In Which Monty Python Proves That Washington Irving Was Responsible For The Idea That Medievals Belived The World Was Flat
No, really. He has trouble getting started, but Terry Jones knows his stuff.
14 comments:
Tom
said...
I haven't watched the video yet, but a very good book on this is "Inventing the Flat Earth." The main discussion of the book is why the belief that medievals thought the earth was flat persisted, remaining in US history textbooks into the 1980s, despite the fact that both historians of the medieval period and of Columbus debunked it repeatedly.
I look forward to watching the video when I get a bit of time.
I watched it, and while some of the historical information about Columbus and the understanding of the world being a sphere was interesting, as was some of the information about early European tribal movements and territorial claims talked about by the second fellow, what struck me was how politically correct it all was, and how easily it became a 'bash the right wingers like GWB for praising Columbus', and 'look what primitive nationalist movements are still extant in Europe today'. In Jones lecture, what struck me was that he'd set out so strongly to 'awaken' us to the idea that Columbus was some sort of revolutionary in the field of evil- single handedly setting the stage for how we would treat these new people we came across, and for a slave industry that would grow in part because of these newly discovered territories. A bit over the top, as if humans hadn't been treating other humans horribly since Cain and Abel, and Columbus had somehow invented new forms of evil. Hardly a 'serious' historical analysis- much too agenda driven. The second fellow wasn't much better, but he didn't have a main point that was so obviously flawed in it's application.
Maybe I've been around academics too much these last few years, but that stuff slides off me these days. Especially when you're talking about British thinkers, who so often feel the need to slide in a comment or two suggesting the superiority of Britain and British culture to America and American culture, so often I think they just can't help themselves. They've got a taste for it, and don't understand how it tastes to anyone else (somewhat like pate de foie gras, which seems like a beautiful delicacy to those who have the taste for it -- and is unspeakably foul-tasting to the rest of us).
At some point all that stuff just hits my filter and gets ignored, and I listen to the rest of what they have to say. I thought he had some good points, both about the ancient/medieval understanding of geography, and about how Columbus' success was completely predicated on his failure to understand as well as others (yet is presented to our high school students as a mark of his advanced, modern, scientific approach contrasted to medieval and Churchy ignorance).
I've been reading a lot of history of the European exploration of the New World lately as part of my Project Gutenburg duties. One really sad aspect of the times was that there were a number of Europeans on the scene in the 16th century who were horrified by what was being done to the Native American population and who tried hard to awaken consciences about it there and back home in Spain. Their complaints often found a sympathetic ear. Unfortunately, the almost universally accepted immediate solution was to start using black Africans for the slave labor instead, because they didn't die quite as quickly on the farms and in the mines.
Yeah, that's a good point. And there was so much money in it: a trader sailing out of Boston or New York could buy slaves from compliant African kings for rum, trade the slaves for sugar, and use the sugar to make a great deal more rum. It may well be fair to say that a substantial amount of the wealth of early America was founded on this slave trade, quite apart from the work the slaves did in the cotton-producing region to create wealth within the nation.
Jones cites Jeffrey Burton Russell in his presentation, who wrote "Inventing the Flat Earth." His debunking of the flat earth idea pretty much follows Russell's line of research.
Russel, however, is more concerned with how the myth persisted and why so many people today believe it despite the fact that historians regularly debunked it from its inception.
Perhaps the most interesting thing in Jones' presentation to me was that the myth was produced by a journalist who did well in fiction (both outside journalism and within, it seems). Some things never change.
Sure, Grim, I let most of it slide too, and look for something else of interest, or at least that has historically been my nature. Now, though, I feel that it's imperative to not sit idly by while these sorts of things are premised and allowed to be reinforced in the 'common knowledge', when they too need contesting. How you frame your argument is as important as the substance of the argument itself, isn't it?
A couple of years ago, I sat in a faculty meeting where two other professors expressed some surprise at the popularity of students using prayer as the selected activity in a project where the specific program was up to them, and they found it amusing and quaint (unsurprisingly, I suppose), and I said nothing. Later, that I said nothing really bothered me, as I felt I'd not been fair the the students who take their faith seriously enough to explore it in their architecture to defend them as normal and reasonable.
Now, the whole thing about the African slave trade perfectly illustrates the flaw in Jones thinking about Columbus, innovator of evil- that he was just doing what lots of other people were doing - I'm not condoning here, just saying that it was hardly unusual or surprising. Therefore, in an era where that was common, we look at the uncommon things Columbus did, which was make a discovery, however flawed his understanding of the facts, and his morals. Jones is on a 'crusade' and doesn't realize it (and here I use 'crusade' in the worst PC meaning).
As shocking as the treatment of the Indians and Africans was -- and it was very shocking -- it's also important to look at it in the context of what life was like for all laborers. Anybody with enough clout to get a royal commission didn't even have a concept of doing the brute labor himself. There were always scads of little unfortunate people to grow the food, make the clothes, draw the water, mine the salt. A head of household thought of himself as independent, and that was so as between him nand the outside world, but he was the beneficiary of something not far removed from a plantation full of slaves. The standard of living in the 16th century was brutal (have you ever walked around one of those replicas of the tiny Nina or Pinta?). Indians had to die in droves to get anyone's attention at all, especially since it took Europeans quite a while to decide whether they were even supposed to think of the members of this primitive new culture as humans with souls.
They were all steeped in a culture that found it infinitely more important whether people were converted to Christianity than whether they lived or died in harsh conditions, or even whether they were treated mercifully or cold-bloodedly murdered for their own good. If you're willing to torture crypto-Muslims or crypto-Jews to death back home, why would you flinch at killing a lot of scary heathens far from the nearest safe haven? What's more, the scary heathens were scarcely less willing to kill the Europeans if they got a chance.
How many gently reared, idealistic modern men could be sent to Alpha Centauri and expected to behave well? Acquiring property was everything to these men: it was a sudden chance to be a king. It's not as though they had a lot of experience with kings' benevolence: it was just a way to scramble up the greasy pole. Columbus was hardly the worst of the explorers. The whole lot, in Central and South America, were constantly engaging in intrigue and treachery against each other.
These guys weren't on a mission of mercy. The were down in the bear-pit in a world where you'd better come out on top if you wanted your kids to eat. It's awfully easy for us to say we'd do better, when most of us have never even imagined living that way. Broken inner cities don't behave better. Starving populations in modern war-torn countries don't behave better.
That's an argument I find very familiar, Tex. I often make a version of it myself.
Although they might have been right, in a way, that conversion is more important than survival. The only reason it ever got better was that Christian, and not Aztec, standards came to prevail. When they could afford it, they began to live up to them.
Granted, I'm strongly inclined to agree that people are better off believing in Christianity -- but not at the cost of torturing people into confessing belief. For one thing, every (ostensible) convert costs you an unknowable number of people who will hate you and your religion forever. For another, the souls of the torturers are forfeit.
If Christian ideals make for better lives, they ought to be able to stand on their own merits and win people by example. Otherwise they're just an in-group marker.
As for their souls being forfeit, I hope not! Even great sins can be forgiven.
It's fine to say that you'd prefer a Church that persuaded instead of coerced. That has worked well in China, in spite of official repression; not so well in Syria or Iraq these days, though. A little more coercion -- at least of the self-defensive type -- might be a good idea. Jesus told his disciples to be sure to arm themselves with swords even if they had to sell their cloaks.
But there's a further problem. There's no guarantee that Christian ideals will make for better lives in this world -- certainly not for you. Your neighbors will reap the benefits of your living a life of chastity and moderation, forgiveness and a devotion to loving them even when they are complete jerks. But for the individual who makes the decision, it may lead to sacrifice and even to martyrdom.
So does it make for a better life in such a way that people will flock to it, as if it were a marketable product? That's not so clear to me. The reason to convert is belief, not benefits.
I believe the Church must confine itself to persuasion instead of coercion in spite of any evidence that can be developed anywhere that persuasion doesn't "work." If conversion "works" via coercion, it isn't itself any more; it's a self-defeating tactic. There are untold numbers of unbelievers in the world today who can't get past the horrors perpetrated by Christians in the past.
And it was you, my friend! not I, who argued that "things got better" with Christianity. I'm not sure things on Earth ever get better on the whole. We make advances in some areas and lose ground in others. I'm not much a of a social progressivist. But even accepting your claim, for the sake of argument, that things got better with Christianity, I don't buy that as an excuse for conversion by the sword. If the Church needs martyrs to draw converts, let the martyrs be the uncoerced believers, not the tortured heretics.
Well, that's the current position of the Church, so you're in luck. We'll see where we stand in a hundred years, or a thousand. I expect we'll see more at least defensive violence, because we're being pressured -- one of the great purges against Christians is the one going on right now, today, while we live. It's just not going on right here, except intellectually (as Douglas was complaining about above).
I'm in an interesting place in the moral progress argument. For many years I argued that moral progress was actually impossible, as you've read not that long ago. But one of the things that could make it possible would be to have a divine law, a standard against which we could measure (as opposed to using our own opinions about what's right, which naturally float from generation to generation, with more recent generations generally being 'more like us' than previous ones).
Now there's two ways to look at that, one relativistic and one solid. The relativistic standard is that we could accept one of many divine laws, and judge them against each other: the Aztec versus the Catholic.
But that leaves us in the same situation: the only standard we have for judging the Aztec versus the Catholic is our own opinions about what would be better. Even if we obtained perfect agreement from all living men and women about that (the Aztecs weren't very nice, after all), we still wouldn't have anything stronger than opinion. It could change; some future generations could decide the Aztecs really had it right after all.
So the solid way of doing it is to say that, no, there is a God and we have learned something about his moral law, and while we could be wrong on certain details, or on application, the law itself doesn't really depend on our opinion of it. By that standard, moral progress is possible, it's just unlikely -- you're more likely to get ebb tides and high tides than to get real progress, the way that scientific progress pushes more-or-less ever forward.
So as a philosopher, I think there are three possibilities, two of which make moral progress actually impossible. But as a Christian, I find that I believe that the third one is really true.
It has the additional advantage of being the position of the Church's Founder. Even now, God could convert all of us by force. Why do you suppose He doesn't? His own words give us some clues.
That's a different matter from wether Christians have the right to fight to protect their bodies and their freedom.
14 comments:
I haven't watched the video yet, but a very good book on this is "Inventing the Flat Earth." The main discussion of the book is why the belief that medievals thought the earth was flat persisted, remaining in US history textbooks into the 1980s, despite the fact that both historians of the medieval period and of Columbus debunked it repeatedly.
I look forward to watching the video when I get a bit of time.
I watched it, and while some of the historical information about Columbus and the understanding of the world being a sphere was interesting, as was some of the information about early European tribal movements and territorial claims talked about by the second fellow, what struck me was how politically correct it all was, and how easily it became a 'bash the right wingers like GWB for praising Columbus', and 'look what primitive nationalist movements are still extant in Europe today'. In Jones lecture, what struck me was that he'd set out so strongly to 'awaken' us to the idea that Columbus was some sort of revolutionary in the field of evil- single handedly setting the stage for how we would treat these new people we came across, and for a slave industry that would grow in part because of these newly discovered territories. A bit over the top, as if humans hadn't been treating other humans horribly since Cain and Abel, and Columbus had somehow invented new forms of evil. Hardly a 'serious' historical analysis- much too agenda driven. The second fellow wasn't much better, but he didn't have a main point that was so obviously flawed in it's application.
Maybe I've been around academics too much these last few years, but that stuff slides off me these days. Especially when you're talking about British thinkers, who so often feel the need to slide in a comment or two suggesting the superiority of Britain and British culture to America and American culture, so often I think they just can't help themselves. They've got a taste for it, and don't understand how it tastes to anyone else (somewhat like pate de foie gras, which seems like a beautiful delicacy to those who have the taste for it -- and is unspeakably foul-tasting to the rest of us).
At some point all that stuff just hits my filter and gets ignored, and I listen to the rest of what they have to say. I thought he had some good points, both about the ancient/medieval understanding of geography, and about how Columbus' success was completely predicated on his failure to understand as well as others (yet is presented to our high school students as a mark of his advanced, modern, scientific approach contrasted to medieval and Churchy ignorance).
I've been reading a lot of history of the European exploration of the New World lately as part of my Project Gutenburg duties. One really sad aspect of the times was that there were a number of Europeans on the scene in the 16th century who were horrified by what was being done to the Native American population and who tried hard to awaken consciences about it there and back home in Spain. Their complaints often found a sympathetic ear. Unfortunately, the almost universally accepted immediate solution was to start using black Africans for the slave labor instead, because they didn't die quite as quickly on the farms and in the mines.
Yeah, that's a good point. And there was so much money in it: a trader sailing out of Boston or New York could buy slaves from compliant African kings for rum, trade the slaves for sugar, and use the sugar to make a great deal more rum. It may well be fair to say that a substantial amount of the wealth of early America was founded on this slave trade, quite apart from the work the slaves did in the cotton-producing region to create wealth within the nation.
Jones cites Jeffrey Burton Russell in his presentation, who wrote "Inventing the Flat Earth." His debunking of the flat earth idea pretty much follows Russell's line of research.
Russel, however, is more concerned with how the myth persisted and why so many people today believe it despite the fact that historians regularly debunked it from its inception.
Perhaps the most interesting thing in Jones' presentation to me was that the myth was produced by a journalist who did well in fiction (both outside journalism and within, it seems). Some things never change.
Sure, Grim, I let most of it slide too, and look for something else of interest, or at least that has historically been my nature. Now, though, I feel that it's imperative to not sit idly by while these sorts of things are premised and allowed to be reinforced in the 'common knowledge', when they too need contesting. How you frame your argument is as important as the substance of the argument itself, isn't it?
A couple of years ago, I sat in a faculty meeting where two other professors expressed some surprise at the popularity of students using prayer as the selected activity in a project where the specific program was up to them, and they found it amusing and quaint (unsurprisingly, I suppose), and I said nothing. Later, that I said nothing really bothered me, as I felt I'd not been fair the the students who take their faith seriously enough to explore it in their architecture to defend them as normal and reasonable.
Now, the whole thing about the African slave trade perfectly illustrates the flaw in Jones thinking about Columbus, innovator of evil- that he was just doing what lots of other people were doing - I'm not condoning here, just saying that it was hardly unusual or surprising. Therefore, in an era where that was common, we look at the uncommon things Columbus did, which was make a discovery, however flawed his understanding of the facts, and his morals. Jones is on a 'crusade' and doesn't realize it (and here I use 'crusade' in the worst PC meaning).
As shocking as the treatment of the Indians and Africans was -- and it was very shocking -- it's also important to look at it in the context of what life was like for all laborers. Anybody with enough clout to get a royal commission didn't even have a concept of doing the brute labor himself. There were always scads of little unfortunate people to grow the food, make the clothes, draw the water, mine the salt. A head of household thought of himself as independent, and that was so as between him nand the outside world, but he was the beneficiary of something not far removed from a plantation full of slaves. The standard of living in the 16th century was brutal (have you ever walked around one of those replicas of the tiny Nina or Pinta?). Indians had to die in droves to get anyone's attention at all, especially since it took Europeans quite a while to decide whether they were even supposed to think of the members of this primitive new culture as humans with souls.
They were all steeped in a culture that found it infinitely more important whether people were converted to Christianity than whether they lived or died in harsh conditions, or even whether they were treated mercifully or cold-bloodedly murdered for their own good. If you're willing to torture crypto-Muslims or crypto-Jews to death back home, why would you flinch at killing a lot of scary heathens far from the nearest safe haven? What's more, the scary heathens were scarcely less willing to kill the Europeans if they got a chance.
How many gently reared, idealistic modern men could be sent to Alpha Centauri and expected to behave well? Acquiring property was everything to these men: it was a sudden chance to be a king. It's not as though they had a lot of experience with kings' benevolence: it was just a way to scramble up the greasy pole. Columbus was hardly the worst of the explorers. The whole lot, in Central and South America, were constantly engaging in intrigue and treachery against each other.
These guys weren't on a mission of mercy. The were down in the bear-pit in a world where you'd better come out on top if you wanted your kids to eat. It's awfully easy for us to say we'd do better, when most of us have never even imagined living that way. Broken inner cities don't behave better. Starving populations in modern war-torn countries don't behave better.
That's an argument I find very familiar, Tex. I often make a version of it myself.
Although they might have been right, in a way, that conversion is more important than survival. The only reason it ever got better was that Christian, and not Aztec, standards came to prevail. When they could afford it, they began to live up to them.
Granted, I'm strongly inclined to agree that people are better off believing in Christianity -- but not at the cost of torturing people into confessing belief. For one thing, every (ostensible) convert costs you an unknowable number of people who will hate you and your religion forever. For another, the souls of the torturers are forfeit.
If Christian ideals make for better lives, they ought to be able to stand on their own merits and win people by example. Otherwise they're just an in-group marker.
As for their souls being forfeit, I hope not! Even great sins can be forgiven.
It's fine to say that you'd prefer a Church that persuaded instead of coerced. That has worked well in China, in spite of official repression; not so well in Syria or Iraq these days, though. A little more coercion -- at least of the self-defensive type -- might be a good idea. Jesus told his disciples to be sure to arm themselves with swords even if they had to sell their cloaks.
But there's a further problem. There's no guarantee that Christian ideals will make for better lives in this world -- certainly not for you. Your neighbors will reap the benefits of your living a life of chastity and moderation, forgiveness and a devotion to loving them even when they are complete jerks. But for the individual who makes the decision, it may lead to sacrifice and even to martyrdom.
So does it make for a better life in such a way that people will flock to it, as if it were a marketable product? That's not so clear to me. The reason to convert is belief, not benefits.
I believe the Church must confine itself to persuasion instead of coercion in spite of any evidence that can be developed anywhere that persuasion doesn't "work." If conversion "works" via coercion, it isn't itself any more; it's a self-defeating tactic. There are untold numbers of unbelievers in the world today who can't get past the horrors perpetrated by Christians in the past.
And it was you, my friend! not I, who argued that "things got better" with Christianity. I'm not sure things on Earth ever get better on the whole. We make advances in some areas and lose ground in others. I'm not much a of a social progressivist. But even accepting your claim, for the sake of argument, that things got better with Christianity, I don't buy that as an excuse for conversion by the sword. If the Church needs martyrs to draw converts, let the martyrs be the uncoerced believers, not the tortured heretics.
Well, that's the current position of the Church, so you're in luck. We'll see where we stand in a hundred years, or a thousand. I expect we'll see more at least defensive violence, because we're being pressured -- one of the great purges against Christians is the one going on right now, today, while we live. It's just not going on right here, except intellectually (as Douglas was complaining about above).
I'm in an interesting place in the moral progress argument. For many years I argued that moral progress was actually impossible, as you've read not that long ago. But one of the things that could make it possible would be to have a divine law, a standard against which we could measure (as opposed to using our own opinions about what's right, which naturally float from generation to generation, with more recent generations generally being 'more like us' than previous ones).
Now there's two ways to look at that, one relativistic and one solid. The relativistic standard is that we could accept one of many divine laws, and judge them against each other: the Aztec versus the Catholic.
But that leaves us in the same situation: the only standard we have for judging the Aztec versus the Catholic is our own opinions about what would be better. Even if we obtained perfect agreement from all living men and women about that (the Aztecs weren't very nice, after all), we still wouldn't have anything stronger than opinion. It could change; some future generations could decide the Aztecs really had it right after all.
So the solid way of doing it is to say that, no, there is a God and we have learned something about his moral law, and while we could be wrong on certain details, or on application, the law itself doesn't really depend on our opinion of it. By that standard, moral progress is possible, it's just unlikely -- you're more likely to get ebb tides and high tides than to get real progress, the way that scientific progress pushes more-or-less ever forward.
So as a philosopher, I think there are three possibilities, two of which make moral progress actually impossible. But as a Christian, I find that I believe that the third one is really true.
It has the additional advantage of being the position of the Church's Founder. Even now, God could convert all of us by force. Why do you suppose He doesn't? His own words give us some clues.
That's a different matter from wether Christians have the right to fight to protect their bodies and their freedom.
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