Christianity

Bismarck

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Count Otto von Bismarck, known as the Iron Chancellor, was a Prussian Junker, and therefore a notable man of the land, and the lord of a German manor.  He was also a servant of his State and of his God, and, to the extent that the word ‘conservative’ still has any meaning, about as conservative as any man at any time could be.  That did not prevent him from becoming the de facto master of Europe by reference, if necessary, to ‘blood and iron’. 

Nor did it prevent him from achieving the following.  The unification of Germany.  The grant of universal suffrage in the German democracy.  And the beginning of the Welfare State. 

As it happened, the first would lead to the most appalling consequences for not just Europe but the whole world in two world wars – but Bismarck could not be held responsible for either.  The second was alarmingly ‘progressive’ for its time, and the third even more so.  History does not give Germany or Bismarck sufficient credit for laying the foundation of the Welfare State – which the United States still refuses to accept.

In 1883 and 1889, Bismarck pushed through legislation for accident insurance for workers and then old age and disability insurance.  For the first, the German government said it had put an end ‘to all those attempts to make health insurance a private matter …and asserts the role of the state’. 

Nearly thirty years later, Lloyd George and Winston Churchill followed that lead in England with the People’s Budget.  They spoke of the ‘business of the state’ in looking after the infirm and the aged.  They provoked a constitutional crisis.  The English averted revolution by having the King threaten to create enough peers to get the legislation passed.  They followed the precedent of the passage of the Reform Bill in 1832.  In each case, the ancient safety valve saved the day.

Bismarck was a most extraordinary man.

Politics are not a science based on logic; they are the capacity of choosing at each instant, in constantly changing situations, the least harmful, the most useful.

As my friends know, that accords exactly with my view of the common law, which underlies our constitution, and politics.  That may not be all that surprising, because that in my view is the Anglo-Saxon – and therefore German – preference for experience over theory, which so distinguishes England from Europe – including Germany.  That is not meant to be confusing.  The roads by which we got where we are have never been straight.

Bismarck had God and could accommodate Him.

A statesman cannot create anything himself.  He must wait until he hears the steps of God sounding through events; then leap up and grasp the hem of his garment…. I am content when I see where the Lord wishes to go and can stumble after him.

Some, especially right now, may wish, like Hamlet, to substitute Providence for God in detecting even the fall of a sparrow.

I have never been a doctrinaire…. Liberal, reactionary, conservative – those I confess seem to me luxuries….

Can you imagine a better statement of the sheer banality of politics today either here or in places we once respected?

Bismarck spent his whole political life dealing with people he could not respect.

There are white men, there are black men, and there are monarchs.

God only knows what fate would await someone rash enough to say that now.

For his scheme of social insurance, Bismarck was content to accept the label ‘progressive’, even ‘socialist’!  A J P Taylor said:

German social insurance was the first in the world, and has served as a model for every other civilized country…At the end, he [Bismarck] talked of ‘the right to work’ and thought of insurance against unemployment – this was the final step to the welfare state of the twentieth century…. He was a despairing conservative, staving off a dreaded though inevitable future, clinging to the present for the fear of something worse.  Real conservatism is rooted in the pride of class.  Bismarck had no feeling for the Junkers from whom he sprung.  In taste and outlook, he was nearest to the rich merchants of Hamburg.

Well, they don’t write history like that anymore.

Nations crave security.  So do their subjects.  The king commanded his subjects to hold him and the state securely.  People now elected governments so that the state would keep the people securely.  That was change indeed.

Bismarck was a soldier who never read Clausewitz.  Ranke was his favourite historian, but he had a soft spot for Taine.  He soaked himself in the Bible and Shakespeare, but he fancied the novels of Dumas.  He naturally had no time for philosophy – Kant, let alone Hegel – and he dismissed Wagner as a monkey. 

In other words, he was ein mensch with whom you knew where you stood – and when you should stop.  What would we give to have on record what passed between this German and Benjamin Disraeli?  A J P Taylor said:

Both had the brooding melancholy of the Romantic movement in its Byronic phase; both had broken into the charmed circle of privilege…. both had a profound contempt for political moralizing…. In politics both had used universal suffrage to ruin liberalism…. Both genuinely advocated social reform….

So much, then, for pigeon holing people.

I referred above to the banality of our politics.  Hannah Arendt, who had some of the most piercing insights of her time, got into trouble talking about the banality of evil.  We now have to live with the evil of banality.  Those vacuous standard-bearers of theory and ideology, who falsely claim to be prophets of ‘conservatism,’ should look on the works of Bismarck and despair.

More on Minorities

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Lectures on Foreign History by J M Thompson is one of my favourite books.  I keep going back to it.  As a tutor at Cambridge remarked, the Reverend historian wrote at a time when good writing was a prized attribute of the historian – one which we hardly see now.

Here is part of the author’s lecture on the reaction of the Church to the Reformation.

First came the Jesuits – then called ‘the Company of Jesus’.  The Company was, he says, a military body living under military discipline.  All religious orders had a vow of obedience, but that of the Jesuits was ‘specially strict’.  The members were to be directed and ruled ‘as though they were a dead body.’ 

As for liberty of thought, there is no more room for patriotic agnosticism in West Point than for Jesuit agnosticism in a Jesuit College.

Well, all that has a very different ambience here and now.

Then came the Inquisition.

After this auspicious beginning, the Spanish Inquisition never looked back.  It became a weapon of the State as well as the Church.  It punished political liberalism as it punished unorthodoxy in religion – they were regraded as two sides of the same coin.  It was turned less against Protestants than against Jews, Moors, and renegade Jewish Christians.  It chose its victims from the classes best worth plundering.  If they could not be burnt, at least their goods might be confiscated, or they might be frightened into purchasing their freedom cash down.

The Reverend was a man of the cloth – and surely also a man of the world. 

Elsewhere, we read of the Duke of Orleans in what was called ‘the barbarous age’.  ‘His Godhead was the Trinity of wealth, of women, and of wine’. 

But it was said that at birth the fairies had given him every gift, but the last fairy said: ‘He will possess all the talents, except the talent for making use of them.’

I know just what the fairies meant – the risk manager’s nightmare.

Being on the nose – the perils of minority

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Where people within a community behave differently as a group within that community, you can get friction.  The Gypsies represent a paradigm case, but history offers many other examples.  Race and religion are the main drivers – say, black and white, Catholic and Protestant, Muslim and Christian – but the friction can have many drivers. 

Internal religious fights can be worse than those between faiths.  Apostasy is one thing – heresy is something else again.  The hereafter may be on the line.  And the friction can manifest itself in different ways.

Acceptance or rejection?

If the members of the minority have to behave and be seen to behave differently to others in their community, are they not satisfied with what the rest do?  Are they in substance rejecting the community at large? 

Believing in your faith or tribal connection does not warrant your being seen to demean or despise that of others.  But there is a real risk of deadly antagonism where a group in an otherwise tolerant society believes it has an exclusive answer. 

This is how Rome saw the early Christians.  The pagans were very tolerant when it came to religion – their own, and that of others.  But the Christians were fanatics who believed that they had the exclusive answer in the way of the Cross.  The Romans were insulted in their majesty, and in their civilised tolerance.  The Christians were in truth zealots, even more so than the obscure and singularly distinct tribe that spurned them, and no government likes to deal with zealots. 

This leads to a much deeper and slippery trap for a minority.

The fear of combination

Very few in government welcome people coming together to review, comment on, or act in response to government.  Milton said that ‘fear of change perplexes monarchs’, but monarchs are in truth aware of the trade union motto that strength comes from unity.  And this just gets worse when the true believers shun rather than court their home-grown neighbours.  Gibbon was caustic.

By embracing the faith of the Gospel, the Christians incurred the supposed guilt of an unnatural and unpardonable offence.  They dissolved the sacred ties of custom and education, violated the religious institutions of their country, and presumptuously despised whatever their fathers had believed as true or reverenced as sacred.

These zealots were following the teaching of a holy man executed under Roman law – and their numbers and fanaticism were bound to be seen to be threatening.  Here is Gibbon again.

Roman policy viewed with the utmost jealousy and distrust any association among its subjects; and the privileges of private corporations, though formed for the most harmless or beneficial purposes, were bestowed with a very sparing hand.  The religious assemblies of the Christians, who had separated themselves from the public worship, appeared of a much less innocent nature: they were illegal in their principle, and in their consequences might become dangerous; nor were the emperors conscious that they violated the laws of justice, when, for the peace of society, they prohibited those secret and sometimes nocturnal meetings.

Some may be reminded of the Freemasons in Europe at the time of Die Zauberflote; people of colour in the American South may be reminded of a truly evil association given to ‘secret and sometimes nocturnal meetings’.

The embryonic English Labour movement was boosted by a decision of the House of Lords in 1901.  In the Taff Vale Case, the English courts held that at common law, a trade union could be liable for loss of profits to employers caused by strike action by members of the union.  Although that may now look to be a case of class bias, the action for damages for breach of contract had to be dealt with by parliament if unions were to retain a workable right to strike.

But a more stunning example of the fear of combination can be found in France after the fall of the Bastille.  Some workers decided to press for better rewards.  Workers used strike federations (coalitions) to get a share of improved trade.  This led to the Loi Le Chapelier which in 1791 prohibited all such associations Well, whatever else may be said of 14 July 1789, nothing could have happened without associations.  The historian J M Thompson mordantly remarked:

It forbids corporate action, in the name of liberty.  It denies it to all alike, in the name of equality.  It prohibits any appeal to force, in the name of fraternity.

That is the history of the world – after a huge fight, children win control of the tree house, and then slam the trap-door shut to stop the next hungry lot claiming their share.  How could you square slavery with the Rights of Man?  How could the Declaration of Independence say that all men were created equal?

And traditionally, the targets of such laws against combinations were directed at the workers rather than the employers.  The first economist, Adam Smith, would have none of it.

We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters [employers]; though frequently of those of workmen.  But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject.  Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate.  To violate this combination is everywhere a most unpopular action, and a sort of reproach to a master among his neighbours and equals.

Those remarks caused me to ask if The Wealth of Nations was banned in some think tanks.

Divided loyalties

The Bible says that no man can serve two masters (Matthew 6 24).  It is hard to think of any ruler who does not subscribe very firmly to that view.

Catholics in England after Henry VIII had to explain how they could be loyal to the king or queen of England as their monarch and the head of the Church England, and at the same time owe allegiance to the head of the Universal Church in Rome – who happened to regard the English monarchs as heretics. 

The question that had been fraught became unanswerable after the Armada.  There is little doubt that the Spaniards would have burnt Queen Elizabeth I at the stake; and then along came Guy Fawkes. 

Charles I tested the boundaries, and paid for it with his life.  He was not Catholic.  James II was, and he went out of his way to provoke every part of the Anglican Establishment in a way that led to his losing the crown and to a change in the English Constitution after the Glorious Revolution.  It was, and is, impossible for a Catholic to be the head of state of England – or, now, Australia. 

That may all look old hat now, but any attempt to revoke that law – which is entirely repugnant to our general laws – may not be well advised.

The extreme peril of heresy

It is sufficient to set out lengthy citations from Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Reason Alone.

Now, when, as usually happens, a church proclaims itself to be the one church universal (even though it is based upon faith in a special revelation which, being historical can never be required of everyone), he who refuses to acknowledge its (peculiar) ecclesiastical faith is called by it ‘an unbeliever’ and is hated wholeheartedly; he who diverges therefrom only in path (in non-essentials) is called ‘heterodox’ and is at least shunned as a source of infection.  But he who avows allegiance to this church and; diverges from it on essentials of its faith (namely, regarding the practices connected with it), is called, especially if he spreads abroad his false belief, a ‘heretic’ and, as a rebel, such a man is held more culpable than a foreign foe, is expelled from the church with anathema (like that which the Romans pronounced on him who crossed the Rubicon against the Senate’s will) and is given over to all the gods of hell.  Exclusive correctness of belief in matters of ecclesiastical faith claimed by the church’s teachers or heads is called orthodoxy.  This could be sub-divided into ‘despotic’ (brutal) or ‘liberal’ orthodoxy ….

We have noted that a church dispenses with the most important mark of truth, namely, a rightful claim to universality, when it bases itself upon a revealed faith.  For such a faith, being historical (even though it be far more widely disseminated and more completely secured for remotest posterity through the agency of Scripture) can never be universally communicated so as to produce conviction.

For heresy, thousands upon thousands of human beings who were perceived to be deviant would be executed by the followers of a holy man who was executed for just that sin against God.

Imported strife

The conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Great Britain was made far worse by events in Ireland.  The contempt felt for indigenous Irish people in England was originally a contempt for a race.  It all began before the Reformation split the Universal Church – with, say, the Statutes of Kilkenny of 1366.  But over time, the division came to be driven by religious differences.  And it became even more vicious because the stakes were so much higher.

In a migrant nation like Australia, where still about thirty per cent of the population was born overseas, there is a risk that people coming from foreign regions of conflict may bring that conflict here with them and so infect the people at large.  Something like that appeared in the fifties when people coming from the Balkans brought with them the products of centuries of conflict in their old homes.

But far worse for Australia, and so much more lasting, was the conflict between Ireland and England, and Catholic and Protestant.  It flared in an ugly and damaging way during World War I, and after World War II it was fundamental to the split in one of two parties in a two-party system.  The result marred our politics for a generation.  The problem then dissipated, largely because of the decline of religion.

There does not appear to be much risk of imported strife now, but if a group owes or expresses some form of allegiance to a foreign power, its members will need to tread warily if representatives of that power turn publicly against an Australian government.  That may well call for a test of allegiance.

Scapegoats

Migrants are usually in a minority, and so become prime candidates for the role of scapegoats.

In Ancient Greece there was a practice or rite of casting out someone like a beggar or cripple or criminal in the face of some natural threat or disaster.  There are traces of a far older tradition in Syria when a goat would be invoked in the purification rites for the king’s wedding – a she-goat was driven out into the waste with a silver bell on her neck.  More recently, but before the Greek custom developed, the Old Testament, Leviticus 16:8, said that ‘And Aaron shall cast lots over the two goats, one lot for the Lord, and the other lot for Azazel.’  The goat of the Lord was sacrificed, and the high priest by confession transferred the sins of himself and the people to the goat that was permitted to escape in the wilderness – where its fate would depend on what sort of predators it may have to contend with.  This was a form of atonement.  The goat that escaped became the ‘scapegoat’.  The traditions or rites might be said to prefigure the role of the Son of God being offered up to redeem mankind by atoning for its sins.  A scapegoat is one who is punished for the sins of others.  This ancient Middle Eastern rite has become a universal custom involving people rather than goats.

But the term has got much wider than that – a scapegoat now is not just one that has to answer for the sins of others; it has to answer for all the problems and failings of what might be called the host people. 

The worst example occurred in Nazi Germany.  The war had been lost only because of the failings of some generals and because Socialists and Communists had stabbed the nation in the back.  Once the German people got released from the hold of these forces of evil, it could realize its potential for the first time, and nothing could stand in its way.  The German character was not just innately good – it was superior; therefore, the reason for any failings had to be found elsewhere. 

You can see that now in what are called ‘populist’ politicians in the U K, Europe, and the U S.  Migrants become the source of all evil.  The scapegoat is the natural first base for a weak and insecure person who is a moral coward. 

It is also the kind of sloppy thinking that attracts insecure people, edgy commentators and journalists, and weak governments.

The threat to the status quo

The Gypsies may have been seen as a threat to civil order, but they were hardly a threat to the status quo.  A minority needs a lot more clout to achieve that status. 

The Huguenots in France and the Puritans in England had that clout, in large part because so many came from so high in the society that they were part of.  If you are going to be a strident minority, it does not help if you were already far better off than most before you stated your own particular claim to standing in the social fabric.  That could lead to the St Bartholomew Day Massacre, what would otherwise be called a pogrom.  Historians assess the standing of the Huguenots by looking at what they call the brain drain in France after their brutal suppression and expulsion.

The Puritans would come to be seen as a pest in England.  Under Cromwell, this fevered minority wanted to shut the pubs.  (They had previously shut the theatres – we could have been denied Shakespeare.) 

In America, the Puritans had the numbers – and it shows.  Among other things, they could make life difficult for Quakers.  The Quakers had been fined, whipped, jailed and banished during Puritan rule in Maryland before it passed its Toleration Act in 1649.  Women had been stripped to find signs of witchcraft, but this act made it unlawful to use hostile language about the religion of others, such as ‘Heretick, Schismatic, Idolater, Puritan, Jesuit…’  Then Penn started his Holy Experiment with Quakers in Pennsylvania.  At this stage of their development in the New World, the colonists prefigured the Enlightenment.  That did not last.  Slavery is not compatible with civilisation.

Religion does sadly seem to be at ease with hierarchy – rather like the judiciary.  And whatever else may be said about the Friends, they made the existing hierarchy feel uneasy – you could see traces of anarchy – and they were very effective leaders of the movement against slavery together with members of the Church of England.  If you take the view that slavery is contrary to any decent notion of civilisation, then the world had to wait until at least this level of abolition before it could consider itself civilised.  That is no small proposition.  And no small vindication of the Quakers.

The position of the Puritans in England was discussed by Paul Johnson in The Offshore Islanders.

English Puritanism was born among the Marian exiles of the 1550s [when the Catholic Queen Mary was burning Protestants]; it was thus an alien import.  It had a consistency wholly foreign to the English….The doctrine of predestination was ludicrous…. The Puritans, like the Roman Catholic extremists, believed that religion was the only important thing in life, whereas most Englishmen thought it was something you did on Sundays.  They were influential out of all proportion to their numbers because, like the Communists in our own age, they were highly organised, disciplined, and adept at getting each other in positions of power…. They oozed hypocrisy …But they did not believe in free speech.  They believed in doctrinaire religion, imposed by force and maintained by persecution…. The privileges the Puritans claimed for themselves they would certainly have denied to others…Above all, Puritanism was the dynamic behind the increase in witch-hunting.

No wonder they got up the noses of the English, and then took their love of witch-hunting to the New World. It still loves the hunt.  Just ask the President.

Caste from within

It is odd to many of us that some minorities have elaborate rules for confining contact with people outside their group.  It is as if they were creating their own kind of caste from within – and most Australians regard caste as a dreadful form of discrimination.  They are utterly and implacably opposed to any form of hierarchy imposed at birth.  We believe, with Sir Henry Maine, that the progress in human society has been from status to contract – we get where we can, not from what we are born with, but what we can achieve in life.  The caste system of the Hindus is anathema to us.  Among other things, it is an invitation to see people as type-cast, and that offends what Kant called the ‘principle of humanity’.

For example, the Gypsies had elaborate rules relating to dealings with gadze – non-gypsies – with life-changing consequences for those who infringed.  Here is what Sir Angus Fraser says in The Gypsies:

Even more pervasive is the dread of contamination….their purity beliefs can now be seen as a core element of their cultures, serving to express and reinforce an ethnic boundary and to delineate a fundamental division between Gypsy and gadzo….Wherever it is strictly adhered to, the taboo system informs all interaction between male and female and Gypsy and Gadzo, and for a Gypsy to be declared polluted is the greatest shame a man can suffer, along with his household.  It is social death…. but their overwhelming concern is with the uncleanness of the female and her potential threat to ritual purity…. The code thus serves to isolate those Gypsies who practise it from any intensive, intimate connection with the gadze; and its existence makes all the more understandable the concern, so apparent in their history, to avoid any form of employment that would require such contact.

This book of Sir Angus strikes me as reliable.  First, when the author refers to an ‘ethnic’ division, he is referring to what we call ‘race’.  Secondly, the strictures relating to cleanliness, women, and contact with others have a lot is common with the beliefs of other ethnic or religious groups.  Thirdly, it confirms the truth of the saying that we all need someone to look down on, and that those who see themselves as different very rarely see themselves as inferior – the contrary is the case.  Fourthly, these codes militate against assimilation with or acceptance by the majority, with the result that the minority ends up worse off.  The various defence mechanisms come back to bite their adherents.  Fifthly, to the extent that any such code may require or authorise discrimination against those found to have breached it, it may well be against the law of the land.

Nor should we forget that some among us just get unsettled to run into someone who just wants to be different.  Some get unsettled by doubt – they crave certainty where that is illusory. 

Others fear a failure to conform – it threatens their attachment and subscription to the body politic which gives them such security and standing as they have.  That is why some go clean out of their minds during revolutions – their whole world is exploding under them, and just what will they be left to stand on?  It is like driving on dry ice.

Jealousy

Green-eyed jealousy is destructive.  When felt at a social level, it arouses the hurt felt at apparent unfairness.  It is then potentially lethal.  It is a real risk for minorities that are seen to beat the system.  Examples are the Huguenots, who came from the upper layers of their world, and the Armenians, who showed a business acumen apparently beyond many of their Turkish neighbours. 

I say that as someone who bought this flat in Yarraville from an Armenian chicken farmer in Sydney who just happened to pick up a few blocks of local real estate on a trip to Victoria.  The Armenians were certainly very active in redeveloping Toorak – in a manner that held no appeal to the remaining elders.  ‘Upstarts’ or ‘nouveaux’ were polite epithets.  It is one thing to see people do well; it is altogether another to be overtaken by someone you once saw as beneath you.  If you really insult someone, you hit them just where it hurts. 

The last tax case I heard involved a scarcely literate Sicilian who migrated here.  He was at first a butcher and then a baker who bought land around Werribee so that by the time he got to me, he was worth north of $40 million.  Some locals could handle that success story better than others.  This will always be a potential problem for what are called ‘aspirational’ migrants who happen to do so much better than the old timers because that is their chosen destiny.

Unity in revolt or persecution

When Benjamin Franklin signed the Declaration of Independence, he remarked: ‘Well, Gentlemen, we must now hang together, or we shall most assuredly hang separately.’  He was surely correct.  They would either be the heroes of a new nation or very dead martyrs of the ancien regime.  You see the same theme in the Tennis Court oath at Versailles and all the propaganda of the artist David – Lenin and his ilk were rather more prosaic; so was their murder rate.

And persecution is a great bonding force.  For ‘persecute’, the OED has ‘treat someone in a cruel or unfair way, especially because of their race or beliefs.’  That was the fate, and the conditioning, of the early Christians, Gypsies and Quakers, and the response to the persecution so often just fuelled the fire by binding the victims together and making them identifiable. 

The study of victimhood, which can descend to self-righteousness, is a favourite of those parts of the press that decry ‘identity politics’ – while positively revelling in themselves; and at the same time rubbishing ‘virtue signalling’.  It is remarkable how so many who are so well off can feel so oppressed.  That is just another record claimed by Donald Trump – and a good slice of the United States.

A triumphant minority

Finally, there is the tragedy than can occur when the minority becomes the majority. 

Take the United States and Australia as examples.  When the white people first appeared in each, they were in the minority.  Because of their overwhelming strength in fighting capacity, they became the majority, and shattered the lives of the indigenous people forever, and in ways that should continue to evoke shame. 

In America, the degradation was made much worse by the importation of black African slaves, with the mordant consequence now that fear levels among many white people are made worse by the day by the threat that the white people may find themselves in the minority.

Conclusions

It would be tart to say that when peoples live together, numbers matter – but they do.  And scripture may be correct when it says that there is nothing new under the sun.

For many, there is some comfort about the slippery impact of the supernatural in the droll remarks of Edward Gibbon:

The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.  And thus, toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious concord.

Finally, some people may get up noses of others just because they seem to be different.  At least, that is why I think my dog looked askance at cats.  And I don’t blame him.

Being on the nose – the perils of minority

Where people within a community behave differently as a group within that community, you can get friction.  The Gypsies represent a paradigm case, but history offers many other examples.  Race and religion are the main drivers – say, black and white, Catholic and Protestant, Muslim and Christian – but the friction can have many drivers. 

Internal religious fights can be worse than those between faiths.  Apostasy is one thing – heresy is something else again.  The hereafter may be on the line.  And the friction can manifest itself in different ways.

Acceptance or rejection?

If the members of the minority have to behave and be seen to behave differently to others in their community, are they not satisfied with what the rest do?  Are they in substance rejecting the community at large? 

Believing in your faith or tribal connection does not warrant your being seen to demean or despise that of others.  But there is a real risk of deadly antagonism where a group in an otherwise tolerant society believes it has an exclusive answer. 

This is how Rome saw the early Christians.  The pagans were very tolerant when it came to religion – their own, and that of others.  But the Christians were fanatics who believed that they had the exclusive answer in the way of the Cross.  The Romans were insulted in their majesty, and in their civilised tolerance.  The Christians were in truth zealots, even more so than the obscure and singularly distinct tribe that spurned them, and no government likes to deal with zealots. 

This leads to a much deeper and slippery trap for a minority.

The fear of combination

Very few in government welcome people coming together to review, comment on, or act in response to government.  Milton said that ‘fear of change perplexes monarchs’, but monarchs are in truth aware of the trade union motto that strength comes from unity.  And this just gets worse when the true believers shun rather than court their home-grown neighbours.  Gibbon was caustic.

By embracing the faith of the Gospel, the Christians incurred the supposed guilt of an unnatural and unpardonable offence.  They dissolved the sacred ties of custom and education, violated the religious institutions of their country, and presumptuously despised whatever their fathers had believed as true or reverenced as sacred.

These zealots were following the teaching of a holy man executed under Roman law – and their numbers and fanaticism were bound to be seen to be threatening.  Here is Gibbon again.

Roman policy viewed with the utmost jealousy and distrust any association among its subjects; and the privileges of private corporations, though formed for the most harmless or beneficial purposes, were bestowed with a very sparing hand.  The religious assemblies of the Christians, who had separated themselves from the public worship, appeared of a much less innocent nature: they were illegal in their principle, and in their consequences might become dangerous; nor were the emperors conscious that they violated the laws of justice, when, for the peace of society, they prohibited those secret and sometimes nocturnal meetings.

Some may be reminded of the Freemasons in Europe at the time of Die Zauberflote; people of colour in the American South may be reminded of a truly evil association given to ‘secret and sometimes nocturnal meetings’.

The embryonic English Labour movement was boosted by a decision of the House of Lords in 1901.  In the Taff Vale Case, the English courts held that at common law, a trade union could be liable for loss of profits to employers caused by strike action by members of the union.  Although that may now look to be a case of class bias, the action for damages for breach of contract had to be dealt with by parliament if unions were to retain a workable right to strike.

But a more stunning example of the fear of combination can be found in France after the fall of the Bastille.  Some workers decided to press for better rewards.  Workers used strike federations (coalitions) to get a share of improved trade.  This led to the Loi Le Chapelier which in 1791 prohibited all such associations Well, whatever else may be said of 14 July 1789, nothing could have happened without associations.  The historian J M Thompson mordantly remarked:

It forbids corporate action, in the name of liberty.  It denies it to all alike, in the name of equality.  It prohibits any appeal to force, in the name of fraternity.

That is the history of the world – after a huge fight, children win control of the tree house, and then slam the trap-door shut to stop the next hungry lot claiming their share.  How could you square slavery with the Rights of Man?  How could the Declaration of Independence say that all men were created equal?

And traditionally, the targets of such laws against combinations were directed at the workers rather than the employers.  The first economist, Adam Smith, would have none of it.

We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters [employers]; though frequently of those of workmen.  But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject.  Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate.  To violate this combination is everywhere a most unpopular action, and a sort of reproach to a master among his neighbours and equals.

Those remarks caused me to ask if The Wealth of Nations was banned in some think tanks.

Divided loyalties

The Bible says that no man can serve two masters (Matthew 6 24).  It is hard to think of any ruler who does not subscribe very firmly to that view.

Catholics in England after Henry VIII had to explain how they could be loyal to the king or queen of England as their monarch and the head of the Church England, and at the same time owe allegiance to the head of the Universal Church in Rome – who happened to regard the English monarchs as heretics. 

The question that had been fraught became unanswerable after the Armada.  There is little doubt that the Spaniards would have burnt Queen Elizabeth I at the stake; and then along came Guy Fawkes. 

Charles I tested the boundaries, and paid for it with his life.  He was not Catholic.  James II was, and he went out of his way to provoke every part of the Anglican Establishment in a way that led to his losing the crown and to a change in the English Constitution after the Glorious Revolution.  It was, and is, impossible for a Catholic to be the head of state of England – or, now, Australia. 

That may all look old hat now, but any attempt to revoke that law – which is entirely repugnant to our general laws – may not be well advised.

The extreme peril of heresy

It is sufficient to set out lengthy citations from Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Reason Alone.

Now, when, as usually happens, a church proclaims itself to be the one church universal (even though it is based upon faith in a special revelation which, being historical can never be required of everyone), he who refuses to acknowledge its (peculiar) ecclesiastical faith is called by it ‘an unbeliever’ and is hated wholeheartedly; he who diverges therefrom only in path (in non-essentials) is called ‘heterodox’ and is at least shunned as a source of infection.  But he who avows allegiance to this church and; diverges from it on essentials of its faith (namely, regarding the practices connected with it), is called, especially if he spreads abroad his false belief, a ‘heretic’ and, as a rebel, such a man is held more culpable than a foreign foe, is expelled from the church with anathema (like that which the Romans pronounced on him who crossed the Rubicon against the Senate’s will) and is given over to all the gods of hell.  Exclusive correctness of belief in matters of ecclesiastical faith claimed by the church’s teachers or heads is called orthodoxy.  This could be sub-divided into ‘despotic’ (brutal) or ‘liberal’ orthodoxy ….

We have noted that a church dispenses with the most important mark of truth, namely, a rightful claim to universality, when it bases itself upon a revealed faith.  For such a faith, being historical (even though it be far more widely disseminated and more completely secured for remotest posterity through the agency of Scripture) can never be universally communicated so as to produce conviction.

For heresy, thousands upon thousands of human beings who were perceived to be deviant would be executed by the followers of a holy man who was executed for just that sin against God.

Imported strife

The conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Great Britain was made far worse by events in Ireland.  The contempt felt for indigenous Irish people in England was originally a contempt for a race.  It all began before the Reformation split the Universal Church – with, say, the Statutes of Kilkenny of 1366.  But over time, the division came to be driven by religious differences.  And it became even more vicious because the stakes were so much higher.

In a migrant nation like Australia, where still about thirty per cent of the population was born overseas, there is a risk that people coming from foreign regions of conflict may bring that conflict here with them and so infect the people at large.  Something like that appeared in the fifties when people coming from the Balkans brought with them the products of centuries of conflict in their old homes.

But far worse for Australia, and so much more lasting, was the conflict between Ireland and England, and Catholic and Protestant.  It flared in an ugly and damaging way during World War I, and after World War II it was fundamental to the split in one of two parties in a two-party system.  The result marred our politics for a generation.  The problem then dissipated, largely because of the decline of religion.

There does not appear to be much risk of imported strife now, but if a group owes or expresses some form of allegiance to a foreign power, its members will need to tread warily if representatives of that power turn publicly against an Australian government.  That may well call for a test of allegiance.

Scapegoats

Migrants are usually in a minority, and so become prime candidates for the role of scapegoats.

In Ancient Greece there was a practice or rite of casting out someone like a beggar or cripple or criminal in the face of some natural threat or disaster.  There are traces of a far older tradition in Syria when a goat would be invoked in the purification rites for the king’s wedding – a she-goat was driven out into the waste with a silver bell on her neck.  More recently, but before the Greek custom developed, the Old Testament, Leviticus 16:8, said that ‘And Aaron shall cast lots over the two goats, one lot for the Lord, and the other lot for Azazel.’  The goat of the Lord was sacrificed, and the high priest by confession transferred the sins of himself and the people to the goat that was permitted to escape in the wilderness – where its fate would depend on what sort of predators it may have to contend with.  This was a form of atonement.  The goat that escaped became the ‘scapegoat’.  The traditions or rites might be said to prefigure the role of the Son of God being offered up to redeem mankind by atoning for its sins.  A scapegoat is one who is punished for the sins of others.  This ancient Middle Eastern rite has become a universal custom involving people rather than goats.

But the term has got much wider than that – a scapegoat now is not just one that has to answer for the sins of others; it has to answer for all the problems and failings of what might be called the host people. 

The worst example occurred in Nazi Germany.  The war had been lost only because of the failings of some generals and because Socialists and Communists had stabbed the nation in the back.  Once the German people got released from the hold of these forces of evil, it could realize its potential for the first time, and nothing could stand in its way.  The German character was not just innately good – it was superior; therefore, the reason for any failings had to be found elsewhere. 

You can see that now in what are called ‘populist’ politicians in the U K, Europe, and the U S.  Migrants become the source of all evil.  The scapegoat is the natural first base for a weak and insecure person who is a moral coward. 

It is also the kind of sloppy thinking that attracts insecure people, edgy commentators and journalists, and weak governments.

The threat to the status quo

The Gypsies may have been seen as a threat to civil order, but they were hardly a threat to the status quo.  A minority needs a lot more clout to achieve that status. 

The Huguenots in France and the Puritans in England had that clout, in large part because so many came from so high in the society that they were part of.  If you are going to be a strident minority, it does not help if you were already far better off than most before you stated your own particular claim to standing in the social fabric.  That could lead to the St Bartholomew Day Massacre, what would otherwise be called a pogrom.  Historians assess the standing of the Huguenots by looking at what they call the brain drain in France after their brutal suppression and expulsion.

The Puritans would come to be seen as a pest in England.  Under Cromwell, this fevered minority wanted to shut the pubs.  (They had previously shut the theatres – we could have been denied Shakespeare.) 

In America, the Puritans had the numbers – and it shows.  Among other things, they could make life difficult for Quakers.  The Quakers had been fined, whipped, jailed and banished during Puritan rule in Maryland before it passed its Toleration Act in 1649.  Women had been stripped to find signs of witchcraft, but this act made it unlawful to use hostile language about the religion of others, such as ‘Heretick, Schismatic, Idolater, Puritan, Jesuit…’  Then Penn started his Holy Experiment with Quakers in Pennsylvania.  At this stage of their development in the New World, the colonists prefigured the Enlightenment.  That did not last.  Slavery is not compatible with civilisation.

Religion does sadly seem to be at ease with hierarchy – rather like the judiciary.  And whatever else may be said about the Friends, they made the existing hierarchy feel uneasy – you could see traces of anarchy – and they were very effective leaders of the movement against slavery together with members of the Church of England.  If you take the view that slavery is contrary to any decent notion of civilisation, then the world had to wait until at least this level of abolition before it could consider itself civilised.  That is no small proposition.  And no small vindication of the Quakers.

The position of the Puritans in England was discussed by Paul Johnson in The Offshore Islanders.

English Puritanism was born among the Marian exiles of the 1550s [when the Catholic Queen Mary was burning Protestants]; it was thus an alien import.  It had a consistency wholly foreign to the English….The doctrine of predestination was ludicrous…. The Puritans, like the Roman Catholic extremists, believed that religion was the only important thing in life, whereas most Englishmen thought it was something you did on Sundays.  They were influential out of all proportion to their numbers because, like the Communists in our own age, they were highly organised, disciplined, and adept at getting each other in positions of power…. They oozed hypocrisy …But they did not believe in free speech.  They believed in doctrinaire religion, imposed by force and maintained by persecution…. The privileges the Puritans claimed for themselves they would certainly have denied to others…Above all, Puritanism was the dynamic behind the increase in witch-hunting.

No wonder they got up the noses of the English, and then took their love of witch-hunting to the New World. It still loves the hunt.  Just ask the President.

Caste from within

It is odd to many of us that some minorities have elaborate rules for confining contact with people outside their group.  It is as if they were creating their own kind of caste from within – and most Australians regard caste as a dreadful form of discrimination.  They are utterly and implacably opposed to any form of hierarchy imposed at birth.  We believe, with Sir Henry Maine, that the progress in human society has been from status to contract – we get where we can, not from what we are born with, but what we can achieve in life.  The caste system of the Hindus is anathema to us.  Among other things, it is an invitation to see people as type-cast, and that offends what Kant called the ‘principle of humanity’.

For example, the Gypsies had elaborate rules relating to dealings with gadze – non-gypsies – with life-changing consequences for those who infringed.  Here is what Sir Angus Fraser says in The Gypsies:

Even more pervasive is the dread of contamination….their purity beliefs can now be seen as a core element of their cultures, serving to express and reinforce an ethnic boundary and to delineate a fundamental division between Gypsy and gadzo….Wherever it is strictly adhered to, the taboo system informs all interaction between male and female and Gypsy and Gadzo, and for a Gypsy to be declared polluted is the greatest shame a man can suffer, along with his household.  It is social death…. but their overwhelming concern is with the uncleanness of the female and her potential threat to ritual purity…. The code thus serves to isolate those Gypsies who practise it from any intensive, intimate connection with the gadze; and its existence makes all the more understandable the concern, so apparent in their history, to avoid any form of employment that would require such contact.

This book of Sir Angus strikes me as reliable.  First, when the author refers to an ‘ethnic’ division, he is referring to what we call ‘race’.  Secondly, the strictures relating to cleanliness, women, and contact with others have a lot is common with the beliefs of other ethnic or religious groups.  Thirdly, it confirms the truth of the saying that we all need someone to look down on, and that those who see themselves as different very rarely see themselves as inferior – the contrary is the case.  Fourthly, these codes militate against assimilation with or acceptance by the majority, with the result that the minority ends up worse off.  The various defence mechanisms come back to bite their adherents.  Fifthly, to the extent that any such code may require or authorise discrimination against those found to have breached it, it may well be against the law of the land.

Nor should we forget that some among us just get unsettled to run into someone who just wants to be different.  Some get unsettled by doubt – they crave certainty where that is illusory. 

Others fear a failure to conform – it threatens their attachment and subscription to the body politic which gives them such security and standing as they have.  That is why some go clean out of their minds during revolutions – their whole world is exploding under them, and just what will they be left to stand on?  It is like driving on dry ice.

Jealousy

Green-eyed jealousy is destructive.  When felt at a social level, it arouses the hurt felt at apparent unfairness.  It is then potentially lethal.  It is a real risk for minorities that are seen to beat the system.  Examples are the Huguenots, who came from the upper layers of their world, and the Armenians, who showed a business acumen apparently beyond many of their Turkish neighbours. 

I say that as someone who bought this flat in Yarraville from an Armenian chicken farmer in Sydney who just happened to pick up a few blocks of local real estate on a trip to Victoria.  The Armenians were certainly very active in redeveloping Toorak – in a manner that held no appeal to the remaining elders.  ‘Upstarts’ or ‘nouveaux’ were polite epithets.  It is one thing to see people do well; it is altogether another to be overtaken by someone you once saw as beneath you.  If you really insult someone, you hit them just where it hurts. 

The last tax case I heard involved a scarcely literate Sicilian who migrated here.  He was at first a butcher and then a baker who bought land around Werribee so that by the time he got to me, he was worth north of $40 million.  Some locals could handle that success story better than others.  This will always be a potential problem for what are called ‘aspirational’ migrants who happen to do so much better than the old timers because that is their chosen destiny.

Unity in revolt or persecution

When Benjamin Franklin signed the Declaration of Independence, he remarked: ‘Well, Gentlemen, we must now hang together, or we shall most assuredly hang separately.’  He was surely correct.  They would either be the heroes of a new nation or very dead martyrs of the ancien regime.  You see the same theme in the Tennis Court oath at Versailles and all the propaganda of the artist David – Lenin and his ilk were rather more prosaic; so was their murder rate.

And persecution is a great bonding force.  For ‘persecute’, the OED has ‘treat someone in a cruel or unfair way, especially because of their race or beliefs.’  That was the fate, and the conditioning, of the early Christians, Gypsies and Quakers, and the response to the persecution so often just fuelled the fire by binding the victims together and making them identifiable. 

The study of victimhood, which can descend to self-righteousness, is a favourite of those parts of the press that decry ‘identity politics’ – while positively revelling in themselves; and at the same time rubbishing ‘virtue signalling’.  It is remarkable how so many who are so well off can feel so oppressed.  That is just another record claimed by Donald Trump – and a good slice of the United States.

A triumphant minority

Finally, there is the tragedy than can occur when the minority becomes the majority. 

Take the United States and Australia as examples.  When the white people first appeared in each, they were in the minority.  Because of their overwhelming strength in fighting capacity, they became the majority, and shattered the lives of the indigenous people forever, and in ways that should continue to evoke shame. 

In America, the degradation was made much worse by the importation of black African slaves, with the mordant consequence now that fear levels among many white people are made worse by the day by the threat that the white people may find themselves in the minority.

Conclusions

It would be tart to say that when peoples live together, numbers matter – but they do.  And scripture may be correct when it says that there is nothing new under the sun.

For many, there is some comfort about the slippery impact of the supernatural in the droll remarks of Edward Gibbon:

The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.  And thus, toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious concord.

Finally, some people may get up noses of others just because they seem to be different.  At least, that is why I think my dog looked askance at cats.  And I don’t blame him.

Religion, power, and money – The Comfort of Tawney

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Tawney’s book, noted below, is a source of comfort when politics get me down – which at the moment is every day.  They don’t write like that any more.  Nor do you often get such rude good sense blessedly bereft of footnoted caveats. 

The relations between religion and business and politics are as fraught today as when Tawney wrote – just over a century ago, and it may ease our pain if we look at a sane humanist response.

Tawney saw that the Church was part of the Establishment.  I do not understand how you can build a monolith on one sent to destroy it – who signed his death warrant when he took a lash to the money lenders in the temple.  The Church naturally ‘denounced agitations, like the communal movement, designed to overturn that natural order.’  The great Marc Bloch thought that the commune was one of the great triumphs of the west.  Perhaps the Church thought the commune stole its thunder.  Bloch said:

It was there in the commune that the really revolutionary ferment was to be seen with its violent hostility to a stratified society.  Certainly, these primitive urban groups were in no sense democratic.  The greater bourgeois, who were their real founders and whom the lesser bourgeois were not always eager to follow, were often in their treatment of the poor hard task masters and merciless creditors.  But by substituting for the promise of obedience, paid for by protection, the promise of mutual aid, they contributed to the social life of Europe a new element, profoundly alien to the feudal spirit properly so called.

It was in this context that Tawney made the droll remark referred to in the note below about the aversion of the Church to doctrines impugning the sanctity of wealth.  Are ‘Left Wing’ and the Church contradictions in terms?

Elsewhere, Tawney said:

The prevalent religious thought might not unfairly be described as morality tempered by prudence, and softened on occasion by a rather sentimental compassion for inferiors.

That is as good a description of the English Tory as I have seen.  It is wholly foreign to the US, and beyond those who falsely claim to be ‘conservative’ here.

Puritanism, not the Tudor secession from Rome, was the true English Reformation, and it is from its struggle against the old order that an England which is unmistakably English emerges……  ‘The triumph of Puritanism swept away all traces of any restriction or guidance in the employment of money.’

The author could produce the scalpel.

A society which reverences the attainment of riches as the supreme felicity will naturally be disposed to regard the poor as damned in the next world, if only to justify itself for making their life a hell in this.

So much of this book published in 1926 is so relevant to the US in 2025.  The essential difference between the U S and the U K lies here:

The distinctive note of Puritan teaching was different.  It was individual responsibility, not social obligation.

Roscoe Pound, the great American jurist, said exactly that at that time. 

Tawney saw a ‘philosophy of indifferentism’.

Naturally therefore they formulate the ethical principles of Christianity in terms of a comfortable ambiguity, and rarely indicate with any precision their application to commerce, finance, and the ownership of property.

But is there no limit?

Compromise is impossible between the Church of Christ and the idolatry of wealth, which is the practical religion of capitalist societies…. ‘Modern capitalism’ writes Mr Keynes ‘is absolutely irreligious, without internal union, without much public spirit, often, though not always, a mere congeries of possessors and pursuers.’

All that sounds to me a fair pointer to the mess we are in now.

RELIGION AND THE RISE OF CAPITALISM

R H Tawney

John Murray, 1936.  Rebound in quarter blue leather with red title label on boards in fancy paper.

Tolstoy wrote a book – another of his very long books –saying that the main reason for the failure of civilisation was our failure to take seriously the Sermon on the Mount.  Could the British Empire have been erected by applying the Sermon on the Mount?  And how could Wall Street have been built in a pious nation that took seriously those warnings about the problems facing rich men trying to get into heaven?  Indeed, how could capitalism have even got off the ground if charging for the use of money is against the word of God?

This book of Tawney is on the shelf for three reasons.  It deals with those questions.  It shows how wobbly, if not downright silly, the Left/Right and Socialism/Capitalism distinctions are.  And the grace of its writing makes the book a pleasure to read.

To put it softly, tension is inevitable in applying religion to capitalism.  Loving your neighbour may be hard one on one, but is it not impossible when you are engaged in conduct, called competition, which has the predicate of Darwin that it is in order for you to annihilate your neighbour if he fails in the contest? 

We might see the history of the West as the story of the reduction of the impact upon us of the supernatural.  In the beginning, Tawney adopts the suggestion that ‘the secularization of political theory [was] the most momentous of the intellectual changes that ushered in the modern world…. Reason takes the place of revelation, and the criterion of political institutions is expediency, not religious authority…. the appeal to religion is often a decorous drapery for a triumphant materialism.’

We see immediately that when it comes to religion and money, as it does with religion and government, faith-sapping casuistry – argumentation so clever that it just has to be suspect – is not the exclusive preserve of the Church of Rome.  Here, then, is the crunch question of the book: ‘Can religion admit the existence of a sharp antithesis between personal authority and the practices which are permissible in business?’ 

The same question arises for government.

The damnation of lending for interest, or buying and selling for profit, was very serious – as would be Wall Street’s diagnosis of madness today.  In the name of God, the books abound with claims that governments should set prices!  But the Church had a vested interest in protecting property and the class system, so that people like those fanatical Franciscans had to be closely watched lest they may be taken seriously with things that matter – like money.  This leads to a very dry remark by Tawney – ‘doctrines impugning the sanctity of wealth resembled too closely the teaching of Christ to be acceptable to the princes of the Christian Church…. The very essence of feudal property was exploitation in its most naked and shameless form….’  That might sum up the book. 

The most crucial and the most difficult of all political questions is that which turns on the difference between public and private morality…. The prevalent religious thought might not unfairly be described as morality tempered by prudence, and softened on occasion by a rather sentimental compassion for inferiors.

Only an Englishman could have said that.

But were Luther or Calvin any better?

Luther’s utterances on social morality are the occasional explosions of a capricious volcano, with only a rare flash of light amid the torrent of smoke and flame, and it is idle to scan them for a coherent and consistent doctrine…..His sermons and pamphlets on social questions make an impression of naïveté, as of an impetuous but ill-informed genius, dispensing with the cumbrous embarrassments of law and logic, to evolve a system of social ethics from the inspired heat of his own unsophisticated consciousness…..

It was [the] doctrine that all things have their price – future salvation as much as present felicity – which scandalized men who could not be suspected of disloyalty to the Church, and which gave their most powerful argument to the reformers. 

Then there was the cold, inevitable and bloodless discipline of Calvin.

Legalistic, mechanical, without imagination or compassion, the work of a jurist and organiser of genius, Calvin’s system was more Roman than Christian, and more Jewish than either.

That sort of comment might get you into real trouble now, but if Tawney was right about Calvin blessing the middle class, then we might better understand the blank determination of the descendants of the Puritans never to let God come between them and the mighty dollar.  For those people, ‘a creed which transformed the acquisition of wealth from a drudgery or a temptation into a moral duty was the milk of lions.  It was not that religion was expelled from practical life, but that religion itself gave it a foundation of granite.’  And just look at where that has left us. 

For better or worse, they don’t write history like that anymore – large and in the round and with style.  Instead, they have gone the way of the courts, and we get visual graphs and verifiable footnotes, and a timidity dulled by anxiety.  And we miss the relief of insight fed by common sense and simple decency.

In every human soul there is a socialist and an individualist, an authoritarian and a fanatic for liberty, as in each there is a Catholic and a Protestant.  The same is true of the mass movements in which men marshal themselves for common action.

And over there in the land of those who thought that they were free, we see the Antichrist, the most vicious manifestation of capitalism yet seen, reigning above the ‘tedious, stale forbidding ways of custom, law and statute.’  And tourists and locals throng to the Frick Gallery, a monument to grandiosity left in expiation by a baron of capitalism.  There they gaze in awe at a painting by El Greco, the supreme voice of the Counter Reformation.  The painting in the colours of jockeys’ silks is of the luminous Nazarene – the phrase is Einstein’s – taking to the money dealers in the temple with a lash, and he looks like he is doing so to a tune of Mozart.  He is putting an end to lucre’s defiling of the house of God.  And for that, a howling mob had him lynched á la mode by the corrupt stooge of a pagan emperor.  In a straight contest between God and Mammon, the latter generally starts at very short odds.  That may or may not have been how Professor Tawney saw it, but that’s the way it is.

And since Professor Tawney wrote this beautiful book a full generation before the Holocaust, he did not stay to notice the one truly awful consequence of the pussyfooting of the Christians about usury, and their squalid need to find a tribe of disposable scapegoats so that they could pretend that their hands were clean.  The questions that this book poses about capitalism and morality are at least as large now as when Tawney wrote it in 1926.  It comes to us from a different age but in the same world.  It is in the very best tradition of history as literature and we look to be unlikely to get much more of it.  It is my favourite kind of history – history as tone poem

Religion, power, and money – The Comfort of Tawney

Tawney’s book, noted below, is a source of comfort when politics get me down – which at the moment is every day.  They don’t write like that any more.  Nor do you often get such rude good sense blessedly bereft of footnoted caveats. 

The relations between religion and business and politics are as fraught today as when Tawney wrote – just over a century ago, and it may ease our pain if we look at a sane humanist response.

Tawney saw that the Church was part of the Establishment.  I do not understand how you can build a monolith on one sent to destroy it – who signed his death warrant when he took a lash to the money lenders in the temple.  The Church naturally ‘denounced agitations, like the communal movement, designed to overturn that natural order.’  The great Marc Bloch thought that the commune was one of the great triumphs of the west.  Perhaps the Church thought the commune stole its thunder.  Bloch said:

It was there in the commune that the really revolutionary ferment was to be seen with its violent hostility to a stratified society.  Certainly, these primitive urban groups were in no sense democratic.  The greater bourgeois, who were their real founders and whom the lesser bourgeois were not always eager to follow, were often in their treatment of the poor hard task masters and merciless creditors.  But by substituting for the promise of obedience, paid for by protection, the promise of mutual aid, they contributed to the social life of Europe a new element, profoundly alien to the feudal spirit properly so called.

It was in this context that Tawney made the droll remark referred to in the note below about the aversion of the Church to doctrines impugning the sanctity of wealth.  Are ‘Left Wing’ and the Church contradictions in terms?

Elsewhere, Tawney said:

The prevalent religious thought might not unfairly be described as morality tempered by prudence, and softened on occasion by a rather sentimental compassion for inferiors.

That is as good a description of the English Tory as I have seen.  It is wholly foreign to the US, and beyond those who falsely claim to be ‘conservative’ here.

Puritanism, not the Tudor secession from Rome, was the true English Reformation, and it is from its struggle against the old order that an England which is unmistakably English emerges……  ‘The triumph of Puritanism swept away all traces of any restriction or guidance in the employment of money.’

The author could produce the scalpel.

A society which reverences the attainment of riches as the supreme felicity will naturally be disposed to regard the poor as damned in the next world, if only to justify itself for making their life a hell in this.

So much of this book published in 1926 is so relevant to the US in 2025.  The essential difference between the U S and the U K lies here:

The distinctive note of Puritan teaching was different.  It was individual responsibility, not social obligation.

Roscoe Pound, the great American jurist, said exactly that at that time. 

Tawney saw a ‘philosophy of indifferentism’.

Naturally therefore they formulate the ethical principles of Christianity in terms of a comfortable ambiguity, and rarely indicate with any precision their application to commerce, finance, and the ownership of property.

But is there no limit?

Compromise is impossible between the Church of Christ and the idolatry of wealth, which is the practical religion of capitalist societies…. ‘Modern capitalism’ writes Mr Keynes ‘is absolutely irreligious, without internal union, without much public spirit, often, though not always, a mere congeries of possessors and pursuers.’

All that sounds to me a fair pointer to the mess we are in now.

RELIGION AND THE RISE OF CAPITALISM

R H Tawney

John Murray, 1936.  Rebound in quarter blue leather with red title label on boards in fancy paper.

Tolstoy wrote a book – another of his very long books –saying that the main reason for the failure of civilisation was our failure to take seriously the Sermon on the Mount.  Could the British Empire have been erected by applying the Sermon on the Mount?  And how could Wall Street have been built in a pious nation that took seriously those warnings about the problems facing rich men trying to get into heaven?  Indeed, how could capitalism have even got off the ground if charging for the use of money is against the word of God?

This book of Tawney is on the shelf for three reasons.  It deals with those questions.  It shows how wobbly, if not downright silly, the Left/Right and Socialism/Capitalism distinctions are.  And the grace of its writing makes the book a pleasure to read.

To put it softly, tension is inevitable in applying religion to capitalism.  Loving your neighbour may be hard one on one, but is it not impossible when you are engaged in conduct, called competition, which has the predicate of Darwin that it is in order for you to annihilate your neighbour if he fails in the contest? 

We might see the history of the West as the story of the reduction of the impact upon us of the supernatural.  In the beginning, Tawney adopts the suggestion that ‘the secularization of political theory [was] the most momentous of the intellectual changes that ushered in the modern world…. Reason takes the place of revelation, and the criterion of political institutions is expediency, not religious authority…. the appeal to religion is often a decorous drapery for a triumphant materialism.’

We see immediately that when it comes to religion and money, as it does with religion and government, faith-sapping casuistry – argumentation so clever that it just has to be suspect – is not the exclusive preserve of the Church of Rome.  Here, then, is the crunch question of the book: ‘Can religion admit the existence of a sharp antithesis between personal authority and the practices which are permissible in business?’ 

The same question arises for government.

The damnation of lending for interest, or buying and selling for profit, was very serious – as would be Wall Street’s diagnosis of madness today.  In the name of God, the books abound with claims that governments should set prices!  But the Church had a vested interest in protecting property and the class system, so that people like those fanatical Franciscans had to be closely watched lest they may be taken seriously with things that matter – like money.  This leads to a very dry remark by Tawney – ‘doctrines impugning the sanctity of wealth resembled too closely the teaching of Christ to be acceptable to the princes of the Christian Church…. The very essence of feudal property was exploitation in its most naked and shameless form….’  That might sum up the book. 

The most crucial and the most difficult of all political questions is that which turns on the difference between public and private morality…. The prevalent religious thought might not unfairly be described as morality tempered by prudence, and softened on occasion by a rather sentimental compassion for inferiors.

Only an Englishman could have said that.

But were Luther or Calvin any better?

Luther’s utterances on social morality are the occasional explosions of a capricious volcano, with only a rare flash of light amid the torrent of smoke and flame, and it is idle to scan them for a coherent and consistent doctrine…..His sermons and pamphlets on social questions make an impression of naïveté, as of an impetuous but ill-informed genius, dispensing with the cumbrous embarrassments of law and logic, to evolve a system of social ethics from the inspired heat of his own unsophisticated consciousness…..

It was [the] doctrine that all things have their price – future salvation as much as present felicity – which scandalized men who could not be suspected of disloyalty to the Church, and which gave their most powerful argument to the reformers. 

Then there was the cold, inevitable and bloodless discipline of Calvin.

Legalistic, mechanical, without imagination or compassion, the work of a jurist and organiser of genius, Calvin’s system was more Roman than Christian, and more Jewish than either.

That sort of comment might get you into real trouble now, but if Tawney was right about Calvin blessing the middle class, then we might better understand the blank determination of the descendants of the Puritans never to let God come between them and the mighty dollar.  For those people, ‘a creed which transformed the acquisition of wealth from a drudgery or a temptation into a moral duty was the milk of lions.  It was not that religion was expelled from practical life, but that religion itself gave it a foundation of granite.’  And just look at where that has left us. 

For better or worse, they don’t write history like that anymore – large and in the round and with style.  Instead, they have gone the way of the courts, and we get visual graphs and verifiable footnotes, and a timidity dulled by anxiety.  And we miss the relief of insight fed by common sense and simple decency.

In every human soul there is a socialist and an individualist, an authoritarian and a fanatic for liberty, as in each there is a Catholic and a Protestant.  The same is true of the mass movements in which men marshal themselves for common action.

And over there in the land of those who thought that they were free, we see the Antichrist, the most vicious manifestation of capitalism yet seen, reigning above the ‘tedious, stale forbidding ways of custom, law and statute.’  And tourists and locals throng to the Frick Gallery, a monument to grandiosity left in expiation by a baron of capitalism.  There they gaze in awe at a painting by El Greco, the supreme voice of the Counter Reformation.  The painting in the colours of jockeys’ silks is of the luminous Nazarene – the phrase is Einstein’s – taking to the money dealers in the temple with a lash, and he looks like he is doing so to a tune of Mozart.  He is putting an end to lucre’s defiling of the house of God.  And for that, a howling mob had him lynched á la mode by the corrupt stooge of a pagan emperor.  In a straight contest between God and Mammon, the latter generally starts at very short odds.  That may or may not have been how Professor Tawney saw it, but that’s the way it is.

And since Professor Tawney wrote this beautiful book a full generation before the Holocaust, he did not stay to notice the one truly awful consequence of the pussyfooting of the Christians about usury, and their squalid need to find a tribe of disposable scapegoats so that they could pretend that their hands were clean.  The questions that this book poses about capitalism and morality are at least as large now as when Tawney wrote it in 1926.  It comes to us from a different age but in the same world.  It is in the very best tradition of history as literature and we look to be unlikely to get much more of it.  It is my favourite kind of history – history as tone poem

Terror in Paris II – Credo Killers

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

In Paris two armed men murdered twelve people. The killers were apparently religious fanatics or zealots. They conducted the operation with a cool efficiency that showed military training. They killed expressly in the name of their God and faith. They did so to create terror among other people for their own purposes. They killed people who they believed were acting against their faith.

About three thousand years ago at a little village called Ai in what used to be called the Holy Land armed men killed twelve thousand people. They were apparently religious fanatics or zealots. They conducted the operation with a cool efficiency that showed military training. They killed expressly in the name of their God and faith. They did so to create terror among other people for their own purposes. They killed people who they believed were acting against their faith.

The massacre at Ai is described in the book of Joshua in a book, the Bible, that provides a foundation for three religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Different numbers were involved in Paris and Ai. In Paris, two killers killed twelve people; in Ai, thirty thousand warriors killed twelve thousand people.

Another difference is in the reason for the killings. In Paris, it appears that the murderers killed people that they thought were involved in insulting their religion. The victims, including police, were in their perverted thinking guilty. In Ai, men, women and children were massacred and the city destroyed because they were part of the Promised Land, that is, part of the land promised by Jehovah to the tribes of Israel. At least, that is what the Bible says. Their ‘guilt’, including the guilt of their children, was to be on the wrong side of the tribal and religious divide. The dice rolled badly for them.

The indigenous or aboriginal peoples at Ai were all liable to massacre under the Law of God expressed in the Bible, to which Jews, Christians, and Muslems owe allegiance. The book of Deuteronomy (chapter 20, 13-17) records that Moses told the people of Israel that if they took a foreign city, they were to kill every male: the women and children ‘thou shall take unto thyself’. ‘But the cities of these people which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance thou shalt save nothing alive that breatheth.’ This is an injunction to commit acts of terror. It is a prescription for what we call ethnic cleansing or genocide. Under it, Joshua and the tribes blew their trumpets at Jericho so that ‘the wall fell down flat’; and ‘they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox and sheep and ass, with the edge of the sword’. At Ai, Joshua set up a clever ambush to enable the massacre of all inhabitants. He did so with ‘thirty thousand mighty men of valour,’ and ‘so it was that all that fell that day, both of men and women, were twelve thousand, even all the men of Ai’(Joshua 8:25.)

Most historians say that Islam was spread by the sword. Well, the Promised Land had been taken by the sword for the tribes of Israel by mighty men of valour with the help of God. Most of the people of Islam now believe that the promised land of Israel is being increased by the sword, with or without help from God. On any view, the history of both of these faiths is marked by violence and terror in the name of their religion and the world as whole is worse off as a result of at least that part of their history.

There is another difference between the murders at Paris and Ai. Leaders of Islam have condemned the murders in Paris as being against their religion. If anyone has said the same for the murders at Ai on behalf of Judaism, Christianity or Islam, I have not heard it. It will be difficult to say that those murders were committed against the word of God. Did the author of the Bible get it wrong or has God changed the rules since then?

This two-facedness makes unbelievers angry. On what ground do the followers of Judaism, Christianity or Islam say that they do not follow a God whose word enjoins terrorism and the doctrine that might makes right? On what basis do they maintain that the God of the Bible is not a terrorist, and a much more lethal terrorist than any of the Greek or Roman gods?

A Jewish zealot shot and killed the Prime Minister of Israel Yitzhak Rabin. The killer used a Beretta 84F .380 ACP semi-automatic pistol. He said that he did it for God because in his view the Prime Minister was betraying Israel. Mr Rabin had been awarded the Nobel Prize for his part in the Oslo Accords for peace in Palestine. The murderer, Yigal Amir, also said:

There is no moral problem. If I was conquering the land now, I would have to kill babies and children as it is written in the book of Joshua.

Was he wrong? Yigal Amir killed for a belief. He killed in the belief that his religion justified his killing. The judges expressly repudiated this argument saying that it was ‘completely inappropriate and amounts to cynical exploitation of Jewish law for goals that are alien to Judaism’. In passing sentence, the Court said: ‘He who so calmly cuts short another’s life, only proves the depth of wretchedness to which [his] values have fallen, and thus he does not merit any regard whatsoever, except pity, because he has lost his humanity.’

Regardless of what the judges said, it hardly seems right to say that this killer was a radical Jew, or that his Judaism radicalised him and made him a killer. Is it fair or even open to blame Judaism for the acts of this killer whose beliefs are seen as a perversion of Judaism? We do not after all call the Ku Klux Klan radical Christians. Christians would be affronted by that description. Is it fair or even open to blame Christianity for the acts of the Ku Klux Klan whose beliefs are seen as a perversion of Christianity?

We need to have this in mind when applying labels like ‘radical Muslems’ to people who kill for a perverted belief in Islam. These labels do not conduce to fairness or sense. I am aware that many Muslems around the world tacitly sympathize with some of these people, just as many so called Christians in the American South tacitly sympathised with the Klan. But to brand every member of a creed by the actions of a few just because they hold that belief is to commit the moral and intellectual crime that lies at the very core of racism.

To the victims of people like Yigal Amir or the Klan, or the terrorists in Paris, the nature of the belief driving their killers hardly matters. It matters to the rest of us, believers or not, in trying to protect ourselves against others who are prepared to kill for a belief. The great American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes stopped three bullets during the American Civil War. More than thirty years after the end of that war in an address called ‘The Soldier’s Faith’, Holmes spoke with admiration of those ‘able to face annihilation for a blind belief.’

The faith of Justice Holmes is in a different universe. The killers we are talking of kill for a belief that excludes tolerance for any contrary belief and any diversion or softening on other moral grounds. I believe – therefore I kill. Credo ergo caedo. They become what might be called credo killers – people like the terrorists in Paris, the Klan, Yigal Amir, and Joshua.

As it happens, the worst credo killers of the twentieth century were killing against God rather than with him, but that is not much help to the rest of us. It matters little to the dead and their families whether the belief for which they were killed is a perversion of a religious faith or a political idea, but it will matter if we the victims spread the poison by judging others just by their creed.

For those who may be interested, I attach a brief extract from the book Terror and the Police State from the chapter Religion, propaganda, and cults. Extract

And as a footnote to the note on A law of suspects?, I set out the following remarks by David Bromwich in a piece entitled Working on the Dark Side from the current (8 January) London Review of Books. In discussing the Senate Select Committee report on CIA detention and interrogation, the learned author says:

Cheney worked hard to eradicate from the minds of Americans the idea that there can be such a thing as a ‘suspect’. Due process of law rests on the acknowledged possibility that a suspect may be innocent; but for Cheney, a person interrogated on suspicion of terrorism is a terrorist. To elaborate a view beyond that point, as he sees it, only involves government in a wasteful tangle of doubts. Cheney concedes from time to time that mistakes can happen; but the leading quality of the man is a perfect freedom from remorse. ‘I’d do it again in a minute.’

Unfortunately for us, Mr Cheney is not alone in having a perfect freedom from remorse, or in being eager to come back for more.