In Another Halo, I quoted from the passage in which Frederick II "...looked somewhat like a god." (p. 398)
The entire following paragraph develops this theme:
"Peasants still at work in a nearby field bowed clumsily to him. So did a monk trudging toward the city. It was more than awe before power. There had always, also in Everard's history, been an aura of the supernatural about this ruler. Despite his struggle with the Church, many folk - no few Franciscans, especially - saw him as a mystic figure, a redeemer and reformer of the mundane world, Heaven-sent. Many others saw in him the Antichrist. But that seemed past. In this world, the war between him and the Popes was over, and he had prevailed." (pp. 398-399)
At the next stage of historical development, people look to themselves, not to any leader or ruler, to reform the mundane world.
22 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Again, I feel like a dour pessimist dashing cold water on your hopes! I see no reason to expect what you wished for in the last paragraph will ever become the general rule among the human race. We are not all going to become like Nicholas van Rijn or Dominic Flandry.
That coin you chose for an illustration interested me. Apparently, by the 13th, the designing and minting of coins had revived so much they were no longer mere lumps of metal with crude designs stamped on them.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
What I meant by the people themselves was not individual enterprise but collective resistance to tyranny and injustice.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Another implausibility which has seldom happened with lasting results.
Ad astra! Sean
Paul: I'm reminded of the scene in LEST DARKNESS FALL when Martin Padway talks to a Roman in a tavern who's complaining about the religious persecution the Goths are imposing.
Puzzled, he said he thought that the Goths let everyone worship in their own way. The Roman bursts out that that's exactly the point -- the Orthodox/Catholic population has to endure seeing Nestorians and Jews and whatnot going about their business free as birds, and he's NOT GOING TO PUT UP WITH IT ANY LONGER!
Injustice is like beauty; largely in the eye of the beholder.
In A MIDSUMMER TEMPEST, one of the Puritans complained that, elsewhere in Europe, Catholics were allowed to worship freely and commented (something like): "Where is the freedom in that?"
Kaor, Paul!
Actually, I think what you were trying to recall was one Jennifer's Puritan guards stating that while the Catholics of France allowed Huguenots freedom of worship, the "Papists" were also still worshiping their way. Which he thought was outrageous!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
That's it.
Paul.
It wasn't belief in tolerance as such that gradually reduced religious persecution: it was a diminution in the importance of religion.
Not necessarily of belief -pur sang-, but of the relative place of religious belief in the things that mattered most.
As a minister of one of the later Bourbon kings said, when asked why he wasn't enforcing the laws against Protestants vigorously:
"So long as men worship the State, let them have what lesser gods they will."
In other words, they were valuable taxpayers and soldiers, so their afterlife just wasn't important to him.
There are other approaches to the same thing:
For example, Roger Williams, one of the founders of Rhode Island (a colony, and then State, which had from the beginning no established Church) put it, since God had predestined from the beginning who should be saved and who damned, trying to secure uniformity of belief was completely futile.
It wasn't that all beliefs were equal -- he believed his extreme variety of Calvinism (to the point of antinomianism) was the only correct belief.
He just believed that nearly everyone was damned anyway, so government might as well focus on purely secular matters.
Likewise, the witch persecutions died out because certain people (the educated elite of Europe and its offshoots) simply stopped believing in magic. This occurred with surprising suddenness, over only a few generations.
Ordinary people remained terrified of evil witchcraft for a long time, even in the advanced countries; in villages not sixty miles from Moscow, people were still killing each other over it as late as the 1920's.
But the movers and shakers, from the late 17th century on, regarded such attitudes as embarrassing and stupid. Once it dropped below a critical threshold of elite support, formal witch prosecutions just petered out, long before the laws were formally amended.
Note that persecuting the "wicked" and "unbelievers" didn't stop -- the impulse is still with us.
It just attaches to different symbolic clusters. Political in the strict sense, or in terms of social attitudes, rather than making the neighbors cow go dry by calling on evil spirits.
Kaor Mr. Stirling!
Wow! Many interesting comments by you lately, both here and in other boxes! I think I can include Paul as well in thanking you for writing them!
I thought what might be called the "Westphalian" attitude toward religious fervor had more to do with Catholics and Protestants grudgingly agreeing they would have to live with one another, first vis a vis each another as nation states, and then (much more slowly) inside their countries.
Yes, once the leaders of a society stopped believing in evil witchcraft, I can see them eventually refusing to enforce the laws against it. I think the very last "witch" be burned or hanged was in Scotland, in 1790.
Ad astra! Sean
Include me in.
Note that tamping down on witchcraft trials was a matter of embarrassment among European elites as much as anything. So old-fashioned, so uncouth, so likely to get you sneered at by advanced thinkers...
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree, I am sure sneering from so called "advanced thinkers" did its bit making the old witchcraft laws too uncool to enforce.
Usually, I have nothing but contempt for that kind of social pressure. The 'avante garde" so often scorn and mock things I either consider good and beneficial or at least defensible. But in the witchcraft case the sneering was right.
Ad astra! Sean
Fashions come and go. For example, between 1900 and the 1930's, nearly all "advanced thinkers", people who considered themselves scientific-minded and modern, supported eugenics, whatever their other political stances on the left-vs.-right spectrum.
The only people who didn't were some religious conservatives and some very orthodox Marxists.
(The latter because Marx, as was typical of many in his formative years, was very much a "blank slate" type, a believer in nurture over nature.)
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Quite true. The Catholic Church was and is opposed to all direct abortions and sterilizations intended directly as such.
And I had not known that of Marx! Something which might displease many who call themselves Marxists today.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Remember the Communist sailor in one of the Trygve Ysmamura books is described as an "environmentalist" because he believes that the environment, not genes, determines personality.
I think it should follow from Hegelian dialectical principles that whatever happens results from interactions between complex organisms and their ever-changing environments.
Paul.
Humans have the advantage of being generalists. Fairly early we developed culture in the general sense, and culture can change much faster than genes, which means you can adapt to a new or changing environment faster.
Hence it was an evolutionary advantage.
Hence also, in humans instinct operates in a much more generalized way than in most other mammals.
Eg., we're territorial, quite extremely territorial like most pack-hunting 'social' carnivores, but our sense of territorial boundaries doesn't necessarily attach to actual physical space the way, say, a wolf's does.
Humans demonstrate classic territorial-pack behavior over, examplia gratia, sports teams.
The instinct -is- there and it -will- manifest, one way or another... but there are a large spray of potential manifestations.
Paul: precisely. That sailor in the mystery novel was a beautiful example of what I was talking about, and an acute observation on Poul's part.
Orthodox Marxism sort of "fossilized" a lot of mid-19th-century assumptions and habits of thought which Marx had absorbed, and which he built in to his ideology.(*)
His followers' devotion to the texts then preserved it against the currents of change in Western thought in general, roughly the way the Bible keeps reintroducing Iron Age habits of thought to succeeding generations.
This is precisely why conservative Christians and orthodox Marxists both rejected eugenics, which was based on (over-simplified) applications of the new Mendelian understandings of genetics.
Marx wrote before Mendel, when the dominant theory was Lamark's.
Marxism has an inbuilt tendency to favor Lamarkian types of genetic theory -- that acquired/learned characteristics can be inherited. Which is true, but they can't be inherited (usually) genetically; it's cultural inheritance.(**) In Lamark's time there was no way to precisely discriminate between the two.
Hence Marxists tend to overestimate both human malleability in particular, and overestimate human ability to dominate and control large complex systems in general.
That explains both Lysenkoism -- Lysenko was essentially a Lamarkian -- and things like the Aral Sea disaster.
The disappearance of the Aral Sea was the sort of environmental disaster mid-Victorians were hubristically given to causing because they thought the world (and themselves) were more subject to conscious control than they really are.
The attitude was "fossilized" and conveyed to generations of Soviet planners via their education in the ideology.
(*) along with one of Marx's personal characteristics, his hubris and arrogance. He thought he'd discovered the magic key that controlled everything, and that if only he had the power he could -accomplish- anything, without limit or constraint. This was also encoded into the basic texts.
(**)environmental pressures can alter the -expression- of genes, including somatic ones; for example severe malnutrition can stunt your offspring, for one generation, because certain genes are turned "on" or "off".
Now at least there are some people who take Marx's analysis as their starting point but who in no way regard his texts as infallible. There are still, of course, textual fundamentalists, sectarians, cultists etc. But many of them have gone out of business as their rigid conceptual systems failed to match up to a complex and changing reality.
Paul: true, but if you're going to use an ideology as a matrix for rule, it tends to get more rigid and to be grossly simplified.
Hence Lenin and Stalin's hatred of "deviationists". Almost all Marxists who actually end up -running- places have thought that way.
Kaor, Paul and Mr. Stirling!
Paul: Once pointed out, I remember that sailor from Anderson's mystery novel. And of how Stirling pointed out that man had absorbed many of Marx's mid-Victorian attitudes. Including the Lamarckism then dominant in biology. I also remember one of the other characters thinking that Communist sailor would soon be bitterly disillusioned by Marxism, as it soon became impossible to keep on denying or ignoring the horrors perpetrated by fanatical Marxists. Not if that Norwegian Communist wanted to remain an honest man!
Mr. Stirling: Many thanks for your always interesting comments. I had not clearly known how strongly Lamarckist Marx and his most devout disciples were. But I can see how that attitude led to nonsense like Lysenkoism and the Aral Sea disaster. And the hubris and arrogance Marx "encoded' into his ideology led directly to the purges and gulags and killing fields of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc.
Ad astra! Sean
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