in some respects is much like the tributary empires of the past and in other respects quite different. It has its own organic logic to it, in need of differentiated parts fulfilling distinct tasks; it moves people, goods, and money around at rapid speed to create them; it fundamentally reconstitutes what goes into it. So what it means to say that the modern world arose from a colonial long event is that we’re all colonialism’s children, some much more favored than others, not that one of our dads beat the others’ up. If you like, you can say that “ironically” postcolonialism says we’re all Europeans now, in that a set of relations that first and primarily encompassed Europe now encompasses the globe, but of course this isn’t actually ironic, just an example of semantic Dutch Booking.
What you said before wasn’t unclear, by the way; I just wanted to hear more. You went in a somewhat different direction than I expected, so I’m glad I asked.
Thanks for the link. But I think you should have done a little more analysis, seeing as how this is Lesswrong and not Digg or Reddit. :)