The House of Wisdom (1)

Contemporary Western writing about Islam and Islamic history comes in various identifiable streams. One stream is writing that seeks to encourage a positive, even rosy, view of Islam: Karen Armstrong is an example of this. One motive for such writing is to encourage positive interactions between Muslims and non-Muslims. Another is to assert a sense of moral superiority over those fellow Westerners who have a more angst-ridden or hostile view of Islam. (These motives are not mutually exclusive.) Then there are those who worry that if the more hostile views of Islam become received wisdom, many Muslims (particularly young Muslims) will simply “buy” that picture of Islam, and adopt it for themselves.

The latter stream of thought merges into those with a nuanced view of Islam. Who are aware of its complexities and varieties, even though they may be quite hostile to its more radical versions. Writers such as Daniel Pipes and Michael Totten fall into this category.

Then there are the writers who take a hostile view of Islam: who see it as fundamentally an intolerant, violent, persecutory religion; or, at least, as having inherent tendencies in that direction. Mark Durie, Andrew Bostom and Robert Spencer are examples of various forms of this approach. Precisely because they are arguing against received wisdom, such writers are often excellent at locating information and sources the mainstream ignores or glosses over.

Complicating all this is that the logic of belief is not necessarily the logic of believers. Someone may identify as a member of a religion without accepting the entire package, or any particular version of the package. This is not necessarily clear to outsiders, however. The most important single reason why the C16th and C17th debates over torture have suddenly been reopened is because we live in the return of the C16th—both in the sense of Islam is going through the same text-based “purification” of faith that the Christian Reformation represented and because we confront the same issue with Muslims that Elizabethan and Stuart England faced with Catholics: how can we tell the “good” law-abiding believers from the “will kill us in our beds” believers? The destructive possibilities of modern technology add further fear to the mix.

One pattern in the “rosy” presentation of Islam is for Muslim conquests to be treated as events that “just happened”, while Christian crusades are (noxious) moral events: this despite the fact that the former both pre- and post-date the latter, as well as being hugely more extensive.

Jonathan Lyons’ history of the impact of Arab-Muslim civilisation on the West, The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilisation, is of the rosy view. Starting with the time line at the front of the book. The first surge of Muslim conquest is entirely glossed over apart from:

732 An Arab raiding party is defeated near Tours, in southern France, effectively ending Muslim penetration of Western Europe from Spain (p.xi).

This is a fairly elliptical treatment of the largest surge in religious conquest in history; one in stark contrast to the much more extensive treatment in the opening timeline of the (much smaller) Western crusades.

Lyons starts with crusade-era Antioch and Adelard of Bath, an enthusiast for Arabic-language learning, a conduit for that learning’s spread to Latin Christendom and a key figure in the book. Lyons informs us that

This great struggle between faith and reason was about to crash down on an unsuspecting Europe (p.4).

This is a very modern secular-humanist take on what was happening at the time. The actual debate was in terms of focusing on God’s Will or God’s Rationality: all the participants were monotheist believers and all sides used the tools of logic and reasoning. All three Abrahamic monotheisms—Latin Christendom, Judaism and Islam—went through this debate in overlapping centuries. In Latin Christendom and Judaism, focusing on God’s Rationality won. It was Islam where focusing on God’s Will carried the day: this creates a certain difficulty in seeing Islam as the purveyor of the light of reason to a benighted Latin Christendom. Or, as Lyons puts it:

The arrival of Arab science and philosophy, the legacy of the pioneering Adelard and those who hurried to follow his example, transmuted the backward West into a technological and scientific superpower (p.4).

But, strangely, failed to come to fruition in the Islam that was the source of all this intellectual ferment.

There is the further difficulty that this ‘Arab science and philosophy’ was the heritage of Greek thought, Indian mathematics and other achievements of various cultures that Arab-language thinkers and scholars utilised—and extended in certain areas. But, as Mark Durie points out in The Third Choice, conquering and supplanting a culture is a somewhat strange basis to get credit for preserving it.
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Though there are cases of such. The British in India, for example, revitalised interest in Hindu culture and history: but that was in contrast to Muslim rulers who had often despoiled and suppressed that culture. As V. S. Naipaul points out, Muslim conquest tends to be a particularly thorough form of colonisation, involving the conquered and converted people rejecting their own history. The first (and possibly greatest) of historical sociologists, Ibn Khaldun expressed this rejection well:

(The Muslims) desired to learn the sciences of the (foreign) nations. They made them their own through translations. They pressed them into the mold of their own views. They peeled off these strange tongues [and made them pass] into their [own] idiom, and surpassed the achievements of (the non-Arabs) in them. The manuscripts in the non-Arabic languages were forgotten, abandoned, and scattered. All the sciences came to exist in Arabic. The systematic works on them were written in (Arabic) writing. Thus, students of the sciences needed a knowledge of the meaning of (Arabic) words and (Arabic) writing. They could dispense with all other languages, because they had been wiped out and there was no longer any interest in them.

In the West, the legacy of the pagan past was not treated that dismissively.

Still, as Lyons’ points out, English is full of terms—admiral, algebra, zero, zenith—which are Arabic in origin. He clearly sees his mission as being to overturn the West’s “wilful forgetting” of this Arab legacy (Pp4-5)

Crusading brutality
Having framed the issues and concerns, Lyons starts with Pope Urban II preaching the First Crusade, noting that (Christian) religious thinkers had been moving towards the permissibility of violence and that the Crusades were in part a reaction to the defeat at Manzikert (Pp10-11). There is no entry for ‘jihad’ in the book’s index, however: Lyons’ concern for “wilful forgetting” seems a touch selective.

Lyons takes us through the grim passage of the First Crusade, including the slaughter of the scholar class in Jerusalem, along with the rest of its inhabitants, when the Crusaders took it. The violence and ignorant barbarism of the Christian crusaders is displayed for the reader: the brutal violence being characterised as the product of ignorant, Christian anti-Muslim propaganda (Pp22ff). In fact, the slaughter of resisting city populations was a sad feature of warfare for millennia: particularly when the besieging forces themselves were short of supplies and under imminent threat, as was the case in the siege of Jerusalem. The Muslims had done the same to the inhabitants of Syracuse when they conquered the city in 878, for example.

Lyons sets out the sad state of the preservation of the Classical intellectual in Dark Age Europe—the loss of original sources, the reliance on patchy compilations: particularly Bishop Isidore’s Etymologies (Pp34ff). Preferring easily accessed secondary sources is a human perennial, apparently.

Medieval civilisation is presented as clinging to a few patchy bits of Plato, a society deeply fearful of change (Pp48-9). In fact, medieval Europe was a society full of technological and institutional innovation. Every time that things settled down enough to start generating a sufficient economic surplus, there was a renaissance, a cultural resurgence—the Carolingian renaissance when Big Karl and his son Louis the Pius briefly established a stable political order; the renaissance of the C12th, when the knightly order was sufficiently established for trade to revive; the Renaissance itself, when the post-Black Death labour scarcity encouraged capital investment, generating increased literacy, culminating in printing. (Thanks to the invention of which, we live in the Renaissance-that-never-ended, since literacy and books became so widespread that the preservation of knowledge became dramatically cheaper and more robust: meanwhile, Islam showed little interest in printing technology—it took over three centuries for printing to move from the Christian north of the Mediterranean to the Islamic south.)

Lyons notes that Saracen raids in the C8th and C9th:

failed to generate the sort of aggressive anti-Muslim hysteria that began to take shape in the eleventh century (p.49).

Possibly because Dark Age Europe had more pressing issues, such as Norse, Avar and Magyar raids and invasions and establishing basic political order.

Lyons, drawing explicit parallels with the contemporary “war on terror”, sees the “anti-Muslim hysteria” of the Crusades as a tool of centralising Papal power (p.50). Diverting the martial energies of the emerging knightly warrior class to more Godly pursuits was a likely motive: an extension of the Peace of God efforts. With Norman advances in Sicily providing an example of what was possible in retaking lands for Christendom after centuries of retreat under Muslim advances, advances that had recently taken most of Anatolia and prompted a plea for help from the Eastern Roman (“Byzantine”) Emperor.

Abbasid inquisitiveness
We then move to the Abbasid revolution against the Umayyads. Muslim armies “had successfully retraced the path of Alexander the Great”, with Iran, Western China and parts of India having been taken into the lands of the Caliphate. This left Arab Muslims as a ruling minority over diverse cultures, with a lot of new converts much more impressed with the hereditary claims of the Abbasids over those of the Umayyads (p.56). (That the Abbasids supported overturning Umayyad insistence on Arab superiority no doubt also helped their cause.)

The religious persecutions of the Eastern Romans against non-Orthodox Christians made Muslim rule more attractive in land seized from the Eastern Romans, encouraging use of diverse talents by the Abbasid Caliphate, though non-Muslims were subject to the jizya tax (p.56). (That Muslims were still a relatively small minority also meant that the costs of intolerance were high: as the Muslim percentage of the population increased over time, the costs of intolerance fell and Muslim rule became more oppressive—a similar pattern can be seen in Norman-Hohenstaufen Sicily, Reconquista Spain and, indeed, the Christian Roman Empire.)

Muslim rule united a huge area under the same legal system. Islam also became the “crossroads” civilisation of Eurasia, both transmitting and mixing ideas and techniques—notably the Chinese invention of paper, which had obvious benefits for scholarship and contrasted with Christendom’s reliance on far more expensive parchment (Pp57-8).

Caliph al-Mansur’s new capital of Baghdad became the focus of cross-cultural influences, from trade with India and China to self-conscious adoption of Iranian heritages. To the extent of propagating the claim that Greek science had come from Iranian sources after Alexander’s conquests—a myth that then persisted for several centuries (Pp60ff).

The Caliph’s interest in learning and scholarly endeavour from both conquered and foreign cultures led to the creation of the House of Wisdom, a translation centre and intellectual clearing house. Official delegations sought copies of Greek texts from the Eastern Romans, scholars searched for texts to bring back and copy. Supporting scholarship and intellectual endeavour became an enduring enthusiasm of the new elite:

Over the course of 150 years, the Arabs translated all available Greek books of science and philosophy. Arabic replaced Greek as the universal language of scientific enquiry (p.64).

In fact, Arabic-speakers translated, not necessarily Arabs: Lyons labels as ‘Arab’ and ‘Arabs’ when it was in fact Arabic speakers—of whatever background—who were intellectually active. Aristotle’s dialectics in his Topics helped, Lyons claims, religious law to become the basis of Muslim society. It also saw the beginning of the conflict between God’s omnipotence and the human desire to control the environment (Pp65-6). A conflict I prefer to characterise as between emphasizing God’s Will or God’s Rationality: how it looked from their, rather than our, perspective. As Adelard himelf put it:

I will detract nothing from God, for whatever is, is from Him … We must listen to the very limits of human knowledge, and only when this utterly breaks down should we refer things to God (p.124).

Indeed, a longer version of Adelard's statement, from p.131 of Ibn Warraq's Defending the West, shows the outlook even more clearly:

I do not detract from the power of God, for all that exists does so from him and by means of His power. However, this is not to say that nature itself is chaotic, irrational or made up of discrete elements. Therefore it is possible for men to achieve an understanding of this rational order inherent in nature, an understanding as complete as the extent that human knowledge [scientia] progresses. ... Consequently, since we do not turn pale before our present state of ignorance about nature, let us return then, to the method of reason.

But the Augustinian concept of the role of scripture—as the indirect creation of God, when the world is His direction creation—made this easier. Islam was to adopt a very different epistemic and metaphysical understanding of scripture—as the timeless, uncreated, direct Word of God.

The scientific endeavours of the period included astrology as an area of legitimate—indeed useful—enquiry. But it was, as Lyons point out, an avenue for wider intellectual and scientific activities: particularly astronomy and mathematics. Including interest in Hindu astronomy and mathematics: as this was published in Sanskrit verse, struggling with the material meant grappling with the fundamental ideas of the mathematics involved. This was the path whereby “Arabic” numerals and the concept of zero passed to Christendom. It also led to Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi—probably of Iranian/Zoroastrian origins—developing algebra and quadratic equations; work that reflected the mixing of Indian, Iranian and Greek influences (Pp67ff).

Just as Islam claimed to be the true path of Allah—restored by the Prophet after Jews and Christians had corrupted it—so now Caliph al-Mamum claimed that Islam was restoring the true glories of Greek learning that the Christianised Romans (“Byzantines”) had forsaken and corrupted (Pp 76-7).

Originating Islam
Lyons then takes a back-step to the origins of Islam, a very rosy view of its origins:

Al-Mamun’s great Abbasid Empire owed much of its enormous vitality to the spiritual and intellectual energies unleashed two hundred years earlier in a remote corner of the Arabian Peninsula (p.78).

That would be the beginning of Islam and of a thousand years of aggressing against every culture and civilisation it came up against. We are treated to a picture of Muhammad as social justice activist opposed by greedy plutocrats:

Muhammad’s message of social justice, the need for good works, and the oneness of God attracted some members of Mecca’s elite … And it resonated with members of the lesser Arab tribes and the urban poor in his native city of Mecca. But it also drew the anger of many among Mecca’s powerful merchant class, grown fat on their command of valuable trade routes and their monopoly over lucrative religious tourism to the city’s cube-shaped Kaaba shrine, then a center of traditional idol worship (p.78).

Lyons places Muhammad’s Meccan revelations in the “age-old Near Eastern tradition of spiritual warning” and goes through Muhammad’s attempts to woo the local Jews. Faced with the refusal of the local Jewish tribes to recognise him as a prophet, Muhammad shifted to a more hostile stance to Judaism (Pp79-80).

Lyons discusses the importance of the direction of prayers in fostering Islamic concern with direction and geographical enquiry, how early Islam encouraged intellectual enquiry more generally and did not fulfil modern notions of antimony between science and religion (Pp80ff). We are spared the Medinan revelations, the denouement of Muhammad’s interaction with the Jewish tribes (their defeat in war, the beheading of their men, selling their women and children into slavery), Muhammad on artistic freedom (beheading a poet who wrote verses against him) or the suppression of paganism. Islamic conquest of vast tracts of territory and people is a mere “spreading”:

The rapid spread of Islam across much of the known world that followed in the years following began to put the accurate determination of time, date and direction out of the reach of basic folk astronomy (p.83).

With happy implications for intellectual enquiry, as the vastness of the Arab empire gave science something to do in the service of faith (find the direction of Mecca for prayer). As did the injunctions to heal the sick did for medicine, the need for ritual cleaning for water delivery and controversy over graven images did for the development of the geometry of complex mosaic patterns. The Caliph’s wish to know about the vast empire he ruled encouraged interest in geography and the size and shape of the earth (Pp83ff).

There is then a shift of gears to discussing the glories of Roger II’s Norman kingdom—based, of course, on his wise adoption of Muslim patterns of religious toleration and patronage of Muslim learning. This leads into a discussion of Muslim contributions to Latin Christendom’s slow development of cartographical skills and geographical understanding and the importance of al-Idrisi's Book of Roger in providing Latin Christendom a window into Muslim knowledge and science. Based on contemporary sources, Lyons suggests that Vasco da Gama may have used a Muslim map and possibly a Muslim pilot (Pp91ff).


This review will be concluded in my next post.

Grasping the past: the American Civil War - people do not secede over trade policy

I find having a perspective from Downunder can sometimes be a useful one to have on American debates. For example, the experience of Australian monetary policy makes the fears of inflation that seem to grip large slabs of American opinion just bizarre. (As such fears, as Scott Sumner points out, manage to both replicate 1930s debates and completely ignore current market signals, they become even more bizarre: if you want to follow Scott's excellent monetary economics blog, start with his FAQs.)

A strain of opinion I find more bizarre still is the claim that the American Civil War was not over slavery, it was “really” more over trade policy—in particular, tariffs. Actually, no: people do not secede, and go to war with their fellow countrymen, over tariffs—they simply do not matter that much.

How can I tell? Because the tariff issue bitterly divided Australian politics in the late C19th and early C20th. The great divide in politics was between free traders (who wished to use income and wealth taxes to fund government) and protectionists (who wanted to use tariffs as a protective device and prime source of government revenue). Not only did the issue never even remotely threaten to lead to war within or among the Australian colonies; while the debate was raging, Australia managed to federate to form a single Commonwealth of Australia.

Country bitterly divided by trade policy unifies!

Yet some Americans insist on trying to claim that no, the Civil War was not about slavery, but far more about trade policy. About what level tariffs would be (if any).

Let me think: slaves represented about one-third of the total wealth of the South. Freeing the slaves would wipe out at a stroke one-third of the total wealth of the South and reduce the value of the labour and vote of free (mostly white) men. Tariffs would reduce the income of exporters. Which one of these is an issue worth fighting over?

The question answer itself. People at the time knew what the real issue was. It was slavery. This reprinted opinion piece from 1860 makes this quite clear. Tariffs are worth but a passing mention, slavery and Westward expansion are the entire focus of the piece.

For if you add in the issue of who would get access to the new lands being opened up Westwards, the wealthiest group in the US, or the hard-scrabble migrants, then there are lots of issues worth fighting about: none of which hinge on tariffs and trade policy but all of which get their power from the implications for the institution of slavery.

(It was also why a lot of Amerindians supported the South: the last Confederate general to stand down was Brigadier-General Stand Watie principal chief of the Cherokee nation.)

In the words of the writer of 1860:

Republicans come to Washington not just with an eye to stopping the expansion of slavery. Their program also includes lower tariffs, which will increase the power of Northern manufacturers; support for the railroads, which will lead to the settlement of the West and to the creation of who knows how many anti-slavery states between the Mississippi and the Pacific; and unrestrained immigration. Eighty percent of new arrivals settle in the North, swelling its power with their labor and their votes. The Constitution may prevent the Republicans from abolishing slavery now, but Southerners are concerned that the great unsettled Dakota prairies will be carved into a dozen states that will become full of Republican-loving Italians and Poles and Irishmen and escapees from the revolutions of 1848. See what happens then.

But it all came down to the threat all this posed to slavery.

As the 1860 article reminded its readers, there was a long history of Southern agitation threatening secession prior to the election of Lincoln in November 1860:

Southerners, of course, have called this tune before. They threatened to bolt in 1820, floated the divisive theory of nullification in the 1830s, and angrily convened in Nashville in 1850.

One seen at the time as being all about the issue of slavery:

Whatever the time and whatever the provocation, the story has always been the same: threats, indignation and outrage, followed in the end by placations from the North and reconciliations that left the South wealthier and the institution of slavery more entrenched.

We can see this concern in the rhetoric coming out of the South at the time, as quoted in the 1860 piece:

Here [is] a present, living, mischievous fact. The Government of the Union is in the hands of the avowed enemies of one entire section. It is to be directed in hostility to the property of that section.

Or even grander claims:

Let the consequences be what they may — whether the Potomac is crimsoned in human gore, and Pennsylvania Avenue is paved ten fathoms deep with mangled bodies, or whether the last vestige of human liberty is swept from the face of the American continent, the South will never submit to such humiliation and degradation as the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln.

Dr Johnson used to wonder “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”. The observation of the servitude of others may make one’s own liberty sweeter, but thought of the power of the votes of former slaves if they were freed would surely be at least as much a concern.

One commenter in an online debate on the causes of the American Civil War put it pithily:

Regarding tariffs, etc., this could always be compromised over. Slavery couldn't. You were either for it or against it.

And the implication of the voting rights of freed slaves was a very real one. After all, Jim Crow was all about stopping people from voting, and justifying a sense of one’s own superior—and the excluded’s inferior—status that went with that.

The American Civil War was over slavery and its implications. People thought so at the time, all the serious scholarship since provides further confirmation of that. Trying to pretend it was more over trade policy is the worst kind of historical “revisionism”.

ADDENDA As commenter Fred notes below, Marx had some things to say at the time about pretending the issue was tariffs instead of slavery. Such a claim was evasion then and it is evasion now.

The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium

This is a post in response to a request: my first on this blog, I believe. (But what Skepticlawyer wants, Skepticlawyer gets.)


What did folk want to read about in the year 2000? Apparently, life in the year 1000—Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger’s The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium, An Englishman’s World was a best seller.

It is easy to see why. Clearly and simply written, taking you through the months of the year based on the Julius Work Calendar, full of delightful vignettes of life a thousand years ago, The Year 1000 is popular history at it best.

For it is also good history: the acknowledgements at the end list almost two pages of academics who assisted the authors. This is up-to-date scholarly understanding rendered in very easily digestible form.

The first chapter starts with the details of creating a parchment manuscript: specifically the Julius Work Calendar, the oldest surviving document of its type, laying out the cycle of the year, both worldly and spiritual. North-Western Europe, but particularly England, is (along with Japan) the best historically documented region in the world. (Other places with longer histories of literacy have also had more profound institutional turmoil, with much destruction of records.)

Twelve chapters follow, one for each month. They discuss what was done at that time of year, but also connect things to events and the recording of events. So we get a discussion of the beginning of the hybrid English language and how differences between Norse and Anglo-Saxon led to simplification in plurals and loss of giving nouns genders (Pp33-4). Or that the King’s Council falling through the floor in 978 is the earliest written evidence of a building being more than one-storey high in England (p.36).

We find out that mead was the reveller’s drink of choice, being more alcoholic than wine—which was about 4% alcohol; light and fruity and mostly made to be consumed within the year—while ale was much safer than water (Pp62-3). The process of coin-making is described, Anglo-Saxon England producing far more silver coins than any other part of Europe at the time (p.70).

We then get the vivid comparison that the records pertaining to President Clinton’s sex life amount to 30 times the storage space of all the surviving Anglo-Saxon manuscripts. Sex scandals are a hardy perennial, however. When King Eadwig failed to turn up to his coronation feast he was found vigorously enjoying the charms of a young lady—her mother did not object, as she was cavorting in the same bed beside her. We just don’t do sex scandals like they used to (p.71).
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England was an importer of silver (all those coins), a result of increasingly vigorous trading activity. In Pavia, English merchants had proved so violently obstreperous when searching of their bags was demanded, it was agreed they would forgo tolls and instead pay a levy every three years (Pp90ff). Those hooligan English!

The month when the gap between rich and poor loomed largest was July, the month just before harvest, when grain prices soared. Not only were people light-headed through hunger, ergot would bloom on the rye producing lysergic acid (LSD), a combination that produced mass hysteria and delirium (Pp101-2).

The first wave of Anglo-Saxon monasticism was wiped out in the first great surge of Norse (“Viking”) incursions. In the C10th, there was a rebirth of the monasteries, partly based on a solid alliance of Church and Crown. So much so, that in 973, King Edgar was anointed, a jealously guarded sacrament of the Roman Church (the Scots kings had to wait until 1331). This raised English kings to emperor status: the coronation of English monarchs ever since has been based on this 973 ceremony (p.108).

October was the preferred month for campaigning (the Battle of Hastings, the first time an Englisc army faced cavalry, was in October 1066). At that time of the year, the countryside was dotted with barns full of grain, hence it was the time for raiding and invading:

One serious autumn raid could mean ruin for generations to come.
It is hardly surprising that so many sports and pastimes related to war in the year 1000 (p.157).

Indeed.

Chess was the new craze, though the queen was not to become the superpower of the board until the C15th. There were no playing cards until the C14th. But games such as backgammon and tictactoe were played, while the Englisc loved riddles (p.158).

Anglo-Saxon was a fairly “non-sexist” language, the term ‘mann’ (plural ‘menn’) applying to both sexes—so the descendants of Adam and Eve were descended from ‘two menn’. Men and women had the same property rights—there are 30 surviving Anglo-Saxon wills, 10 from women and their wills read just the same as those of the men. Two powerful women—Aelfthryth, mother of King Ethelred and regent during his minority (after his half-brother King Edward’s mysterious murder: the prime suspect being the woman who became regent and her son king) and Emma, wife of Ethelred (and later Canute, who put aside his first wife to marry the English queen) and mother of both Harthacanute and Edward the Confessor—dominated English politics (Pp163ff).

That the House of Wessex did not use primogeniture—all royal princes were aethelings, “throne worthy”—but selected who seemed most capable gave the women who raised capable sons status and potential leverage. But it is hard to go past the history of Alfred’s daughter Aethelfraed, the “Lady of Mercia”, who built fortresses and (successfully) led armies as the epitome of feisty (and admired and respected) Englisc women . The Norman chronicler William of Malmesbury seems to find her achievements somewhat more surprising than the Anglo-Saxons did—after all, half the mixed sex religious establishments founded in the C7th were led by women. By the year 1000, however, there were no mixed sex establishments: the Church was “tightening up in matters sexual”. Until the mid C10th, married clergy were common, but church reformers began to enforce celibacy (Pp167ff).

The Church was expanding its control over life (“Nanny Church” in the authors’ nice phrase): particularly marriage, with adverse effects on the status of women. Anglo-Saxon marriage was a secular affair, with divorce an accepted institution:

though the record are scanty, thanks to filtering by the church in later years, it does seem that Anglo-Saxons separated and divorced when they had to, without any particular ethical complications. The only concern of the community was practical — the proper partitioning of property and the care of the children. One Anglo-Saxon law code makes clear that a woman could walk out of her marriage on her own initiative if she cared to, and that if she took the children and cared for them, then she was also entitled to half the property (p.171).

The law strove to protect the frailer sex in a rough, male-dominated warrior society. Men were waepnedmenn “weaponed-persons”, and women were wifmenn, “wife-persons”, with wif deriving from the word for weaving. Men protected and women provided clothes. But the increased Christian moralism was not good for women—Canute’s law code decreeing that a woman who committed adultery her legal husband got all her property and her nose and ears were to be removed: there was no similar penalty for a male adulterer. This law did not, however, persist with the law not treating female adultery so harshly until Cromwell’s time (Pp.172-3).

Anglo-Saxon law was fine (wergild) based, with men and women valued according to their social status. King Alfred’s code decreed that fondling the breast (uninvited) of a freewoman was a 5 shilling fine, throwing her down cost 10 shillings, rape 60 shillings (a huge sum). All these fines being paid, like all wergild, to her (p.172).

While marriages were negotiated between (male) heads of households, the morgengifu, “morning gift”, paid on satisfactory completion of the wedding night, was paid to the wife—which encouraged her to be virginal on her wedding night. Not that the law required virginity: if the husband did not care, the law saw no reason to get involved. But, if deception was involved, King Aelthelbert decreed the gift was to be repaid (apparently to stop husbands being saddled with the child of another man). King Alfred allowed men to fight another man found in bed with his wife, daughter or married sister or mother and, if he killed him, no retribution was liable. Wives were not held responsible for the criminal actions of their husbands, unless they were active accomplices (Pp.173-4).

It was also a time of trial by ordeal (asking God, the witness of all acts, to bear witness), which was not to be abolished until the Church withdrew its support for requiring miracles-on-order from God in the Lateran Council of 1215 (Canon 18 forbidding clergy to take part in such trials, which rather took the point out of them). The typical Anglo-Saxon ordeal being to hold a red-hot iron while walking 9 paces, having his hand bandaged for a weak. It was then inspected to see if it was healing: if not, he was guilty and the penalty enacted (for thievery, hanging). Gallows stood at every town and crossroads, with bodies dangling until the birds picked them clean; a grisly warning against law breaking (Pp.174-5).

As for worries about the year 1000 (or 1033) being the date of the Apocalypse, none of the wills composed in the 990s do other than assume that the world would continue as it had (p.186).

We get a nice excursion into the career of Gerbert of Aurillac, Pope Sylvester II—a widely read, quick-witted man of science and adviser to Emperors and Kings whose intellect and success inspired considerable envy, and dark claims of pacts with Satan. His re-introduction of the abacus was a major boon to Europe intellectual (and commercial) life. This in a world where Alcuin had claimed that 9,000 was as high as figuring could go—given Latin numerals were being used, so 9,000 was MMMMMMMMM, one could perhaps see the difficulty (Pp188ff).

The last chapter, "The English Spirit", contrasts amazing craftsmanship with a woman buried with the bones of the baby still trapped in her birth canal inside her. The authors note that England in the year 1000 would hardly seem much of a candidate for future greatness, there were plenty of more impressive societies around at the time. And yet:

all these locally dominant power structures were autocracies — and autocracy, in the long run, was not to prove the way ahead. It was inflexible and hidebound, fatally resistant to the spirit of innovation on which progress depends. The English may have looked foolish when they paid their Danegeld to the barbarous Vikings in the years around 1000, but at least they knew how to generate their money through enterprise rather than through crude conquest, and the taxes that were doubtless raised with great grumbling could only have been levied and paid over so repeatedly on some ultimate basis of popular consent.
Consent and social co-operation are among the most difficult elements to define in any society, but they were to prove crucial for the long-term future of the English way … The English described themselves as “subjects” in the year 1000, as they do today, but ten centuries of political development were to earn them rights and privileges that made them the envy of “citizens” elsewhere (Pp196-7).

Administrative weakness required consent to make up the gaps. This was to prove the basis of the medieval development of representative principle, from Alfonso IX of Leon and Castile asking merchants to elect delegates to discuss taxes and Simon de Montfort doing the same, and adding in elected knights of the shires, to justify standing up to the King’s ministers, followed by Edward I being clever enough to work out that taxes which are consented to are easier to collect and giving an avenue to listen to people’s concerns can avoid getting too badly out of touch, thereby avoiding his father’s problems.

But this was building on patterns that can already be discerned in Englisc society. This was a society full of latent possibilities—the first Arabic numerals turn up in a Western document in 976—one where rule of law and property rights were already considerably developed.

Lacey and Danziger make the society of the time more understandable without condescending. Their final words are warning against what C. S. Lewis called the “snobbery of chronology”, which our own time is rife with:

But whether we display more wisdom or common humanity is an open question, and as we look back to discover how people coped with the daily difficulties of existence a thousand years ago, we might also consider whether, in all our sophistication, we could meet the challenges of their world with the same fortitude, good humour and philosophy (p.201).

Quite.

The Year 1000 is an excellent journey into a past made accessible through a happy melding of scholarship, clear and lively writing, and good sense.

Trusting liberals and competent conservatives

Conservative US columnist Charles Krauthammer has set out how, in the US, conservatives think that liberals are stupid and liberals think that conservatives are evil. (Throughout this post, I am using ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ in their, somewhat odd, American uses—American conservatives being folk who accept what, historically, was liberal politics and economics while American liberals are social democratic/progressivist: but this is the terminology of both American politics and American social science, hence the terminology I will use in this post.)

Amusingly, some recent research suggests an empirical basis for Krauthammer’s polemical dissection. Jacob Vigil, an evolutionary psychologist, working from Jacob Jost’s analysis that political ideologies:

like virtually all other belief systems, are adopted in part because they satisfy various psychological needs … [which] is not to say they are unprincipled, unwarranted, or unresponsive to reason or evidence

has come up with an analysis of liberal-versus-conservative political identity as coming from different personal interaction strategies.

The basic idea is that:

Conservatives, being more oriented toward dominance, tend to acquire a larger group of friends and associates than liberals. They are more sensitive to potential threats because there are more people in their orbit, and thus the danger of their being hurt by a duplicitous person is greater. Liberals, being more inward-oriented, have smaller, tighter social groups and thus feel less threatened, which in turn allows them to be more open to unfamiliar experiences.

Or, to put it even more pithily:

“The basic idea is that folks who have small social spheres are going to be demonstrating more trust cues, and those who have bigger social spheres, more capacity cues.” Liberals, in other words, are demonstrating trustworthiness as a way of attracting the social support they need, while conservatives are demonstrating power for the exact same reason.

So, consider Krauthammer’s take on American liberals:

Liberals tend to be nice, and they believe -- here is where they go stupid -- that most everybody else is nice too. Sure, you've got your multiple felon and your occasional war criminal, but they're undoubtedly depraved 'cause they're deprived. If only we could get social conditions right -- eliminate poverty, teach anger management, restore the ozone, arrest John Ashcroft -- everyone would be holding hands smiley-faced.
Liberals believe that human nature is fundamentally good. The fact that this is contradicted by, oh, 4,000 years of human history simply tells them how urgent is the need for their next seven-point program for the social reform of everything.
Liberals suffer incurably from naivete, the stupidity of the good heart. Who else but that oracle of American liberalism, The New York Times, could run the puzzled headline: "Crime Keeps On Falling, but Prisons Keep On Filling." But? How about this wild theory: If you lock up the criminals, crime declines.

Sure, Krauthammer’s poking fun. But the underlying idea sits rather nicely with Vigil’s analysis.
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Then there is how Krauthammer summarises the archetypal American liberal take on conservatives:

They think conservatives are mean. How can conservatives believe in the things they do -- self-reliance, self-discipline, competition, military power -- without being soulless? How to understand conservative desire to abolish welfare, if it is not to punish the poor? The argument that it would increase self-reliance and thus ultimately reduce poverty is dismissed as meanness rationalized -- or as Rep. Major Owens, D-N.Y., put it more colorfully in a recent House debate on welfare reform, "a cold-blooded grab for another pound of flesh from the demonized welfare mothers."

Is this not someone who operates via an intentions-matter signalling-trust mechanism reacting in horror at people operating according to a consequences-matter signalling-capacity/competence mechanism?

Whether Vigil has got the connection between experience in childhood and adolescence and adult politics correct is a moot point. But his descriptions of the adult strategies of signalling competence or signalling trust do seem to be getting at something. So, in his words, people who are:

competency-oriented; they’ve discovered they have the ability to influence the lives of others. They advertise this capacity, which makes them desirable not only as potential mates, but also as potential friends or business associates. Thus they acquire a larger social sphere.

They would have an approach which is concerned with what works, and where finding out about folk’s character, and dealing with them accordingly, is important. That would tend to lead to a certain sort of politics.

Then there is the signaling-trust strategy:

To advertise their desirability as friends or associates, they take a different route, emphasizing their ability to care for, and about, others.

It is all about intentions and compassion: a different sort of politics flows from that.

The work of Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues on the psychological foundations of morality (which I recently posted on) has some congruence with this, in that it postulates a wider set of moral concerns for conservatives over liberals in ways that also seem to overlap with Vigil's analysis. I am sceptical of Vigil’s take on the childhood and adolescent origins of different people-management strategies. But he has broached a line of research that does seem to be on to something worth pursuing.

Elizabeth Moon and posterior-interior cerebration within the American left

I have, from time to time, enjoyed the SF novels of Elizabeth Moon, mainly the Familias Regnant stories. She is not one my favourite SF writers, but I have never done other than enjoyed reading one of her books. I am sure that, over the years, she has engaged many an adolescent (and not so adolescent) male in her tales of smart, badass women and the notion that female naval admirals is just where the future goes.

In other words, she has practised more reaching-the-public feminism than many a “who reads this constipated jargon anyway?” academic feminist, convinced of the superiority of their cognition—not least because most of the public would not even be able to understand the thoughts said academic feminist expresses in such a way as to ensure they don’t.

Elizabeth Moon recently (Sept. 11 2010) published a meditation on citizenship on her livejournal. The first ten or so paragraphs are moderately liberal-Democrat in tone on the need to contribute to society and criticising the American right as having a selfish conception of liberty, white flight from attempting to create racial balance in schools as undermining public schools as vehicles of social integration, while using crass statements by Ken Lay of Enron and Laura Bush as examples of blind self-involvement.

Then she moves on to the point that creating a nation of immigrants means that immigrants have some responsibility to fit in. Living in a country with a considerably higher proportion of foreign-born citizens than the US (25% of Australian residents are foreign-born compared to 14% of US residents), I take her point, one that is expressed moderately sensibly. Certainly, well within the realm of reasonable discourse:

The point here is that in order to accept large numbers of immigrants, and maintain any social cohesion, acceptance by the receiving population is not the only requirement: immigrants must be willing and able to change, to merge with the receiving population. The new place isn't the old place; the new customs aren't the old customs. "Acceptance" is a multi-directional communications grid. Groups that self-isolate, that determinedly distinguish themselves by location, by language, by dress, will not be accepted as readily as those that plunge into the mainstream. This is not just an American problem--this is human nature, the tribalism that underlies all societies and must be constantly curtailed if larger groups are to co-exist.

She then proceeds to make some fairly obvious points about proposing to build a new Islamic centre at or near the site of the 9/11 attacks:

When an Islamic group decided to build a memorial center at/near the site of the 9/11 attack, they should have been able to predict that this would upset a lot of people. Not only were the attackers Islamic--and not only did the Islamic world in general show indecent glee about the attack, but this was only the last of many attacks on citizens and installations of this country which Islamic groups proudly claimed credit for. That some Muslims died in the attacks is immaterial--does not wipe out the long, long chain of Islamic hostility.

She also makes her own position (politely) clear:

It is hard to believe that those making the application did not know that--did not anticipate it--and were not, in a way, probing to see if they could start a controversy. If they did not know, then they did not know enough about the culture into which they had moved. Though I am not angry about it, and have not spoken out in opposition, I do think it was a rude and tactless thing to propose (and, if carried out, to do.)

There is absolutely nothing morally or intellectually offensive in any of this. Her expressed opinion puts Elizabeth Moon well within mainstream US opinion on the issue, given polling finds that nearly 70% of Americans (and 71% of New Yorkers) oppose the proposal: indeed, it puts her on the liberal wing of that mainstream opinion.
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What she is after is a bit of give-and-take and what disturbs her is that she is not seeing or experiencing enough of it from Muslims she reads about or meets:

I can easily imagine how Muslims would react to my excusing the Crusades on the basis of Islamic aggression from 600 to 1000 C.E....(for instance, excusing the building of a church on the site of a mosque in Cordoba after the Reconquista by reminding them of the mosque built on the site of an important early Christian church in Antioch.) So I don't give that lecture to the innocent Muslims I come in contact with. I would appreciate the same courtesy in return (and don't get it.)

But—and here’s the thing—she take Islam, and its doctrines, seriously:

The same with other points of Islam that I find appalling (especially as a free woman) and totally against those basic principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution...I feel that I personally (and many others) lean over backwards to put up with these things, to let Muslims believe stuff that unfits them for citizenship, on the grounds of their personal freedom. It would be helpful to have them understand what they're demanding of me and others--how much more they're asking than giving. It would be helpful for them to show more understanding of the responsibilities of citizenship in a non-Muslim country.

Wicked her!

Now, the historically illiterate will no doubt refer to C19th and early C20th suspicions about Catholics, or more recent suspicions about Vietnamese or whoever (even though Elizabeth Moon has already made that point).

Right, please nominate the Catholic (or Vietnamese, or whoever) equivalent of 9/11 (or the Bali bombings), or the jihadi networks more generally, in the historical experience of the United States or the Commonwealth of Australia; go.

What makes Islam and Muslim migration a much more difficult issue is the beliefs and actions of many Muslims: beliefs and actions that, alas, have a lot of history and doctrine behind them. In her US liberal-polite, wanting–to-be-reasonable way, Elizabeth Moon is grappling with these realities.

And it is a very liberal-Democrat form of politeness and reasonableness she presents. (The goals of libertarians don’t “only benefit themselves” for example: and there is plenty of perfectly genuine patriotism among Tea Partiers—neither group is, en bloc, failing to understand the requirements of citizenship.) But still, by admitting there are genuine, and specific, issues with Muslim integration, Elizabeth Moon broke a major progressivist taboo.

And was promptly punished for it by being “dis-invited” from being guest of honour at a feminist science fiction convention, along with getting a lot of online opprobrium.

Her post was, apparently, “an anti-Muslim rant”. No, actually, it wasn’t; as anyone who reads it—and whose cognition is not stuck somewhere within their own posterior—can tell for themselves.

But it gets better. A definition of feminism was promulgated for the convention—this being a feminist science fiction con after all. Read the definition. Particularly this para:

Feminism is many things to many people, but one way to describe it is as a belief in the social, political, and economic equality of all. Feminism is part of a larger constellation of movements seeking social, political and economic equality for all people, regardless of race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, gender identity, creed, ability, status, or belief.

Notice anything about it? Reclusive Leftist certainly has. I will just let her go to town on it:

Notice anything? Like maybe the fact that this definition of feminism doesn’t even mention discrimination based on sex? We have “gender identity” and “sexual orientation,” which covers the GLBTQ crowd, but what about just plain old sex discrimination? Apparently, equality regardless of sex just isn’t on the menu.
Notice anything else? Like maybe the fact that this isn’t a definition of feminism at all? Feminism is a movement and political philosophy that addresses the systematic oppression of females because they are female. What WisCon is offering up instead is just a general definition of liberal social justice. Sexism isn’t even mentioned.

Oi vay!

I am sure the posterior-interior cerebration on display in the dis-inviting of Elizabeth Moon, and in describing her meditation on citizenship as an “anti-Muslim rant”, is warm and cosy. Reassuring even. It is just not, in any sense, useful. Not for understanding the world, nor changing it for the better. Elizabeth Moon’s feisty, competent heroines are much more useful for the latter.

If you want to understand why the left side of American politics just got an almighty electoral shellacking, the sort of sneering, intolerant, intellectually incompetent, not-talking-to-you (but will shout-at-you) self-delusion that Elizabeth Moon has experienced is part of the story.

ADDENDA A poll finds that US Muslims only support the proposed mosque slightly more (43%) than atheists/agnostics/no-religion (42%) and other non-Christians (41%), are the group least likely to support moving the proposed ground zero mosque to another location (14%) but the most likely group to support making it an interfaith centre (30%), making US Muslims marginally against the proposal (43% in favour, 44% interfaith centre or another location).

The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages (2)

This is the second part of my review of Jean Gimpel’s The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages. The first part was in my previous post.


Believers in progress
Gimpel argues that a crucial difference between medievals and classicals is that the medievals believed in progress. As the medieval scholar and friar 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 (p.147).

While it was another medieval, Bernard, master of the Episcopal school at Chartres from 1114-9, who produced the much quoted:

We are as dwarfs mounted on the shoulders of giants, so that although we perceive many more things than they, it is not because our vision is more piercing or our stature higher, but because we are carried and elevated higher thanks to their gigantic size (Pp147-8).

Medieval writers noted and marvelled at the invention, the creation of new things, they saw around them. The surgeon Theodoric, in a 1267 treatise, said of the extraction of arrows:

every day a new instrument and a new method is invented (Pp148-9).

While the Dominican Fra Giordano of Pisa held that:

Not all the arts have been found; we shall never see an end of finding them. Every day we could discover a new art … It is not twenty years since there was discovered the art of making spectacles which help one to see well, an art which is one of the best and most necessary in the world. And that is such a short time ago that a new art which never before existed was invented … I myself saw the man who discovered and practised it and I talked with him (p.149).

The good Fra, one suspects, personally experienced the benefits of this new marvel.

According to my general rule about invention—if something was invented before 500BC, it was first invented in the Fertile Crescent: if it was invented after 1500, it was first invented in the West but if it was invented between 500BC and 1500, it was first invented in China; unless it had something to do with horses, in which case it was invented in Central Eurasian steppes—the most complex mechanical clock was that developed by Su Sung in the Sung capital in the C11th. But prediction of astronomical events was a closely guarded secret of the Chinese imperial court, as it was used to buttress imperial power. When, in 1126, the Sung fled their former capital to a new Southern capital, they were unable to replicate the clock due to lack of required specialists. The conquering Jin, and their later supplanters Yuan Mongols, kept the clock going. When the Ming overthrew the Yuan in 1368, they had no interest in the clock and no more is heard of it. By 1600, Jesuits were introducing European mechanical clocks to a China that showed no sign of ever having created such a thing (Pp150ff).

Back in Europe, interest in creating a mechanical clock (primarily for astronomical purposes) had developed in the C13th, partly spurred by Hindu astronomer and mathematician Bhaskara’s perpetual-motion machine of about 1150, known through Arabic treatises. Indeed, Giovanni di Dondi’s C14th treatise treats a “common” or time-telling clock as presumed knowledge before reading his manuscript. It is likely that the weight-driven clock with mechanical escapement was invented in the late C13th. Gimpel traces the development of an effective mechanical clock through various treatises (including a reference in Dante’s Paradiso Canto X) peaking in Giovanni di Dondi’s complex and much-celebrated astronomical clock (Pp152ff).
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Keeping di Dondi’s clock going was also a trial for medieval Europe. But, in the meantime, “ordinary” mechanical clocks spread throughout Latin Christendom in the C14th. The Latin Church accepted the “mechanical” time of evenly spaced hours rather than the “eternal” time of 12 divisions of daylight: unlike the Orthodox Church, which banned installation of any mechanical clocks in Orthodox churches until the C20th. To Gimpel, the difference flowed from the power of the mercantile interest in Western Europe, who knew that “time is money” (Pp168ff).

Gimpel explores how the C12th Renaissance differed notably from The Renaissance:

There was, however, one fundamental difference between this earlier renaissance and the later, more famous, one. While the latter was primarily concerned with literature and art, the twelfth-century renaissance was primarily taken up with philosophy and science (p.174).

Of his representative figures:

Giovanni di Dondi, the horologist; Villard de Honnecourt, the architect-engineer; Walter of Henley, the agronomist—all had one thing in common: a rational outlook on life (p.171).

This did not mean they were not men of faith, but that they applied a reasoned, empirical practicality to the problems they confronted.

For:

From the first quarter of the twelfth century to the last quarter of the thirteenth century—until the year 1277 to be precise—there was a sustained effort to marry reason and faith (p.171).

An upsurge that started as early as Gerbert of Aurillac (Pope Sylvester II) “the first to set Europe on the path of science”, reviving the use of the abacus, developing Boethius’s treatises on arithmetic and music, writing a treatise on astronomy (p.172).

Figures such as Lanfranc and St Anselm—both C11th Archbishops of Canterbury—led the application of reason to faith. In Anselm’s words:

It seems to me negligent, if after we have been confirmed in the faith, we do not strive to understand what we believe (p.172).

But it is the career of Peter Abelard who Gimpel most warms to, quoting him at considerable length and celebrating his intellectual acumen and combativeness (Pp172ff).

It was a period where philosophical treatises (including those of natural philosophy, the study of the world—what became science) were sought out and translated. Gimpel tabulates some of the authors translated in the C12th and early C13th:

It was the work of these translators that made possible the rise of modern science, for it was they who made accessible this vast body of knowledge to the humanists of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in the schools and universities of Europe. They deserve our respect—quite as much as the over-praised humanists of the fifteenth century (p.175-8).

Take that Petrarch!

It was a period of both praise and appreciation of the value of classical antiquity and belief in the growth of knowledge. In the words of William of Conches, in opposition to the opponents of natural philosophy:

since they themselves are unacquainted with the forces of nature, in order that they may have all men as companions in their ignorance, wish them to investigate nothing but to believe like rustics. We, on the contrary, think that a reason should be sought in every case, if one can be found (p.179).

Shades of C. P. Snow’s “Two Cultures”. William was avid in his support of natural philosophy, saying on the question of whether God could find a way of reconciling the element of fire and earth:

We do not place a limit on divine power, but we do say of existing things none can do it, nor in the nature of things can there be anything that would suffice.

Or, similarly:

God can make a cow out of a tree, but has He ever done so? Therefore show some reason why a thing is so, or cease to hold that it is so (p.179).

William of Conches was a doughty manifestation of the ultimate triumph of Aristotelian philosophy in Latin Christendom, at a time when it was being routed in Islam by al-Ghazali and his followers, despite the efforts of Abū ‘Alī al-Ḥusayn ibn ‘Abd Allāh ibn Sīnā (Avicenna) and Abū 'l-Walīd Muḥammad bin Aḥmad bin Rushd (Averroes), who were very influential in Latin Christendom but whose tradition was to prove stillborn in Islam.

Gimpel sees some of the effects of Christianity as feeding into this triumph, as the works and efforts of these medieval natural philosophers:

furthered the demythologising of nature that Christianity had begun (p.180).

Gimpel quotes historian Lynn White who noted that:

In 1956 Robert Forbes of Leyden and Samuel Sambursky of Jerusalem simultaneously pointed out thatChristianity, by destroying classical animism, brought about a basic change in the attitude towards natural objects and opened the way for their rational and unabashed use for human ends. Saints, angels and demons were very real for the Christian, but the genius loci, the spirit inherent in a place or object, was no longer present to be placated if disturbed (p.180).

(The connection between the Judaeo-Christian world view and the rise of science is further discussed here.) The Cathedral school of Chartres put representative statues to represent (the mostly pagan) masters of each of seven arts: Priscian for Grammar, Aristotle for dialectic, Cicero for rhetoric, Boethius for arithmetic, Ptolemy for Astronomy, Euclid for Geometry while Music is apparently accompanied by Pythagoras. Gimpel quotes period scholars to convey the sense of intellectual excitement, particularly centred on the Paris and its University (Pp180ff).

Not that this intellectual ferment went without challenge. As Gimpel notes:

The teaching of Aristotle was prohibited in Paris in 1210 and 1215 and in Toulouse in 1245. In 1263, Urban reiterated condemnations directed at the Averroists. The Bishop of Paris, Etienne Tempier, in 1270 condemned 13 propositions taught at the Faculty of Arts (p.182).

All this leading up to his 1277 condemnation of “219 execrable errors which certain students of the Faculty of Arts have the temerity to study and discuss in the schools” (Pp182-3). While Aristotelian thought—in the form of the Thomist synthesis—was to be embraced by the Church in ensuing decades, the condemnations did put a crimp on natural philosophy at Paris.

Gimpel places Roger Bacon in his time, particularly by looking at the work of his master Robert Grosseteste (c.1175-1253), a translator of Aristotle, a prolific writer who wrote on optics and held that:

the mathematical laws of geometrical optics were the foundation of physical reality, essential to the understanding of nature (p.186).

Bacon admired and continued the work of Grosseteste (who he probably never met). He also advocated reform of the calendar, though his work did not bear full fruit for some centuries. Gimpel describes him as:

the first man really to have undertaken planned experimental research (p.193).

Gimpel shows us a Bacon who was a man of his time, rather than some weird burst of light in medieval darkness. A time which included such people as Peter of Maricourt, whose work on magnets was not to be surpassed until William Gilbert published his De Magnete in 1600, acknowledging and incorporating the work of his C13th predecessor. Thanks to Peter, European compasses came to surpass in quality the Chinese originals (Pp183ff).

The peak of C13th exploratory confidence was the efforts of the Vivaldi brothers of Genoa who set out with two ships to find the Indies in 1291. After sailing down the coast of Africa to beyond Cape Non, all trace of them is lost (p.196). But one of Bacon’s works, according to Columbus’s own testimony in 1498, helped inspire the later Genoese adventurer on his own voyage two centuries later. Curiously, the two Franciscan brothers who sailed with the Vivaldis probably did not know about the work of Bacon, their fellow Franciscan, because the head of the order (the future Pope Nicholas IV) had placed restraints placed on some of his writings (p.197). Whatever the reason for the constraints, and the form of house arrest he suffered, Gimpel sees it as bringing to an end the surge in natural philosophy, and the effort of the Church to marry reason and faith, leading to the surge in mysticism in the C14th and C15th (p.198).

Various reactions
The C14th was a hard, even calamitous, century. The Great Famine of 1315-1317, the start of the Hundred Years War in 1337 and of the great trading house bankruptcies, the Black Death 1347-50, the revolutionary upheavals of 1378-82 (most famously, the Revolt of the Ciompi and the Peasant's Revolt).

Gimpel identifies two long-term effects from the 1277 condemnations:

by separating philosophy from theology it served to establish the intellectual climate in which science developed almost independently of liberal humanism; and, on the other, it caused Christianity to revert to mysticism (p.200).

Which he defines as:

Mysticism is the attempt to penetrate the riddle of the universe not by logic, but by sympathetic intuition (p.200).

Mystical monastic orders saw a major surge, as did interest in

superstitious arts and occult sciences – geomancy, hydromancy, aeromancy, pyromancy, chiromancy, augury, and necromancy; for alchemy, for astrology, and for witchcraft (p.202).

We enter into Europe of the witch burnings. The Crusading impulse lost power, particularly after St Louis's disaster in Egypt. Islam was once again resurgent, with the Turks steadily advancing, while the climate turned colder and Europe experienced the re-appearance of regular famines. Gimpel takes us through the horrors of famine and plague, noting that Europe did not recover its medieval peak population until around 1600 (Pp202ff). (Edward I ruled over more subjects as monarch of England than did Elizabeth I.)

For the survivors, the great dying meant higher wages, while prices generally declined. Struggles over these shifts led to the uprisings of 1378-82, whose rhetoric prefigured that of socialists of later centuries (Pp213ff).

It was also a period of monetary upheaval. Philip the Fair devalued the coinage in 1294-5, 1306 and 1313, to considerable social angst and upheaval (p.221). The relative price of gold and silver shifted: early in the medieval period, in the Islamic Empire it was 14:1, in Europe 12 or 10:1. Predictably, gold moved eastward and silver westward. In the C13th, the relative values shifted and the flows went the other way. Financial crisis followed, with most of the major Florentine banking houses collapsing in the 1340s while overall economic activity declined (though generally not as sharply at population) (Pp222ff).

European inventiveness applied itself to war, inventing cannon in the early C14th, there being no record of Chinese cannon until three decades later (p.228). Gimpel chronicles various indicators of the late medieval period being one of decline from its C13th peak; with non-military technology basically reaching a plateau, though the improved navigational techniques and printing were the basis from which the Renaissance blossomed (Pp229ff).

In his Epilogue, Gimpel considers why the dynamism of the medieval period has been so ignored or forgotten. Dissing the medieval is a long, even venerable, historical tradition:

While the Renaissance viewed medieval society as scholastic and static, the Reformation saw it as hierarchical and corrupt, and the Age of Enlightenment considered it to be irrational and superstitious (p.238).

That is a lot of received hostile lenses to view the past through.

And neo-medievalist enthusiasts—such as those of the Romantic era—often just added in new myths (including horns on Viking helmets). Conservatives saw the medieval period as one of “natural” social order and stability, radicals as a period of a blessedly non-technological age of artisans and craftsmen (Pp238-9). In the mid-C20th, interest in the technological history began to grow and slowly rescued medieval achievement (Pp239-40).

The fatal urge to predict
Having done such a splendid effort in rescuing the past, Gimpel moves into giving a fine example of Why Historians Should Not Predict, proceeding to analyse the current era as one of technological stagnation, where the impetus of the Industrial Revolution was running out of puff (Pp240ff). He was, of course, writing his first edition as the information technology revolution was just beginning.

To be fair, from 1973 onwards there was a dramatic slowing in productivity growth in developed economies that economists are still trying to determine the reasons for. Still, anyone living in the age of the personal computer, mobile phones, multimedia and the internet is going to read the last few pages of The Medieval Machine in some puzzlement. Particularly as Gimpel updated and extended this section for the 1988 second edition.

Gimpel had caught the Grand Theory of History bug, developing a theory of technological dynamism as a pattern of rise, peak and ageing where psychological drive leads technological evolution. Since he compares France (the peak country of the medieval period) with the US, a lot of this seems typical European “our decline will happen to you!”. Paul Kennedy's infamous late 1980s prediction that the US was suffering worse “imperial overstretch” than the Soviet Union is an (even more unfortunate in timing) example of the same genre.

I have a lot of sympathy for Gimpel’s concern that regulation (for example, of pharmaceuticals) is choking off innovation. Not least because there is some truth to it—which is why biotech and related fields are now dominated by the US. But his fiscal and trade alarmism seems overdone (particularly as the US moved into fiscal surplus in the next decade). His final sentence is:

China is at the beginning of a cycle that could last a millennium, while Western civilisation stands at the end of a cycle that is already one thousand years old (p.271).

Maybe. And maybe China, for all its current economic vigour, will get old before it gets rich. I very much believe in learning about the past to get a sense of the present: but not in predicting the grand future. That is what history teaches me NOT to do: I will stick to those rather more specific “robust predictions of general tendency” that the better bits of social science can reveal to us.

But if I disagree with the last 30 pages of grand historical theorising (based, to be fair, on a range of empirical indicators), the rest of The Medieval Machine is a splendid corrective to much of the conventional un-wisdom on the medieval period.

The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages (1)

There is surely no period of European history that is loaded down with more misconceptions than the medieval period. It is regularly dismissed as centuries of social stagnation, fearful of change, an intellectual desert.

The history of philosophy, for example, has for many decades been typically taught as modern philosophy starts with Descartes, there are the Classical philosophers (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Stoics etc) but nothing of continuing intellectual significance occurred in the intervening over thousand years between Plotinus (or maybe Boethius) and Descartes (though Aquinas—and perhaps Maimonedes—might be conceded to be great philosophers).

In reality, the medieval period was one of considerable intellectual activity, particularly after the Aristotelian revival from the C12th onwards. One of the besetting problems of modern philosophy is that modern philosophers (from Descartes, Locke, Hume onwards) are having an argument with Aristotle and Aristotelian thought but either do not admit it or, worse, do not know it. Even when they are allegedly engaging with Aristotle and Aristotelian thought—as with the First Cause/Unmoved Mover argument for the existence of God—they often do not actually engage with the argument, from failing to understand it. The First Cause/Unmoved Mover argument is not, as it is usually characterised, an argument about some chain of causes within time (a misconstruing that generates the “what caused the first cause”? response) but an argument about the ground of causation across (indeed outside) time.

But a much worse myth is that of the medieval period as one of social stagnation, fearful of change. On the contrary, the medieval period was one of institutional innovation and technological dynamism. Yes, the collapse of literacy (and population) after the fall of the Western Roman Empire meant much loss of knowledge and skills. But that also led to casting around for new ways to do things to deal with the new circumstances (notably a shortage of people in general, a shortage of literacy skills in particular and serious public order issues).

Jean Gimpel’s The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages is an excellent corrective to misconceptions about medieval stagnation. For example:

from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries more stone was quarried in France than had been mined in the whole history of Ancient Egypt (where the Great Pyramid alone was built to a volume of 40,500,000 cubit feet) (p.59).

The population of medieval Europe peaked much higher than that of Roman and Germanic Europe, for example.

Not that is was notably a period of inventiveness as such. Much of this technological dynamism was adaptation of ideas they got from elsewhere, but a feature of medieval Europe was precisely its willingness to adapt ideas from anywhere. A very useful trait for a civilisation to develop: particularly when it later broke out (after Columbus and Vasco da Gama) and became the first civilisation to be in contact with all parts of the globe, and so the full range of available human ideas and techniques.

The Medieval Machine begins with a chronology of the Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages, starting with:

536 or 537 floating mils (on the Tiber)

and concluding with:

c.1445 movable type

Six pages and nine centuries of technological innovation which begin 60 years after the official fall of Western Roman Empire with the deposition of the last Western Emperor in 476 and conclude about 45 years before Columbus crosses the Atlantic.

The book proper starts with “The Energy Resources of Europe and Their Development”, moves on to “The Agricultural Revolution”, then “Mining the Mineral Wealth of Europe”, “Environment and Pollution”, “Labour Conditions in Three Medieval Industries”, examines the life and work of “Villard de Honnecourt: Architect and Engineer”, then “The Mechanical Clock: The Key Machine”, “Reason, Mathematics and Experimental Science” before concluding with a final chapter and an epilogue.

A machine society
Gimpel begins boldly:

The Middle Ages introduced machinery into Europe on a scale no civilisation had previously known. This was to be one of the main factors that led to the dominance of the Western hemisphere over the rest of the world (p.1).

The cogs and gears that had been in toys and curiosities in Classical antiquity became working, productive machinery in the medieval period. In other words, the medieval period was one where what economists would call ‘capital substitution’ occurred, substituting capital (machines) for labour.

What Gimpel wishes to convey to the modern reader is how pervasive machinery became in the medieval world. Particularly mills, which were used in:

grinding corn, crushing olives, fulling cloth, tanning leather, making paper, and so on. They were the factories of the Middle Ages (Pp1-2).

Major assets and products of investment, meeting places, social centres, mills were a medieval archetype. Some of Richard Posner’s original work on economic analysis of the common law had to do with the law regarding mills, for example.
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Mills had been developed in Roman times: but they were at least as often powered by slaves as by water power. Serfs were not slaves, however, and Dark Age Europe just did not have the available bonded labour for such purposes. So waterpower took over. Thus Belisarius’s engineers put mills on barges, to get around opponent’s attempts to cut off their water supply – hence the floating mills on the Tiber (Pp 6ff)

Monasteries, particularly Cistercian monasteries, were great spreaders of technology (Pp3ff). Which took off as slavery declined and disappeared, particularly from the middle of C9th (which is when the knightly order of labour-for-protection is getting underway and rapidly becoming a hereditary, thus long-term, deal). The number of water mills expanded spectacularly: one part of France had 14 mills mentioned in the C11th, 60 in the C12th and over 200 in the C14th. The Domesday Book records 5,624 water mills in England for a population estimated at about 1.4m: each water mill supplying an average of 50 households (Pp10ff).

Mills were a good investment, returning excellent rents from assets whose ownership and income were both generally well protected, hence the explosion in construction. The camshaft being the key invention that allowed this mechanisation of so many functions: a process that spread from grinding flour to many other functions from the end of the C10th onwards. Gimpel making the point that Chinese inventiveness did not result in social transformation in the same way that occurred in medieval Europe (Pp12ff). (Medieval Japan was a somewhat different matter: while Gimpel uses China as a comparison point, Japan does not figure in his text.)

The illustrative story of the mills and dams of La Bazacle, on the outskirts of Toulouse, traces the technological and institutional ingenuity of the medievals, the dams and mills being incorporated in a limited-liability company. By the time it was nationalised after 1945, the company had been operating for 8 centuries: likely the longest-running limited liability company in the world (Pp17ff).

In the C11th, medieval engineers began to harness wind power, apparently inventing the sail-using “post mill”—which turns in the wind—independently of the:

horizontal windmill (mounted on a vertical axis), which had been known to have existed from the seventh century onwards in the plateaus of Iran and Afghanistan (where the wind always blows from the one direction) (p.24).

The European version being designed to cope with variable wind direction: at the time of the Third Crusade, German engineers brought it to the Middle East. Mills were so lucrative, that there were many disputes over their construction (Pp25ff).

Innovating farming
The explosion in mill construction, interacting with the medieval warm period that Gimpel documents at some length (Gimpel published the first edition in 1976, before it became awkward to note the warmer weather of the medieval period), and much greater use of horsepower, kicked off something of an agricultural revolution. The horse collar was introduced into Europe from the steppes sometime in the C8th, allowing, for the first time, extensive use of horses in agriculture. The introduction of nailed horseshoes, also from the steppes, followed around the C10th. People then learnt how to hitch one horse behind the other, and European agriculture harnessing of horsepower really took off; Gimpel providing some very revealing statistics on the superiority of horses over oxen, mules, donkeys and men (Pp29ff).

Arguments over horses (which were more expensive to keep) against oxen were fought in various agricultural treatises that were published from the C13th onwards—such as the work of Walter of Henley, who thought the cost of horses outweighed their extra productivity. (The only thing the knightly class was apparently as interested in as reading about as tournament, war and related romances was estate management.) These treatises:

reveal a very modern approach to agricultural methods and economics. In general, they encouraged the adoption of experimental techniques and advised that a systematic effort be made to run the estates on a rational basis (p.38).

Moderns really should not be surprised by the pervasive practicality of the medieval period: if you made too many wrong decisions you, or people you were responsible for, starved. Yet, this harnessed practicality also generated enough security and surpluses for cautious experimentation to take place, while the competitive jurisdictions provided enough pressure for proven ideas and techniques to spread.

The slow spread of the three-field system from the C8th onwards, coupled with the introduction of the heavy-wheeled plough, greatly expanded the productive possibilities, with crop yields increasingly dramatically from the C11th to C13th (Pp39ff).

Manure was a prized product, being used assiduously to increase farm productivity. Sheep were prized for both manure and, especially, wool. In their attempt to flee the worldly life of cities and manor, the Cistercians cleared new lands and created a highly productive (and economically innovative) network of monasteries. Including vineyards and the production of wine (Pp44ff).

Medieval diets were often quite good, including from increased use of legumes—Gimpel quotes one historian famously describing the Middle Ages from the C10th onwards as “full of beans”: the three-field system encouraging more planting of vegetables. Gimpel goes into some detail into the available data on medieval diets (Pp51ff).

After the disappearance of the plague from Europe in the C7th, the decline of Norse and other excursions, and the settling in of the knightly system, the population of Europe shot up—even Pope Urban II preaching the First Crusade alluded to Latin Christendom being too small an area for the expanding population. The increase was particularly marked in England and France, with the Kingdom of France having perhaps a third of the population of all of Europe (Pp56ff).

The medievals were avid and extensive quarriers of stone and miners of metals. Water-powered stamping mills increased throughput of ore while water-powered bellows permitted much higher temperatures in furnaces. England and Central Europe were the main sources of metal (Pp59ff).

Factories, particularly water-powered factories, created pollution issues, while burgeoning populations cleared forests for both farming land and heating. Coal began to be burnt, with London first reporting atmospheric pollution problems in the 1280s. Regulation attempted to abate some of the worst nuisance, to limited effect (Pp75ff).

Dirt and prosperity encouraged the growth of public baths—Paris had no less than 32. Concern about sexual permissiveness put the public baths under increasing pressure, until they died out, with adverse effects on hygiene, which did not recover for many centuries (Pp91-2). That C13th Europe was more hygiene-conscious than C18th Europe is not exactly a modern expectation: but neither is that women in C9th England had greater social possibilities—and better property and other legal rights—than in C18th England.

Skills in demand
Gimpel then examines labour conditions in mining, textile and construction industries. Miners did well—being treated as free workers with status and privileges—urban textile workers, not so much—they were controlled urban proletariat with little say or rights. Construction workers—particularly masons—were much more like the miners. The Black Death killed people but not land, capital etc, so increased wages, particularly skilled wages, as labour became scarcer compared to capital. Comparing wages with food prices, Gimpel estimates that masons in the C14th—prior to the wage rises after the Black Death—had real incomes about twice that of masons in the C17th (Pp93ff).

At the peak of the construction industry were the architect-engineers, whose skills were eagerly sought after and well rewarded. They built castles, bridges, palaces and, especially, cathedrals. The heights reached by the medieval cathedrals were extraordinary—the record was reached by Strasbourg cathedral at 466 feet, the height of a forty-story building—being beaten only by iron and steel construction in the late C19th and C20th. There was a certain amount of trial and error involved—the collapse of the 156 feet high (the equivalent of 14 stories) vault of Beauvois cathedral in 1284 put a bit of a damper on the ever-upward enthusiasm (Pp114ff).

Gimpel uses the relatively well-documented life of Villard de Honnecourt (born around 1200, professionally active from about 1225-1250) to take us through the social milieu and activists of these much-admired architect-engineers. He conveys the restless energy, the interest in what works, of folk such as Villard very well:

It is probably through the Islamic world that western Europe got involved in perpetual motion, but with the difference that Europe, given its interest in mechanization, would try to use perpetual motion as a practical source of energy (p.129).

Villard’s writings are full of proposed machines, geometrical techniques and application of geometry to the study of nature and natural forms. Gimpel notes the similarity between the interests and education of Villard with Leonardo da Vinci. It was, in fact, very medieval to portray God the Creator as architect-engineer, measuring the universe (Pp130ff). (In contradiction to yet another misconception about medieval ignorance, the flat-earth myth.)

But it is the mechanical clock that Gimpel uses to zero in on the distinctive-machine mindedness of the medieval Europeans:

The men of the Middle Ages were so mechanically-minded they could believe that angels were in charge of the mechanisms of the universe: a fourteenth-century Provencal manuscript depicts two winged angels operating the revolving machine of the sky (p.147).

This review will be concluded in my next post.