Chapter 15.                  (conclusion) 

                              Conversion of Emperor Constantine to Christianity 

                                     (artist: Rubens) (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

 

The next phase in the history of the West comes with the rise of Christianity. Did Christianity get strong because it offered Romans a way out of sensuality and materialism, i.e. inspired them and, thus, enabled them to live by a system of values again? Or did it just happen to coincide with the end of the Empire?   

The position of Moral Realism is that the simultaneous appearance of these two social phenomena is no coincidence. Changes in values coincide with changes in ways of life because values changes lead to new patterns of behavior, ones that either help or hinder a society in its struggle to survive. Neither can accurately be said to cause the other. Both are signs of a nation’s experimenting with even deeper changes in its thinking. Nations always have at least some experimenting going on in the thinking of the citizens. Mixing or creating new memes. Once in a while, an experiment works. The old values of Rome decayed. The Christian ones were there to offer a way out, a life raft when the old ship sank.

The downside of Christianity was that it told people that the highest state for a human to aspire to is not citizenship. It is a state of grace, i.e. peace with God. Renounce the world in all its tempting forms; focus on eternity. In the last years of the Roman Empire, balance between Christian values and Roman ones was nigh on to impossible to find. When the Visigoths’ challenge came, too many Romans had let their ideals decay, in the cases of the old style, pagan Romans, or else to stray too far from the practical/material, in the cases of the Christians. People who had integrated the two value sets were too few to stop the barbarian tide. Melding the two was still too complex.

Rome fell, in an agony that we today cannot imagine. But the catastrophe had been coming for a century, at least. The time from the Romans’ accepting Christianity as the state religion to the Empire’s fall is six generations – almost nothing in biological evolution’s terms. It took another thousand years, fifty generations, for Europe to find a way to synthesize the Roman ideals and those of Christianity into one coherent, practicable way of thinking and living.

Again, Hegel’s model, does seem to fit. Roughly. But the model I offer in this book goes beyond Hegel. We must leave his model because it portrays our species’ cultural evolution as being mysterious, involuntary, and even fated. We have to wrench the wheel that steers this ship away from instincts and luck and put it into the hands of Reason and Choice. Minds and Freedom. We have to get control over our own cultural evolution. Hegel doesn’t give us that option.

Under the Christian worldview, the earth had been specially created by God to house man, his most beloved creation. But man’s role was not to enjoy life when he could (as the ancients had). Instead, humans were here to praise God and gratefully accept all God sent their way, all joy and all suffering. Getting ready for the next life after death was what mattered. “Memento Mori” (Remember Death) was carved into a plaster base holding a human skull on every scholar’s desk. Remember death. Let go of this brief life of temporal, secular, painful illusions and think instead about the eternal, spiritual life beyond this life. This way of thinking sounds like a backward step, and in many ways, it was. It did not foster the constant improving of practical skills for the whole, larger society. It focused the attention of many smart people away from matters in this material world.

 

 

                  

               The Good Samaritan (credit: Aimé Morot, via Wikimedia Commons)

 

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

This was a big change from the ways of the slave-owning, sensual, late Empire Romans. It is worth noting here, however, that gladiatorial games were banned around 400 A.D. A change toward a more moral society. The Romans were changing. They were just too slow about it and the melding of the two sets of values into a synthesis was still too hard for people to imagine.

Why the Church later became so cynical as to own property and engage in wars, while individual serfs were not to even contemplate such acts (unless the pope told them to make war on the heathens) was kept vague. But the emotional grip and social solidarity produced by Christianity were so strong that hypocritical Church authorities easily steered followers’ past the Church’s hypocrisies.

For centuries in Europe, the Church’s explanations of the universe and the human place in it were enough to attract, build, and retain a large following for the Church and the values it endorsed. The values, in turn, gradually fostered more honest, diligent communities, ones that eventually began to re-establish order. That was all that mattered as far as cultural evolution was concerned. 

Christian communities began to enjoy periods of increasing prosperity as their values created stability, diligence, and productivity. Even though they were not very progressive by modern standards, or by the standards of the glory days of Rome, the later Middle Ages were a big improvement on the violence and chaos that had come for centuries right after the values of the Romans unraveled.

The synthesis of Roman practicality and Christian compassion, and some experimental new ideas, got more and more viable as the contradictions were worked out in the minds and daily lives of ordinary folk. Gradually, Europe began to climb back toward prosperity and the rule of law. But it did so under a moral system very different from that of the Roman Empire. 

At first, the behaviors Christianity recommended had seemed effete to Romans of the mid-Empire. Compassion for the poor was stupid. They bred like flies. A good horse was worth a thousand of them. Who was this Chrestus? What system had he offered that was luring Roman youth into its cult? The cross as its symbol yet! The cross was a symbol for losers!

But that system, which gave moral status to all humans (unlike slaves, even serfs had rights), mutual support through all tribulations (caring for each other in plague, famine, and war), and honesty in all dealings (God watches all) proved superior to the Roman one in the final test. Dissatisfied with what had become the Roman way of life – a life filled with pleasures, but also cynicism – more and more people became converts. When Theodosius made Christianity the official faith in 380 CE, he was only acknowledging reality. Christianity’s values enabled its adherents to build prosperous communities and keep order in them. It impressed, then persuaded people. In short, it got popular.

 

 

        

      gladiators in ancient Rome (credit: J. L. Gerome, via Wikimedia Commons) 

 

Christianity offered something new – a worldview that felt personal, a way of life that made moral sense. Over the long term, it created efficient communities.

 

As contemptible as Christianity seemed to mid-Empire Romans, who cheered themselves hoarse as gladiators killed each other, it gradually assimilated the old Roman system. The large point to grasp here is that even though individuals might not be aware of any long-term trends, Christianity didn’t just sound nice. Over millions of people and hundreds of years, it worked. It got results.

Christianity’s otherworldly worldview, for a while, caused a decline in Roman practical skills. This loss kept Europe from growing dominant worldwide until comparatively recent times. But finally, subtler, more worldly Renaissance values fostered exploration and invention. They melded with Christian beliefs of duty, self-denial, and compassion, and some new ideas. Then, visible changes, like the Europeans’ “discovery” of the New World and the rise of Science, gave proof that the new way worked.

In our view in this book, the view that looks for causes and effects, the Christian way of life, that required every citizen to respect every other citizen, enabled Western society’s efficiency level to rise past a critical threshold. A flowering of Western civilization became, not just likely, but inevitable. The new hybrid values system worked: Greek abstract ideas, Roman practical skills, and some new, Renaissance ideas. The offspring ideas interbred with Christian values. In 1000 years, fifty generations, a functioning whole emerged (visible, for example, in the Hanseatic League).

   

        

                     Map showing cities in the Hanseatic League (credit: Wikipedia)

 

It took over a thousand years for people whose lives focused on worldly matters, instead of on seeking salvation in a life after death, to be seen as good Christians. But then architects, artists, merchants, explorers, even conquistadores, could do what they had always done, but now as ways of glorifying God. From the perspective of the life of a single human being, this transition seems so slow, but in evolutionary terms, a thousand years is short. Fifty generations. Some insects do that in a summer. Some bacteria do it in a week. Under the model of cultural evolution, humans can’t evolve as fast as insects, but much faster than they ever could in the days before cultural evolution kicked in. 

It’s interesting here to note the intricacies of the socio-historical process. Even societies that seem to have reached equilibrium always hold a few individuals who restlessly test their society’s accepted world view, values, and morés. These people's followers are often the young, which suggests that adolescent revolt plays a vital role in the evolution of society. Teenagers make us look at our values and, once in a long while, they even make us realize that one of our familiar values is due for overhaul. Even a value retirement. Surprise! Teenage revolt serves a crucial purpose in the process of cultural evolution.

However, it’s more important to understand that many people in the rest of society see the new thinkers and their followers as delinquents. Only rarely are they seen as valuable by a majority. It’s even more important to see that the numbers involved on each side don’t matter as much as whether, first, the new thinkers’ ideas attract at least a few followers, second, they are allowed to practice their ways in a relatively free society, and third ...the ideas work, i.e. the followers then live more vigorous 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 in their power to quell the process. Most often, they can. But not always. For Western society, until the practical features of its ancient beliefs were integrated with its more humane Christian ones, Medieval Europeans did not support those in their midst whose ideas and morés focused on life in this material world.

Artists, scientists, inventors, explorers, and entrepreneurs are eccentric. They don’t support the status quo, they threaten it. But they move the rest forward. They flourish only in a society that tolerates eccentrics. Renaissance culture did.

   

 

           Gutenberg inspecting a proof (circa 1440) (engraving created in 1800’s)  

      (credit: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Johannes-Gutenberg)

 

                          

 

         The Glasses Apostle (credit: Conrad von Soest, via Wikimedia Commons)

 

To flourish, a society must use resources and grow when it has opportunities to do so, or it will lose out later when events in the environment grow harsher, competition gets fiercer, and it has few or no resources banked. 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 devise and use new ways are allowed to do so undisturbed. If they then live better, the majority begins to pay attention and take up these ways. ("Wow! Eyeglasses work!") 

This market-driven way, if practiced honestly, is the way of peaceful cultural evolution, the alternative to the war-driven one. Humans have taken a long time to even begin to grasp and follow the peaceful path, but as a species, we are almost there, almost to the point of being able to evolve culturally without war.

Now we can return to our main argument. We have already shown that humans must have a general code, usually called their moral code, to live by, just so they can organize their communities into teams that can efficiently get food, build shelters, care for the sick and injured, raise kids, etc. Furthermore, the code that the West has lived by is due for some major updating. It has not worked very well over the last century and if it is not updated, it will end in disaster for the human race. We have to have a code in place just to live, but the old one will not do. The problem for this twenty-first century is to figure out a new code for our society. Our discussion is getting us closer to building that code.

What has been discussed in this chapter is a quick and simplified summary of what Western societies did in terms of writing and re-writing their code for a few of their early recorded centuries. And it’s worth inserting that the summary presented here is admittedly very quick and simplified. There is a strong case to be made for the claim that the Renaissance began much earlier than the mid-1400s. More like the mid-1000s.^4. But most historians agree that the West for several centuries after the fall of Rome in the West was weak, and life was miserable for nearly all the people. Then, as the breakthroughs of science began to happen, the West began to surge ahead of the rest of the cultures of those times in economic and military power. It has continued to do so right into our times. A lead which all the signs indicate is now, in the 2020s, coming to an end.

What has also been shown along the way is that values endure over generations if and only if they work, i.e. they create nations that function efficiently in physical reality over the long haul.

The nations of the West took a thousand years to integrate Christian tolerance with Greek abstract thought and Roman practicality, but once Western nations learned to see commerce, Science, and exploration as ways of serving God, during the Renaissance, material progress came. Renaissance values worked. ("Do practical things that glorify God. Then, He loves you.") Western culture surged, in commerce, technology, and conquest, ahead of all other cultures.

But the hybrid moral code that led to the success of the West, fell out of touch with the wealth and power it had enabled the people of the West to acquire. The ways in which the West’s material progress outstripped its moral progress will be dealt with later in this book. For now, let’s just follow the evidence – what has happened in the West since the Renaissance. Once we have described what happened and why, i.e. once we have a model of cultural evolution in our minds, then we can go on to design a better code to teach to our children in these times.

 

 

 

Notes

 

1. Edith Hamilton, Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes (New York, NY: Warner Books, 1999), pp. 16–19.

2. Matthew Fox, The Accessible Hegel (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2005).

3. Edward Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. 1 (1776; Project Gutenberg).

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/731/731-h/731-h.html.

4. Dana B. Durand, Nicole Oresme and the Mediaeval Origins of Modern Science, article (journals.uchicago.edu)