Medieval science and Justinian I

In the last couple of weeks, I had an exchange with Richard Carrier on medieval technology. Sadly, I missed the best links on the Internet about the question. These come from the web site of Paul Gans of New York University and cover the horse collar controversy and the stirrup controversy. Reading them was a bit eerie. You see, Gans sees the great horse collar dispute as primarily a bun fight between classicists (Richard Carrier, in the red corner) and medievalists (me, in the blue corner). Gans himself concludes that the medievalists were mainly right but probably overstated the case when they said that Roman horse harnesses straggled the unfortunate creatures that had to wear them. Trouble is, Gans is a medievalist himself, so of course he decides against the classicists. Do also check out the rest of Gans’s medieval technology web page.

My new website, jameshannam.com, intended to try and get my book God’s Philosopher’s: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science has had a good first week. It’s had over a thousand visitors and a hundred people have registered their interest in the book. As it didn’t appear on Google until yesterday and has a very low page rank, I’m quite pleased. Several of my essays from Bede’s Library are linked to Wikipedia so I thought, in my innocence, I could add some links to the essays now on the new site as well. Alas, I was accused of spamming and all the links were taken down. Luckily, most have now been re-instated but it is quite a time consuming process.

Finally, I hope to finish an article on one of the most notorious events in intellectual history – the closure of the Athens academy of Plato in 529AD by the Emperor Justinian. Except, he didn’t really. As we so many of these stories, it’s amazing to find the source for it is so unreliable. It is only attested in the history of Agathias, who was not born until ten years after the purported closure. Furthermore, the alleged decree that Justinian issued is not found in the voluminous records of Roman law dating from his reign. It turns out, Justinian may have shut off public funds for the pagans teaching in Athens (although not in Alexandria, oddly enough), but he never issued a decree closing down the pagan schools. I hope to get an article up in the next few days. Then I should finally sit down and write one on the history of human dissection, about which misinformation still abounds, as a correspondent pointed out to me this week.

Click here to read the first chapter of God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science absolutely free.

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Is the Jesus Myth a Conspiracy Theory?

Ockham’s Razor, a conservative blog in the US, has picked up on an article from New Scientist magazine explaining how to construct your very own conspiracy theory. They apply this to the lunatic fringe-ideas on 9/11, the death of Diana and the assassination of JFK. Obviously, I immediately wanted to know how the Jesus Myth stacked up. Do Jesus Mythers follow standard conspiracy theory behaviour? There’s only one way to find out. Here is the New Scientist low-down on producing a conspiracy, coupled with my comments on the Jesus Myth.

Pick your adversary: A sense of anomie (dislocation from society and authority) fuels beliefs in conspiracy theories, so pick a big bad organisation of some sort - government or big business is ideal.

Well, Jesus Mythers tend to blame everything on the Christian Church which is certainly big and, by their lights, bad.

Choose your event: You’ll need a big, contemporary newsworthy event around which to weave your theory.

No question here – the life and death of Jesus was one of the biggest events in history, even if it took a while for the world to realise.

Develop your story: Construct your theory from carefully selected information that weaves together into a compelling story. If something doesn’t fit, reinterpret it in line with your theory.

This is classic Jesus Myther strategy. The story of how early Christians pulled the wool over the eyes of everyone including, it seems, themselves is certainly compelling. It is crafted from carefully selected and re-interpreted evidence weaved into a narrative that can then be used to explain away the evidence that doesn’t fit.

Create uncertainty: Question existing evidence or find new evidence that contradicts the “official” account.

The huge amount of effort that Jesus Mythers put in to invalidate the historical sources such as Tacitus, Josephus, Paul’s letters and the Gospels fits this perfectly. Their standard tactics are to find tiny inconsistencies and blow them up out of all proportion.

Prepare your defence: If someone highlights a gap or inconsistency in your evidence, don’t be afraid to tweak your story, but keep the core conspiracy in place.

After a lot of work, the pagan parallels argument of the Freke and Gandy has been largely defeated, but the Jesus Mythers simply retreat from that and move on to something else.

Broaden the circle of conspirators: to include those who question your position: “They’re denying the truth - they must be involved too!”

For Mythers, any Christian scholar is an apologist and all Christian sources are ruled out of court. Just for disagreeing with the Jesus Myth, atheist historians have been accused of being closet Christians on the Secular Web’s discussion boards.

So it’s official. According to the New Scientist, the Jesus Myth is a conspiracy theory.

Click here to read the first chapter of God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science absolutely free.

Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.

War and Peace and Religion

It’s hardly possible to walk into a bookshop at the moment without being regaled by titles telling you that religion is a bad thing. This is odd because several of the authors are scientists or philosophers who are more than a little familiar with evolutionary theory. It’s obvious that religion is pretty close to being a human universal and that, despite all the confident predictions of rationalists, it is stubbornly refusing to die out.

Richard Dawkins thinks that religion is an undesirable side effect of a useful adaptation, rather like the way that a moth’s lunar navigation system causes it to circle into a candle flame. Lewis Wolpert says it is a by-product of our tendency to assume everything is conscious and has purposes. Daniel Dennett supposes a hostile meme that spreads from brain to brain, reproducing like a virus of the mind. The trouble is, as any competent evolutionist should be able to see, these explanations of religion are inherently unlikely. They assume the exception before testing the rule. Most traits are adaptations that give their bearers some sort of evolutionary edge and religion is unlikely to be any different. Otherwise, if an anti-religious culture appeared, it would quickly dominate its neighbours which are handicapped by irrational faith. In fact, all humanity’s efforts at anti-religious societies have been appalling failures.

So, if we are honest about it, religion is likely to have survived because it does us good. If it looks like faith is a bad thing then we are probably looking at the matter the wrong way. Take the question of whether religion causes war. You have to admit that apologetic attempts to defuse this argument have been pretty pathetic. When Oxford theologian Alister McGrath says that most religious violence is cover for another motivation, usually political or economic, he clearly hasn’t read his history. It is absurd to claim that the medieval crusaders who marched across Europe to do battle with the infidel were not almost entirely motivated by a muscular Christian faith. Likewise, as we are now realising thanks to the searing honesty of ex-jihadis like Ed Hassan, Islamic suicide bombers and their masters are driven by a fanatical believe that their interpretation of Islam is true and demands that they make war on the West.

So yes, obviously religions cause wars. The point everyone misses is that they are even better at promoting peace. We can’t easily see this because of something I call the ‘headline fallacy’. Conflict is newsworthy while peace is a bit tedious. Look at the Middle East. While there’s no doubt that the Arab/Israeli conflict is fuelled by Judaism and Islam, it is more surprising that there are so few wars between Arab states. They are all led by dictators of varying degrees of unpleasantness but somehow they manage to rub along OK. The only exception in recent years was when the avowedly secular Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. When he needed to court Arab support, he promptly found religion and pretended an ostentatious piety. It isn’t outrageous to suggest that Islam, which forbids attacks on the faithful, prevents many more wars in the Middle East than it causes.

Proving why things don’t happen, however, is tricky. But there are enough examples of religion holding people together to make it more than likely that faith is a better promoter of peace than war.

Click here to read the first chapter of God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science absolutely free.

Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.

Read the first chapter of my book "God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science"

Regular readers will have been following my efforts to find a publisher for my book God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science. Many publishers and independent readers thought the book was good but they were not convinced that there was a market for medieval science, however accessibly presented. I want to prove them wrong.

So today, I am launching a new website: jameshannam.com. You can download the introduction and first chapter of God’s Philosophers absolutely free. If you like what you read, then please register your interest in purchasing a copy once it is published. You will not be committing yourself to anything and the resulting mailing list will only be used to send one email to inform you of how you can buy the book when it comes out. I will be using the list to show publishers that a market exists but I promise won’t let them use it for their own marketing.

God’s Philosophers tells the unfamiliar story of how advances in science and mathematics during the Middle Ages led directly to the period usually called “The Scientific Revolution”. It debunks the myth that the medieval era was one when all progress was obscured by the clouds of superstition. On the contrary, reason was lauded and even the Christian church supported the study of logic and philosophy. Along the way, you will read about many exciting characters and stories such as the doomed lovers Abelard and Heloise, the terrible fate of the astrologer Cecco D’Ascoli and the wretched family of Italian polymath Jerome Cardan. The book ends with the tumultuous career of Galileo and shows just how much his work owed to his medieval predecessors.

God’s Philosophers is written in an easy style and does not require any prior knowledge from its readers. Neither does it dumb down. Complicated issues of science and philosophy are handled in straightforward language with examples from everyday life. If you thought you weren’t interested in the intellectual life of the Middle Ages, read the first chapter. You may be surprised!

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In Reply to Richard Carrier

In his response to my defence of Lynn White, Richard Carrier concedes almost all I could ask him to. He is certainly entitled to disagree with White’s ideas on the influence of Christianity. As to whether the classical era was the most inventive in history, I shall await his new book. I shall certainly be purchasing it when it appears. If I did imply that the pike was invented in the fourteenth century, I did not intend to. However, its use as a counter to heavy cavalry does begin at that point. I also think he overstates the effectiveness of a makeshift palisade as seen in Braveheart, but I don’t either of us will be volunteering to test that one to death.

I’ve got three issues that I’d like to follow up. Firstly, at the end of his post, Carrier engages in a little semantic gymnastics but trying to claim the early Renaissance began in 1250. Medieval society always rested firmly on antique foundations but I don’t find the term ‘renaissance’ terribly helpful. Certainly, to redefine those bits of the Middle Ages we like as the early Renaissance while, no doubt, continuing to refer to the nasty bits as medieval, does nothing to advance historical understanding. The names we give to periods must not be allowed to imply value judgements. They are simply labels of convenience. In point of fact, I refuse to use the terms Renaissance, Dark Ages or Enlightenment because the risk of giving these terms more meaning than they deserve is just too great. My PhD thesis, on sixteenth century natural philosophy, did not include the words Renaissance or Scientific Revolution. Neither examiner appears to have noticed the omission which just shows we don’t really need these value-laden terms at all.

My second point is a bit less idiosyncratic. Carrier points out that horseshoes and the heavy plough we not unknown in the late Roman Empire. Nor, in fact, were watermills and some other machines. What is odd is the way that these technologies simply did not seem to catch on until the 7th or 8th centuries. There is no doubt that Roman society was deeply conservative but even that doesn’t explain why they never bothered with watermills and continued to prefer hand querns. Marxists used to claim it was a symptom of a slave-based economy. Other historians think that the big infrastructure projects of the Empire were invariably urban so their was no capital left for rural improvements. I’ve no idea what the answer is, but when Carrier claims the Romans would have used a stirrup if they saw one, he is engaging in wishful thinking. Societies, especially big empires, are often very slow to adopt the technology of what they perceive to be lowlier races.

Finally, Carrier claims that Roman agriculture was as efficient as anything in Europe up to the eighteenth century. Firstly, that means as efficient as anything up to the thirteenth century because there was little improvement in the intervening period. Second, there is evidence that medieval agriculture was more productive than under Rome. For instance, most population estimates reckon that densities in 1300 were roughly double at the height of the Roman Empire. France had a population of about twenty million just before the hundred years war. The province of Gaul supported roughly ten million. We need to treat these guesses with a lot of circumspection, of course. Also, improvements to agriculture probably account for only some of the difference. The amount of land under the plough might have increased and the medieval warm period, which today’s global warming lobby has been trying so hard to deny, also may have had a significant effect in increasing crop yields. Overall, however, medieval agriculture was almost certainly more productive than under the Romans due, as White realised, to horse collars, heavy ploughs, three field rotation and water mills.

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Carrier, Dawkins and a diabolical Englishman

Richard Carrier has replied to my post on Friday with a forthright defence of the ancient world combined with a bit of retreat from his previous rhetoric. I’ll be saying a bit more on the question on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, Richard Dawkins is back. This time he is going after astrology, spiritualism, homeopathy and the new age. His new series, The Enemies of Reason, begins on Channel 4 on 13th August. There is a lengthy interview and preview in the Sunday Times which generally approves of the enterprise. Melanie Phillips in the Daily Bigot (whoops, I mean the Daily Mail) is rather less sympathetic. Personally, I find the phrase ‘breaking a butterfly on the wheel’ comes to mind when I think of setting Darwin’s rottweiler on a bunch of harmless hippies.

Finally, in this rather disconnected blog entry, I’ve recently finished reading Hawkwood: Diabolical Englishman by Frances Stonor Saunders (published as The Devil’s Broker Seeking Gold, God, and Glory in Fourteenth-Century Italy in the US). It’s OK. Saunders is a journalist whose previous book was on the CIA’s covert work to influence the arts and culture. Quite why this qualified her to write about late-medieval Italy, I have no idea. But in the weird and wacky world of publishing, having a successful book to your name and journalistic contacts is worth far more than being competent to write the book in question.

Anyway, as I said Hawkwood is OK. Saunders can write clearly and has done a fair bit of leg work in the library. There are occasional patches of the purple prose which is now obligatory in popular history, but just make it look like her editor has asked her to liven things up. The story she has to tell is a good one and it is reasonably well told. The problem is simply that she has not really grasped the material. Although there is a lengthy list of primary sources in the bibliography, most of her quotations come from secondary works. Saunders does not appear to have sat down and read all the contemporary chronicles and sources. She has clearly read the Canterbury Tales and some Dante, which is a start, but there is no sign she has mastered anything that isn’t available in English translation. The result is her narrative is often cursory and disconnected. Stuff happens, wars are lost, cities surrender and Saunders has absolutely no idea why. It maybe no one else does, but there are ways for historians to handle this. Hawkwood should have been a work of narrative history based on the original sources of the kind patented by Runciman, Wolfson, Freeman and Lord Norwich. Sadly, it is a much lesser beast although its little light does shine brighter in the murk of the current popular history market.

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Stirrups, horse harnesses and Richard Carrier

Apologies for the lack of a post on Wednesday. I had my PhD viva and could hardly lift a finger after two and a half hours of being grilled on sixteenth century natural philosophy and mathematics.

In a recent post on his blog, Richard Carrier has attacked the work of the distinguished American medieval historian Lynn White. Scroll down to the section headed ‘Horse S**t’ in the blog post here. Carrier’s motive is quite clear from his references to the ‘Horse collar of Christ’ and heavy cavalry as a miracle of Jesus. In fact, the relevant book by Lynn White, Medieval Technology and Social Change, makes almost no mention of Christianity. While White was certainly a Christian, he is most famous for a 1967 article blaming our current environmental problems on Christianity, which is hardly the action of an unqualified admirer of the religion. Carrier, of course, is up to his normal anti-Christian bashing that we have come to expect from this luminary of Internet Infidels.

Carrier mentions White's theory about the stirrup. White correctly notes that this made heavy cavalry possible and that European warfare was revolutionised by it. Carrier sneers at this. He points out that the Romans used four horned saddles which worked almost as well as stirrups. What he doesn’t tell us is that these saddles were big, heavy and expensive. There is simply no way that you could equip a large contingent of light cavalry with them and stay within budget. And Carrier admits they were no good for heavy cavalry who really did need stirrups to function. He then tries to suggest that heavy cavalry did not radically alter warfare because it could be seen off by infantry in a defended position. True enough – everyone knew attacking dug-in troops with cavalry was suicidal (though that didn’t stop some fools from trying it). But once the infantry started to move, heavy cavalry could smash it to pieces in the field and often did. Witness the Battle of Hastings where the Saxon shield wall held off the Norman cavalry all day. But as soon as they broke formation they were dead meat. It was not until the fourteenth century that the real answer to heavy cavalry appeared – the pike. These long spears allowed infantry to form a prickly hedgehog that cavalry could not penetrate. The trouble was that pikes require trained professional soldiers who are able to move in formation. These didn’t exist in the feudal armies of the High Middle Ages or the barbarian hordes that preceded them. Warfare is a game of paper, scissors, stone. If you have heavy cavalry, you rule the roost until someone invents scissors.

The horse-collar too, was an improvement that, coupled with horse shoes, three field rotation and heavy ploughs, allowed agriculture to increase yields well beyond what the Romans managed. Where White went wrong was to assume these changes happened overnight. Of course, as we learn from Robert Fossier in the New Cambridge Medieval History, progress was actually much slower and the agricultural system that White assumed was in place by 900AD did not in fact become ubiquitous until after 1200.

So, White’s work has been criticised, adapted and finessed. That’s all within the rules of the game. But his fundamental point that the Middle Ages were a period of technological advance is unchallenged. Carrier’s blinkered hatred of Christianity is also preventing him from see the facts.

By the way, further to my recent post, it seems the Jesus Project is coming a part at the seams. Jim West and others have been finding all sorts of people are listed as fellows who know nothing about it including Richard Bauckham and Dom Crossan. Both have asked to be removed. Richard Carrier is still listed as a fellow though....

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Religion as an extended phenotypes

A few posts ago I explained why I didn’t find two popular evolutionary explanations for religion very convincing. I attacked the idea that religion was a harmful by-product of something useful and the idea that it was a meme that was good at spreading itself despite being harmful to its host.

Ironically, it was Richard Dawkins who also produced the most popular exposition of what I think is the best way to study man’s religious impulse, in his book The Extended Phenotype. In that book, he explained that it was not just bodies that genes could build and evolution could act on. Things like a bird of paradise’s dance, a termite nest and a beaver’s dam are also evolutionary adaptations just as much as the peacock’s tail and gubby’s spots. That, I think, is probably also true of the religious instinct. It is a part of our extended phenotype, an adaptation that humans have evolved because it is good for us. After all we have been religious for an extremely long time if archaeological evidence of burial practices and cave paintings are anything to go by. Even if it started off as a by-product, the religious instinct has clearly been selected for in the meantime. In fact, many evolutionary adaptations start off as useless appendages or features that natural selection works into something much more productive. Perhaps the initial impetus was from our desire to see causes in the world or to impart personality to rocks and the sky. This is certainly an area worthy of study and I expect that archaeologists can tell us rather more about this than has percolated into evolutionary biology.

The fact that religion is preserved by evolution doesn’t tell us which religions might be true but nor does it mean that they are all false. Imagine that we lived in a world where religion really had held back progress as Hitchens and Dawkins absurdly believe. In that case, it wouldn’t exist because religious societies would have been wiped out by the non-religious way back in prehistory. So, the next question I want to ask (skipping the ultimate origins of religion) is exactly how it has improved mankind’s lot. How does religion increase our ability to survive and procreate? To answer the question, I will be linking what we’ve discussed about game theory, the decline of violence and in-groups/out-groups.

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Steven Pinker fails to boil blood

A correspondent kindly informed me that Steven Pinker, whose work I often find very interesting, has been trying to stoke up some controversy. He has suggested some questions that he thinks so controversial they will make people’s blood boil. Well, after reading through them, I reached for a thermometer and found my body temperature had not increased by a fraction of a degree. So, I thought I might try and answer his questions as well. But before I do so, I’d like to pose one of my own that Pinker did not feel it worth asking:

“In a hundred years time, will people look upon our attitudes towards abortion with the same horrified incomprehension that we feel about nineteenth century slavery?”

I’d be interested in Pinker’s answer. Now to his questions:

1: "Do women, on average, have a different profile of aptitudes and emotions than men?" A: Yes, obviously.

2: "Were the events in the Bible fictitious -- not just the miracles, but those involving kings and empires?" A: No. Many of them are confirmed by other sources.

3: "Has the state of the environment improved in the last 50 years?" A: Possibly. The fall of communism led to a big improvement.

4: "Do most victims of sexual abuse suffer no lifelong damage? A: If it is anything like as prevalent as we have been led to believe, then many people are able to make a full recovery.

5: "Did Native Americans engage in genocide and despoil the landscape?" A: Yes, according to Jared Diamond’s new book Collapse (which I will review in a few weeks time when I’ve finished it).

6: "Do men have an innate tendency to rape?" A: Most don’t. Some do.

7: "Did the crime rate go down in the 1990s because two decades earlier poor women aborted children who would have been prone to violence?" A: Yes. But it was not a crime worth paying.

8: "Are suicide terrorists well-educated, mentally healthy and morally driven?" A: Yes.

9: "Would the incidence of rape go down if prostitution were legalized?" A: I doubt it. Increasing supply tends to increase demand.

10: "Do African-American men have higher levels of testosterone, on average, than white men?" A: No idea.

11: "Is morality just a product of the evolution of our brains, with no inherent reality?" A: Some elements of morality have evolutionary explanations. Others are much harder to explain in this way.

12: "Would society be better off if heroin and cocaine were legalized?" A: No.

13: "Is homosexuality the symptom of an infectious disease?" A: Never heard of this one before.

14: "Would it be consistent with our moral principles to give parents the option of euthanizing newborns with birth defects that would consign them to a life of pain and disability?" A: No.

15: "Do parents have any effect on the character or intelligence of their children?" A: Obviously, yes.

16: "Have religions killed a greater proportion of people than Nazism?" A: A trick question, I think. Nazism was only around for 15 years. At that tie it certainly killed more than religions.

17: "Would damage from terrorism be reduced if the police could torture suspects in special circumstances?" A: No. Torture is ineffective as the victim just tells the torturer what he thinks he wants to hear. Even the Inquisition realised this.

18: "Would Africa have a better chance of rising out of poverty if it hosted more polluting industries or accepted Europe's nuclear waste?" A: Yes possibly. But the decision should be made by Africans, not western environmentalists or African dictators.

19: "Is the average intelligence of Western nations declining because duller people are having more children than smarter people?" A: It’s possible but I’ve only seen evidence that IQs are increasing.

20: "Would unwanted children be better off if there were a market in adoption rights, with babies going to the highest bidder?" A: A well-regulated market might work and help reduce abortion. But it would be hard to avoid abuses.

21: "Would lives be saved if we instituted a free market in organs for transplantation?" A: I’ve already argued in favour of this.

22: "Should people have the right to clone themselves, or enhance the genetic traits of their children?" A: I’m not convinced this would be beneficial.

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Aristotle, Gravity and Wile E. Coyote

Wile E. Coyote’s greatest enemy is gravity. He just can’t beat it. But somehow he does manage to resist it for longer than most of us. We all know the scenes where he inadvertently runs of a cliff edge but keeps going until he stops. Only then does he fall. (Many people mistakenly believe that he falls when he realises he is only supported by thin air, but this just shows the danger of equating correlation with cause. He realises he is standing on thin air when he comes to a halt, but he actually falls because he is stationary.)

There is a crazy logic to this. As a very small kid, I remember it seemed plausible that this would happen if you did run off a cliff. Luckily I never tried it. Even though I realise today that this isn’t true, the humour of the situation depends on the fact that it might have been. We can relate to a world where gravity doesn’t take hold until your previous motion has stopped.

Chuck Jones, director of the Roadrunner cartoons, probably never read Aristotle’s Physica but he did manage to model Aristotelian dynamics nevertheless. The Physica was the main source of natural science in Christian Europe's universities during the Middle Ages until the seventeenth century. According to Aristotle, there are two kinds of motion – forced and natural. Natural motion means falling under gravity. Forced motion is anything else, for instance when you throw a ball. Now Aristotle believed that the two kinds of motion could not exist in the same object at the same time. A ball cannot move under the influence of gravity and the motion you impart by throwing it simultaneously. Thus, according to Aristotle, when you throw a ball, it travels in the direction you propelled it, gradually slowing down due to air resistance. At some point the air resistance means that it will stop. Then, gravity will take hold and the ball will drop straight down to the ground. So, only when forward momentum is used up does gravity come into effect. This is exactly what happens to the unfortunate Wile E. Coyote.

This suggests to me that Aristotle’s idea isn’t as daft as we historians often assume. Firstly, it is actually true of a ball thrown straight up into the air. The ball really does stop, stationary for an instant at the apex of its trajectory, before gravity drags it back down to earth. Secondly, Aristotle idea does have a twisted logic that a small child watching a cartoon clearly comprehends. We should be slow to mock it.

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