Synthesising Mokyr & (modified) Siedentop
In this post, we shall accomplish the ‘impossible’ – akin to climbing K-2 in winter, alone and without oxygen – by providing a unified explanation for the British Industrial Revolution (no modesty here!). We shall do so, by synthesising the ‘beliefs-techno-institutional co-evolution’ argument of Mokyr with our own Perennial Philosophy based re-interpretation of Siedentop’s thesis on the role of Christianity in the development of Liberalism.
There’s almost universal consensus on the central questions in Economic History: Why did the Industrial Revolution happen only in the last few hundred years in human history? Why Europe (and not Song/Ming/Qing China, or Chola/Vijaayanagaran India or Ottoman Turkey, etc)? And why the UK?
Obviously scholars have been contemplating this question very deeply; and in 2020 there’s almost universal consensus that one cannot be taken seriously on this issue without internalising the great economic historian Mokyr – who coined the very term ‘Industrial Enlightenment’. We shall provide a more detailed and thorough review of his views later. But for now, here’s the Oxford University Press outline on Joel Mokyr’s (2018) A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy:
“During the late eighteenth century, innovations in Europe triggered the Industrial Revolution and the sustained economic progress that spread across the globe. While much has been made of the details of the Industrial Revolution, what remains a mystery is why it took place at all. Why did this revolution begin in the West and not elsewhere, and why did it continue, leading to today’s unprecedented prosperity? In this groundbreaking book, celebrated economic historian Joel Mokyr argues that a culture of growth specific to early modern Europe and the European Enlightenment laid the foundations for the scientific advances and pioneering inventions that would instigate explosive technological and economic development. Bringing together economics, the history of science and technology, and models of cultural evolution, Mokyr demonstrates that culture—the beliefs, values, and preferences in society that are capable of changing behavior—was a deciding factor in societal transformations.
Mokyr looks at the period 1500–1700 to show that a politically fragmented Europe fostered a competitive “market for ideas” and a willingness to investigate the secrets of nature. At the same time, a transnational community of brilliant thinkers known as the “Republic of Letters” freely circulated and distributed ideas and writings. This political fragmentation and the supportive intellectual environment explain how the Industrial Revolution happened in Europe but not China, despite similar levels of technology and intellectual activity. In Europe, heterodox and creative thinkers could find sanctuary in other countries and spread their thinking across borders. In contrast, China’s version of the Enlightenment remained controlled by the ruling elite.”
The main word that is missing in the above outline is “Christianity”. Its importance can be pointed out by asking the question: What exactly was – ‘the supportive intellectual environment’ – in the 16th and 17th centuries that – ‘explain[s] how the Industrial Revolution happened in Europe’ in the 18th and 19th centuries? Where did it come from? And how important was it in shaping the Industrial Revolution? And how exactly did it shape it?
And the great political philosopher Sir Larry Sidentop in his monumental ‘Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism‘ – Harvard University Press/Belknap (2017) makes the link by arguing for the Christian foundations of European moral behaviour, as the societal glue providing the supportive environment
“Here, in a grand narrative spanning 1,800 years of European history, a distinguished political philosopher firmly rejects Western liberalism’s usual account of itself: its emergence in opposition to religion in the early modern era. Larry Siedentop argues instead that liberal thought is, in its underlying assumptions, the offspring of the Church. Beginning with a moral revolution in the first centuries CE, when notions about equality and human agency were first formulated by St. Paul, Siedentop follows these concepts in Christianity from Augustine to the philosophers and canon lawyers of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, and ends with their reemergence in secularism—another of Christianity’s gifts to the West.
Inventing the Individual tells how a new, equal social role, the individual, arose and gradually displaced the claims of family, tribe, and caste as the basis of social organization. Asking us to rethink the evolution of ideas on which Western societies and government are built, Siedentop contends that the core of what is now the West’s system of beliefs emerged earlier than we commonly think. The roots of liberalism—belief in individual freedom, in the fundamental moral equality of individuals, in a legal system based on equality, and in a representative form of government befitting a society of free people—all these were pioneered by Christian thinkers of the Middle Ages who drew on the moral revolution carried out by the early Church. These philosophers and canon lawyers, not the Renaissance humanists, laid the foundation for liberal democracy in the West.”
However the secular critique of the above Christian/Siedentop thesis is that the ideas of political freedom, social equality and individual identity evolved in spite of, and not because of, Christianity. And there are both powerful and convincing conceptual and empirical arguments that have been made in articulating the secular liberal perspective.
So how do we reconcile these seemingly irreconcilable views on Christianity?
By positing that practiced Christianity – like all religions everywhere – is not only a partial representation of the human spiritual potential, but also like all its sister existential traditions has a Dr. Jekyl/Mr.Hyde double-face. This double-face exists both in the practiced [and formalised] doctrine and more significantly in the formalised institutional churches. The founders and the high-level thinkers/practitioners and reformers represent the aspirational Dr. Jekyll, while the vast overwhelming majority mainly revel Mr. Hyde – because they are subject to the human moral errors of pride, lust, prejudice, greed, vaulting ambition, etc. The true believer primarily sees the Dr.Jekyl face of their faith, while the virulent atheist sees mainly Mr. Hyde. However the neutral agnostic – unable to make up the mind on which face is truer – is still bound to ask the question; so what’s the connection between the Dr.Jekyl view of Christianity and the common environment of early modern Europe that laid the societal foundations for the Industrial Revolution?
The 21st century Perennial Philosopher’s non-exhaustive answer to this query is as follows (and in no particular order) :
- Christianity – alongside all the world’s existential traditions – emphasises the ‘moral structure to man’s inner cosmos’ and the need for an upstanding ‘moral character’ to realise existential fulfilment.
- Upstanding moral character in the population leads to lowered theft of private property, lowered opportunistic behaviour in situations requiring relationship-specific investments, enhanced social trust and the easier arrival at efficient solutions to coordination problems, lowered cheating in situations of moral hazard, decreased exploitation in asymmetric information contexts, enhanced individual motivation for the private provision of public goods, etc.
- Starting with Francis of Assisi and fostered by Kempis’ ‘Imitation of Christ’ formalisation in the 12th and 13th centuries, service to one’s fellow man – especially the poor, the meek, the weak, the hungry and the suffering – becomes an integral part of Western civilisation’s cardinal rules of the well-lived life. And even more significantly – without Assisi’s inspiration of the Christian need for social self-sacrifice by every individual, there’s no institutionalisation of Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security and unemployment insurance. 21st century capitalist based inequality would have been a lot worse, if economic growth would even have happened, without Franciscan Christianity.
- The deep evangelical motivation behind the Protestant Revolution’s angered response to the monopoly abuses of the rent-seeking medieval Catholic Church, builds on the Gutenberg printing revolution by having the Bible translated into local languages and as a most fundamental consequence – bringing about mass literacy. This latter outcome was, of course, a pre-requisite for the sustained product/process innovations that drove the growth in productivity during the Industrial Revolution (mass literacy is not observed in medieval China, India or Ottoman Turkey). Today’s universal education was innovated by the Protestant Revolution!
- More complicated, its the Mr.Hyde side to Christianity that is also the direct cause of the modern nation-state. Without the medieval religious wars, particularly the Thirty-year war that ends in the Westphalian Peace of 1648, there is no modern nation-state. And the modern nation-state is well acknowledged as the entity that helps the evolution of a wide variety of institutions (patent office, financial markets, etc in the late 17th century) that enable the 18th/19th century Industrial Revolution. Note that neither the still ongoing Shia/Sunni division in Islam nor the medieval Saiva/Vaishnava divide in India resulted in this crucial innovation of the ‘stable nation-state’.
- It’s also this same Mr.Hyde feature to Christianity that drove the the religious refugees to flee Europe for North America; as well as the adoption of the ‘Establishment and Free Rights’ in the First Amendment of the U.S Bill of Rights. And of course, without the U.S’ subsequent late 19th century economic development and its future decisive roles in both WWI & WWII, the planet would have been trapped in an abominable colonial/fascist/communist domination in the 20th century.
- Ever since Schumpeter’s definitive ‘Capitalism, Socialism & Democracy‘, most serious students of economics realise that it’s dynamic efficiency that is not only the essence of capitalism but also the driver of sustained productivity enhancing wealth creation. However, what’s not emphasised is that the ‘creative destruction’ that’s at the core of this insight requires profound existential qualities of the individuals who are part of this process, for it to work effectively. For example, the entrepreneurial creator needs courage and bravery to deal with the risk and the terrifying (Knightian) uncertainty to venture into the unknown. However he also needs to not get too carried away with his very temporary success in any particular cycle; and to most definitely avoid an ephemeral Ayn Randian Napoleonic triumphalism.
- It’s important here to recall that the ambitious French megalomaniac was an emperor for less than a dozen years, as was the Third Reich’s Fuhrer and even the far nobler Alexander’s reign was even shorter – all demonstrating that this necessary existential modesty is admittedly a profound challenge for the megalomaniacal entrepreneurial personality.
- For example, compare a Napoleon’s or the average corporate founder’s longevity [even a 250-year envisioned Matsushita was recently renamed, after a short-lived 75 years or so, to Panasonic!] to that of a deeply repentant – personally chosen act of upside-down crucifixion – Peter’s anguish; whose Church, for all it faults, has survived continuously for a couple of millennia, and counting.
- Equally central, the losers in any particular entrepreneurial contest need the resilience to accept their temporary loss and then rise to compete the next day.
- Perhaps most importantly, the individuals on the ‘destructive’ end of this inevitable process need the equanimity to reconcile with the devastation caused by this externally impersonal process and to not descend into despair, depression or outright nihilism.
- And it’s the world’s existential traditions, including Christianity – and most definitely not secular humanism – that have developed the institutional framework for aiding the individual in dealing with the ephemeral nature of success, or the more enduring pain and suffering that is inherent in the capitalist ‘creative-destruction’ process.
- As the Spanish Catholic philosopher Miguel de Unamuno has articulated in his incomparable The Tragic Sense of Life’, its pain and suffering that is inherent in worldly life; and Schumpeter’s insight implicitly embraces it, only to explicitly articulate that sustained increases in productivity-enhanced per capita income is most definitely not a definitive response to human pain – but only the best available alternative to minimise poverty-based suffering that mankind has evolved.
- And without the soothing balm of the planet’s existential traditions – including Christianity – to the inevitably tragic human condition, mankind’s situation will only be worse.
- Economics is, truly speaking, the planet’s Tragic Science! (a racist Carlyle who declared it ‘dismal’ merely because of his personal existential limitations couldn’t have been more wrong).
- Man is a creature of habits – both physical and mental; and changing them is hard work. A change in beliefs is obviously a mental habit change that requires serious motivation; and the planet’s existential traditions, including Christianity, can provide these deep-rooted drivers of changes in behaviour.
- On a similar accounting, Institutions are ‘sticky’ and are even more difficult to change – since they’re inter-personal in nature and changing them is correlated with changing the behaviours of a wide spectrum of individuals in that society. Religious institutions can both be obstacles to change as well as significant catalysts for changes in institutions. Both MLK Jr’s leadership of the American Civil Rights movement as well as Pope John Paul I’s decisive role in the support for Solidarity and the downfall of Soviet Communism are significant examples of the latter. (This positive Dr.Jekyll-like change driver feature to the existential traditions, also explains the CCP’s fear of organised religion; as well as the Colonial British pre-emptive adoption of the Hindu Religious & Charitable Endowments Act in occupied India).