Hey there.
I go back and forth on Europe's Protestant Reformation, which kicked off 500 years ago
this year.
But I have come back around, and I think it really does represent the birth of the Modern
World.
Let me explain.
The Reformation is part of the standard story of the Progress of Western Civilization.
Typically it's white washed as a courageous stand for individual conscience and freedom.
Our modern Enlightenment ideas of individual rights are supposed to have grown out of the
stand that people like Martin Luther and John Calvin took against the Catholic Church.
In the early 1900's German Sociologist Max Weber took it farther, arguing that there
was something called the Protestant Work Ethic that explained capitalism and the "natural
dominance" of Germanic and Anglo-Saxon cultures.
The closer I have looked into it, the more convinced I've become that this is largely
bullshit.
The true ideological successors of the Reformation aren't Bill Gates and Barack Obama, they
are Osama Bin Laden and Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi.
Yes, it's great that the power of the Catholic Church was broken, but it was broken because
these guys believed that religion should be more extreme, and should dominate life more
than it already did.
The reformation was not about freedom.
The followers of John Calvin in particular thought that everybody should live in a Theocracy.
Some protestants were just as happy to burn heretics as the Catholics were, and some were
even more bloodthirsty.
But the Reformation jihadis did bring us the modern world.
It was an unintended consequence, but it may be one of the most important things that has
ever happened.
The reformers believed that everyone should read the bible.
This meant that everybody should learn to read.
In 16th century Europe this was a pretty revolutionary concept.
Back then it was only a subset of priests, merchants and government officials who were
literate.
80 to 90 percent of everybody else worked the land, and there was no reason for them
to read.
From the 1500s on, certain rulers, most notably in Scandinavia, started to make broader literacy
a priority.
I've thought a lot about development lately, and I've become convinced that widespread
literacy is the most important thing that can happen to a country.
I love all eras of history, and have spent years studying ancient Rome, and Medieval
Europe.
But I sometimes question whether any history before widespread literacy really matters.
It's the ability to read and write that makes a person a real actor in society.
Knowledge really is power.
The story of the world before 1700 or so, in every country, may look different, but
it's basically the same thing.
Most of us human beings are agricultural laborers.
There's a small elite with all the power, and they squabble.
They fight over lands and people, and the suffering is often terrible.
New elites come out of the steppes, or across the seas, replace the old elites, increase
the suffering for a bit, introduce some new ideas, but never really improve things all
that much.
We like to romanticize these old Kings, Conquerors and Caliphs, but they are all really just
gangsters.
What changed all this was literacy.
Mass literacy gave us the world we know.
Mass literacy eventually led to mass politics, and makes power for a broader slice of people
possible.
Perhaps unwittingly the religious fanatics of the Protestant reformation set all this
in motion.
Places like Sweden and Switzerland are widely admired for their levels of development.
Their development leadership started because their rulers wanted everybody to read the
bible.
Weirdly, The unintended consequences of that choice made the modern world.
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