The 20th century may have been American but the millennium has belonged to the Europeans. And what should we nominate as the main enterprise of the past 1,000 years? There is no doubt about that: the Catholic church.
In 999 nobody would have recognised the term "Europe." There was only Christendom. But at the core of Deepak Lal's book is the story of how the church set in motion a train of events that led to the end of Christendom, then on to the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution. Looking back, we can say that in spite of the Catholic church's astonishing success, the main event of the millennium has been the death of God.
But first, consider the glory of the church. From the Baltic to the Mediterranean, from Ireland to the Polish border, what is Europe but 100,000 villages? In each village the oldest, strongest, richest and most beautiful building is the church. Today most of them are deserted, but once they were the centre of life-registering births, memorialising deaths, sanctioning marriage and forgiving sin. No business enterprise ever had such a network, nor offered such a desirable product: eternal life. And none ever accumulated such wealth or power. In the 10th century the church owned up to 40 per cent of the productive land in parts of Europe. The church's greatest millennium runs from about 600 to 1600-but even in decline it has had few rivals; kings humbled themselves before it.
Why should Europe-this not-so-sterile promontory-have come to dominate the world? The answer is geography, which precedes history and ideas. The story of this book is partly one of how ideas have interacted with environment. If there is a single thread running through Lal's thesis, it is greed; he is, after all, an economist. The extremes of man's relationship with nature are represented by religious awe and exploitative greed. Modernisation means the transition from one to the other. In most societies the greed of a ruling class has been the driving force; its objective has been to extract the maximum surplus from the peasants, leaving them just enough to survive to produce more surplus. This created the empires of gorgeous palaces and solemn temples. The more sophisticated of these cultures have also exploited the market and the additional wealth created by commerce. In Sung China, Lal notes, there was a certain crony capitalism-but the state always maintained the upper hand.
So how did Europe come to produce a society in which the market got the upper hand? The market is also driven by greed, but (to paraphrase New Labour) it is driven by the greed of the many rather than that of the few. How did this come about? Lal's intriguing answer is that we owe it to the greed of the church.
The church's greed for land led it to create all kinds of rules restricting marriage (especially re-marriage), thus maximising the number of people who died without heirs and thus passed their land to the church. It also encouraged romantic love and free choice of marriage partners. (Hindu and Chinese ceremonies have not, traditionally, included questions such as, "Do you take this man to be your lawful wedded husband?") Add to this the cults of virginity and celibacy, and with luck you find that a fair proportion of the population dies without heirs. That was where the church acquired its wealth and where, long before the industrial revolution, Europe acquired its nuclear family. The extended family ensured that land did not pass out of family groups; the nuclear family allowed it to do so-to the church's benefit.
It was to protect this huge accumulation of wealth that Gregory VII's declaration of the supremacy of the church was announced. Greed for land was followed by greed for power. The result was that, for a while, a single legal system operated across Europe. During this time, bills of exchange, bankruptcy laws, the beginnings of joint stock companies, trademarks, patents, and much else were invented. When the authority of the church declined, it left behind an economic union which India, for example, never possessed. India, like Europe, was an area of separate power centres within a common culture, but because the Brahmins never attempted to interfere in the secular world, the common culture never produced a common market. The existence of courts and of law independent of the state established the idea of the separation of executive and judicial power in Europe, unknown in both India and China.
The nuclear family is the root of the individualistic culture which has characterised the west ever since. Capitalism-and modernity-were built from the bottom up, by people acting independently of and probably against the wishes of the state. The church made a second critical contribution to this through its promotion of guilt. The challenge was to combine romantic love (which is notoriously fickle) with a stable society. The answer was guilt, above all, sexual guilt, followed by the threat of purgatory. It is only the Latin church which made so much of the Fall. (It was the church rather than the Bible which linked the Fall to sex; it seems just as plausible to see the Fall as related to the acquisition of self-consciousness.) Other cultures, most famously those of China and Japan, but also those of Islam and India, rely on shame and social control rather than individual guilt, individual conscience and personal salvation. When Kant discovered the moral law within himself, he was finding something which had been put there by the Catholic church for its own purposes.
However, the problem for the church has been that the individualism it unwittingly created, together with the Greek heritage of scientific enquiry, eventually undermined both its intellectual and secular authority. Given the social framework established by the church, this has implications for society far beyond religion. The death of God brings with it the death of sin and of guilt (Freud did his best to help). For a society based on guilt this has consequences visible today in psychological disorders such as depression, and social disorders such as the breakdown of families and overcrowded prisons. The weakness of society in the west is reflected in the rise of litigation: legal rights are ascribed to almost everything and everyone.
If western civilisation is undermined by modernity and industrialisation, will this happen elsewhere, too? The death of God affects eastern civilisations less because their societies were never based on religious faith but rather on social control-shame, not guilt. Industrialisation came to Europe through individualism, but in other cultures it has been brought in ready-made-technology and material progress without the corrosive Enlightenment ideas which paved the way for them. Is it possible, then, that India or China may be able to modernise without westernising, and may be all the stronger for it? Will the next millennium be the Sino-Indian millennium?
You might argue that in the far east shame has been a motive for modernisation. Japan and China have been driven to modernise in order to put behind them, if not to repay, the humiliations they have suffered at the hands of the west. In Japan's case, this led first to war and, in the past 50 years, to the pursuit of economic equality.
Japan-the only country so far to have achieved modernity without westernisation-seems at first an illustration of Lal's thesis. Japan has civilisation-but not so many of its discontents as the west has. Crime and drug taking are low; social structures remain less fractured than in the US or Europe. But what about the current malaise in Japan: is it temporary? Or is it something more serious? Perhaps the problem with shame is that, once you have caught up with the author of your humiliation, you do not know where to go. Individualism has its problems, but the American dream at least provides a shared belief and a dynamic for an individualistic society.
A more collective society, if it is going to be dynamic, would seem to need a common purpose. Economic catch-up functions for a while-but then what? The classic collective purpose, national expansion, is not attractive. Is there an alternative other than to lapse (as Japan seems, at least temporarily, to have lapsed) into aimlessness? Can there be an Asian dream to match the American dream, without being a destructive one?
The function of religion is to give meaning to life: "In the beginning was meaning." Religion explained that there were reasons for things, not simply causes. Unintended Consequences is part of the magnificent western intellectual tradition which has destroyed religions and meanings. This is a book about the accidental mutation of societies-that is, about the meaninglessness of history. The question for the future is: which of our societies will cope best with that meaninglessness? Will it be the dynamic na?vet? of the American dream? Or the collective Chinese belief in their history and destiny?
Unintended Consequences
Deepak Lal
MIT Press 1998, ?27.95
