8 ms·

One of the things I gathered when reading the excellent Fields of Blood by Karen Armstrong is that this 'rule of law' property of religion was a fundamental fac

One of the things I gathered when reading the excellent Fields of Blood by Karen Armstrong is that this 'rule of law' property of religion was a fundamental facet of early-modern history. The idea that all persons could be held answerable to one set of rules and principles is so alluring that you have people even today trying to hold secular American leadership accountable to them. Religion, initially, came in two flavors. One for the aristocracy, which was oriented around finding meaning in the many ethically and morally awful things they had to do to maintain their territories, human capital, and privileged lifestyles. The other was for commoners, who needed ways to cooperate and trust each other. If two people didn't know each other, then they could still trust each other if they spoke the same language, worshipped the same gods, paid tithes to the same temples. Religion was how they ordered their thoughts about what was right and wrong. It didn't matter for the people at the time what was scientifically or rigorously right, just that it was the same throughout a people. Until the age of Christianity, rulers had no interest in how the commoners believed. But as the world became more and more connected and the scale of warfare grew to where conscription became more and more necessary, rulers increasingly started to try to control how their populace worshipped. Fast-forward to the age of Gutenberg. Bibles getting printed in the vernacular, so that ordinary people could read them, was a game changer. All of a sudden, religious hypocrisy became a thing, people with power became accountable for how they used that power, rather than just making up interpretations amongst themselves as they went along.

olavk 11y ago
Sounds like bunk! Religion has pre-historic origin, it is older than agriculture and hence older than aristocracy as a class. Pre-christian rulers did have interest in how commoners worshiped - for example the Romans (though otherwise tolerant of various religious beliefs) insisted that all citizens took part in the emperor cult, which lead to problems for the first Christians. The rule of law is certainly older than Gutenberg - for example the pre-christian Icelanders held public recitals of the laws, so literacy was not required for laws to be public knowledge.
- vinceguidry 11y ago
  The rule of law, as we call it, is a specific term meaning that leaders are to held accountable to laws just as subjects are. It is rule by laws, and not people. It was pretty much invented by the English. A variety of factors, primarily geographical, prevented it from being adopted in continental Europe for a long time after it was already pretty-well-settled in Britain. The rule of law was one of the most important building blocks of the British Empire. Laws themselves, of course, are as old as civilization. Religion is, as you say, older than civilization, but it is worth examining how religion worked pre-historically and after the rise of civilization, as they are very different. You can learn about prehistoric religion in the aforementioned Fields of Blood. Essentially humans have three brains, the basal ganglia, the limbic system, and the neocortex, all of which gives us various drives. Religion is the child of the neocortex and serves to make sense of the other two drive us to do.
  - vagelim 11y ago
    The rule of law was most certainly not invented by the English. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_law
    - vinceguidry 11y ago
      "Invention" is somewhat arbitrary when discussing topics as these. You have to draw a line somewhere, and the English were the first to actually subjugate the head of state to their system of laws. Therefore I say the English invented rule of law. They may not have been the first to think that the king needs to follow the law, but they were the first to successfully demand it. Obviously you can look back through history and find isolated examples of things that kind-of look like rule of law, but the English were the first to do it right. A fun thing to do is to go through different countries you're interested in and analyze how much of the rule of law each of them actually implements, rather than just professes to have. Laws and justice are such appealing notions that even tyrants feel the need to put the people they want to execute on "trial". Plenty of totalitarian governments have nominal "constitutions" that aren't worth the paper they're printed on. I personally consider it a measure of how advanced and robust a society is. One should not think of democracy as "people having elections", but rather as a collection of different principles which society forces the people that would want to rule it to follow. Is there a functioning legal system? Is there a system for transfer of power? Is there a working constitution? The rule of law is an emergent property that rests on all of these things.
laotzu 11y ago
Very interesting. I wonder about the relationship between the advent of the Gutenberg press and the Inquisition which began shortly after.
- vinceguidry 11y ago
  The Inquisition was not one thing that started at one time. The pope had charged cardinals with convening councils called inquisitions to combat heresy since the 12th century. They were initially not the violent affairs we think of today. I have yet to really study the Spanish Inquisition in detail, which is what you appear to be referring to, as it was convened some twenty years after the first Gutenberg was published, but I doubt the it had much to do with it. The Gutenberg took a hundred years to wreak its particular havoc in the form of the Reformation. It was Martin Luther himself who had translated the Bible into German.
  - laotzu 11y ago
    While the printing press helped spread the bible, it also helped spread around revolutionary ideas like Copernicus' On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres which greatly influenced thinkers like Giordano Bruno, who in turn printed and published works on the matter, ultimately leading to his execution at the stake by the Inquisition.

olavk 11y ago

Sounds like bunk! Religion has pre-historic origin, it is older than agriculture and hence older than aristocracy as a class. Pre-christian rulers did have interest in how commoners worshiped - for example the Romans (though otherwise tolerant of various religious beliefs) insisted that all citizens took part in the emperor cult, which lead to problems for the first Christians. The rule of law is certainly older than Gutenberg - for example the pre-christian Icelanders held public recitals of the laws, so literacy was not required for laws to be public knowledge.

vinceguidry 11y ago
The rule of law, as we call it, is a specific term meaning that leaders are to held accountable to laws just as subjects are. It is rule by laws, and not people. It was pretty much invented by the English. A variety of factors, primarily geographical, prevented it from being adopted in continental Europe for a long time after it was already pretty-well-settled in Britain. The rule of law was one of the most important building blocks of the British Empire. Laws themselves, of course, are as old as civilization. Religion is, as you say, older than civilization, but it is worth examining how religion worked pre-historically and after the rise of civilization, as they are very different. You can learn about prehistoric religion in the aforementioned Fields of Blood. Essentially humans have three brains, the basal ganglia, the limbic system, and the neocortex, all of which gives us various drives. Religion is the child of the neocortex and serves to make sense of the other two drive us to do.
- vagelim 11y ago
  The rule of law was most certainly not invented by the English. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_law
  - vinceguidry 11y ago
    "Invention" is somewhat arbitrary when discussing topics as these. You have to draw a line somewhere, and the English were the first to actually subjugate the head of state to their system of laws. Therefore I say the English invented rule of law. They may not have been the first to think that the king needs to follow the law, but they were the first to successfully demand it. Obviously you can look back through history and find isolated examples of things that kind-of look like rule of law, but the English were the first to do it right. A fun thing to do is to go through different countries you're interested in and analyze how much of the rule of law each of them actually implements, rather than just professes to have. Laws and justice are such appealing notions that even tyrants feel the need to put the people they want to execute on "trial". Plenty of totalitarian governments have nominal "constitutions" that aren't worth the paper they're printed on. I personally consider it a measure of how advanced and robust a society is. One should not think of democracy as "people having elections", but rather as a collection of different principles which society forces the people that would want to rule it to follow. Is there a functioning legal system? Is there a system for transfer of power? Is there a working constitution? The rule of law is an emergent property that rests on all of these things.

laotzu 11y ago

Very interesting. I wonder about the relationship between the advent of the Gutenberg press and the Inquisition which began shortly after.

vinceguidry 11y ago
The Inquisition was not one thing that started at one time. The pope had charged cardinals with convening councils called inquisitions to combat heresy since the 12th century. They were initially not the violent affairs we think of today. I have yet to really study the Spanish Inquisition in detail, which is what you appear to be referring to, as it was convened some twenty years after the first Gutenberg was published, but I doubt the it had much to do with it. The Gutenberg took a hundred years to wreak its particular havoc in the form of the Reformation. It was Martin Luther himself who had translated the Bible into German.
- laotzu 11y ago
  While the printing press helped spread the bible, it also helped spread around revolutionary ideas like Copernicus' On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres which greatly influenced thinkers like Giordano Bruno, who in turn printed and published works on the matter, ultimately leading to his execution at the stake by the Inquisition.