Religious Empires
From Mbscientific_wiki
Christian and Islamic Hyper-Empires
Christianity came to power in the person Constantine I, the new Emperor of Rome (312 AD), who then established the new Capital, Constantinople, in Byzantium. This, Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire, was the first to fully support Christianity in form of the One Holy Catholic Church, posthumously declaring St. Peter The Apostle as the First Pope.
Following the fall of Rome and the Western Roman Empire (476 AD), the church entered into a long period of missionary activity among the Germanic peoples, Celts, Slavs, Vikings , Hungarians, etc. In time, with conversions, the church was established among the masses and coupled with kingship throughout Europe. And even though Rome itself had fallen, the Papacy persisted in retaining its presence in Rome as the center of Christian Teaching, the central point of the missionary work. In combination of Religious Monopoly coupled with rooted kingships throughout Europe, The Holly Roman Empire was in full reign by 1100 AD (src:European History).
Islam (622 AD) grew out of Saudi Arabia and in about 130 years was established as a Hyper-Empire, extending from China and India to the east to Russia to the north, to Africa to the south and Spain to the west.
During the Golden Age of Islam (750-1258), the seat of the Caliphates in Baghdad had become the central point of learning and commerce. Among many institutions, the House of Wisdom was established, accumulating scholarly works from all over the empire, including works of classical Greece, Persia and India. Baghdad's population might have been a million or more, gathered from all over the Islamic world, including the best and the brightest. The influence of the accumulated scholarly works and the resultant practices would therefore spread all over the Islamic world, Including Cordoba in Islamic Spain.
As with all other empires, Islamic and Christian Empires had conflicts over everything, from religion to resources to territoriality, culminating in multiple wars including the Christian Crusades (1095-1272).
Baghdad fell to the Mongol Empire in 1278. The Islamic Empire fragmented and then in time reconstituted under the Mongol Khans (which converted to Islam), forming the Ottoman Empire to the west (of Islamic lands, to the east of Europe).
In Europe, while the Western Roman Church grew out of the ashes in the Dark Ages, The Byzantine Empire, under constant attack, was faltering, dragging the influence of the Eastern Orthodox Church (of Byzantium) with it. By the time Byzantium fell to the Ottomans (1453 AD), Roman Catholicism was in the height of its power. And then things began to change.
In 1439 Printing Press is assembled by Johannes Gutenberg. And in 1492 Islamic Spain fell. In short order all of the scientific and technological knowledge accumulated during the reign of Islamic Empire, covering the knowledge passed on through the Greek, Persian, Roman, Indian and Even Chinese civilizations, were now being disseminated via the printing press. European Renaissance was launched.
When Martin Luther started the Protestant Rebellion (1517) many of the European Kingdoms where primed to break away from the ideological monopoly of The Papacy. In 1534, Under Henry VIII, England broke away. Protestant ideas were gaining converts resulting in the all out Thirty Year Wars (1618-1648) of Protestants and Catholics in the Holy Roman Empire, involving most of the European powers.
Assault on the power base of the church was one thing, debunking the very core ideology of the church as the carriers of the word of God was another thing altogether. Scientific thinking tried to wrestle the heavens from the dominion of the religious order. It was considered the word of God that set earth as the center of the universe and gave man dominion over earth. Then came along Copernicus who said that earth and other planets revolved around the sun (heliocentric model - 1540). That was heresy to the core, and Copernican thinkers joined the ranks of the heretics (Giardino Bruno was burnt alive at the stake in Rome -1600).
Galileo empirically verified the heliocentric model (1610). For that they put him under house arrest for the rest of his life (the sitting Pope was his life long buddy). All of that was put to rest by Kepler (early 17th century). He actually codified planetary motion. It was corroborated, it was factual. And if that went against the word of God according to any religion, well too bad, fact is a fact. It is interesting that Christianity actually absorbed that. It adapted to a rather devastating body blow.
By late 17, early 18th century Newton had a completely corroborated (all be it partial) model of the universe. But he himself saw God as the master planner. The response was rather brilliant, even if out of necessity. It went like this: if science factually debunks a religion doctrine, and the evidence is corroborated, then we'll just absorb the science within the religious domain, and we'll call it creation science (sound familiar?!). Mind you, this was all an argument within Christianity, the rest of the world was doing just fine!
While all of this is going on, Europe is in the thralls of its colonial outbreak. Naval powers of Spain, Portugal, England, France and Netherlands had begun the process of global exploit and colonization. That implied naval vessels, warfare tools and tactics, a huge military and the logistical support structures that go along with it. That meant building all manners of things. So the nascent scientific revolution of the renaissance went hand in hand with engineering, craftsmanship and all of the other skill sets required for the ventures (Src: wikipedia:Colonialism).
The advent of the (James) Watt steam engine in the 1770s fed right into that industrial build up, ushering in the Industrial Revolution. That firmly established the domain of science and engineering. That domain was no longer one of abstraction for its own sake, it now meant building tools, devices, it meant making money. That domain was now the domain of powerful, wealthy and politically connected industrialist. The domain of science and engineering was no longer manned by few pioneering thinkers. It was well funded, well manned, industry supported, university educated. It was the prime mover of the future of societies, and whoever couldn't jump on the band wagon got left behind, subordinate to the industrial powers. And that is exactly happened to the rest of the world, including Islamic countries, India, China, Japan, the rest of Asia and all of Africa.
In short, what started in our social evolutionary morphology as settlements, growing into kingdoms, and into empires then mega-empires and hyper-empires of Christianity and Islam, had fully fledged to the World Wide Colonial Empires of Europe.
Scientific-Engineering Domination as the Social Evolutionary Driver
Through industrial revolution it became self-evident that it is the depth of understanding of the physical nature that allows for invention of all of the tools and technologies that engender that social revolution. So, examination and practice of pure science as well as applied science not only became fashionable, popular, but it was funded in large scales.
Therefore throughout eighteenth and nineteenth century the scientific-engineering domain was expanding exponentially:
- Works in pure and applied mathematics of Leonhard Euler (1707-1783) Pierre Laplace (1749-1827) among many other had pioneered what became modern mathematical physics.
- Works of Michael Faraday (1791-1867), James Maxwell (1831-1879) and many others covered electromagnetism. That work, would usher in the era of electrical devices, for example:
- Telephone patent was issued to Alexander Graham Bell in 1876
- In 1876, James Woodward obtained a US patent on the light bulb, selling a share of his patent to Edison in 1885.
- In September 4, 1882, Thomas Edison switched on the first electrical generating and power distribution system
- Mechanical Engineering had come to its own producing every thing from Steam Locomotives (1804-1829 early models) and Steam Ships (John Fitch Steamboat 1788) to cotton gin (Eli Whitney - 1793) to revolver pistols (Sam Colt 1848) to Gatlin Guns (Dr. Richard J. Gatling - 1861) and everything in between, proliferating in every industrial niche.
- In Biology Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859. Germ Theory was proved by Louis Pasteur - 1862, ushering in the eradication of germ bearing disease in the Pasteurization process.
And that is just to note a few genres in scientific proliferation. The London World Exhibit at the Crystal Palace (1851) brought together over 13,000 exhibitions from around the world, viewed by over 6 million people. Science was popular, even sexy! Scientific thinking and application was now socially selected for.
I am going to segue here to make a pertinent point. In this time period science and religion effectively began to divorce. And as divorces go, they don't make for easy partners. In fact, religion and science clash, within the individual's mind as well as the social order. Notice that within the discipline of morphological flows religious thinking and scientific thinking reconcile. They are two aspects of our morphological evolution, as we have chronicled. But outside of the discipline, religion and science do not reconcile, they clash. Specifically, science requires scientific thought as its foundation. You have an idea, then you prove (corroborate) it or disprove it, and until proven its just that, an idea. Religious thinking goes by faith, there is nothing to corroborate. So, faith and scientific thought clash. But within the morphological flow discipline they do reconcile, in fact both make perfect sense. Our brains are wired to create closure between the known and the unknown. We sense and need to be part of the big picture. So what science can't figure out is punted to the realm of religion. It can provide the psychological refuge that comforts and nurtures. Science is necessarily cold. Religion must be warm and comforting. That is unless you piss off the guardians of religion, in which case they excommunicate you, persecute you, punish you, kill you and then throw you in hell.
All of that makes perfect sense within the discipline of morphological flows. It is perfectly ok to be anthropomorphic, to create God in your own image. After all you encompass all that you know; who else would you create your God in the image of? Of course we model the universe in terms that we understand. What else would we do, model it in terms we don't understand? We are linear creatures subjected to a narrow bandwidth of seeing space-time and we model our universe in that sense. It is imperfect by definition, but perfectly understandable. Within the discipline we don't expect anything differently.
Morphological Markers
1- Social Cohesion - Byzantium, with unified kingship and religion had a long rain (some 1100 years). Though as usual warfare was the rule and not the exception, Byzantium by enlarge was maintained until it finally began to falter under persistent attack.
In the western Europe however, warfare was constant throughout this time period (ergo Dark Ages). One can argue that in this period Catholicism was the only commonality between waring tribes. Perhaps that is the reason why kingships as well as the masses were so beholden to the church. In times of constant warfare, turmoil and brutality, the church was the only source for solace.
The warlike profile of European powers continued throughout the dominion of Papacy, reformation and colonialism.
In the Golden Age of Islam, like Byzantium, there was only one religious/political center, so there was a measure of cohesion through governance and religion. After the fall of the Baghdad, we find a similar situation in the Islamic world as in Europe, that is many warlike kingdoms with the same religion.
So even though one can argue that political cohesion was scant throughout this period, religious cohesion not only persisted but spread. That speaks loudly to the stability of religion. As stated before, morphologically, Empires form a pyramidal hierarchy with all of the power concentrated at the top. The top is inherently unstable. Kings, dynasties, empires, they all come and go. But the bottom of the pyramid, the population is stable, as a rule. The religion is practiced by the masses, so as they perpetuate, the religion perpetuates.
So what we see is tribal separation in form of nation states, coupled together with religious cohesion.
2- Technology- We can see two main points. One is the absorption of knowledge from all over the world in the Islamic hyper-empire. The second is the absorption of that knowledge by the European Renaissances.
Once that knowledge was mass produced through print, memetic evolution jump started. Universities and learning centers were established all over Europe. New knowledge was forged in relatively short order. And once the industrial revolution was under way, technology became the driver of social evolution.
By the end of this period, say 1900, our social morphology spanned the globe and was intertwined like never before because of technology. When a new technological piece was invented, every nation clamored to get it, as quickly as possible, then better it, to best the other nations. National competition, was now technological competition. And whoever couldn't keep up was a target of subjugation. The result was that technological growth was exponential.
3- Economy- Wealth, along with territorial size, size of trade networks, population size, and technological might, grew exponentially.
Paper money was first introduced and in short order gained ground to become the preferred tool of conducting financial transactions. Prior to that fortunes where tied in with physical objects such as gold, silver etc. So the amount of wealth was capped by the availability of those objects. So economics itself was capped by the availability of those objects. Paper money has a virtual aspect to it. Though the paper is physical, its worth is a virtual number printed on the paper. This single facet removes the artificial cap of availability of objects such as gold or silver. Therefore, paper money, and monetary notes in general, can potentially free up economic activities to fit the commerce at hand as opposed to fitting the gold or silver at hand. But that creates another problem.
As the scale of trade increased unfamiliar situation pertaining to money exchange became problematic, these are concepts the we now understand as parts of macro-economics: inflation, monetary policy, price elasticity, supply and demand, capital formation, taxation capacity, currency valuation, etc. These terms began to force a scientific approach to economic analysis after the renaissance period. By 17 and 18th centuries there were myriad of schools of economic thought (also see http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/).
The result was an economic hybrid. Although paper money and notes had virtualized economics, value of money was still tied in to gold (wikipedia:Gold_standard) and silver. That persisted until the economies in 20th century would become to big. There weren't enough gold to cover the virtual currencies in circulation (more on this in the next chapter).
Perhaps the most significant implementation of economic virtuaization, taking advantage of new political realities in the newly born United States, was Hamiltonian economics, implemented by Alexander Hamilton, among others, in the late 18th century. He in essence created the modern stock market. Where as before stocks were bought by a few wealthy merchants, in the new American political regime everyone could be a shareholder. That system, free market capitalism, by which we live today, allows for raising vast amounts of capital that even governments couldn't dream of. That allowed for the rapid implementation of industrial revolution and the military industrial complex.
4- Military- We see the first evidence of use of explosives delivered by cannon fire in the Islamic world of the 13th century. Cannons made their entry in Europe during the Islamic wars against Spain in the same time period. Firearms and artillery, as well as the means of delivery of the firepower thorough armies and navies, changes warfare, both tactically and strategically. Prior to this period armies could size up one another by counting the men in arms. Firepower, e.g. artillery, rapid fire revolvers, rifles, and mounted machine guns changes that completely. By 1900, relatively small battalions, even a handful of ships, could and did subjugate entire nations who didn't have it. That is how colonialism spread so rapidly all over the globe.
Ironclad, steam powered, ships were introduced in this time period. Taking them farther and faster and impervious to cannon balls.
Perhaps most importantly, military was now employed as the tool for global influence in support of the policies of nations. Whereas before armies had to conquer a territory and stay put, now a few gunships could subjugate a ruler, implement a trade agreement (by force if necessary) and open up the territory for exploitation, and then leave to do the same thing with another territory. And, if from time to time there was resistance, the gunships could return for another visit. So the colonial powers could rule by proxy and effectively exploit the newfound riches without even being there in large numbers. And if they really liked the place, they could set up colonies, possibly with a relatively small garrison, or not, the colonists were armed enough to take care of small matters themselves.
Technological, economic and military capacities of European powers resulted in truly global national morphologies. Though nations were still tribal, harboring all of the territorial ambitions, national egos and resentments and other xenophobic drivers that usher tribal conflict and warfare. And, as we see in the next chapter, the case with the European powers was no different.
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