Thoughts for September 18, 2022
Good afternoon. Today’s topics are a welcome to new readers, the Middle Ages, secularization trends, and tree planting.
Welcome New Readers
Last week’s entry got about three times as many reads as usual, and there were quite a few sign-ups for email subscriptions, I presume thanks to some promotion on Twitter. Welcome, and I’m grateful that those you reading this found my writings to be valuable enough to come back for at least a second time.
Last week’s post was admittedly a bit saltier than usual, and I was in a rather foul mood when I wrote it. But in any case, I hope that some of these ideas are things that you do not see elsewhere. That means that some ideas will be good, and some will miss the mark.
Middle Ages
This week I finished Philip Daileader’s lecture series on the Great Courses on the Middle Ages. I greatly enjoyed this series and am disappointed that it’s over. There are several topics that I would like to explore in more depth later on, but for now, here are some comments on periodization of the Middle Ages, the subject of his final lecture.
Traditionally, the Middle Ages begin with the deposition of the Western Roman Emperor Augustus Romulus in AD 476, though recent historians have downgraded the significance of this event and are more inclined to consider the start of the Middle Ages earlier, perhaps with Emperor Diocletian’s establishment of the Tetrarchy in AD 293. This event was the beginning of the division of the Roman Empire into the Western and Eastern halves, the latter of which would come to be known as the Byzantine Empire, and it is where Daileader’s series starts. It may be better to consider the period from around AD 300 to the establishment of the Caliphate in the 7th century as a transitional period between antiquity and the Middle Ages.
The end of the Middle Ages has traditionally been assigned to the late 15th or early 16th centuries, with the boundary event being the capture of Constantinople by the Ottomans (1453), Columbus’ voyage to the Americas (1492), the Protestant Reformation (1517), or something else around this time. The concept of the Middle Ages sounds like an anachronism; a contemporary would have wondered, the middle of what? The concept arose with the 14th Century Italian humanist Petrarch, who regarded classical Greece and Rome as periods of greatness and the Middle Ages as a time of darkness (the now-mostly-rejected concept of the Dark Ages was also developed by Petrarch). Petrarch believed that the revival of Classical thinking and literature propelled humanity into modernity, a new period of intellectual flourishing. Most contemporary historians have also downgraded the historical importance of the Italian Renaissance from Petrarch’s assessment.
Although Daileader’s lecture series goes through about the end of the 15th century, the traditional demarcation of the Middle Ages, he argues that the Middle Ages should really be regarded as having ended around 1750 to 1850. In making this argument, he defines the major characteristics of the Middle Ages as follows.
The dominant form of government is monarchy.
The economic mode is primarily agrarian.
Socially, the Middle Ages are characterized by hereditary groups (e.g. nobility).
Belief in God was nearly universal, with Catholic Christianity dominant. Theology was a high status field.
High fertility and high death rates were the norm.
Almost all of these conditions remained the case in Europe beyond 1500 and into the late 18th and early 19th Centuries. The only major exception is that with the rise of Protestantism in the 16th Century, Catholicism lost its position of dominance in Western Europe. But by 1850, all of these conditions had changed or were changing.
Although I hesitate to argue with a professional medieval historian, when my understanding of the topic is at an amateur and superficial level, I find Daileader’s argument unconvincing. The main problem is that, of his five characteristics of the Middle Ages, four are also characteristic of ancient and Classical societies as well, and thus this is not a very useful characterization of the time period.
I would dispense of the concept of the Middle Ages entirely and date the rise of modernity much earlier. In this, I was influenced by Peter Watson’s Ideas, where he argues that individualism, which emerged in the 11th century, was a decisive turning point. He notes a fundamental shift in Christian theology at this time, from the ancient focus on salvation of nations or humanity in general, to salvation of individuals. Concepts such as human rights, economic liberty, democracy, and science should all be regarded as corollaries of individualism. The Commercial Revolution, which also developed from the 11th Century in Italy, is also a vital milestone whose influence is seen in the Age of Exploration and the Industrial Revolution. As documented by the historian Charles Homer Haskins, a wide ranging renaissance, which he terms the Renaissance of the 12th Century, was underway in the 12th Century and had begun in the 11th.
For these reasons, I would argue that modernity was underway no later than the 11th century, and perhaps the reestablishment of centralized states such as the Holy Roman Empire marks the beginning of a kind of pre-modernity. The Industrial Revolution is better understood as an intensification of modernity, rather than a fundamental break with the past.
Secularization
Pew Research Center has conducted a new study of religious trends in the United States, and it shows a sharp drop in Christianity.
After remaining stable in the late 20th century, the share of Americans who identify as Christian started dropping precipitously in the 1990s. Since then, there has been an ongoing rise in the number of net conversions out of Christianity (total number of conversions out minus number of conversions in).
Forms of the secularization thesis go back to the Enlightenment, and it can be regarded as having two major elements: first, a declining level of religiosity overall, and second, a decline in the political salience of religion. Worldwide, the second trend is much more evident than the first. Secularization can be seen as one of several trends comprising the process of modernization. See also this essay.
Why exactly this trend is occurring is not clear (to me at least). Several recent write-ups, such as this one, give the hypothesis that secularization is a function of wealth.
While the study does not grapple with the question of why Christians are disaffiliating from their religion, Kramer said there are some theories that could help explain this phenomenon.
"Some scholars say that it's just an inevitable consequence of development for societies to secularize. Once there are strong secular institutions, once people's basic needs are met, there's less need for religion," Kramer said.
Maybe there is some truth, but phrases like “inevitable consequence” come across as a post hoc analysis. It also doesn’t match the on-the-ground reality; few people say “I left my religion because I am financially well off and don’t need it anymore”. Far more people say they left their religion because they couldn’t square it with empirical observations of the world, or because they were offended by its political orientation. The aforementioned article profiles a woman who left her LDS church over its hostility to homosexuality. A similar trend is observed in the Middle East and Iran; it is hard to imagine that Iran’s corrupt theocratic government, religious oppression in Saudi Arabia and other countries, and Islamist terrorist groups have not played a significant role in driving people away from Islam.
It wasn’t long ago that culture wars in the United States revolved around religion and issues such as whether courthouses should display the 10 Commandments and whether creationism should be taught in schools. These issues were not resolved, but they are no longer politically salient, with each side having moved on to new culture war issues revolving around race and gender, as Scott Alexander documents. To illustrate how fast things have changed, consider that evangelical voters were considered a decisive group in George W. Bush’s reelection in 2004. Just four years later, noted televangelist Pat Robertson endorsed the pro-choice Rudy Giuliani over the pro-life John McCain because he was offended by McCain’s opposition to torture, exerting no discernible influence on the race.
There is downward spiral for the Christian Right, which has only gotten much worse since 2008. When the obvious mismatch between the religious values and political agenda drives people away, this leaves extremists to set the agenda, which in turn drives more people away. This downward spiral is, by now, probably terminal. Support for terrorism, civil war, and Russian atrocities, as well as what we have seen with political Islamism, are chilling illustrations of how bad the situation could get.
Tree Planting
Environmentalism can be divisive, but one thing that almost everyone agrees on is that we like trees. For instance, it might be possible to sequester an amount of carbon through tree planting that is equivalent to 3-14 years of world emissions (I would lean to the smaller figure, as it better accounts for practical limitations that a major tree-planting program would face), at a reasonable cost of $20-50 per ton of CO2 removed.
At a city level, trees are good for aesthetics, cleaning air pollution, and reducing the urban heat island effect. One thing that stands out from this study is the importance of aesthetics and wealth. The study does a cost-benefit analysis of tree planting in five cities. In all five, the study finds that benefits exceed costs. However, in four of the five cities, the largest benefit is an increase in property values (which I take as a proxy for aesthetics), and in the same four, benefits no longer exceed costs when property values are excluded.
There is a common notion that wealth drives consumption and is thus destructive to the environment. But this study illustrates the opposite principle: wealth gives people the motivation and means to pay for environmental quality. Work with Environmental Kuznets Curves shows that this phenomenon is common. One might object that the emphasis on aesthetics and property values cheapens environmental quality, to which I would ask, on what other basis could environmentalism proceed?