Genealogical Detectives
Genealogists are a bit like detectives. We look for the origin of modernity by investigating moments when societies shifted from the pre-modern to the modern. These shifts may not have been all that noticeable at the time, but they were momentous. They could take the form of socio-political change, intellectual developments, or major demographic shifts. The three books described below are historical investigations of such modernity moments. They describe some of the ways our contemporary situation originated. They may prove helpful as we explore the paths that lead to the present.
In Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity, Walter Scheidel argues—surprisingly—that it was the fall of the Roman Empire that created the opening for the possibility of the modern. Scheidel’s book is a rewriting of another famous history of Rome, Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. This famous eighteenth-century work still haunts the contemporary vision of why Rome fell. Gibbon’s thesis, simply, is that the fall of Rome was bad and it was the fault of Christians. Scheidel’s book is less about why Rome fell than why it was good that Rome fell. Whereas Gibbon saw a crime and identified a culprit, Scheidel is like a detective who goes looking for a crime and discovers that something good happened. The failure of Rome—and the attempts to recreate Rome by Charlemagne, the Catholic Church, Napoleon, etc.—created the opening for a thriving competition between peoples that made modernity possible. Scheidel writes, “the Roman empire made modern development possible by going away and never coming back.” If Rome had stuck around, modernity wouldn’t have happened. For Scheidel, where empires dominate—such as the Chinese, Ottoman, or Persian Empires—modernity is made impossible. And since modernity is good, the demise of Rome is good. This might give you pause considering Western imperialism. But for Scheidel, Modernity (as good) is heavily identified with Europe. Scheidel’s book definitely falls into the Whiggish pro-modern camp. Both theists and decolonialists have good reason to be wary, but it is a provocative book. Check it out.
Another “detective story” worth examining is Samuel Moyn’s Christian Human Rights. Moyn explores how human rights became a dominant political principle and how the term has been appropriated and transformed in various ways. He investigates how conservative Catholics appropriated a philosophical idea, which originated in the French Revolution, and forged a dominant political idea after WWII. According to Moyn, Christians adapted the term in response to fascism, communism, and also political liberalism. We find unexpected “modernity moments” in Pope Pius XII’s 1942 Christmas address and the 1936 Irish Constitution. Both showed the remarkable ways conservative Catholics assumed human rights into their vision of society. Moyn is both skeptical and admiring of this intellectual appropriation. For Moyn, this unexpected appropriation has been forgotten because of the near collapse of Western Christianity and the re-appropriation of Christian human rights by secular activists. The modern became traditional which is what allowed it to become modern again. An odd tale, but worth the read.
Finally, my third book. Stephen Bullivant’s Mass Exodus: Catholic Disaffiliation in Britain and America since Vatican II examines secularization after Vatican II from the perspective of a sociologist attending to the stunning decline of religion in Western Europe. Bullivant tries to explain part of why this occurred, by focusing on Catholicism in Britain and the United States. How did a religious community that was marked by deep levels of commitment and practice decline to the point of near collapse? For Bullivant, part of this is due to the changes in authority in the post-Vatican II world. He looks to meatless Fridays and contraception as two ways to understand this. Meatless Fridays had been an essential part of Catholic devotional and cultural life, and in the blink of an eye, it suddenly was not. On the flip side, Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae shocked many by reaffirming the Catholic Church’s traditional condemnation of contraception. This created a crisis in the life of the Church. The authority in the church seemed unmoored and arbitrary. If the Church could just make stuff up, maybe it made the whole thing up. If it refused to change, the world would change without it. Bullivant closes with the question of whether Vatican II provides the framework to resist secularization or if it itself was the agent of secularization. The theological work that needs to be done depends in part on the sociological investigation that Bullivant has done here.
Happy reading!
