The Making of Modernity: Part I

What follows is a horrendously brief narrative that borders on dangerous simplicity. However, I think the gist of it is correct and that it will clarify a number of posts. There are two essential elements of modern society which make "modernity" utterly distinct from all other pre-modern societies that preceded it. There are, of course, countless more but they are not by any means, but I believe that they are two of the most important. These elements were conceived in the medieval Europe but they were transformed by the crisis of the 17th century and utterly triumphed in 18th. They would cause, beginning in 1789, a series of violent revolutions in the Western world that would utterly transform society over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, all of which have led to the production of our pluralistic, impersonal, and materialistic (though prosperous and affluent) post-modern world. The two elements that I plan to trace are these: the nation-state/civil society and rationalism. Two other vastly important elements are science and capitalism but their rise is more well known and I will allude to them only briefly throughout what follows. Science and capitalism both produced the industrial age but, I believe, that industrial age could have taken any number of different forms had the Western world bee dominated by different ideas, a different culture, and a different kind of political organization. It is worth noting that without the rise of the nation-state it is doubtful that the spectacular rise of trade after 1500 would have been possible and thus little capital would have been accumulated to finance an industrial revolution, an issue I will return to later.

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Before the making of modernity can be truly appreciated, on needs to understand what came before it. Non-historians, and even some historians, make the fallacy that delivers a deathblow to all historical inquiry; anachronism. Far too often the common sense notions of how our society functions and what the contours of the modern world view are simply applied to the past. The world I will describe is radically different from our own. In the first place a person derived his identity from a geographical region far smaller to the nation. Nations, strictly speaking, did not exist before at least 1500. People were primarily from Yorkshire, Essex, the Midlands, or Suffolk instead of "England." Only in the fifteenth century during the later years of the Hundred Years War did a primitive English or French identity emerge. Even more so a person identified with his community, either the village manor or the burg. It was unlikely that a commoner traveled more than 20-30 miles from their home during their life. Most social control was informal rather than formal; it was administered by the community elders, the local guilds, or the local parish. Social bonds were intensely relational and duty bound instead of impersonal and contractual. Though the bureaucracy of the monarchy was relatively small prior to 1500 it had been growing steadily since about 1100 with the rise of the state.

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And despite the fact that the basic identity for most people was a relatively small geographical area, Europe was more unified during the Middle Ages than it would be until the creation of the Common Market after World War II. European unity was derived from three basic sources; the Latin Church, the Latin Mass, and Latin letters. Though it's power waned after its height in the 13th century under Innocent III with the rise of the state, the Catholic Church remained a very strong institution in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance and its system of monasteries and bishoprics provided Europeans from Ireland to Lithuania with a common faith. With the Catholic Church came, of course, the Latin Mass. What constituted "Europe" depended on whether the Mass was celebrated and a bishop was put in place. A common faith and a common language facilitated a common intellectual community. Besides authors like Dante and some Italian humanists of the Renaissance, Latin was the lingua franca of the intellectual world of the High and Late Middle Ages as well as the for most of Renaissance. Though often neglected, the High and Late Middle Ages produced superb scholarship in philosophy, theology, and science that would contribute to the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution.

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There was also no distinction between the secular and religious in the pre-modern European world. The sacred was immanent and pervasive; there was a true sense that the majesty of God was visible in all things created. It was believed that Classical learning, philosophy, and the sciences all contributed to a better understanding of God and His Word. Of course this meant that the wrath of God was just as immanent as his majesty. Though canon law and civic law comprised separate spheres all law was based on the divine, natural law. Modern notions of individual rights were non-existent. Instead each person had specific duties both to God and his fellow man. Ideally, the king, surrounded by a council of wise lawyers and counselors, ruled under and by the divinely-given natural law and its duties that were embodied by the canons of law and by tradition and precedent. The king (and his lords) had a duty to rule his subjects benevolently and in return his subjects had the duty to obey him. When both of these duties were fulfilled the body politic was healthy. Kings, who were said to "reign by the grace of God" and, in a way, acted as mediators between the man and the divine, were often idealized father figures and when rebellions against the monarchy they were aimed not at the king himself but his advisors who gave the king unwise council. Rebellions by peasants usually sought for ministers to be sacked and conditions improved rather than any change in the system (though the Peasant Revolt in England during the 14th century did have some radicals call for the overthrow the nobility and a direct relationship between the king and his people). To have rebelled against the social order would have been a vile sin. It is no coincidence that the lowest level of Hell in Dante's Inferno is reserved for rebels and traitors (Satan, Brutus, Cassius, and Judas). The line between Church and State were blurred; although they were separate institutions and occupied separate spheres, they were bound together through a dialectic relationship. One characteristic of Latin Christendom, and thereby Europe, was the communitas fidelium - "community of the faithful." Simply put, it meant that to be a good subject was to be a good Christian and vice versa. The ideal of kings was to create a Christian kingdom in their realms.

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As for the nobility, there was "power in the blood." It is not right to speak of "classes" during the Middle Ages; class is an invention of the 19th century. Status was not based on wealth but on prestige - i.e. a person's place in the aristocratic hierarchy and place based on familial - or blood - relations. It was not uncommon in the Late Middle Ages and especially the Renaissance for mercantile or banking families to be far wealthier than noble ones, but such families were forced to buy titles and land if they wished to move up in society. There were essentially three orders, at least officially, in every medieval society; the clergy, the nobles, and the rest (serfs, freemen, burgers, etc). It was the nobility who dominated warfare and military command was given to the noble with the most prestige, not the most talent. This was a fact that would continue until Napoleon. As the medieval world became the early modern world the role of the aristocracy became increasingly problematic since, despite their name, they were not the "best" in society. Indeed, in the Late Middle Ages the order of rural gentlemen and urban-based merchants and lawyers were better educated than the nobles and at times wealthier. It was from this level of society that the emerging "new monarchs" would draw the bulk of their bureaucracy since they were well educated and loyal (they owed their place in society to the king).

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A final element of the pre-modern (European) world worth mentioning is the role of tradition. Innovation was abhorrent to the medieval and the Renaissance mind and ancient texts (the Bible, but also the Classical authors) were treated as authoritative. "Who could improve on Aristotle's Metaphysics or Ptolemy's Amalgast?" the medieval or Renaissance man would ask. The traditions of canon and civic law, the ways of the ancestors and forbearers, were also viewed as authoritative and unchangeable (though of course everything was subject to divine law). To have gone against them smacked of hubris. It was the goal of medieval Scholasticism to fuse these two authoritative and conflicting traditions (the Classical philosophy and Christianity) together. The Renaissance and the Reformation were both efforts to bring back the ideal past, the Classics and the Early Church respectively, rather than to introduce new innovations. Of course, both movements ultimately were incredibly innovate, despite what the humanists and reformers thought. Such was the medieval world. It was an era of incredibly dynamism and production: in the years 1000-1300 the foundations of European civilization were set, including those quintessentially European institutions (the university, the state, parliaments, our system of law, etc.) However, for all of its accomplishments the Middle Ages had its problems and beginning in the Renaissance, but especially after 1500, these problems would be fleshed out. Though the Renaissance and the Reformation sought to revitalize the pre-medieval past, which they disparaging turned into the "dark ages," ultimately they would create something incredibly new. They put Europe on the road to modernity and it is that process to which we will turn to next.

Why History?

I continue the defense of my major:

*History produces identity. It helps us understand who we are and where we came from.

*It can demolish myths that have been constructed for dangerous and self-serving purposes by groups, cultures, and nations.

*History helps us understand other peoples, how their culture developed, etc. It helps us deal effectively with other peoples.

*Understanding where we came from, how we got to the present, is important if we are to shape the future. The past affects the present and the future and if we are to shape the future, we need to know about the past. You need to know why or how something is before you can fix or change it.

*History teaches us about human nature. What man is capable of, both good and evil.

*History is fascinating. There is a sort fo thrill in finding out how your ancestors lived or being connected with the past that produced you.

Hopeful Mom and Dad feel that their money is being well spent after reading this.

The 25 Most Influential Books in History

The following are the top 25 most influential books in history, in my opinion. Feel free to add any that you think I have missed or disagree with the order.

25. Tao Te Ching – Lao Tzu

24. The Qu’ran

23. Utopia – Thomas More

22. On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres - Copernicus

21. The Annalects – Confucius

20. The Institutes – John Calvin

19. The Leviathan – Thomas Hobbes

18. Bondage of the Will – Martin Luther

17. Summa Logicae – William of Ockham

16. Summa Theologica – Thomas Aquinas

15. Physics – Aristotle

14. Either/Or – Soren Kierkegaard

13. The Republic – Plato

12. The Social Contract – Jean Jacque Rousseau

11. On the Genealogy of Morality – Friedrich Nietzsche

10. Two Treatises of Government – John Locke

9. The Origin of the Species – Charles Darwin

8. Novum Organum – Francis Bacon

7. The Prerequisites for Socialism and the Tasks of Social Democracy – Eduard Bernstein

6. Das Kapital – Karl Marx

5. Discourse on Method – Rene Descartes

4. The City of God – St. Augustine

3. Critique of Pure Reason – Immanuel Kant

2. Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica – Isaac Newton

1. The Bible

History

History is for most people a boring subject. For most this is because it is about the past, which people don’t feel has much to do with them. The American industrialist Henry Ford once said “history is bunk.”Many people would agree emphatically with his statement and add that they should never have to take the miserable subject in school ever again. However, before you write off history, let me pose this profound statement to you: history is the only thing you can know for certain. The scientist will immediately scoff at this statement. But please pause and think it over for a minute. Say you are researching how chemical A will react with chemical B. The event happens and you prepare to draw a conclusion. But upon what basis are you to make your conclusion? Why, it is history! The history of the event of the reaction of chemicals A and B. Unless as a person, you are capable of reliving the exact moment of the chemical reaction while simultaneously writing the conclusion your information is passed upon the memory of past events. We are all involved in history everyday by recalling past memories and interpreting them or understanding them.

History is fundamentally important to our everyday lives. We avoid touching a hot stove because we remember in the history of our lives touching such a stove once in the past and being burned by it. Most of our actions are based on our remembrance of the past. Imagine what your relationships would be like with your friends, girlfriends or boyfriends, and husbands or wives if you suddenly suffered a bout of amnesia and could not remember anything. You could not remember how to please them or talk to them or, if need be, deal with them. In reality everyone is concerned with history in one form or another. History is not important not only on a personal basis, however. If, as a society we refuse to remember the past we will be like the foolish little boy who cannot remember that the hot stove burns him. Now I do not mean in any way to convey in this analogy that history comes in cycles. I do not believe it does, but the problems and challenges we face today have been experienced by countless generations before us because they are the challenges and problems of humanity. It is foolish to have their examples and not learn from them. History does not repeat itself but the human experience and human characteristics endure throughout history. History does not simply teach us about people who lived long ago but also tells us about ourselves. It teaches what humanity is capable of; both in creative power and in depravity.

History is also important because cultures develop historically. History tells a great deal about where we and other countries in the world are today and how we got there. Understanding the history of the United States should be important to anyone who claims to be a good American citizen. We can understand what policies failed in the past and avoid them in the future. If you listen to any of the talking heads on TV or radio they almost always will try to use history as a verification of the policy they are promoting. If Americans had a better understanding of history they would see that such historical "proofs" are often the result of bad history (See my blog on historical fallacies). History helps develop a critical mind. An understanding of foreign cultures and how they developed is also key for voters who are elected leaders that deal with American foreign policy. I believe one the reasons that Americans are so disliked around the world is because we have a poor understanding of other countries. For instance, I believe that Americans have a poor understanding of the Middle East or even Europe which has not helped the United States positively interact with these areas of the globe.

I would encourage you to take a closer look at history and understand its importance. People are far too influenced by Deweyian "practical" education. The average person and even a great many in acamedia are specialists and do not have a broad education. As a result they tend to be very narrow minded. An education in engineering has a good many applications. It helps us build better buildings, machines, and bridges. But engineering cannot tell us more about the world around us or ourselves. History, which is ultimately the study of people throughout history, is the best at educating us about the world and equipping us with the tools to be good citizens.

Some Historical Fallacies

Today I sat in my economics class at college and had a hard time controlling the outburst that was building within in. It is the last day before Easter break, and as many of the students had skipped class to catch early flights back to their homes our professors decided to give a lecture on the economics of war. However, in the process, my libertarian professor proceeded to put forth some serious historical fallacies. Since I have to wait several hours to be picked up before heading home, and my roommate is taking the xbox, I have decided to empty my anger at the class by correcting his mistakes. Now, don’t get me wrong, my economics professor is a really nice guy. But he, like the other libertarian economists at my school, have a very poor understanding of history because their view of history is filled with libertarian bias. They try to universalize an ideology that works well with economics but not elsewhere.

He tried to make the case (correctly) that wars do no benefit economically for a country. Wars, he said, are started only because the ruling elite see an opportunity to expand their power. First I would like to point out that this libertarian economics professor is, ironically, making a Marxist argument. A Marxist view of history teaches that wars are fought for the benefit of the ruling capitalist elite for their economical or political benefit. History is driven not by ideals or ideology but for material gain. The problem with this view of history is that it was destroyed in the First World War. Socialists and capitalist alike enthusiastically clamored for war and there were celebrations in the streets of London and Berlin when war finally broke out on August 1, 1914. World War I was fought primarily over nationalist sentiment that had reached a boiling point in the 1910s with a volatile diplomatic environment as countries practice realpolitik to advance their national interest. Wars do not benefit monetarily, but, like other costly transactions, a decision is made that the material costs of the war outweigh the national interest or ideological victories that might be won. Wars, in short, are not fought for material gain, which is a point lost on many libertarians and leftists to this day.

Secondly he put forth the libertarian myth that the American entry into World War I, and thus breaking the “sacred” advice of our founding fathers, had terrible consequences on the rest of twentieth century history. He stated that the American intervention inadvertently caused the rise of the USSR because the approach of the “yanks” caused the Germans to send V.I. Lenin back to Russia to foment revolution and end the Eastern Front. First I would like to point out that the Kadets and the Mensheviks had already thrown the tsar in March before the US entered into the war in April. Second, the Germans did not need any motivation to send Lenin to Russia to collapse the Russian state later in April. The war was already costing the Germans millions of lives and the German population was living in perpetual starvation by the time 1917 came and any chance to exploit the political stability in Russia would be seized by the German General Staff. Contrary to what my professor said the Germans were not “holding their own” in the war, but rather needed an immediate end to the conflict, even if the US had not entered the war.

Whether the US had gotten involved in World War I or not Lenin would have made his way back to Russia and launched the October Revolution. Even if the Germans had considered the risk of sending Lenin to Russia outweighed ending the war (unlikely given the state of Germany in the spring of 1917) can it honestly be believed that Lenin would not have made his way back to the Russia to take part in the “inevitable unfolding of history?” The consequences of the US entering the war actually benefitted the European situation by decisively ending the war. By 1917 the populace that had embraced war in 1914 was now shocked by the affects of total war and growing angry with appalling poverty and starvation that the war had caused. Socialists and communists had been steadily growing louder and more radical. Earlier in 1917 the French army mutinied and refused to continue fighting until it the mutiny was crushed. If the senseless slaughter that the Europeans were unable to extricate themselves from continued longer, it was likely that disillusionment with the war may have caused a socialist revolution across Europe. Such a revolution almost occurred in Germany in 1919.

Thirdly my professor claimed that the US also, by winning the war for the Allies, paved the way for Hitler and the Third Reich. I will not deny that Versailles was a major contributor to the rise of Nazism, but history is not inevitable. The Germans had fourteen years to choose their course and unwisely, for a variety of reason including Versailles, chose National Socialism in 1933. But this is not to say that the Germans could not have chose otherwise or that Hitler was inevitable given Versailles. The Americans under Wilson actually presented a peace plan (the Fourteen Points) that would have staved off the effects that a punitive peace had on Germany, but David Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau reneged on their agreement to the Fourteen Points in the spring of 1919.

These stories are merely the propaganda of libertarians who want to equate deviating from the Jeffersonian model with mortal sin. The advice of Washington in 1798 not to become involved abroad was given in a historical context that has long since passed. Strictly adhering to foreign policy advice made in the 1790s simply was not prudent in the 20th century and remains so in the 21st. Contrary to libertarian rhetoric a proactive government is not a heinous sin. It was precisely the isolationism of the US during the 20s and 30s that facilitated the rise of Hitler in the 1930s. Hitler was able to make his territorial claims on Europe because he knew that the US would not intervene. While the US should not entangle itself in needless foreign interventions, a proactive US foreign policy can be quite beneficial both to Americans and the world. As a Christian, I think that that what Paul says concerning government is true: “for he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer.” (Romans 13:4)