[Serious] Book reports

[Belacqua]

OK, I finished Dominion, by Tom Holland.

I guess I'm a little disappointed, just because I was expecting something different. But it's not fair for me to say he should have written a different book -- this one is what it is, and it does what it does quite well.

Overall it's more like a Daniel Boorstin book, if anybody remembers those. The Creators and The Discoverers by Boorstin are readable surveys through all of Western history, with a zillion anecdotes around a loose theme. There is just so much in them that you're bound to learn something. Dominion is the same. I learned a whole bunch of interesting things about history that I didn't know. For example, I had no Charlemagne was so genocidal. I had heard of the Horst Wessel song, but I didn't know who Horst Wessel was. Things like that.

I had anticipated something different based on the reviews: a demonstration with evidence that our modern thinking, although no longer explicitly Christian, is still largely shaped by values that Christianity was the first to spread. In a few places he does focus on such evidence, and makes a good case. But the examples of this are lost in the masses of detail.

So I see what you mean, @Grandizer, when you quoted the review earlier to the effect that such a general theme "explains everything and nothing." Because Western history was so completely dominated by Christians for so long, anything they did was justified along the way by their Christianity. To Holland's great credit, he has clearly done his best to tell both the good and the bad. For every Quaker he describes as arguing against slavery, there is a page devoted to a slave-owner using the Bible as justification for slaves.

The interesting thesis, the part the reviews led me to believe was more dominant, is summed up in the Conclusion. Here is the most concise part:

Today, as the flood-tide of Western power and influence ebbs, the illusions
of European and American liberals risk being left stranded. Much that they have
sought to cast as universal stands exposed as never having been anything of the
kind. Agnosticism – as Huxley, the man who coined the word, readily
acknowledged – ranks as ‘that conviction of the supremacy of private judgment
(indeed, of the impossibility of escaping it) which is the foundation of the
Protestant Reformation’.32 Secularism owes its existence to the medieval
papacy. Humanism derives ultimately from claims made in the Bible: that
humans are made in God’s image; that his Son died equally for everyone; that
there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female. Repeatedly, like
a great earthquake, Christianity has sent reverberations across the world. First
there was the primal revolution: the revolution preached by Saint Paul. Then
there came the aftershocks: the revolution in the eleventh century that set Latin
Christendom upon its momentous course; the revolution commemorated as the
Reformation; the revolution that killed God. All bore an identical stamp: the
aspiration to enfold within their embrace every other possible way of seeing the
world; the claim to a universalism that was culturally highly specific. That
human beings have rights; that they are born equal; that they are owed
sustenance, and shelter, and refuge from persecution: these were never selfevident
truths.
The Nazis, certainly, knew as much – which is why, in today’s
demonology, they retain their starring role. Communist dictators may have been
no less murderous than fascist ones; but they – because communism was the
expression of a concern for the oppressed masses – rarely seem as diabolical to
people today. The measure of how Christian we as a society remain is that mass
murder precipitated by racism tends to be seen as vastly more abhorrent than
mass murder precipitated by an ambition to usher in a classless paradise.

It is a conclusion that other (particularly British) thinkers have been expressing for a while now. John Gray, for example, is an atheist historian who says something similar. Terry Eagleton argues that since the failure of Christianity, we feel the lack of an all-unifying moral and aesthetic system. Alain de Botton has argued that an important baby has been thrown out with the Christian bathwater, and we should take active steps to shore up our Christian-like values of universality.

Probably there's a reason why it's the Brits who are writing this kind of thing. Unlike in the US, Christianity in Britain has shrunk to such a small percentage that educated people no longer feel it as a threat. With no danger of themselves getting evangelized, they are free to look back on the good parts of what has been lost.

(This reminds me of certain lifestyle trends here in Japan: after your whole city has been paved over and converted to a car-culture with parking lots instead of gardens, where the breezy old wooden houses have been torn down in favor of air-conditioned concrete boxes, then people get nostalgic for the old ways. And lifestyle magazines start to show young people in traditional clothes holding fans in their gardens, even though only a tiny percentage of young people have moved back to small towns and actually live that way.)

So I guess this is a very detail-packed contribution to this current trend, including John Gray and Eagleton, etc., of looking at Christianity in the rear-view mirror and thinking about what it gave us, and what may be lacking now that it's gone.