How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (8 page)

The Jews believed that history was progressing toward a golden Messianic Age, when, in the words of the distinguished historian Marjorie Reeves, “a Holy People was expected to reign in Palestine in an era of peace, justice, and plenty, in which the earth would flower in unheard of abundance.… The Messianic age is conceived as within history, not beyond it.”
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Early Christianity fully incorporated Jewish millenarianism and hence a progressive view of history. There was another aspect to Christian faith in progress as well: almost without exception, Christian theologians have assumed that the application of reason can yield an
increasingly more accurate
understanding of God’s will.
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Augustine noted that there were “certain matters pertaining to the doctrine of salvation that we cannot yet grasp”—but “one day,” he added,
“we shall be able to do so.”
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Progress in general was inevitable as well, he supposed. Augustine wrote: “Has not the genius of man invented and applied countless astonishing arts, partly the result of necessity, partly the result of exuberant invention, so that this vigour of mind … betokens an inexhaustible wealth in the nature which can invent, learn, or employ such arts. What wonderful—one might say stupefying—advances has human industry made in the arts of weaving and building, of agriculture and navigation!” He likewise celebrated the “skill [that] has been attained in measures and numbers! With what sagacity have the movements and connections of the stars been discovered!” Augustine concluded that all of these advances resulted from the “unspeakable boon” that God conferred on his creation—a “rational nature.”
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Many other Christian thinkers echoed Augustine’s optimism about progress. In the thirteenth century Gilbert de Tournai wrote, “Never will we find truth if we content ourselves with what is already known.… Those things that have been written before us are not laws but guides. The truth is open to all, for it is not yet totally possessed.”
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In 1306 Fra Giordano preached in Florence: “Not all the arts have been found; we shall never see an end to finding them. Every day one could discover a new art.”
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But the most notable statement came from Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) in the
Summa Theologica
, which stands as a monument to the theology of reason and set the standard for all subsequent Christian theologians. Because humans could not see into the very essence of things, Aquinas argued, they must reason their way to knowledge, step by step—using the tools of philosophy, especially the principles of logic, to construct theology.
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For Augustine, Aquinas, and the others, such views reflected the fundamental Christian premise that
God’s revelations are always limited to the capacity of humans at that time to comprehend.
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In the fourth century Saint John Chrysostom stated that even the seraphim do not see God as he is. Instead, they see “a condescension accommodated to their nature. What is this condescension? It is when God appears and makes himself known, not as he is, but in the way one incapable of beholding him is able to look upon him. In this way God reveals himself proportionately to the weakness of those who behold him.”
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In addition, with all these thinkers we see the Christian belief in man’s rational nature—what Augustine called that “unspeakable boon”—and also in God himself as the epitome of reason.
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Had they seen God
as an inexplicable essence, as had the Greek philosophers, the very idea of rational theology—and, more broadly, of progress itself—would have been unthinkable.

The twentieth-century classical scholar Moses I. Finley was quite aware that the European embrace of progress was “unique in human history.”
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But he seems not to have realized that the idea of progress is profoundly Christian. The philosopher John Macmurray put it best when he said, “That we think of progress at all shows the extent of the influence of Christianity upon us.”
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The West and the Rest

To this discussion a qualification must be added: faith in progress was fundamental to
western
Christianity. As for Orthodox Christianity in the Byzantine East, it prohibited both clocks and pipe organs from its churches.
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Nor was it only the Orthodox Church that did not embrace the idea of progress. By looking at other major traditions from the East, we can appreciate the uniqueness of the Western approach.

Consider life under Islam, which arose as a religion and cultural force several centuries after Christianity did. In 1485 Bayezid II, sultan of the Ottoman Empire and caliph of Islam, outlawed the printing press. That ban remained in effect throughout the Muslim world for at least the next three centuries.

The sultan’s action represented far more than the power of tyrants. It reflected Muslim commitment to the
idea of decline
in contrast to the idea of progress. In addition to the Qur’an, Muslims give great authority to a collection of writings known as Hadith. These consist of sayings attributed to Muhammad and accounts of his actions. In the first Hadith Muhammad is quoted as saying: “Time has come full circle back to where it was on the day when first the heavens and earth were created.” The second Hadith quotes the prophet thus: “The best generation is my generation, then the ones who follow and then those who follow them.” The Palestinian historian Tarif Khalidi interpreted these passages—which were “both frequently cited and commented upon” by Muslim scholars—to “suggest a universe running down, an imminent end to man and all his works.”
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They also imply the superior virtue of the past. In this context, prohibit
ing the printing press was not surprising, for books written by hand—the standard from the past—would seem inherently better.

Even more important, Islam holds that the universe is inherently irrational—that there is no cause and effect—because everything happens as the direct result of Allah’s will at that particular time. Anything is possible. Attempts at science, then, are not only foolish but also blasphemous, in that they imply limits to Allah’s power and authority.
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Therefore, Muslim scholars study law (what does Allah require?), not science.

But what of the “Golden Era” of Muslim science and learning that flourished while Europe languished in the “Dark Ages”? Chapter 4 makes it clear that the “Dark Ages” are a myth. The “Golden Era” of Islamic science and learning is too. Some Muslim-occupied societies gave the appearance of sophistication only because of the culture sustained by their subject peoples—-Jews and various brands of Christianity (see chapter 14).

Islam’s conception of the universe and its resulting opposition to reason, science, and philosophical inquiry have had a profound impact down to the present day. Muslim societies today are manifestly backward in comparison with those of the West. As Robert Reilly points out in
The Closing of the Muslim Mind
, “The Arab world stands near the bottom of every measure of human development; … scientific inquiry is nearly moribund in the Islamic world; … Spain translates more books in a single year than the entire Arab world has in the past
thousand
years; … some people in Saudi Arabia still refuse to believe man has been to the moon; and … some Muslim media present natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina as God’s direct retribution.”
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It is also useful to look at China. Many historians claim that, until modern times, almost every significant invention was first made in China. If so, then it also must be admitted that nearly every one of these Chinese inventions was either disregarded or very little exploited; some even were prohibited. As Jean Gimpel, the French historian of medieval inventions, put it: “it is a feature of Chinese technology that its great inventions … never played a major evolutionary role in Chinese history.”
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Consider the case of gunpowder. Whether gunpowder was independently invented in Europe or imported from China is irrelevant. It is well known that the Chinese had gunpowder by the thirteenth century and even cast a few cannons. But when Western voyagers reached China
in the sixteenth century the Chinese lacked both artillery and firearms, whereas the Europeans had an abundance of both. The Chinese also invented a mechanical clock, but the court Mandarins soon ordered all of them destroyed. As a result, when Westerners arrived, nobody in China really knew what time it was.
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The reason so many innovations and inventions were abandoned or even outlawed in China had to do with Confucian opposition to change on grounds that the past was greatly superior. The twelfth-century Mandarin Li Yen-chang captured this viewpoint when he said, “If scholars are made to concentrate their attention solely on the classics and are prevented from slipping into study of the vulgar practices of later generations, then the empire will be fortunate indeed!”
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Nothing sums up the importance of the idea of progress better than the story of the great Chinese admiral Zheng He (also Cheng Ho).
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In 1405 Zheng He commanded a large Chinese fleet that sailed across the Indian Ocean and reached the coast of East Africa. His purpose was to display the power of China and to collect exotica—especially unusual animals—for the imperial court. The voyage was entirely successful, making its way to and from Africa without major mishaps and bringing back a cargo of exotic goods and strange animals, including several giraffes. In all, Zheng He led seven of these voyages, each of them successfully completed, the last one in 1433 (during which he may have died and been buried at sea). It is believed that Zheng He’s Chinese fleet included several hundred ships and that the major ships dwarfed anything being sailed in the West at this time.
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The Chinese flotilla must have awed the occupants of the Indian and African ports it visited, and had the Chinese been so inclined, they could easily have imposed their rule over coastal areas all along their route, just as Westerners were soon to do following Vasco da Gama’s Portuguese expedition that reached India in 1498. Moreover, had Chinese voyaging continued, they might well have sailed around Africa to Europe or across the Pacific to the “New World.”

But after 1433 the voyages ceased. What happened?

The death of Zheng He would not have been enough to halt the voyages completely, given the obvious successes of the previous expeditions and the opportunities at hand. Instead, a decree came down from the emperor forbidding the construction of any oceangoing ships. The emperor also had Zheng He’s fleet dragged ashore and stripped of useful
timbers; the remains were allowed to rot. Even the plans for such ships were destroyed, and the Chinese attempted to erase all records of Zheng He’s voyages. Soon it was a capital offense to build a seagoing ship (as opposed to junks for sailing along the coast and on the inland waterways). For good measure, all the exotic animals Zheng He had brought back to the imperial zoo were killed.

Why? The court Mandarins believed that there was nothing in the outer world of value to China and that any contacts were potentially unsettling to the Confucian social order. Progress be damned.

Contrast this with the medieval West’s eager adoption of technologies that had been invented elsewhere. As Samuel Lilley wrote in his history of technological progress, “The European Middle Ages collected innovations from all over the world, especially from China, and built them into a new unity which formed the basis of our modern civilization.”
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These counterexamples to the history of the West expose the weakness of the widely accepted claim that technological progress is pretty much an inevitable product of the times—that, for example, when conditions were right the incandescent bulb and the phonograph would have been invented whether or not Thomas Edison ever existed. Inventions don’t just happen.
Someone
has to bring them about, and the likelihood that anyone will attempt to do so is influenced by the extent to which they believe that inventions are possible—that is, the extent to which the culture accepts the idea of progress.

Perhaps of even greater significance is that inventions not only must be made but also must be sufficiently valued to be used. That is not inevitable either. What if the phonograph had been outlawed, as the printing press was in the Ottoman Empire? What if the state had declared a monopoly on the incandescent lightbulb and destroyed all privately produced bulbs, as the Chinese did with iron production in the eleventh century?

The Road to Modernity

Throughout the remainder of the book, we shall see how the Christian conception of God as the rational creator of a comprehensible universe, who therefore expects that humans will become increasingly sophisticated and informed, continually prodded the West along the road to modernity.

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