Perhaps by the high tide of the Roman era people had begun to realize that all of these sky-cults with their various sects were ultimately front for the same thing and started to speculate about an even more powerful all-encompassing creator God behind it all.

In my haste I forgot to address this point. Macmullen documents the extent to which the rise of Christianity depended on the coercive power of the state and active and very brutal persecution of non-Christians (like the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, only more widespread and much bloodier, although the metaphor holds).

Just as it’s a myth that the Catholic Church set out to suppress science (it didn’t, and where it did, this was as much in response to being challenged by the Italian city-states and Protestantism as anything), it’s a myth that Christian ascendency in the Roman world was in any way peaceful or pleasant. Macmullen even punches huge holes in the common Christian piety that Christianity represented an advance for women. It didn’t, it was a disaster, particularly for educated women, but also for commoners. Macmullen’s quotation of court records from Roman Egypt where a pagan judge fines and flogs a man for raping a prostitute while a Christian judge orders the woman executed for adultery makes the difference incredibly stark.

AJ: Another thing to add to the mix, and also dependent on higher average wages.

In order to have an industrial revolution, you need relatively little science. The only thing you need to know is that atmosphere has weight and so can exert pressure (for a steam engine). It is quite likely Heron of Alexandria had figured this out empirically, too. What you do need is expensive labour, which makes coming up with labour saving devices a worthwhile exercise.

Research by Daron Acemoglu and Robert Allen indicates that in Britain in 1709, average wages were ten times higher than those in continental cities such as Paris or Strasbourg and six times those in Beijing. Economists generally argue that wages were higher in Britain at the time in part thanks to the Glorious Bloodless Revolution of 1688, which constrained the state’s power to impose ad hoc (and high) taxes, unlike for the people who lived under the Hapsburgs, the Bourbons and the Qing. If people know they can keep more of their wealth when an investment comes off, they’ll happily invest.

It is also no secret that the Industrial Revolution in Britain really went nuts after 1807. What happened that year? The abolition of slavery. A similar growth pattern can be observed when contrasting slave-holding states of the US with non-slaveholding states before the civil war.

In short, slavery does two things:

1. Where slaves are cheap (as they were for much of classical antiquity), there is no incentive to come up with labour saving devices.

2. Where skilled slaves are expensive (as sometimes happened in antiquity, but not in the antebellum south), there is an incentive to exploit them only for one’s private use or gain. In the Roman world, any ‘tinkering’ of the type we associate with the Scottish Enlightenment tended to be done by slaves, not free people with incentives to invest.

In both cases, the price mechanism is fucked up beyond all recognition, and an industrial revolution is impossible.

Abolishing slavery and free markets are — combined — more important than good science. If you have the free market, and you ditch slavery, the science will follow. And quickly.

Indeed. Perhaps I should’ve qualified this by saying so. Or more accurately it centres on the religious traditions transmitted throughout the Occident but truly originating in Sumeria. If we s’pose itoriginated anywhere.

Eastern Culture tends to stress harmony so instead of actively wiping previous religions off the face of the Earth they accomodate them. The West did this to a lesser extent bu, say, turning pagan fertility rites into a celebration of a guy getting nailed to a bit of wood. (Yay!)

The idea that religion follows three stages is oversimplistic, like all models. It does not allow for the transition, for example, of a maternal goddess centred culture to the patriarchal one. There is scant evidence due in part to the persitent refusal of Linear A to be deciphred etc but, and my knowledge here is approx 10 years out of date, it appears that there is an archaic animism with common features world wide followed by various branchings off. In the West this manifests as the emergence of polythesitic sky cults followed by monotheism.

I was discussing the Western branch strictly. The Dharmic tradition is entirely other.

I have yet to meet an Asian who adheres to the religious traditions of their culture.

I do subscribe to the idea the reason it wasnt taken up was the relative ease of getting slaves to do the same jobs.

But if there ever was a time for the pagan to have ecliped the single gods that would have been it.

I just like to add something about the geneology of religion as I understand it. There are roughly three stages. The first is animism: seeing the ‘divine’ in everything about: rocks, animals, trees etc. Then polytheism in which broader forces of nature are personified anthropomorphically.

These two,and the shift from one to other are concurrent with what Marx would’ve referred to as a revolution in the economic mode of production. After the Agrarian revolution, the division of labour was expanded greatly and what we’d think of as a class system emerged. One such privilege obtaining would be the ability to observe the heavens systematically. I suppose that the ascendence of the sky-cult pantheons occurred as a result of a priestly class that was able to track the movements of constellations, planets etc more closely.

The problem with this is that it doesn’t hold (like so much of Marxism). Japan (and much of East Asia) is now developed/1st world and so on. Their religions are still a mixture of animism and polytheism, and look like being so for the foreseeable. I have always found the argument that religion follows three stages to be unmitigated tosh, simply because (and I bet you’d never thought you’d hear me say this) it is completely Eurocentric. It also allows atheists to make the glib comment that going from one God to none is inevitable. As we’ve seen, it ain’t.

As for modern welfarism being based on wealth, up to a point yes. How much compassion you do depends on what you can afford. Nevertheless, it is clear that the Christian advocacy of compassion as a virtue was a new thing for Mediterranean cultures and the medieval Church did genuinely engage in what we would call forms of “welfare”.

I just like to add something about the geneology of religion as I understand it. There are roughly three stages. The first is animism: seeing the ‘divine’ in everything about: rocks,. animals, trees etc. Then polytheism in which broader forces of nature are personified anthropomorphically.

These two,and the shift from one to other are concurrent with what Marx would’ve referred to as a revolution in the economic mode of production. After the Agrarian revolution, the division of labour was expanded greatly and what we’d think of as a class system emerged. One such privilege obtaining would be the ability to observe the heavens systematically. I suppose that the ascendence of the sky-cult pantheons occurred as a result of a priestly class that was able to track the movements of constellations, planets etc more closely.

The particular nature of the religious personae continued to be derived from nature. This is well-illustrated by the fact that until the trade-routes extended sufficiently to allow connection between northern Europe and the Mediterranean world the ancient Egyptians had no Storm God. There isn’t much by way of storms there. But trade imported the gods as well as the furs.

There were many forms of Manichean Monotheism extant in the West from around 500 BCE or so. These declared many things but two thing common to most were that reality is a war between Good and Evil and that Good is personified by an omnipotent and eternal father God.

Perhaps by the high tide of the Roman era people had begun to realize that all of these sky-cults with their various sects were ultimately front for the same thing and started to speculate about an even more powerful all-encompassing creator God behind it all. Perhaps this also had to do with the extended knowledge that comes of the development of science and technology in the Roman world. They had long grown weary of animal sacrifice as a determinant of success in battle or harvest and had decided to rely on more banal and reasonable criteria. The old religion, in other words, no longer made sense in the new world.

Given the beating that Western monotheistic cosmology has taken from Galileo, Darwin, Hubble et al. Given that the cosmos no longer seems to have us at the centre of it. Indeed given that we are on a tiny rock in vast void punctuated by occasional galaxies…

And given that religion always follows our knowledge of nature and the possibilities afforded us by the technology that comes of this I expect that some new religious paradigm will emerge. What, I won’t say. But it’s the same old monkey so it’ll be beautiful in some ways and batshit in other fer sure.