FYI, this working paper summarizes my new account of the sacred. By making X sacred, a group can bind together around their shared view of X, motivate their members, and divert more energy toward X. But this comes at the cost of inducing costly signals of sacrifice for X, and inducing the distortions of setting apart, idealizing, and discouraging deliberative thought about X. Making X sacred can also discourage changes to X; treating X as sacred tends to induce hypocrisies, ones which changes tend to expose.
This is a really good post! Now that Christianity is weak you may be underestimating how much it held back progress in earlier times (who opposed "test tube babies"?) but this doesn't undermine the point that a safely Christian society kept in check the proliferation of other "idols" of worship and largely prevented today's "my sacred" vs "your sacred" conflicts, like Tolkien fanatics vs. inclusivity fanatics. Maybe the sort of sacred we need would look like Churchill-at-war-style martial nationalism, which is strong enough to unite us across many differences but doesn't get in the way of innovation. I'm not suggesting that martial nationalism is benign, but neither is Christianity, nor is any other serviceable sacred alternative.
One data point that I would add to your list of 48: it's usually in bad taste to call sacred things "sacred" because it makes explicit the irrationality that accompanies sacred things. Exceptions to this are fully established religions that have embraced and explicitly doubled down on certain irrationalities. Star Wars fans can get livid at the poor treatment of their favorite characters by the new movies, but they don't want to say that Luke Skywalker is sacred and should not be desecrated, even though that's how they feel.
And once again, geographical expansion is not the change being discussed - it is about ways in which the culture exists, such as companies forming, voting, not for profits, family sizes, inheritance practices, etc.
Modern Christianity holds sacred Jesus, God, the Bible, churches, marriage, families, saints, the Virgin Mary, some relics, some days of the year, equality before God, etc. It holds the following to be generally not sacred - civilian administrations, companies, animals, (cows, pigs, etc.), personal appearance as long as the privates are covered, lending, status that isn't directly related to religion, ancestors, most occupations, inheritance, etc.
The idea is that the Christian set of sacred classifications stood less in the way of the significant cultural changes we saw in the last few hundred years than other religions would have by directing people's natural need to hold things sacred away from interfering in day-to-day practical matters towards less problematic areas.
You say people don't have a need or tendency to see some things as sacred. Maybe so. I don't know how much variation in it there is, or whether this averages out within a culture or what. I don't know if Robin is right, but that's what the topic is here. All I'm saying is that the topic is not people wandering across the prairies in covered wagons, but ways of living and organising while also nearly 100% believing in Christianity.
My point about the American expansion in the 1820s is that it was due to all the land to expand into, and that any culture in that position with the technology to do it, regardless of religion, would have done the same. The results can be predicted just from greed, without needing religion as an explanatory variable.
The industrial revolution is a different topic you introduced. I would ask you, why did the industrial revolution not happen in Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Shinto, etc. countries? All of the cultures at the time were religious. What do you think it is about Christianity in particular? Does Christianity draw "more" sacred energy than Buddhism? Seems dubious.
Also, I don't think there's a finite amount of "sacred energy." Some cultures are religious fundamentalists, spending a lot of collective time and energy on things they consider sacred. Consider the Amish. Other cultures are much more secular and pragmatic. It seems the religious fundamentalist cultures just have a lot more focus on sacred things. This usually impedes progress.
Christianity once pulled more sacred energy to itself, and it explicitly approved many kinds of competition and market freedoms
The industrial revolution falls under that broad category of many kinds of competition and market freedoms.
Once again, no one has said here that Christianity created anything, so you ought to stop arguing as if anyone did. The point Robin is making is that Christianity may have occupied the 'sacredness attention' of people in a way that freed them to treat secular things in a practical non-sacred way.
The industrial revolution happened in Christian societies,. It is the co-existence that is being discussed here, not anything else.
What are you talking about? He doesn't say a word about the industrial revolution in Europe. Which also didn't have much to do with Christianity. The industrial revolution was a result of secular ideas and technologies, such as the printing press, the scientific method, and improvements in agriculture that supported the growth of towns and cities containing people with time to work on things other than farming.
He mentions US development as one example of something prevalent throughout the western world. Was the US frontier responsible for the industrial revolution in the UK, or Germany or France?
There are all sorts of aspects of Christianity that contributed in part to the development of the western world. That doesn't mean Christianity is being credited with inventing all technology, or any particular technology.
Genesis 1.28 And God blessed them saying, "Increase and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and rule over the fishes of the sea and the birds of the heaven and all the domestic animals and the entire earth and all the creeping things which creep upon the earth."
I believe that we should subdue the earth. I support the use of pesticides, GMOs, nuclear power, I even think we should at least look at wiping out the varieties of mosquitoes that bite humans, but I hear the Appeal to nature fallacy more and more from the people that go to the church that I attend. Today natural is treated by too many as ideal and people seem to think that it is wrong to change to much for our human benefit.
Well, he mentioned the rapid growth of the U.S. two centuries ago. That was the era of westward expansion. He also mentioned disruptive changes that other countries might not have allowed. Again, that's because developing a new frontier always allows for a higher level of disruptive changes. Which is because central authorities have trouble keeping pace with the new frontier; they can't regulate what they don't well understand or what they are physically distant from. We saw this in the early days of the Internet as well.
The technology allowing westerners to conquer native American land didn't come from Christianity. Westerners had guns, diseases, sedentary farming techniques that meant they would permanently occupy territory after claiming it and could support higher population density. Christianity can't claim to have invented any of those things.
I don't think Robin is talking primarily about westward geographical expansion of the US, but more the technology and organisational ability in the first place, and it's continued rapid development and deployment.
The US expansion two centuries ago can't be attributed primarily to Christianity. Rather, it was the fact that there was a huge amount of valuable westward land for Americans to expand into, populated only by natives with inferior technology who couldn't stop them from doing that. In such a scenario, what else could possibly happen? It doesn't matter what religion the invaders had; they had superior technology and (like every group of people anywhere) a thirst for power and wealth. Moral or religious justifications for conquest will always be invented post-hoc if necessary.
(Still not liking your non-standard use of the word "sacred" - people normally just use this term for stuff directly related to religion.)
This is a really good post! Now that Christianity is weak you may be underestimating how much it held back progress in earlier times (who opposed "test tube babies"?) but this doesn't undermine the point that a safely Christian society kept in check the proliferation of other "idols" of worship and largely prevented today's "my sacred" vs "your sacred" conflicts, like Tolkien fanatics vs. inclusivity fanatics. Maybe the sort of sacred we need would look like Churchill-at-war-style martial nationalism, which is strong enough to unite us across many differences but doesn't get in the way of innovation. I'm not suggesting that martial nationalism is benign, but neither is Christianity, nor is any other serviceable sacred alternative.
One data point that I would add to your list of 48: it's usually in bad taste to call sacred things "sacred" because it makes explicit the irrationality that accompanies sacred things. Exceptions to this are fully established religions that have embraced and explicitly doubled down on certain irrationalities. Star Wars fans can get livid at the poor treatment of their favorite characters by the new movies, but they don't want to say that Luke Skywalker is sacred and should not be desecrated, even though that's how they feel.
And once again, geographical expansion is not the change being discussed - it is about ways in which the culture exists, such as companies forming, voting, not for profits, family sizes, inheritance practices, etc.
Modern Christianity holds sacred Jesus, God, the Bible, churches, marriage, families, saints, the Virgin Mary, some relics, some days of the year, equality before God, etc. It holds the following to be generally not sacred - civilian administrations, companies, animals, (cows, pigs, etc.), personal appearance as long as the privates are covered, lending, status that isn't directly related to religion, ancestors, most occupations, inheritance, etc.
The idea is that the Christian set of sacred classifications stood less in the way of the significant cultural changes we saw in the last few hundred years than other religions would have by directing people's natural need to hold things sacred away from interfering in day-to-day practical matters towards less problematic areas.
You say people don't have a need or tendency to see some things as sacred. Maybe so. I don't know how much variation in it there is, or whether this averages out within a culture or what. I don't know if Robin is right, but that's what the topic is here. All I'm saying is that the topic is not people wandering across the prairies in covered wagons, but ways of living and organising while also nearly 100% believing in Christianity.
My point about the American expansion in the 1820s is that it was due to all the land to expand into, and that any culture in that position with the technology to do it, regardless of religion, would have done the same. The results can be predicted just from greed, without needing religion as an explanatory variable.
The industrial revolution is a different topic you introduced. I would ask you, why did the industrial revolution not happen in Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Shinto, etc. countries? All of the cultures at the time were religious. What do you think it is about Christianity in particular? Does Christianity draw "more" sacred energy than Buddhism? Seems dubious.
Also, I don't think there's a finite amount of "sacred energy." Some cultures are religious fundamentalists, spending a lot of collective time and energy on things they consider sacred. Consider the Amish. Other cultures are much more secular and pragmatic. It seems the religious fundamentalist cultures just have a lot more focus on sacred things. This usually impedes progress.
Christianity once pulled more sacred energy to itself, and it explicitly approved many kinds of competition and market freedoms
The industrial revolution falls under that broad category of many kinds of competition and market freedoms.
Once again, no one has said here that Christianity created anything, so you ought to stop arguing as if anyone did. The point Robin is making is that Christianity may have occupied the 'sacredness attention' of people in a way that freed them to treat secular things in a practical non-sacred way.
The industrial revolution happened in Christian societies,. It is the co-existence that is being discussed here, not anything else.
What are you talking about? He doesn't say a word about the industrial revolution in Europe. Which also didn't have much to do with Christianity. The industrial revolution was a result of secular ideas and technologies, such as the printing press, the scientific method, and improvements in agriculture that supported the growth of towns and cities containing people with time to work on things other than farming.
He mentions US development as one example of something prevalent throughout the western world. Was the US frontier responsible for the industrial revolution in the UK, or Germany or France?
There are all sorts of aspects of Christianity that contributed in part to the development of the western world. That doesn't mean Christianity is being credited with inventing all technology, or any particular technology.
A related comment: As a Christian I believe:
Genesis 1.28 And God blessed them saying, "Increase and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and rule over the fishes of the sea and the birds of the heaven and all the domestic animals and the entire earth and all the creeping things which creep upon the earth."
I believe that we should subdue the earth. I support the use of pesticides, GMOs, nuclear power, I even think we should at least look at wiping out the varieties of mosquitoes that bite humans, but I hear the Appeal to nature fallacy more and more from the people that go to the church that I attend. Today natural is treated by too many as ideal and people seem to think that it is wrong to change to much for our human benefit.
Well, he mentioned the rapid growth of the U.S. two centuries ago. That was the era of westward expansion. He also mentioned disruptive changes that other countries might not have allowed. Again, that's because developing a new frontier always allows for a higher level of disruptive changes. Which is because central authorities have trouble keeping pace with the new frontier; they can't regulate what they don't well understand or what they are physically distant from. We saw this in the early days of the Internet as well.
The technology allowing westerners to conquer native American land didn't come from Christianity. Westerners had guns, diseases, sedentary farming techniques that meant they would permanently occupy territory after claiming it and could support higher population density. Christianity can't claim to have invented any of those things.
I don't think Robin is talking primarily about westward geographical expansion of the US, but more the technology and organisational ability in the first place, and it's continued rapid development and deployment.
The US expansion two centuries ago can't be attributed primarily to Christianity. Rather, it was the fact that there was a huge amount of valuable westward land for Americans to expand into, populated only by natives with inferior technology who couldn't stop them from doing that. In such a scenario, what else could possibly happen? It doesn't matter what religion the invaders had; they had superior technology and (like every group of people anywhere) a thirst for power and wealth. Moral or religious justifications for conquest will always be invented post-hoc if necessary.
(Still not liking your non-standard use of the word "sacred" - people normally just use this term for stuff directly related to religion.)