Stark and missionaries

As you can tell, I really like Rodney Stark's book How the West Won. By the way, he has other great books that make people realize how often we accept a version of history that has been twisted for political purposes. Sad but true. Let's get back to this book that shows how often the rise of the West has been misunderstood (deliberately, in some cases) by many historians.

Stark sums up the next chapter much as he did earlier chapters. The rise of Western modernity, according to him, was a function of freedom – freedom to innovate and freedom from confiscation of the fruits of one's labors. When the Greeks were free, they created a civilization advanced beyond anything else in the world, but when Rome imposed a huge Imperial iron fist over the West, progress ceased for a long time. The fall of Rome again unleashed creativity, and the fragmented and competing Europeans soon outdistanced the rest of the world. Why? They were possessed not only of invincible military naval might but also superior economies and standards of living.

I wish this message would get to voters today in the United States. They elected a man who wants huge government bureaucracy. As government gets bigger, the individual citizens get smaller. That's what we are seeing today.

In the last section of his book (How the West Won), Rodney Stark notes other important things that have come out of the rise of the West. For one thing, Christian missionaries have done much good in the non-Western world. They took on crimes against women such as foot binding, female circumcision, the stoning to death of rape victims on false grounds of adultery, and the custom of suttee, in which widows were burned to death as they were tied to their husbands' funeral pyres. Missionaries argued against tyranny and slavery. They fought  high infant-mortality rates, illiteracy, the castration of young boys.

In the home stretch--Stark and How the West Won

More  from Rodney Stark and his powerful book, showing the value of Christianity to the rise of the West and the value of the West itself to the flourishing of the world.

Stark moves in chapter 17 to a discussion of liberty and prosperity. He credits the rise of a newly respectable upper-middle-class with the Industrial Revolution. This group of people believed that status and power should be achieved through merit rather than through inheritance. Innovation was valued and rewarded. So, the two primary supports of this group were education and liberty.

Why did it gain such a foothold first in England? He says secure property rights, high wages, and cheap energy helped immensely. British culture was favorable to commerce, unlike most other societies throughout history, which generally regarded commercial activities as degrading. Even the nobility in England displayed very little contempt for commercial activities like those on the European continent did.

Education helped fuel the rise of British commercialism. Stark says by 1630, before the takeoff of the Industrial Revolution, Britain had by far the best-educated population in the world. I worry a lot about education today in America. Government schools are so busy teaching politically correct ideas or indoctrinating their students, they often don't have time to actually educate anymore.

Then the United States became a manufacturing giant. This happened for the same reasons that the Industrial Revolution had originated in Britain – political freedom, secure property rights, high wages, cheap energy, and a highly educated population. Plus, the United States had great resources and a huge, rapidly growing domestic market.

Nearing the end . . .

This has been the longest set of blogs on one topic since I began to write several years ago. The reason is that it touches on so much of what's wrong today in American society. We don't know history, we have walked away from a Christian faith, we downplay all the wonderful achievements of the West,  we play up multiculturalism to the point that the young see nothing special about our society, we don't realize how much good has come from the connection of Christianity to the West. So let's get back to Rodney Stark and his book How the West Won.

The last section of his book deals with the age of modernity, which he dates from 1750 to the present  time. Between 1750 and 1850 people witnessed an era of immense and stunningly rapid progress which began in Britain, with a wave of inventions and innovations that transformed nearly every aspect of life. What soon became known as the Industrial Revolution continued and spread, allowing people to enjoy in the West the standard of living only dreamed of in the past. But in fact modernity has helped nearly everyone. For example, he mentions that an infant born today in the Republic of the Congo can expect to live 25 years longer than a baby born in France in 1800.

Of course, Stark recognizes that the Industrial Revolution brought problems. But he says critics have imagined that there was some previous utopia wherein no one hungered or shivered and had a quiet, intimate family life. In truth, life in preindustrial rural villages was terrible. People knew nothing of the world, most families had no privacy living in one-room shacks, no one ever bathed, people went to bed hungry, people lacked adequate clothing, most lived by doing backbreaking labor, half the children did not live to the age of five, and people were often old and toothless by the age of 40. 

What were some of the evils of industrialization? Stark  mentions child labor, and it is true that in the early days the Industrial Revolution did exploit children to labor in factories. But he says we need to realize the Industrial Revolution did not initiate child labor;  it ended that. Children from earliest times had labored long and hard. But by gathering child laborers in the factories, industrialization made them visible, which shocked genteel sensibilities to such an extent that governments began to pass laws to reform and eventually to end these practices. 

Another evil of industrialization Stark covers is the fear of technology that genteel souls reacted to. This hatred and fear of technology can be traced back to intellectuals who visited the earliest factories and were revolted by the fast-moving machines restricting human action. They found it dehumanizing. But many of them had never done physical labor themselves and therefore failed to comprehend that  factory work was actually less physically demanding than the traditional forms of labor. Field hands flocked to the factories for better pay and for less grueling work. Stark says economists have demonstrated that the Industrial Revolution did not displace many skilled craftsmen. It's true the technology replace some skilled occupations, but it created many more skilled jobs than it eliminated.

OK, this is a good place to stop.

Yes, more of Stark's history of the West

Yep, more here from Rodney Stark's important book How the West Won. I don't apologize for the lengthy summary of its key points because we live at a time when Christianity and its impact upon the West has been denigrated. We are told the West is nothing special and Christianity has caused misery throughout the world. The truth is far different as I've been trying to show from his book. So, here we go again.

Stark discusses the fact that Christianity became the basis for science. He has explored this in other books he has written, but I can summarize it briefly here. He says science arose only in Christian Europe because only medieval Europeans believed  that science was possible and desirable. And the basis of their belief was their image of God and his creation. It was the medieval world that insisted on the rationality of God. Every detail was supervised and ordered; the search of nature could only result in the vindication of faith in rationality. Furthermore, because God had given humans the power of reason, it ought to be possible for people to discover the rules established by God.

Stark contrasts  this view with other religions. Most religions outside the Judeo-Christian tradition do not posit a creation at all. The universe is said to be eternal without a creator. From this view, the universe is a supreme mystery, inconsistent, unpredictable, and arbitrary. For people holding this latter view, the only paths to wisdom are meditation or inspiration. Islam teaches that Allah set his creation in motion but often intrudes in the world and changes things as it pleases him--he's arbitrary. So, many influential Muslim scholars through the centuries have held that efforts to formulate natural laws are blasphemy because that would deny Allah's freedom to act. But Christians believe nature is a book meant to be read. Europeans believed in God as the intelligent designer of a rational universe, so they were encouraged to pursue the secrets of creation.