Photo of the aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg, 1863

In the United States, the idealism of the American version of the Romantic revolt attempted to integrate the Enlightenment ideals of reason and order and the superiority of these Western ways with Romantic ideals that asserted the value of the individual. This produced painful excesses: genocide of the native people, enslavement of millions of Africans, and, one of history’s worst horrors, the US Civil War.

America had to undergo some difficult adjustments before it began to integrate the Christian belief in the worth of every individual with the respect for the law that enables individuals to live together in peace. But the slaves were freed, and the government began to compensate the native tribes (with reserves of land and with cash) and take them into the American mainstream (with opportunities for Western-style educations), or rather, to be more accurate, Americans began moving toward these ideals with more determination, and they continue to do so into this era. A very slow process, but we must not give up.

Thus, in the larger picture of all of these events, the upheaval called the Romantic Age wrote into the Western value system a greater willingness to compromise and a deeper respect for the ways of compromise, resulting in the institutions of democracy. These guided people toward balance and so kept their various countries from devolving into chaos. Democracy was, and is, our best hope for creating institutions by which people use reason and debate instead of war to find a timely balance in each new generation between the security-loving conservatism of the establishment and the heated passions of the reformers.

Lesser sideshows in the swirls of history happen. These are analogous to similar sideshows that have happened in the biological history of this planet. Species and subspecies meet, compete, mingle, and then thrive or die off. But the largest trends are still clearly discernible. The dinosaurs are long gone, and so it also goes in human history. A viable new species of society keeps emerging in what can properly be called a synthesis. In a compromise, two opposing parties each give a bit of what they like in order to get a bit more of what they want. What happened at the end of the Romantic upheaval was like what Hegel called a synthesis, a melding between a thesis and its antithesis, but it was also something more. As conditions changed and old cultural ways became obsolete, the synthesis that arose was a new species of society: modern representative democracy. A new life form, vibrant and unique.

  

                                                        Occupy Wall Street protesters, New York, 2011

The idea of democracy evolved until it saw the protecting of the rights of every individual citizen as the most important reason for its existence. All of this came about from the melding of Christian respect for the value of every single human being, Roman respect for order and discipline, and Greek love of the abstract and of the seer who can question the forces that be, even those of the material world. Representative democracy based on universal suffrage was the logical goal of the Renaissance and Enlightenment world views when they were applied by human societies to themselves. The Romantic Age simply showed that the adjusting and fine-tuning takes a while. And it continues on.

In the meantime, what of the Enlightenment world view? Inside the realm of science, the Enlightenment was still entirely in place and, in fact, was getting stronger. The Romantic revolt left it untouched, even invigorated. Science came to be envisioned, by scientists, as the best way to fix the ills of society.

Under the scientific world view, as both Newton and French scholar Pierre-Simon Laplace had said, all events were to be seen as results of previous events that had been their causes, and every single event and object became, in an inescapable way, like a link in a chain that went back to the start of the universe. The giant universal machine was ticking down in an almost mechanical way, like a giant clock.

While the Romantic revolt ran its radical course, governments, industries, businesses, armies, schools, and nearly all of society’s other institutions were quietly being organized along the lines suggested by the Enlightenment world view. The more workable of the Romantic ideals (e.g., relief for the poor, protection of children) were absorbed into the Enlightenment worldview as it kept spreading until it reigned, first in the West, then gradually in more and more of the world.

 

 

                                                Crewe locomotive works, England, 1848

At this point, it is important to stress that whether or not political correctness approves of the obvious conclusion we are heading toward, it is there to be drawn and so should be stated explicitly. The Enlightenment worldview and the social system that it spawned got results like no other ever had. It just worked. European societies that operated under it kept increasing their populations, their economic output, and, more tellingly, their control of the physical resources of this planet. However, it is also important to stress that the Westernizing process very often wasn’t even close to fair or just. Western domination of this planet did happen, but in the twenty-first century, in most of the West, we are ready to admit that while it has had good consequences, it has had plenty of evil excesses as well.

  

                                     Naval gun factory, Woolwich, England, c. 1897

                                    

                                                                       Antoine Lavoisier with his wife, Marie

This scientific way of thinking was further employed by geniuses like Isaac Newton, William Harvey, Michael Faraday, Antoine Lavoisier, and others. Its gurus piled up successes in the hard market of physical results. Of those who resisted the new way, some were converted by reason, some went down in military defeats, some worked out compromises, and some just got old and died, still resisting the new ways and preaching the old ones to smaller and smaller audiences. The Enlightenment, as it is now called, had taken over.

Other societies that operated under world views in which humans were thought to have little ability to control the events of life are to be found in all countries and all eras of history, but we don’t need to discuss them all. The point is that the advancing worldview by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, around the planet, was the one we call scientific, the Enlightenment view.

The one significant interruption in the spread of the Enlightenment’s values is the period called the Romantic Age. The meaning of this time is still being debated, but in my model, which sees a kind of cultural evolution in the record of human history, there are only a couple of interesting points to note about the Romantic Age (roughly, the mid-1700s to the mid-1800s).

  

                            Abbey in an Oak Forest (Friedrich); passion and imagination of Romantic Age

First, it reaffirmed and expanded the value of the individual when the Enlightenment had gone too far and made duty—to the family, the group, or the state—seem like the only “reasonable” value, the one that should motivate all humans as they chose their actions. Romanticism asserted forcefully and passionately that the individual had an even greater duty to his own soul. I have dreams, ideas, and feelings that are uniquely mine, and I have a right to them. Paradoxically, this philosophy of individualism can be very useful for a whole society when it is spread over millions of citizens and over decades and generations. This is because even though most of the dreamers produce little that is of any practical use to the larger community and some even become criminals, a few create beautiful, brilliant things that pay huge material, political, and artistic dividends.

 

                                            Drawing of guillotining during the French Revolution

In the second place, however, we should note that as a political philosophy, Romanticism produced some painful excesses. In France, for example, the citizens were indeed passionate about their ideals of liberty, equality, and brotherhood, but once they had overthrown the hereditary kings and nobles and set up an idealistic people’s republic, they didn’t know how to administer a large, populous state. In a short while, they fell into disorder and simply traded one autocrat for another (Louis XVI for Napoleon). Their struggle to reach an enlightened view of the deepest nature of humans, and to understand how a system of government that resonates with humans’ deepest nature might be instituted, took longer than one generation to evolve. But the French did begin evolving resolutely toward it. After Napoleon’s fall, a new Bourbon dynasty was instituted, but the powers of the monarchs were now severely limited, and after some more turmoil, the new Bourbon gang were also ousted. Democracy evolved – in erratic ways and by pain, but it evolved and grew strong, and is still evolving in France, as is the case in all modern states.

The loss of much of the Romans’ practical skill, especially their administrative abilities, kept Europe from growing dominant worldwide until the Renaissance. At that time, these more worldly values were reborn due to a number of factors familiar to scholars (e.g., the fall of Constantinople, the rise of science, the discovery of the Americas, etc.). Or perhaps, in another more causally focused view, we could say that the Christian way, which required every citizen to respect every other citizen, built Western society’s levels of overall economic and social efficiency up to a critical mass that made the flowering of Western civilization now called the Renaissance inevitable. The new hybrid value system worked: Greek theoretical knowledge and Roman practical skills in a Christian social milieu.

                                                              Hanseatic League, city of Lubeck

Western culture finally integrated its most fundamental value systems, classical and Christian. It took over a thousand years for people whose lives focused on worldly matters instead of only on seeking salvation in the world after death, to be seen as admirable, moral, Christian citizens in the eyes of the community. Artists and architects, even merchants and conquistadores, finally could do what they did to glorify God. But in evolutionary terms, a thousand years is almost nothing.

Handling and mastering the physical world through commerce, science, and art gradually became acceptable as a way to serve God. The world views, values, morés and behaviour patterns—the total culture package of Christianity, with the value it placed on every individual human being—was finally integrated in a functional way with the knowledge, both abstract and practical, that had been passed down from the ancient Greeks and Romans. That breakthrough unleashed a deluge. Individuals who rose above society’s conventions—in “inspired” ways—began to prove that they could be valuable to the greater community, even if at first they upset the order sought by less daring people.

It is interesting to note the intricacies of the socio-historical process. Even societies that seem to have reached equilibrium always contain a few individuals who restlessly test their society’s accepted world view, values, and morés. These people and their disciples are often the young, which suggests adolescent revolt plays a vital role in the evolution of society. Teenagers make us look at our values and, once in a while, we realize that one of those values is due for overhaul or even retirement. Teenage revolt serves a larger purpose in the evolutionary process of cultural change.

However, it’s more important to understand that many people in the rest of society see these new thinkers and their followers as delinquents, and only a very few see them as great humans. It is even more important to see that the numbers involved on each side really don’t matter. What does matter is whether the new thinkers’ ideas attract at least a few followers and whether the ideas work, which is to say, whether the followers then live better, healthier, happier lives than the rest of the society.

A society, like any living thing, needs to be opportunistic, constantly testing and searching for ways to grow, even though many citizens in its establishment may resent the means by which it does so and may do everything within their power to quell the process. Often they can, but not always. For Western society, until the practical, effective features of its classical values were integrated with its more humane, respectful Christian ones, Europeans largely did not support thinkers with ideas and morés that focused on life in this material world.

Artists, scientists, inventors, and entrepreneurs are, by their very nature, eccentric. They don’t support the status quo, they threaten it. But the dreamers are the ones who move the rest forward in a timely way toward newer, better ways of doing things. They only really flourish in a society that not only tolerates but takes pride in its eccentrics. In a truly dynamic society, cleverness is melded with kindness and acceptance of those who are different. In short, European culture needed a thousand years to even begin to “get its act together” and meld all of its values into a single smoothly functioning whole.

To survive, a society must use resources and grow when it has opportunities to do so, or it will lose out later when events in the physical universe grow harsher or when the competition gets fiercer. How do new, improved ways of doing things become established ways of doing things? One means is by war, as has been mentioned. But the peaceful mechanism can also work, and it is seen in tolerant societies when the people who use new ways are allowed to do so undisturbed, and it can be seen that they live better. At that point, the majority begins to pay attention.

In the more tolerant society, other citizens, by their own choice, begin to take up the new ways. Gradually, more choose not to be left behind in what appears to be becoming a stagnant cultural backwater. This market-driven way is the way of peaceful evolution, the alternative to the war-driven one. Worldwide, we have taken a long time to reach it, but as a species, we are almost there.

                                    Renaissance pocket watch (from a painting by San Friano) 

Thus, a more tolerant Renaissance society rose out of the new ideas that melded respect for the individual and even exaltation in humanity’s creative potential with an equal respect for the inherent worth and rights of other citizens. Science requires both if it is to flourish.

In Renaissance thinking, a man could be moral, venturesome, independent, and patriotic. The ideas of Greece, Rome, and Christianity could be blended in a way that was practicable and consistent. The new system of ideas worked, and it was exciting because it was empowering.

                   

                                                             Replica of Gutenberg’s printing press

The growing Renaissance focus on the rights of the individual produced some excesses (e.g. the Thirty Years’ War and the English Civil War), but these were gradually tamed. When the dust settled, one thing was clear: there would be no going back to the medieval ways of thinking. The way forward was to live by reason, or more accurately, to live by the most reasonable interpretations of reason’s darling child, science, and science’s material world view. Material acts done right did glorify God. In this frame of mind, the West settled into the era called the Enlightenment.

                                       Battle of Rocroi, Thirty Years’ War (painting by Ferrer-Dalmau)

To most of the people alive at the time, it wasn’t at all obvious that the Church’s traditional views were deficient in any way, or that the views of the Enlightenment scientists, like Galileo, were better ones. But decades of experience in which people who lived by the ways of individualism, science, and inductive reasoning outperformed those who lived by the old ways (based on blind obedience to authorities whose authority came from texts that were not to be analyzed or criticized) gradually won over more of the citizens in each new generation.

                   

                                     English physician William Harvey (from a painting by van Miereveld) 

Some of the new beliefs were anathema to medieval thinkers—but the new beliefs worked. They enabled this “enlightened” subculture within society to solve problems (e.g., navigate the oceans, cure diseases, predict eclipses, boost production in industry and agriculture, and, especially, make increasingly deadly weapons). This new subculture within Europe’s nations was therefore able to increase its community of followers and its range of influence at a rate that the old Church and aristocracy, in the end, could not match. As was noted above, science continued attracting new followers because the miracles of science can be replicated; science works.

But values and their consequences are not obvious; the relationship between a society’s moral values and its survival has eluded analysis for too long. In this twenty-first century, we must do better.

                                                                                 Conversion of Emperor Constantine to Christianity, by Raphael

  

What followed, in the West, was the rise of the early Christian Church. Did Christianity grow strong because it offered Romans a way out of the cynical ennui of life in the late Roman Empire? Or did it just happen to coincide with that ennui? My position is that values coincide with social change because values lead to patterns of behavior, ones that either help or hinder a society in its struggle to survive.

Christianity told people that the highest state for a human to aspire to was not citizenship. It was a state of grace, that is, peace with God. This was much easier to achieve in a monastery or nunnery. Renounce the world in all of its tempting forms; focus on eternity. The balance between Christian values and Roman ones was hard to strike. When the Visigoth barbarian invaders’ challenge came, the old-style citizens had let their virtues and the behaviors attached to them slide for too long. The Christian community, in the meantime, had been taught to shut it all out. People who had integrated the two value sets, who could be passionately loyal to Rome and also to Christianity, were too few to stop the barbarian tide. Rome fell, in an agony that we today cannot imagine. But the challenge was bound to come. One hundred fifty years in evolution is six generations, in evolutionary terms, almost nothing. For Europe to find the balance between the ideals of democratic citizenship and those of Christian spirituality took another thousand years. More on that as we proceed.

Under the Christian world view, the earth was the center of the universe, specially created by God to house man, his most beloved creation. But man’s role was not to enjoy life as much as he could (as the ancients had) in this garden turned, by human’s sin, to a barren plain. Humans were here to praise God and gratefully accept all that God sent their way, all joy and all suffering. Getting ready for the next life after death was what mattered. This sounds like a backward step, and in many ways it was.

But Christianity added some useful ideas of its own. Christians were taught to act humanely toward all other people, not just other Romans, to behave honestly and compassionately in their dealings with others, and to commit in a deeply personal way to Christ’s kind of faith and his honest and compassionate way of life. Christians were programmed to live as if being kind to all was a desirable, moral way to be, even if the kindness might not get rewards for its doer in this lifetime.

This was a huge change from the ways of the slave-owning, gladiator-loving, militaristic, sensual, mid-Empire Romans. Why the Church later became so cynical as to conduct wars and own property while the individual serf was not to even contemplate such things (unless the pope told him to make war on the heathens) became vague. But the grip and the social utility of Christianity’s good ideas was so strong that for centuries the hypocritical authorities found ways to successfully steer ordinary followers’ thoughts and perceptions past the Church’s inconsistencies.

For ten centuries, the Church’s explanations of the entirety of the universe and human experience were enough to attract, build, and retain a large following for the Church and the values and morés it endorsed. The values, in turn, made communities that worked. In evolutionary terms, that was all that mattered. Christian communities began to enjoy long periods of growing prosperity because they were internally stable, even though by modern standards, they were not very progressive. After the chaos that had followed the fall of the Roman Empire, stability was everything.

  

                                    Christians made into human torches (artist: Siemiradzki) 

The behaviors these values produced had seemed effete to most of the citizens of the middle Roman Empire. What was this “Chrestus”? What system had he proposed that was stealing their children into its cult? The cross as its symbol yet! The cross was a symbol for losers.

But that system, which gave legal status to all humans (even serfs had rights), mutual support through all tribulations (mutual aid in war, famine, and plague), and honesty in all dealings (God was watching!) proved superior to the Roman one in the final test. Dissatisfied with what had become the Roman way of life, a life filled with material comforts and pleasures but devoid of ideals, more and more people became converts.

Christianity offered something else—a spiritual worldview that felt personal and a way of life that made sense to them because they believed it was what God had said he wanted of humans and because, over the long term, it fostered a kinder, more inclusive community. As contemptible as Christianity seemed to many of the mid-Empire Romans, who cheered themselves hoarse as Christians were fed to lions, it nevertheless assimilated the old Roman system under which it had risen. Its ideas didn’t just sound nice; over millions of people and hundreds of years, they worked.

It is tempting to see in the Romans’ culture a synthesis of the ways of the Athenians and those of the Spartans. This is an example of Hegel’s famous dialectic: one way of thinking, along with the human groups that gather around it, forms and grows, and then an opposite way of thinking rises up like a kind of cosmic response to the first way. The two struggle, interact, and finally meld into a true synthesis, which is not like a compromise because it is a new way with a life of its own.

The people who are born into the new way are not aware they are using some elements from one philosophy and some from another. The new way is simply their way, and supporting ideas that are added to the new system make it seem like a neat, smooth, seamless whole. Thesis, antithesis, then synthesis, over and over, with the system always spiraling upward to greater and greater consciousness. This is Hegel’s model of human social evolution.

It is tempting. It’s a fairly simple model, and with a little stretching it can be made to seem to fit in era after era and country after country when we study human history. But it is simply too simple. The Roman ways of thinking of life did contain some ideals similar to those of both the Athenians and the Spartans, but we know that there was too much else going on in the thinking and living styles of the Romans for Hegel’s model to be seen as satisfactory today. Human societies are subtler than that. What makes more sense is to examine each society‘s worldview, values, morés, and behavior patterns and observe how they coordinated to produce a whole culture and way of life that met citizens’ survival demands of the time. Under that humbler view, we can learn much more about how human societies really work.

The model of human cultural evolution presented in this book doesn’t attempt to be as all-encompassing as Hegel’s thesis-antithesis-synthesis model because the process of human cultural evolution doesn’t fit Hegel’s model. Rather, the process of human cultural evolution is more closely analogous to the process of evolution in the rest of nature—by genetic variation and natural selection and accident and disaster.

Life didn’t move forward through time and proliferate into its many forms by the mechanism that Hegel describes. In the past, conditions like tsunamis, earthquakes, floods, droughts, volcanic eruptions, and even collisions with giant meteors suddenly closed down, or opened up, reams of opportunities. Then, usually, life forms moved in opportunistically. Life spreads across time and space not like a chain or road, but like a bush branching and bifurcating from that primal trunk started from a few cells eons ago.

The model of human cultural evolution presented in this book can’t match Hegel’s dialectic for cognitive attractiveness. Hegel’s model seems so neat and complete. But life isn’t that neat, and our models of human culture must be placed in the realm of the living. The model explored here can do what we need it to do. It can give us enough insights into how human cultures work, and what right and wrong are for us to then be able to build a rational moral code. And that is all we need.

So let’s return to our main line of thought. The Romans put more practicality, discipline, and efficiency into the Athenian values and morés they borrowed. They built roads, bridges, and aqueducts of great size and engineering sophistication by employing knowledge they had learned from the Greeks, mainly the Athenians, and from their own neighbors, the Etruscans (or Tuscans). Similarly, in other areas such as war, law, medicine, and agriculture, the Romans achieved practical successes unmatched in their times.

 

                                              Tuscan wrestlers, from a painting in a tomb in Tarquinia, Italy

In addition, it is important to note that the Roman republic, as cruel as it could be to outsiders, was dearly loved by Romans. They were citizens of a democracy. They were like family. They truly thought they deserved to rule because there had never been any state like Rome. It had been chosen by the gods to be specially gifted and destined. The state religion said so. The Aeneid said so. Thus the Roman world view, by a direct chain of logic, assigned to the Romans the most important role that had ever existed in the history of the world. For them, their gods did not rule them and their universe with cruelty. Instead, for generations, the Romans were certain of where they stood: clearly, the gods (later, God) loved Rome.

                                     Glory days of ancient Rome, as depicted by T. Cole, American artist

This worldview produced an Athenian kind of patriotism because it was built around a model that gave democratic rights and duties to all Roman citizens, or at least all “true” citizens, namely adult Roman males who owned property. There were aristocratic families, as had been the case in almost all previous states, and these folk were accustomed to the idea of privilege. But there were also plebeians, and they too were full citizens with rights to vote, run for office, have a fair trial if they were charged with a crime, and so on. How could one not love such a country? What would one not endure for her?

When slaves eventually became nearly half of the population of southern Italy, the Romans viewed this situation as just part of the natural order. This view, by the way, that the superior people must have slaves in order to have time to pursue nobler ideals and activities did not originate with the Romans. It had been Aristotle’s view centuries before, and he defended it at length for reasons similar to those that were part of the total cultural outlook of the Romans. These people were convinced, without thinking about it, that their country’s system and the patriotism that it fostered—patriotism that had been displayed over and over by them, their fellow citizens, and their ancestors—made them superior. The Romans felt they deserved to be the masters of inferior cultures.

A society built on slaves and materialism and restrained only by a warrior’s code of discipline and loyalty, had to collapse when the warriors ran out of territories to conquer and sank into boredom, sloth, envy, and internal strife. In short, the cultural code account was depleted until it was bankrupt and overdrawn. By the time its people realized that Rome really could fall, it was too late.

                                  Late Roman decadence, as conceived by artist T. Couture

Note how the decline of the Romans’ value system and the laziness of the later Romans regarding ideals of citizenship and honesty presaged that fall. Note also how we today understand intuitively the crucial roles values play in the shaping of citizens’ lifestyles and, therefore, in the success of their state. We know of this relationship at a level so deep that we take it to be obvious. When the Romans became hypocritical and corrupt, we assume the collapse of their state was inevitable. (This idea is common among modern scholars, but it comes from Edward Gibbon, whose work on the subject is still, arguably, the most respected of all time.³)

Chapter 11 – Historical World Views

Every society must work out and articulate a view of the physical universe, a way of seeing the world, a way that then becomes the base on which the society’s value system is to be built. This is no minor matter; while philosophers may dally over the questions in a theoretical way, real folk have to deal with life. They have to have some code in place that helps them decide them how to act. World view, values, and behaviours must form a coherent system under which each individual is empowered to make decisions and take action so the entire society can efficiently operate and survive in its always changing, always demanding environment.

All societies know this in some deep way. Societies up until our time have worked out their world views, values, and morés to the extent they have because people everywhere have always placed great stock in their society’s model of how the material universe is constructed, how it operates, and where it is going. They know implicitly that their worldview must be used as their guide when they are trying to decide whether an act that feels morally right is practicable. There is no point in striving for the impossible.

So let’s keep moving forward in this task of building a new, universal moral code, but let’s also move with all the prudence we possess. What is at stake is everything. Before we begin building this new system, we need to get our thinking into the necessary mindset by considering the most salient peaks in the histories of some of the societies of the past, in order to see how systems of world views, values, and behaviors coordinate and evolve.

  

                                                                G.W.F. Hegel

In this chapter, philosophy students will notice similarities between some aspects of my ideas and the philosophy of Hegel, and I admit freely that similarities exist. But I also have some major points of disagreement with Hegel, which I will explain along the way. For those readers who are not philosophy students, please note that I will give only a very quick version of my understanding of Hegel. If you find the ideas presented here at all interesting, you really should give Hegel a try. His writing is difficult, but not impossible, and it has also been interpreted by some disciples who write more accessibly.¹ But in this book, let’s now get back to our analysis of the world views, values, morés, and behavior patterns that are discernible in the history of some of the societies of the West.

  

                         BBC film director’s conception of Trojans dragging wooden horse into Troy

For instance, let’s consider the ancient Greeks, the ones who came long before Socrates’ time. They portrayed the universe as an irrational, dangerous place. To them, the gods who ran the universe were capricious, violent, and cruel, which also described the Greeks’ world view. Under this view, humans could only cringe fearfully when confronted with the gods’ testy humors. Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Ares, Hades, Athena, Apollo, and the rest were all lustful, jealous, cruel, and unpredictable. Zeus, especially, had thunderbolts; Poseidon inflicted earthquakes; Apollo, plagues.

But as Greek culture advanced, this worldview evolved. By the Periclean Age, many Greek stories and plays portrayed humans challenging the gods. At the same time, the Greeks evolved their system of values toward a braver, smarter lifestyle. They began trying to explain the world in ways that left room for people to understand and manipulate at least some of the events in their world. Once their worldview included those possibilities, they began to create action plans that enabled humans to cause, hasten, or forestall events in the world. They tried out the daring plans; when some worked, more daring plans followed. (Edith Hamilton articulates these ideas well.²)

                                                                                                                                                   

                                                    Aristophanes, Greek comic playwright

It is important to see that human individuals and groups will normally not attempt any action they consider taboo. Ancient tribes who happened upon an action that seemed contrary to or outside of what was appropriate for humans in their worldview only grew upset and fearful. Whether the action obtained promising results or not, the only thing most of those people wanted to learn was how to avoid putting themselves in the same situation again. They sought to avoid it for fear of bringing the gods’ wrath down on them. Once in a long while, a genius might question his society’s worldview and even describe an alternative one, but he often paid dearly for such audacity—by being ostracized or put to death.

 

                                

                                                             Euripides, Greek tragic playwright

However, changes in a society’s worldview and then in the society’s values and morés can also evolve more gradually, helped by many lesser geniuses. By the Golden Age of Athens, writers, artists, and philosophers were attempting all kinds of things that only a few centuries earlier would have been unthinkable. Their worldview had evolved to allow for at least some degree of human free will. The works of Euclid, Plato, Euripedes, Archimedes, and Aristotle could only have been produced under a worldview in which a person could conceive of actions challenging the orthodox beliefs of the tribe and even the forces of the universe, even though the challenge might rarely succeed. At the same time, their neighbours, the Spartans, were evolving their destructive society, the perfect military state. The clash called the Peloponnesian War was inevitable, and Athens lost. A few years later, the Macedonians out-Spartanned the Spartans, and after another generation or two, the Romans ended the matter by conquering them all.

                                              Artist’s conception of a Roman warrior

Thus in Western history, the next important worldview is the Roman one. Operating under it, people became even more practical, more focused on physical effectiveness and power, and less interested in or even aware of ideas considered for their own sake. Among many of the early Romans, this feeling expressed itself in a hatred of all things Greek; the truth was that the Romans borrowed much from the Greeks, especially in theoretical knowledge, but they loathed having to admit it.

In their heyday, the Romans no longer feared the gods in the way the ancient Greeks and the Romans’ own ancestors once had. As the republic faded and the empire took over, the Romans turned so far from earlier thinking that they lost much of the Greek, especially the Athenian, capacity for abstract things—wonder, idealism, pure geometry, philosophical speculation, and flights of imagination. The Romans built their state on Athenian-style, democratic principles, values, and behaviors, but like the Spartans, they loved results and power, not speculation.

                                            Pont du Gard: Roman aqueduct in present-day France