Right, I've removed an inflammatory comment and a sweary response. Don't lower the tone around here, please.
UPDATED: I have removed a number of people's comments because an entire thread had devolved into all and sundry swearing at each other. "Steersman", you are hanging by a thread around here. While some of the material sent your way was intemperate (and has also been deleted), you're not as bright as you think you are and you need to understand this, especially around a mob of Tory Brits. We tend to accept the notion of "natural hierarchies", something with which Americans struggle.
The next person who causes me to spend time on Substack management while I'm supposed to be on holiday gets fired into the sun.
Worse than that, the postmodern, "woke" cultural-left's larger goal is to destroy western civilization (which is already in trouble, being disrupted by technology) and replace it with Neo-Feudalism.
So, the globalist "New Clerisy" (Kotkin) pushes its quasi-religious, postmodernist cult dogma, which is as Christopher Lash pointed out, the "belief" that "reality is socially constructed".
Walsh made a huge contribution to the effort to expose the "woke" cult's nonsense at the level of popular culture in a way that eclipses the intellectual opposition to "wokeism".
Walsh is actually also very funny. But in an old-school, populist, middle and working class way (he mocks the pretensions of the elites and the PMC).
Walsh exposes the fact that the "woke" "left" hasn't actually solved the problem of sex and gender, just inserted polluted, corrupt ideology into the debate.
The "conservative" critique of the "left" stands: the left (mostly) won't take responsibility for its errors or for its tendency to be a magnet for mental dysfunction.
a classic example of the failure of the "left" (social science leftism)
Your point is good, but Walsh isn't addressing nuanced philosophical issues (that most of his audience doesn't care about), he is addressing the fact that "woke" neomarxists are trying to destroy western civilization and replace it with something worse: ILLIBERAL, totalitarian Neo-Feudalism wrapped up in a postmodern disguise. (see Ken Wilbe's discussion of the "pre/trans fallacy", which isn't about "trans" gender, but trans-rational psychological development.)
Discussion of academic and philosophical nuances will not save western civilization, political organizing will. Legislation and sausage.
also incoherent (at least as a decontextualized, I didn't read the linked material)
" ... doubt that she, and most women would take much if any responsibility for that themselves as they have, more or less, turned "woman" and "female" both into matters of identity instead of matters of labels for quite transitory reproductive abilities:"
My assumption is that you are trying to say that the TERF position is based on "identity"?
This seems like a bad definition of femaleness:
"matters of labels for quite transitory reproductive abilities"
Sex is immutable, though. It really is just about gamete production, there are 2 types only, each individual produces one of the 2 types, depending on life stage and never switches to the other.
Gender is psychology.
The argument is about whether language, policy and law should reflect a self assessment based on a subjective constellation of characteristics, or an objective, measurable and indeed obvious characteristic that's quite accurately predictive in matters of reproduction, physiology and crime patterns.
Bring it to the Clownfish Prison Board, and the Clownfish Sports Regulator, and insert it into text books for Clownfish Elementary.
But it's quite irrelevant when we're discussing human societies, and how we should strike the balance between individual liberties and protection of vulnerable groups. Of humans, in whom sex is determined at conception, immutable from then on, and relevant in some contexts.
This has been a thought provoking thread. Claiming that sex can never be changed is quite fundamental, but so is claiming that the current’s procedures do change the sex of people undergoing them. Also gametes don’t seem to play any direct role in sports for example, so even that biology based definition does not seem to lead to any practical resolutions.
Human evolution does have unique biological characteristics.*
Each of the "millions of species" is BY DEFINITION unique, because evolution is a process of SPECIATION (variation).
The general principles of evolution that are common to all species are:
1. variation
2. selection
3. retention
The most unique feature of human evolution is culture, which allowed the human species to rapidly adapt, in the evolutionary sense, unique survival mechanisms.
From the late 1970s, sociobiologists refined their new model of gene-culture co-evolution ("Dual Inheritance Theory") in the face of vicious opposition from the insane, anti-rationalist elements of the cultural-left (which now includes the "woke" nonsense).
Argument from authority. Ideological infiltration of various “authority” institutions does not make false claims any less false.
There are only two gametes produced among plants and animals, as requiring more than two gametes would make sexual production far too difficult. Leaving aside species that produce neuters (eusocial species), there are typically equal numbers of males and females produced, because otherwise there would be too much advantage in expressing as the scarcer sex.
Sex is both gamete and chromosomal. We can’t change the chromosomes of your cells and can’t enable you to produce the other gametes. So, we cannot change the sex of humans.
Biology is both a deeply historical and pervasively fuzzy boundary science (e.g. “species”: it makes sense to think of lions and tigers as different species, but they can still interbreed). The existence of fuzzy boundary, and so odd boundary cases, does not change the reality that sex in humans is immutable.
That secondary sexual characteristics are varied and not absolutely evenly distributed (so “fuzzy”) does not change any of the above. That there is a species which can change the gametes it produces means it changes from one sex to the other. But it does not change the reality of just two sexes, just that there is a species that can move from one to the other.
Homo sapiens are not such a species. The ability to surgically adjust secondary characteristics does not change this.
"As I discuss with Louise, however, we have to decide as a culture whether we want to step through that door and explore the valley beyond. Ancient Rome was an awesome civilisation in an older sense of the word: great, and terrible, and cruel." Could say the same for an Old Testament Christian approach too. There is a simple answer to wokers to be taken from the OT: God made us male and female, different but complementary. As with anything though, there's plenty of unpalatable in with the easy and appealing. I like a little brimstone, but just a little.
Other thought: the desire to help as a Christian is fine (to an extent) if the methodology were improved. It's an overly feminine, softly softly approach to go, "Oh you poor thing, I will pretend for you, I will shelter you under my wing", but indulging delusions isn't helpful over all. Suicide rates don't improve with cross-sex hormones. Sometimes mummy has to say "no".
Chasing an impossible goal is self-destructive, but it *feels cruel* to say, "no, you are not that, I will not pretend you are", or to suggest dealing with any trauma or hormonal imbalance in order to find contentment in your own body, but that would be a perfectly good Christian response, AKA God made you as your body, you are fine as you are. You may be tested, but you must persevere.
Yeah but we've ditched the Old Testament and kumbaya'd the New. God = love, and love = unconditional acceptance and passivity. The Great Enblandening. I know that's not a word, but it should be.
I wasn't describing my own views, just referencing a wider societal trend in the UK and other parts of the anglosphere, a trend I do not think is net good (or biblical).
Yes God's love can be the toughest of tough love. The article short-circuits Christian views of suffering which is not a luxury position of woe is me surrender and adoption of victim identity but by faith moving to a better place, redemption or die trying. Jesus was not a hippie
As a Christian, I encounter among my faith peers both of these responses to someone desperately mixed up and unhappy enough to plant a flag into transhood thinking it will solve their problems:
1. Love means willing the good of another so I am loving you to the greatest possible extent, to wit, that I ardently desire that you leave this bogus, deceitful nonsense behind and experience the truth and love that is Christ, and then the life of joy and peace and fellowship and rightly-ordered desires that follows giving him your heart
2. Love means never making anyone feel bad for any reason, including questioning their self-sabotaging behavior
A few people have got pretty grumpy (mainly on Twitter & Notes, not here) and pointed out that Wokery hasn't taken on all of Christianity. Well, of course it hasn't. It's a HERESY, that was my point.
Tom Holland makes a pretty convincing argument that Liberalism is also a Christian heresy - and of course most of us recognise that liberalism abandoned a great deal of the Christianity that gave it some of its most important ideas (moral equality of persons being the biggie, of course).
However, what you're seeing is almost a reverse colonisation of Christianity by Wokery in the form of your point 2.
I am an American Episcopalian, one of the most liberal denominations, and I am surrounded by fellow Christians (I'm tempted to put scare quotes around that but will refrain) whose actual religion as demonstrated by their words, actions, attitudes, concerns and attention is Wokery. They absolutely do use the faith infrastructure they have inherited in order to promote this new religion. I don't think it's necessarily intentional, and it is almost certainly unconscious and well-meaning, but I do get wearily frustrated by people next to me at the communion rail who ought to know better who are trying to shove Christ into the primacy of their woke worldview, when he is in fact -- and their presence in the building should indicate their understanding of this -- actual reality, the actual Logos.
Lol; obviously yes. Thing is, I love the liturgy, I love the dignified music, I love the Book of Common Prayer. There are still some normies in my parish and our rector is a relative conservative in a relatively conservative diocese. I can’t abide rock band / pastor in a leather jacket / stage instead of an altar churches, so here I sit. Lots of evangelical churches are wokie captured too, or they’re not but yet are full of sweet but vapid people who have houses full of scriptural word art and Jesus coffee mugs but no deep knowledge of their faith or commitment to being countercultural. For all the churches in this country it’s actually pretty hard to find a good one. Community is important but the Lord knows my heart and my mind.
I know what you mean about the liturgy and especially the King James Version when it has not been tossed. But I have scarcely been inside an Anglican Church since I was confirmed too many years ago. That is, until I stepped into Wells Cathedral when the boys choir was practicing ten years ago. Beauty upon beauty. I told my daughters I would attend church every Sunday if I lived here. I came back on Sunday and took Holy Communion. The assistant glared at me - I am sure she thought I was a ring in as I did not know how to do it properly, but things have changed a bit in sixty years. Ah well. The old Christians knew a thing or two about keeping their congregation and did not encourage folk singing as a path to God.
Your point about Walsh's comedic talent is astute. I listen to his podcast when I can tolerate him (about 2/3 of the time). He tries to flex his comedic muscle sometimes, but it almost never works. It comes across like he's trolling-but-not-really-but-yes-he-is. Kidding but not kidding. And it makes him come across like a weasel who is unwilling to accept full responsibility for his words, which I don't think is his intention.
I can't read his mind, and maybe it's not his religion that's repressing his inner comedian. But I do think I'm at least half right. He started his Mulvaney rant with an apology. Something no Roman satirist worth his salt would ever do.
I would argue it’s American WASPishness that’s his problem with executing decent satire. Yes, even in Catholicism there is a BIIIGGG culture of painful earnest politeness as next to godliness and where using foul language is right up there. Americans often mistake scarcasm and frankness as sins against charity and charity is ‘niceness’. It frustrated the hell out of me when I did a nun run over there because I kept doing the proverbial stepping on a conversational rake every time I got too Australian and let slip an expletive.
That's where we are. The epidemic of cowardice is such that nobody from the center or on the left will call out the trans insanity. It's a pathetic state, but it's where we are and we deserve to feel bad about it.
You make some solid and thought-provoking points. I think you're onto something, when you argue that wokeism succeeded as it did because it was able to piggyback off of -- i.e., parasitize -- certain Christian doctrines. But I wonder if that's the fault of Christianity, per se, or of the feminized, watered-down, Globohomo Americanized version of Christianity. Because Christianity was also the religion of all those "problematic" historical figures who waged wars, conquered and subjugated weaker nations, created and ruled over large empires, and who claimed to be doing so to glorify God and promote the faith. And if they had encountered a postmodern feminist or tranny, they would have had zero compunctions about using "cruel and unusual punishment" to stop their heresies from spreading; mere verbal ridicule and satire would have been child's play in comparison. Now, I'm not saying theirs was the correct understanding of Christianity, but only that there's no good reason to reject theirs and say that the postmodern feminized variant is the real thing either. Both can find support in scripture, and that leads me to think of Aristotle's conception of virtue as the mean between opposite vices; maybe the Christianity of the Inquisition is on one vicious extreme, postmodern feminized Christianity is on the other vicious extreme, and the real faith is somewhere between them.
Another thing: the spread of communism in non-Christian Asian nations points to a deeper civilizational problem. I sometimes wonder if our cultural technology just cannot adequately account for our biology: i.e., that living in societies above Dunbar's number inevitably dooms us to bad government and insane cultural and political ideologies, and that eras of good, functional government and culture are necessarily an unstable aberration from a general rule of dysfunction.
Anyway, thanks for writing this essay. It's really given me some great food for thought!
So much better. Imagine Joe Biden's head on Dylan Mulvaney's frock-clad stick body with blue acrylic nai--claws and a Valley Girl accent saying. "OK guys, I'm feeling soooo cunt!"
I very much agree with the Christian origins of wokery. Our current situation reminds me of Nietzsche's Last Man, who is only concerned with his own comfort. In a society bereft of meaning - something worth suffering for - the only thing left is the brute fact of suffering itself. And the only meaning left is to try and eliminate suffering and seek comfort.
Without the belief in God, which gives meaning, we are left with a Christian value system that has no meaning except the elimination of suffering - in Nietzsche's view, Nihilism. To avoid confusion, I am atheist who doesn't like atheism.
A neurohacker and a cognitive scientist ponder the reverse-engineering of religion to create the post-post-modern "religion of no religion" with the former President of the Santa Fe Institute.
> I very much agree with the Christian origins of wokery.
While wokery does have some Christian roots, it's Nietzschean roots, by way of Sartre are even stronger. Heck, the whole transgender thing can be thought of as a Nietzschean triumph of one's will over one's very biology.
No, I don't really agree. The manner in which it manifests is the individual as victim of their body. 'Born in the wrong body' is meant to garner our sympathy and compassion, not our awe.
In some cases, it's pretty clear that the person's attitude is more Nietzschean and the "born in the wrong body victimhood" is just for the benefit of the NPCs.
@Paul, I want to thank you for your clear definition of 'meaning' as something worth suffering for. You've hit the nail on the head and crystallised a nebulous notion.
I am an epistemological materialist, but I grew up in a churchgoing family. The preacher had a messy divorce. About a decade after that, I heard that he had drank himself to death, and that for about two years prior, he was displaying significant weight gain and other signs of failing health. I infer that nobody in his congregation, and none of the other clergy, would open their eyes and act accordingly and successfully. I'm no Biblical scholar, but if I remember correctly, it is one thing to love your neighbor as yourself, and a different and often contrary thing to condone your neighbor's every single behavior, even the self-destructive ones. As we learn more and more about the poor outcomes of the followers of transgenderism et al, I think it will become more and more apparent that Christianity's failings here are accidentally self-inflicted by modern adherents and not essential consequences of the precepts.
Ha. It was a high quality deepfake that disappeared soon after it came out on Instagram. It was an authentic looking ruthless never-supposed-to-say-it-out-loud anti trans statement.
Modern Christian thought has many sins for which it must answer, and wokery is but one of them.
A quick read of Jonathan Edward's classic sermon "Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry God" shows a different, far less compromising school of Christian thought. One in which sin is sin, no matter what platitudes one heaps on it. Modern Christian denominations would do well to return to some of that tradition.
We can and should have compassion for all who suffer. God does call us to that.
We should never enable or excuse sinful conduct. It is not unloving or lacking in compassion to call out sin for what it is.
re: liberalism and ILLIBERALISM, geopolitical and historical origins, role of genetics, inbred vs outbred gene pools
Yep, scholars and philosophers have previously noted that there are deeper social origins to leftist "beliefs" than materialism, Marxism, romanticism (anti-rationalism), etc.
A lot of medieval Christianity was a reflection of decentralized (non-imperial) politics. (see Paleo-libertarian historical Leonard Liggio).
Don't forget that medieval (European/Byzantine) Christians suffered at least 1,000 years of being attacked and subject to slave raids and pillaging by (non-Christian) Viking slavers (who were defeated), Arab/Berber slavers (their civilization was more or less stopped in its imperial expansion), the Mongolian Golden Hordes (faded) and the Ottomans (also slavers and the surviving remnant of Mongol empire that converted to Islam, stopped in its imperial expansion at the "Siege of Vienna" in the late1600s).
Christian Europeans/Byzantines had it pounded into them that vicious "pagan" empires had to be defeated for survival reasons, and that decentralized politics wasn't going to get the job done. What did get the job done was the evolution of what anthropologist Joseph Henrich (Harvard) calls WEIRD culture, classical liberalism, Constitutional order, high-social-trust social institutions, classically liberal personality traits, which resulted from the banning of cousin marriage by the early church (to diminish the political power of clans to resist conversion to the Church). Classically liberal personality traits co-emerge with the increased genetic variability that resulted from the nuclear family structure (the alternative to clannish cousin marriage), as did "capitalism" (charter cities, river and sea trade, market economics) and increased literacy/numeracy, scientific and technological innovations (windmills, sextants), and "democracy".
But there was a regression to "oriental despotism" in the imperial recentralization of power after 1492, which the Inquisition resulted from, as well as the attempts by the increasingly powerful and wealthy Royal empires to wipe out medieval "liberal" reforms, such as peasants' rights (spread from the Abbey at Cluny, etc.).
So, the historical accident of the early church's ban on cousin marriage had the unintended historical result of creating a gene pool in which classical liberalism spread, was temporarily sidelined after 1492, but continued to produce deep social change, including the co-emergence of the WEIRD gene pool with high-social-trust, Enlightenment values (agentic values such as individual achievement) and modern rationalism.
The reason that Christians, people of NW European origin, are embarrassed by their culture's imperial ("pagan") tendencies is that those tendencies went too far toward empire building and political re-centralization, even if the original justification for doing so was to work around the Ottoman Empire's blocking of Silk Road trade, to eliminate Viking and Arab slave raids, Mongol marauders etc.
On the issue of sin, evil, suffering and salvation (spiritual liberation from impurity: evil and sin), Christianity is in the tradition of Axial culture and contemplative "purity myth" religion that evolved after the Bronze Age collapse, which was a classic example of how technological and economic disruption drives social change (see Gerhard Lenski).
To vastly oversimplify, Axial cultures, people in walled, medieval cities, needed a new set of social institutions and beliefs, such as the evolving idea of a transcendent God of personal salvation, to create a more powerful alternative to "paganism" (generally, the remnants pre-Axial, nomadic culture).
Axial cultures, including Christianity, evolved because the psychological archetype of "pagan" culture was not able to adapt to techno-economic disruption and emerging coherence needs in culture and the need for a new model of social order.
Note: Islam is also Axial (its purity myth, Divine Unity, tawhid, goes beyond Christianity's Trinity), but failed for various reasons (geopolitics restricted the emergence of capitalism and an expanding urban commoner class), one of which was intense inbreeding due to a strong form of the practice of cousin marriage in Arab culture (not all Muslims are Arab, but it is the central culture in the religion). Islam partly reformed "pagan" forms of slavery, but was still economically dependent on slave labor and the slave trade because of the historical lack of industrialization and technological innovation in the muslim world.
Also note that the Enlightenment, modern rationalism, severely eroded the legitimacy of mythic religion in crucial ways, but failed to provide a satisfactory, alternative metaphysics, a system of meaning and purpose.*
I don't agree with everything Wilber says here (he sort of confuses medieval liberalism and modern liberalism), but his sociological analysis is a good summary:
In one sense, of course, science and liberalism are right to be anti-spiritual, because most of what has historically served as spirituality is now prerational, magic or mythic, implicitly ethnocentric, fundamentalist dogma. Liberalism traditionally came into existence to fight the tyranny of prerational myth and that is one of its enduring and noble strengths (the freedom, liberty, and equality of individuals in the face of the often hostile or coercive collective). And this is why liberalism was always allied with science against fundamentalist, mythic, prerational religion (and the conservative politics that hung on to that religion).
...
The main strength of liberalism is its emphasis on individual human rights. The major weakness is its rabid fear of Spirit. Modern liberalism came into being, during the Enlightenment, largely as a counterforce to mythic religion, which was fine. But liberalism committed a classic pre/trans fallacy: it thought that all spirituality was nothing but prerational myth, and thus it tossed any and all transrational spirituality as well, which was absolutely catastrophic. (As Ronald Reagan would say, it tossed the baby with the dishes.) Liberalism attempted to kill God and replace transpersonal Spirit with egoic humanism, and as much as I am a liberal in many of my social values, that is its sorry downside, this horror of all things Divine.
Elsewhere Wilber claims that his idea that that the "right" (conservatism) is based on the "interiors" of human consciousness (interiors = meaning, purpose, subjectivity) and the "left" is based on "exteriors" (social and institutional structures, physical existence, the environmental, technology, objectivity), is unique.
(Wilber is claiming his "integral theory" can solve the problem of subjective/objective differences.)
I've read Heinrich and Cohn, so I'm familiar with these arguments, although the former makes some legal history errors. The first cousin marriage ban was in the Roman Republic; Christianity, because it grew up in the Roman Empire, took this on and then expanded it at the Council of Trent.
Relatedly, Orthodox Christianity (as opposed to Catholic Christianity) regressed towards the pre-Roman inbreeding norm, forgetting the prior civilisation's Christian rules as it went backwards. This has had consequences - people in Orthodox countries produce different behaviours in response to various games theory exercises when compared with people from Catholic countries. A country like Ukraine, meanwhile, has a line down the middle that tracks the confessional divide between Catholic and Orthodox.
What happens when you don't have a combination of both Roman and (later) Christian norms is illustrated by the peculiar history of Ireland, where there was conversion to Christianity but no adoption of Christian (or Roman obviously, because Ireland was never a part of the Empire) social and marital norms. This meant the Irish clans colonised everything, including the Church.
One effect of this was that the Pope finished up backing Protestant William of Orange in his conquest of Ireland, because the Catholic Church (in Rome) saw William as a way to smash up the Irish clans and their domination of the Irish version of Catholicism. This is why Ireland, after the Battle of the Boyne, became more Roman than Rome.
From memory, Wrangham uses Boehm’s work as part of this argument that we became Homo sapiens by using proactive aggression to systematically kill off those high in reactive aggression. A pattern you can still see in contemporary foragers.
You might find Liggio's description of (spin on?) medieval liberalism (Constitutional order) interesting:
The conquest of the kingdom of Grenada in 1492 witnessed the establishment of Absolutism, the core feature of which was the end of the universal, supra-political position of religion and especially of the Church. The universal church was replaced under Absolutism by a subservient, state religious bureau. Throughout Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the universal, trans-political position of the Church was ended. For example, the French kings and rulers of the Spanish kingdoms were able by Concordats to gain from the Papacy total control over the church institutions in their territories.
The Protestant reformation, the second phase of this movement, occurred where local rulers were not able to gain similar concessions from the Popes; countries where rulers had wrested control of the Church remained "faithful" and sought to consolidate their gains through the Catholic Reformation centered on the Council of Trent. In Spain, the rulers of Castile, Aragon, and Cataluna after 1480 gained the power to establish political inquisitions beyond the powers of the bishops. The infamous Spanish Inquisition not only dominated the peninsula, but the Vice-royalties of Mexico and Peru.
Just as the Monarchist’s Church of the Council of Trent (with the Royal Inquisition) contributed to Absolutism, the history of Spain and Spanish colonies in the reign of Charles V indicate the great turning point whereby Spain lost its medieval constitutionalism and led much of Europe in substitution of oriental despotism. As William Graham Sumner’s The Conquest of the United States by Spain (1900) showed that while the U.S. conquered Spain’s colonies, Spain’s imperialist ideas had conquered the intellect of American politicians, so the distinguishing characteristics of European constitutionalism compared to oriental despotism (cf. Jones, The European Miracle (1981) were lost with Spanish conquests of Asia and South America. Spain adopted the imperial methods of India, Turkey, China, Mexico, and Peru in place of decentralized, limited constitutional institutions of medieval Europe.
The decline and political control of religious institutions in the fifteenth century undermined the foundations of European constitutionalism’s uniqueness.
... To achieve imperial greatness, Spain had to abandon the medieval free market and constitutional institutions.
I'm a classicist & lawyer, not a medievalist - but my co-author on this stack, Lorenzo, is a proper medievalist, so I'll defer to him for his view of Liggio's arguments.
My sense (amateur anthropologist) is that given the periodic rise and fall, expansion and contraction, of empires, the greater tendency toward rationalism in the Greco-Roman system was:
1. a feature of sea trade, which has less need of agrarian (middle eastern) religion's conformity and supernaturalism
2. in opposition to the holy archetype of supernaturalism in Persian and middle eastern [culture] because creating the cultural opposite of an enemy creates cultural unity.
Rationalism was fitted to the Greco-Roman system in ways consistent with the tribal origins and features of those cultures.
Rationalism (Enlightenment modernism) reached its greatest peak under NW European maritime sea trade and after imperial expansion.
As you pointed out in another comment, Russia and Eastern Orthodox Christianity are resistant to liberalism and modern rationalism. I would say largely because Russia was not at core a maritime sea trade civilization, rather it was/is agrarian and continental.
Not sold. The Dutch Republic and Britain managed to be pretty imperial and stay Parliamentary. Access to American silver, obviating the need to bargain domestically over revenues, was a bigger driver of Iberian autocratic centralisation. Which was still pretty legalistic. Hence, for instance, the Kingdom of Galicia remaining a institutionally separate Crown. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Galicia
Also, the flood of silver made Spanish goods very uncompetitive, undermining the local commercial interests.
I don't know much about the Dutch Republic, but wasn't it an extension of Habsburg Spain or something like that? The Dutch peasants and urban commoner classes were arguably more genetically disposed to be "capitalist".*
Britian was anti-Absolutist (Calvinist, anti-Pope), so King George was "liberal" by the standards of his time.
Liggio's main point (which contradicts the standard WASP narrative in the USA) is that the "classically liberal" urban commoner classes, like most everything else, generally went two ways around 1492:
1. continue medieval, classically liberal practices, as they had formed under decentralized politics. England is in that category.
2. adopt mercantilism, in an alliance with "oriental despotism", Absolutism, colonialism and imperialism.
Recentralized power meant using the Church as a tool of empire and trade as a tool of empire.
As you say, and Liggio points out, the vast wealth of gold/silver/etc. from the Spanish colonies was the driver of recentralization (and weapons production in Spain and wars across Europe). There is a tiny pocket of Spain (a village called Livia or something like that) a few kilometers inside of France in La Cerdanya (sort of near Andorra). Territorial exceptions based on royal deals and family relations obviously happened, but I can't see how that has much pertinence.
Imperial expansion co-emerged with political recentralization and "modernization" (the Queen's project to reinvent Castilian as a standardized language that would replace all other dialects, etc.).
Britian and the USA held onto the older, medieval, pre-imperial liberal traditions while they were wiped out by imperial powers elsewhere.
As I noted previously, Joseph Henrich's WEIRD model is useful in understand how classical liberalism emerged, and the role that outbreeding in gene pools and the replacement of "clannish" social forms (including dynastic forms) with the nuclear family played in the evolution of classical liberalism.
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* excerpt:
...
so the dutch ... are descended from a population that spent 400+ years or so in a manor system, some of whom (self-sorting!) then jumped right in to a system where they were free and independent peasants working on their own and trading their wares in markets (another crucial part of the story…for another day). and they’ve been doing the latter for nearly one thousand years. well no wonder they invented capitalism
The progression might have been something like this:
Charter ("Free") Cities in Germany give rise to the Hanseatic League, which spreads both east and west, including to what is now Holland and London.
Holland is more vulnerable to continental wars and politics than London (Walter Russel Mead), so the (classically liberal, medieval) "liberty" traditions in London become a backwater. By extension, the USA Constitution, weirdly, is one of the last remnants of medieval liberalism. NYC, originally a Dutch colony, places a huge imprint of medieval and early modern "liberty" and classical liberalism (tolerance of diversity of religion, etc.) on american culture.
Britian makes major scientific and technological advances (including weapons, sea navigation) both because it has a tradition of "backward" medieval liberalism and a gene pool that supports high-social-trust in the social infrastructure (derived from originally Hanseatic banking and insurance schemes) needed to support a vast system of sea trade becoming a world power.
The British system didn't hold to any kind of ideological purity about classical liberalism in its empire building, it adopted the same kind of brutal colonialist methods as the competition (Spain, France, Portugal).
Colin Woodard's work makes clear that the gene pools of origin of the cultural regions of the USA map into more "liberal" culture in the Northeast and more "clannish" culture in the Appalachians and the South. Thus, the unfulfilled plan by the Confederates to build a new colonial slave state stretching to the Pacific, then south into Mexico and Central America.
‘Medieval liberalism’ is a very odd terminology, as highly anachronistic. I prefer to think of it in terms of bargaining/Parliamentary politics (where ‘Parliament’ refers also to Cortes, Estates, Diets, Sejms etc.).
Also not keen at all on ‘Oriental Despotism’ as terminology, as it encourages over-reliance on cultural explanations and draws distinctions between Europe and ‘Orient’ that also quite misleading.
Kurt Wittfogel’s book is an intriguing read, but his claim about the nature of irrigation turned out to be mistaken. You did not need centralisation to have irrigation, it was a case of the wider problem of creating features that both hold farmers in place and generate more things that have to be protected. That makes them more “captive” to state exploitation.
In the case of the Nile, the complete reliance on the flood in a country with essentially no rain made production highly “transparent” to the state, so highly taxable. (It is the same point as firms documenting employment payments make income flows highly transparent to the state, so highly taxable.)
Marx’s use of the term is a rather inadequate attempt to make his Hegelian simplification of history, so as to give it a “knowable” and “proper” direction work.
Medievalist here. The Latin Church massively expanded the incest prohibitions early in the medieval period. Having sex with godparents was incest. Having sex with a kin relation of someone you had sex with was incest. That’s why it mattered if his brother Arthur had had sex with Catharine of Aragon on their wedding night. If they had, Catherine having sex with Henry was incest. Of course, since Henry had had sex with her sister, having sex with Ann Boleyn was also incest. Awkward.
The degree of affinity was dropped from 7th to 4th at the fourth Lateran Council in 1215. It was becoming too hard for royals and nobles to avoid folk too close in kinship and too much chance of unpleasant ancestry discoveries. But kin groups were already cactus in manorial Europe by then. (They kept going in the pastoralist fringes, notably Ireland, Scottish highlands and Balkans.)
Right, I've removed an inflammatory comment and a sweary response. Don't lower the tone around here, please.
UPDATED: I have removed a number of people's comments because an entire thread had devolved into all and sundry swearing at each other. "Steersman", you are hanging by a thread around here. While some of the material sent your way was intemperate (and has also been deleted), you're not as bright as you think you are and you need to understand this, especially around a mob of Tory Brits. We tend to accept the notion of "natural hierarchies", something with which Americans struggle.
The next person who causes me to spend time on Substack management while I'm supposed to be on holiday gets fired into the sun.
Never vote for a "woke" politician.
Never vote for an "anti-woke' politician unless they provide some minimal, coherent rationale for being "anti-woke".
Support and promote organizations, scholars and thinkers that are promoting sophisticated anti-woke activism. Example:
https://www.fairforall.org/dr-tabia-lee/
Worse than that, the postmodern, "woke" cultural-left's larger goal is to destroy western civilization (which is already in trouble, being disrupted by technology) and replace it with Neo-Feudalism.
So, the globalist "New Clerisy" (Kotkin) pushes its quasi-religious, postmodernist cult dogma, which is as Christopher Lash pointed out, the "belief" that "reality is socially constructed".
Walsh made a huge contribution to the effort to expose the "woke" cult's nonsense at the level of popular culture in a way that eclipses the intellectual opposition to "wokeism".
Walsh is actually also very funny. But in an old-school, populist, middle and working class way (he mocks the pretensions of the elites and the PMC).
Walsh exposes the fact that the "woke" "left" hasn't actually solved the problem of sex and gender, just inserted polluted, corrupt ideology into the debate.
The "conservative" critique of the "left" stands: the left (mostly) won't take responsibility for its errors or for its tendency to be a magnet for mental dysfunction.
a classic example of the failure of the "left" (social science leftism)
https://www.thecut.com/2016/07/why-it-took-social-science-years-to-correct-a-simple-error-about-psychoticism.html
www. thecut. com /2016/07/why-it-took-social-science-years-to-correct-a-simple-error-about-psychoticism.html
re: the perfect is the enemy of the good?
Your point is good, but Walsh isn't addressing nuanced philosophical issues (that most of his audience doesn't care about), he is addressing the fact that "woke" neomarxists are trying to destroy western civilization and replace it with something worse: ILLIBERAL, totalitarian Neo-Feudalism wrapped up in a postmodern disguise. (see Ken Wilbe's discussion of the "pre/trans fallacy", which isn't about "trans" gender, but trans-rational psychological development.)
Discussion of academic and philosophical nuances will not save western civilization, political organizing will. Legislation and sausage.
also incoherent (at least as a decontextualized, I didn't read the linked material)
" ... doubt that she, and most women would take much if any responsibility for that themselves as they have, more or less, turned "woman" and "female" both into matters of identity instead of matters of labels for quite transitory reproductive abilities:"
My assumption is that you are trying to say that the TERF position is based on "identity"?
This seems like a bad definition of femaleness:
"matters of labels for quite transitory reproductive abilities"
Sex is immutable, though. It really is just about gamete production, there are 2 types only, each individual produces one of the 2 types, depending on life stage and never switches to the other.
Gender is psychology.
The argument is about whether language, policy and law should reflect a self assessment based on a subjective constellation of characteristics, or an objective, measurable and indeed obvious characteristic that's quite accurately predictive in matters of reproduction, physiology and crime patterns.
Ah, the clownfish argument - it's been a while.
Bring it to the Clownfish Prison Board, and the Clownfish Sports Regulator, and insert it into text books for Clownfish Elementary.
But it's quite irrelevant when we're discussing human societies, and how we should strike the balance between individual liberties and protection of vulnerable groups. Of humans, in whom sex is determined at conception, immutable from then on, and relevant in some contexts.
We'll have to agree to disagree
This has been a thought provoking thread. Claiming that sex can never be changed is quite fundamental, but so is claiming that the current’s procedures do change the sex of people undergoing them. Also gametes don’t seem to play any direct role in sports for example, so even that biology based definition does not seem to lead to any practical resolutions.
Human evolution does have unique biological characteristics.*
Each of the "millions of species" is BY DEFINITION unique, because evolution is a process of SPECIATION (variation).
The general principles of evolution that are common to all species are:
1. variation
2. selection
3. retention
The most unique feature of human evolution is culture, which allowed the human species to rapidly adapt, in the evolutionary sense, unique survival mechanisms.
From the late 1970s, sociobiologists refined their new model of gene-culture co-evolution ("Dual Inheritance Theory") in the face of vicious opposition from the insane, anti-rationalist elements of the cultural-left (which now includes the "woke" nonsense).
---
* https://coevolution.fas.harvard.edu/
It applies to all mammals, not just humans.
Argument from authority. Ideological infiltration of various “authority” institutions does not make false claims any less false.
There are only two gametes produced among plants and animals, as requiring more than two gametes would make sexual production far too difficult. Leaving aside species that produce neuters (eusocial species), there are typically equal numbers of males and females produced, because otherwise there would be too much advantage in expressing as the scarcer sex.
Sex is both gamete and chromosomal. We can’t change the chromosomes of your cells and can’t enable you to produce the other gametes. So, we cannot change the sex of humans.
Biology is both a deeply historical and pervasively fuzzy boundary science (e.g. “species”: it makes sense to think of lions and tigers as different species, but they can still interbreed). The existence of fuzzy boundary, and so odd boundary cases, does not change the reality that sex in humans is immutable.
That secondary sexual characteristics are varied and not absolutely evenly distributed (so “fuzzy”) does not change any of the above. That there is a species which can change the gametes it produces means it changes from one sex to the other. But it does not change the reality of just two sexes, just that there is a species that can move from one to the other.
Homo sapiens are not such a species. The ability to surgically adjust secondary characteristics does not change this.
Fab, really interesting.
"As I discuss with Louise, however, we have to decide as a culture whether we want to step through that door and explore the valley beyond. Ancient Rome was an awesome civilisation in an older sense of the word: great, and terrible, and cruel." Could say the same for an Old Testament Christian approach too. There is a simple answer to wokers to be taken from the OT: God made us male and female, different but complementary. As with anything though, there's plenty of unpalatable in with the easy and appealing. I like a little brimstone, but just a little.
Other thought: the desire to help as a Christian is fine (to an extent) if the methodology were improved. It's an overly feminine, softly softly approach to go, "Oh you poor thing, I will pretend for you, I will shelter you under my wing", but indulging delusions isn't helpful over all. Suicide rates don't improve with cross-sex hormones. Sometimes mummy has to say "no".
Chasing an impossible goal is self-destructive, but it *feels cruel* to say, "no, you are not that, I will not pretend you are", or to suggest dealing with any trauma or hormonal imbalance in order to find contentment in your own body, but that would be a perfectly good Christian response, AKA God made you as your body, you are fine as you are. You may be tested, but you must persevere.
The "test, but persevere" trope has its roots in Job, the oldest book in the Bible. Interesting.
Yeah but we've ditched the Old Testament and kumbaya'd the New. God = love, and love = unconditional acceptance and passivity. The Great Enblandening. I know that's not a word, but it should be.
Sibling to "embiggen", which I also like.
Also to "ensmallen," which, I believe, is a Dawn French coinage.
Then why not littlate?
The Old Testament is still part of the Bible, and the New Testament contains more than just "God = love".
Avoid any church that forgets the above.
I wasn't describing my own views, just referencing a wider societal trend in the UK and other parts of the anglosphere, a trend I do not think is net good (or biblical).
I never said you were.
Most people who attend non-fundamentalist churches do it for the socializing, not the religion. The fundies go for the hate.
> The fundies go for the hate.
When you hate Truth, Truth feels like hate.
(*chuckle*)
You haven’t even a hallway nodding acquaintance with truth.
Yes God's love can be the toughest of tough love. The article short-circuits Christian views of suffering which is not a luxury position of woe is me surrender and adoption of victim identity but by faith moving to a better place, redemption or die trying. Jesus was not a hippie
As a Christian, I encounter among my faith peers both of these responses to someone desperately mixed up and unhappy enough to plant a flag into transhood thinking it will solve their problems:
1. Love means willing the good of another so I am loving you to the greatest possible extent, to wit, that I ardently desire that you leave this bogus, deceitful nonsense behind and experience the truth and love that is Christ, and then the life of joy and peace and fellowship and rightly-ordered desires that follows giving him your heart
2. Love means never making anyone feel bad for any reason, including questioning their self-sabotaging behavior
One of those is wrong
A few people have got pretty grumpy (mainly on Twitter & Notes, not here) and pointed out that Wokery hasn't taken on all of Christianity. Well, of course it hasn't. It's a HERESY, that was my point.
Tom Holland makes a pretty convincing argument that Liberalism is also a Christian heresy - and of course most of us recognise that liberalism abandoned a great deal of the Christianity that gave it some of its most important ideas (moral equality of persons being the biggie, of course).
However, what you're seeing is almost a reverse colonisation of Christianity by Wokery in the form of your point 2.
I am an American Episcopalian, one of the most liberal denominations, and I am surrounded by fellow Christians (I'm tempted to put scare quotes around that but will refrain) whose actual religion as demonstrated by their words, actions, attitudes, concerns and attention is Wokery. They absolutely do use the faith infrastructure they have inherited in order to promote this new religion. I don't think it's necessarily intentional, and it is almost certainly unconscious and well-meaning, but I do get wearily frustrated by people next to me at the communion rail who ought to know better who are trying to shove Christ into the primacy of their woke worldview, when he is in fact -- and their presence in the building should indicate their understanding of this -- actual reality, the actual Logos.
> I am an American Episcopalian
Have you considered switching to a denomination that still worships God?
Lol; obviously yes. Thing is, I love the liturgy, I love the dignified music, I love the Book of Common Prayer. There are still some normies in my parish and our rector is a relative conservative in a relatively conservative diocese. I can’t abide rock band / pastor in a leather jacket / stage instead of an altar churches, so here I sit. Lots of evangelical churches are wokie captured too, or they’re not but yet are full of sweet but vapid people who have houses full of scriptural word art and Jesus coffee mugs but no deep knowledge of their faith or commitment to being countercultural. For all the churches in this country it’s actually pretty hard to find a good one. Community is important but the Lord knows my heart and my mind.
There is nothing more depressing than going to church and encountering a man with a guitar.
He's making both Christianity and rock music worse.
I know what you mean about the liturgy and especially the King James Version when it has not been tossed. But I have scarcely been inside an Anglican Church since I was confirmed too many years ago. That is, until I stepped into Wells Cathedral when the boys choir was practicing ten years ago. Beauty upon beauty. I told my daughters I would attend church every Sunday if I lived here. I came back on Sunday and took Holy Communion. The assistant glared at me - I am sure she thought I was a ring in as I did not know how to do it properly, but things have changed a bit in sixty years. Ah well. The old Christians knew a thing or two about keeping their congregation and did not encourage folk singing as a path to God.
Check out the ordinariate! I'm hopeful that one day it will develop into a rite of its own as Anglo Catholic.
Your point about Walsh's comedic talent is astute. I listen to his podcast when I can tolerate him (about 2/3 of the time). He tries to flex his comedic muscle sometimes, but it almost never works. It comes across like he's trolling-but-not-really-but-yes-he-is. Kidding but not kidding. And it makes him come across like a weasel who is unwilling to accept full responsibility for his words, which I don't think is his intention.
I can't read his mind, and maybe it's not his religion that's repressing his inner comedian. But I do think I'm at least half right. He started his Mulvaney rant with an apology. Something no Roman satirist worth his salt would ever do.
Perhaps it’s politeness. It’s easier to be funny if you’re willing to be rude.
I would argue it’s American WASPishness that’s his problem with executing decent satire. Yes, even in Catholicism there is a BIIIGGG culture of painful earnest politeness as next to godliness and where using foul language is right up there. Americans often mistake scarcasm and frankness as sins against charity and charity is ‘niceness’. It frustrated the hell out of me when I did a nun run over there because I kept doing the proverbial stepping on a conversational rake every time I got too Australian and let slip an expletive.
As soon as he stops talking about "trans" he sounds like any old right-wing nutter.
While he's on "trans" he is the Voice of Reason.
That's where we are. The epidemic of cowardice is such that nobody from the center or on the left will call out the trans insanity. It's a pathetic state, but it's where we are and we deserve to feel bad about it.
You make some solid and thought-provoking points. I think you're onto something, when you argue that wokeism succeeded as it did because it was able to piggyback off of -- i.e., parasitize -- certain Christian doctrines. But I wonder if that's the fault of Christianity, per se, or of the feminized, watered-down, Globohomo Americanized version of Christianity. Because Christianity was also the religion of all those "problematic" historical figures who waged wars, conquered and subjugated weaker nations, created and ruled over large empires, and who claimed to be doing so to glorify God and promote the faith. And if they had encountered a postmodern feminist or tranny, they would have had zero compunctions about using "cruel and unusual punishment" to stop their heresies from spreading; mere verbal ridicule and satire would have been child's play in comparison. Now, I'm not saying theirs was the correct understanding of Christianity, but only that there's no good reason to reject theirs and say that the postmodern feminized variant is the real thing either. Both can find support in scripture, and that leads me to think of Aristotle's conception of virtue as the mean between opposite vices; maybe the Christianity of the Inquisition is on one vicious extreme, postmodern feminized Christianity is on the other vicious extreme, and the real faith is somewhere between them.
Another thing: the spread of communism in non-Christian Asian nations points to a deeper civilizational problem. I sometimes wonder if our cultural technology just cannot adequately account for our biology: i.e., that living in societies above Dunbar's number inevitably dooms us to bad government and insane cultural and political ideologies, and that eras of good, functional government and culture are necessarily an unstable aberration from a general rule of dysfunction.
Anyway, thanks for writing this essay. It's really given me some great food for thought!
I strongly recommend giving Tom Holland's "Dominion" a read; it addresses your earlier comments.
Thanks for the recommendation!
Bollocks is bollocks. You can't root you life in the extremely bloody silly.
Did you see the deep fake of Joe Biden eviscerating trans ideology? If so, is that what you mean by Roman sensibility?
No, haven't seen that. Did it involve a lot of mumbling and missing the podium?
So much better. Imagine Joe Biden's head on Dylan Mulvaney's frock-clad stick body with blue acrylic nai--claws and a Valley Girl accent saying. "OK guys, I'm feeling soooo cunt!"
I very much agree with the Christian origins of wokery. Our current situation reminds me of Nietzsche's Last Man, who is only concerned with his own comfort. In a society bereft of meaning - something worth suffering for - the only thing left is the brute fact of suffering itself. And the only meaning left is to try and eliminate suffering and seek comfort.
Without the belief in God, which gives meaning, we are left with a Christian value system that has no meaning except the elimination of suffering - in Nietzsche's view, Nihilism. To avoid confusion, I am atheist who doesn't like atheism.
A neurohacker and a cognitive scientist ponder the reverse-engineering of religion to create the post-post-modern "religion of no religion" with the former President of the Santa Fe Institute.
https://jimruttshow.blubrry.net/john-vervaeke-and-jordan-hall/
> I very much agree with the Christian origins of wokery.
While wokery does have some Christian roots, it's Nietzschean roots, by way of Sartre are even stronger. Heck, the whole transgender thing can be thought of as a Nietzschean triumph of one's will over one's very biology.
No, I don't really agree. The manner in which it manifests is the individual as victim of their body. 'Born in the wrong body' is meant to garner our sympathy and compassion, not our awe.
In some cases, it's pretty clear that the person's attitude is more Nietzschean and the "born in the wrong body victimhood" is just for the benefit of the NPCs.
@Paul, I want to thank you for your clear definition of 'meaning' as something worth suffering for. You've hit the nail on the head and crystallised a nebulous notion.
I am an epistemological materialist, but I grew up in a churchgoing family. The preacher had a messy divorce. About a decade after that, I heard that he had drank himself to death, and that for about two years prior, he was displaying significant weight gain and other signs of failing health. I infer that nobody in his congregation, and none of the other clergy, would open their eyes and act accordingly and successfully. I'm no Biblical scholar, but if I remember correctly, it is one thing to love your neighbor as yourself, and a different and often contrary thing to condone your neighbor's every single behavior, even the self-destructive ones. As we learn more and more about the poor outcomes of the followers of transgenderism et al, I think it will become more and more apparent that Christianity's failings here are accidentally self-inflicted by modern adherents and not essential consequences of the precepts.
Ha. It was a high quality deepfake that disappeared soon after it came out on Instagram. It was an authentic looking ruthless never-supposed-to-say-it-out-loud anti trans statement.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2023/02/09/fact-check-video-edited-show-joe-biden-making-transphobic-remarks/11211453002/
Modern Christian thought has many sins for which it must answer, and wokery is but one of them.
A quick read of Jonathan Edward's classic sermon "Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry God" shows a different, far less compromising school of Christian thought. One in which sin is sin, no matter what platitudes one heaps on it. Modern Christian denominations would do well to return to some of that tradition.
We can and should have compassion for all who suffer. God does call us to that.
We should never enable or excuse sinful conduct. It is not unloving or lacking in compassion to call out sin for what it is.
re: liberalism and ILLIBERALISM, geopolitical and historical origins, role of genetics, inbred vs outbred gene pools
Yep, scholars and philosophers have previously noted that there are deeper social origins to leftist "beliefs" than materialism, Marxism, romanticism (anti-rationalism), etc.
A lot of medieval Christianity was a reflection of decentralized (non-imperial) politics. (see Paleo-libertarian historical Leonard Liggio).
Don't forget that medieval (European/Byzantine) Christians suffered at least 1,000 years of being attacked and subject to slave raids and pillaging by (non-Christian) Viking slavers (who were defeated), Arab/Berber slavers (their civilization was more or less stopped in its imperial expansion), the Mongolian Golden Hordes (faded) and the Ottomans (also slavers and the surviving remnant of Mongol empire that converted to Islam, stopped in its imperial expansion at the "Siege of Vienna" in the late1600s).
Christian Europeans/Byzantines had it pounded into them that vicious "pagan" empires had to be defeated for survival reasons, and that decentralized politics wasn't going to get the job done. What did get the job done was the evolution of what anthropologist Joseph Henrich (Harvard) calls WEIRD culture, classical liberalism, Constitutional order, high-social-trust social institutions, classically liberal personality traits, which resulted from the banning of cousin marriage by the early church (to diminish the political power of clans to resist conversion to the Church). Classically liberal personality traits co-emerge with the increased genetic variability that resulted from the nuclear family structure (the alternative to clannish cousin marriage), as did "capitalism" (charter cities, river and sea trade, market economics) and increased literacy/numeracy, scientific and technological innovations (windmills, sextants), and "democracy".
But there was a regression to "oriental despotism" in the imperial recentralization of power after 1492, which the Inquisition resulted from, as well as the attempts by the increasingly powerful and wealthy Royal empires to wipe out medieval "liberal" reforms, such as peasants' rights (spread from the Abbey at Cluny, etc.).
So, the historical accident of the early church's ban on cousin marriage had the unintended historical result of creating a gene pool in which classical liberalism spread, was temporarily sidelined after 1492, but continued to produce deep social change, including the co-emergence of the WEIRD gene pool with high-social-trust, Enlightenment values (agentic values such as individual achievement) and modern rationalism.
The reason that Christians, people of NW European origin, are embarrassed by their culture's imperial ("pagan") tendencies is that those tendencies went too far toward empire building and political re-centralization, even if the original justification for doing so was to work around the Ottoman Empire's blocking of Silk Road trade, to eliminate Viking and Arab slave raids, Mongol marauders etc.
On the issue of sin, evil, suffering and salvation (spiritual liberation from impurity: evil and sin), Christianity is in the tradition of Axial culture and contemplative "purity myth" religion that evolved after the Bronze Age collapse, which was a classic example of how technological and economic disruption drives social change (see Gerhard Lenski).
To vastly oversimplify, Axial cultures, people in walled, medieval cities, needed a new set of social institutions and beliefs, such as the evolving idea of a transcendent God of personal salvation, to create a more powerful alternative to "paganism" (generally, the remnants pre-Axial, nomadic culture).
Axial cultures, including Christianity, evolved because the psychological archetype of "pagan" culture was not able to adapt to techno-economic disruption and emerging coherence needs in culture and the need for a new model of social order.
Note: Islam is also Axial (its purity myth, Divine Unity, tawhid, goes beyond Christianity's Trinity), but failed for various reasons (geopolitics restricted the emergence of capitalism and an expanding urban commoner class), one of which was intense inbreeding due to a strong form of the practice of cousin marriage in Arab culture (not all Muslims are Arab, but it is the central culture in the religion). Islam partly reformed "pagan" forms of slavery, but was still economically dependent on slave labor and the slave trade because of the historical lack of industrialization and technological innovation in the muslim world.
Also note that the Enlightenment, modern rationalism, severely eroded the legitimacy of mythic religion in crucial ways, but failed to provide a satisfactory, alternative metaphysics, a system of meaning and purpose.*
I don't agree with everything Wilber says here (he sort of confuses medieval liberalism and modern liberalism), but his sociological analysis is a good summary:
* https://www.lionsroar.com/liberalism-and-religion-we-should-talk/
excerpts:
In one sense, of course, science and liberalism are right to be anti-spiritual, because most of what has historically served as spirituality is now prerational, magic or mythic, implicitly ethnocentric, fundamentalist dogma. Liberalism traditionally came into existence to fight the tyranny of prerational myth and that is one of its enduring and noble strengths (the freedom, liberty, and equality of individuals in the face of the often hostile or coercive collective). And this is why liberalism was always allied with science against fundamentalist, mythic, prerational religion (and the conservative politics that hung on to that religion).
...
The main strength of liberalism is its emphasis on individual human rights. The major weakness is its rabid fear of Spirit. Modern liberalism came into being, during the Enlightenment, largely as a counterforce to mythic religion, which was fine. But liberalism committed a classic pre/trans fallacy: it thought that all spirituality was nothing but prerational myth, and thus it tossed any and all transrational spirituality as well, which was absolutely catastrophic. (As Ronald Reagan would say, it tossed the baby with the dishes.) Liberalism attempted to kill God and replace transpersonal Spirit with egoic humanism, and as much as I am a liberal in many of my social values, that is its sorry downside, this horror of all things Divine.
...
Elsewhere Wilber claims that his idea that that the "right" (conservatism) is based on the "interiors" of human consciousness (interiors = meaning, purpose, subjectivity) and the "left" is based on "exteriors" (social and institutional structures, physical existence, the environmental, technology, objectivity), is unique.
(Wilber is claiming his "integral theory" can solve the problem of subjective/objective differences.)
I've read Heinrich and Cohn, so I'm familiar with these arguments, although the former makes some legal history errors. The first cousin marriage ban was in the Roman Republic; Christianity, because it grew up in the Roman Empire, took this on and then expanded it at the Council of Trent.
Relatedly, Orthodox Christianity (as opposed to Catholic Christianity) regressed towards the pre-Roman inbreeding norm, forgetting the prior civilisation's Christian rules as it went backwards. This has had consequences - people in Orthodox countries produce different behaviours in response to various games theory exercises when compared with people from Catholic countries. A country like Ukraine, meanwhile, has a line down the middle that tracks the confessional divide between Catholic and Orthodox.
What happens when you don't have a combination of both Roman and (later) Christian norms is illustrated by the peculiar history of Ireland, where there was conversion to Christianity but no adoption of Christian (or Roman obviously, because Ireland was never a part of the Empire) social and marital norms. This meant the Irish clans colonised everything, including the Church.
One effect of this was that the Pope finished up backing Protestant William of Orange in his conquest of Ireland, because the Catholic Church (in Rome) saw William as a way to smash up the Irish clans and their domination of the Irish version of Catholicism. This is why Ireland, after the Battle of the Boyne, became more Roman than Rome.
It certainly didn't start out that way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Boehm
From memory, Wrangham uses Boehm’s work as part of this argument that we became Homo sapiens by using proactive aggression to systematically kill off those high in reactive aggression. A pattern you can still see in contemporary foragers.
Awesome.
You might find Liggio's description of (spin on?) medieval liberalism (Constitutional order) interesting:
The conquest of the kingdom of Grenada in 1492 witnessed the establishment of Absolutism, the core feature of which was the end of the universal, supra-political position of religion and especially of the Church. The universal church was replaced under Absolutism by a subservient, state religious bureau. Throughout Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the universal, trans-political position of the Church was ended. For example, the French kings and rulers of the Spanish kingdoms were able by Concordats to gain from the Papacy total control over the church institutions in their territories.
The Protestant reformation, the second phase of this movement, occurred where local rulers were not able to gain similar concessions from the Popes; countries where rulers had wrested control of the Church remained "faithful" and sought to consolidate their gains through the Catholic Reformation centered on the Council of Trent. In Spain, the rulers of Castile, Aragon, and Cataluna after 1480 gained the power to establish political inquisitions beyond the powers of the bishops. The infamous Spanish Inquisition not only dominated the peninsula, but the Vice-royalties of Mexico and Peru.
Just as the Monarchist’s Church of the Council of Trent (with the Royal Inquisition) contributed to Absolutism, the history of Spain and Spanish colonies in the reign of Charles V indicate the great turning point whereby Spain lost its medieval constitutionalism and led much of Europe in substitution of oriental despotism. As William Graham Sumner’s The Conquest of the United States by Spain (1900) showed that while the U.S. conquered Spain’s colonies, Spain’s imperialist ideas had conquered the intellect of American politicians, so the distinguishing characteristics of European constitutionalism compared to oriental despotism (cf. Jones, The European Miracle (1981) were lost with Spanish conquests of Asia and South America. Spain adopted the imperial methods of India, Turkey, China, Mexico, and Peru in place of decentralized, limited constitutional institutions of medieval Europe.
The decline and political control of religious institutions in the fifteenth century undermined the foundations of European constitutionalism’s uniqueness.
... To achieve imperial greatness, Spain had to abandon the medieval free market and constitutional institutions.
...
https://phillysoc.org/liggio-the-hispanic-tradition-of-liberty/
I'm a classicist & lawyer, not a medievalist - but my co-author on this stack, Lorenzo, is a proper medievalist, so I'll defer to him for his view of Liggio's arguments.
My sense (amateur anthropologist) is that given the periodic rise and fall, expansion and contraction, of empires, the greater tendency toward rationalism in the Greco-Roman system was:
1. a feature of sea trade, which has less need of agrarian (middle eastern) religion's conformity and supernaturalism
2. in opposition to the holy archetype of supernaturalism in Persian and middle eastern [culture] because creating the cultural opposite of an enemy creates cultural unity.
Rationalism was fitted to the Greco-Roman system in ways consistent with the tribal origins and features of those cultures.
Rationalism (Enlightenment modernism) reached its greatest peak under NW European maritime sea trade and after imperial expansion.
As you pointed out in another comment, Russia and Eastern Orthodox Christianity are resistant to liberalism and modern rationalism. I would say largely because Russia was not at core a maritime sea trade civilization, rather it was/is agrarian and continental.
Not sold. The Dutch Republic and Britain managed to be pretty imperial and stay Parliamentary. Access to American silver, obviating the need to bargain domestically over revenues, was a bigger driver of Iberian autocratic centralisation. Which was still pretty legalistic. Hence, for instance, the Kingdom of Galicia remaining a institutionally separate Crown. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Galicia
Also, the flood of silver made Spanish goods very uncompetitive, undermining the local commercial interests.
I don't know much about the Dutch Republic, but wasn't it an extension of Habsburg Spain or something like that? The Dutch peasants and urban commoner classes were arguably more genetically disposed to be "capitalist".*
Britian was anti-Absolutist (Calvinist, anti-Pope), so King George was "liberal" by the standards of his time.
Liggio's main point (which contradicts the standard WASP narrative in the USA) is that the "classically liberal" urban commoner classes, like most everything else, generally went two ways around 1492:
1. continue medieval, classically liberal practices, as they had formed under decentralized politics. England is in that category.
2. adopt mercantilism, in an alliance with "oriental despotism", Absolutism, colonialism and imperialism.
Recentralized power meant using the Church as a tool of empire and trade as a tool of empire.
As you say, and Liggio points out, the vast wealth of gold/silver/etc. from the Spanish colonies was the driver of recentralization (and weapons production in Spain and wars across Europe). There is a tiny pocket of Spain (a village called Livia or something like that) a few kilometers inside of France in La Cerdanya (sort of near Andorra). Territorial exceptions based on royal deals and family relations obviously happened, but I can't see how that has much pertinence.
Imperial expansion co-emerged with political recentralization and "modernization" (the Queen's project to reinvent Castilian as a standardized language that would replace all other dialects, etc.).
Britian and the USA held onto the older, medieval, pre-imperial liberal traditions while they were wiped out by imperial powers elsewhere.
As I noted previously, Joseph Henrich's WEIRD model is useful in understand how classical liberalism emerged, and the role that outbreeding in gene pools and the replacement of "clannish" social forms (including dynastic forms) with the nuclear family played in the evolution of classical liberalism.
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* excerpt:
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so the dutch ... are descended from a population that spent 400+ years or so in a manor system, some of whom (self-sorting!) then jumped right in to a system where they were free and independent peasants working on their own and trading their wares in markets (another crucial part of the story…for another day). and they’ve been doing the latter for nearly one thousand years. well no wonder they invented capitalism
...
https://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2016/01/23/the-dutch-the-absence-of-manorialism-in-medieval-netherlands-and-new-york-values/
The progression might have been something like this:
Charter ("Free") Cities in Germany give rise to the Hanseatic League, which spreads both east and west, including to what is now Holland and London.
Holland is more vulnerable to continental wars and politics than London (Walter Russel Mead), so the (classically liberal, medieval) "liberty" traditions in London become a backwater. By extension, the USA Constitution, weirdly, is one of the last remnants of medieval liberalism. NYC, originally a Dutch colony, places a huge imprint of medieval and early modern "liberty" and classical liberalism (tolerance of diversity of religion, etc.) on american culture.
Britian makes major scientific and technological advances (including weapons, sea navigation) both because it has a tradition of "backward" medieval liberalism and a gene pool that supports high-social-trust in the social infrastructure (derived from originally Hanseatic banking and insurance schemes) needed to support a vast system of sea trade becoming a world power.
The British system didn't hold to any kind of ideological purity about classical liberalism in its empire building, it adopted the same kind of brutal colonialist methods as the competition (Spain, France, Portugal).
Colin Woodard's work makes clear that the gene pools of origin of the cultural regions of the USA map into more "liberal" culture in the Northeast and more "clannish" culture in the Appalachians and the South. Thus, the unfulfilled plan by the Confederates to build a new colonial slave state stretching to the Pacific, then south into Mexico and Central America.
https://colinwoodard.com/dna-study-confirms-american-nations-map/
‘Medieval liberalism’ is a very odd terminology, as highly anachronistic. I prefer to think of it in terms of bargaining/Parliamentary politics (where ‘Parliament’ refers also to Cortes, Estates, Diets, Sejms etc.).
Also not keen at all on ‘Oriental Despotism’ as terminology, as it encourages over-reliance on cultural explanations and draws distinctions between Europe and ‘Orient’ that also quite misleading.
Kurt Wittfogel’s book is an intriguing read, but his claim about the nature of irrigation turned out to be mistaken. You did not need centralisation to have irrigation, it was a case of the wider problem of creating features that both hold farmers in place and generate more things that have to be protected. That makes them more “captive” to state exploitation.
In the case of the Nile, the complete reliance on the flood in a country with essentially no rain made production highly “transparent” to the state, so highly taxable. (It is the same point as firms documenting employment payments make income flows highly transparent to the state, so highly taxable.)
Marx’s use of the term is a rather inadequate attempt to make his Hegelian simplification of history, so as to give it a “knowable” and “proper” direction work.
Medievalist here. The Latin Church massively expanded the incest prohibitions early in the medieval period. Having sex with godparents was incest. Having sex with a kin relation of someone you had sex with was incest. That’s why it mattered if his brother Arthur had had sex with Catharine of Aragon on their wedding night. If they had, Catherine having sex with Henry was incest. Of course, since Henry had had sex with her sister, having sex with Ann Boleyn was also incest. Awkward.
The degree of affinity was dropped from 7th to 4th at the fourth Lateran Council in 1215. It was becoming too hard for royals and nobles to avoid folk too close in kinship and too much chance of unpleasant ancestry discoveries. But kin groups were already cactus in manorial Europe by then. (They kept going in the pastoralist fringes, notably Ireland, Scottish highlands and Balkans.)
https://www.uab.edu/humanresources/home/images/M_images/Relations/PDFS/FAMILY%20MEMBER%20CHART.pdf
Interesting!