Slaughtering conventional history’s sacred cows

[Valin]

World magazine

 

Historian Rodney Stark writes books that are models of popularly accessible scholarly writing. After reporting for the Oakland Tribune and The Denver Post, Stark gained a Ph.D. and taught at the University of Washington for 32 years before heading to Baylor University 10 years ago.

His The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the Worlds Largest Religion (HarperOne) was WORLDs Book of the Year for 2012. His new book, How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity, slaughters more of conventional historys sacred cows, including the belief beloved by classicists that the Greco-Roman world was wonderful and its demise a disaster. Heres an excerpt reprinted with permission of ISI Books. Marvin Olasky

 

 

Chapter 4: The blessings of disunity

 

In response to the long-prevailing absurdities about how the fall of Rome plunged Europe into the Dark Ages, some historians now propose that very little happened after the Western Empire collapsedthat the world of Late Antiquity, as Peter Brown has identified the era from 150 to 750, was one of slow transformation. Brown is, of course, correct that the history of these centuries can be told without invoking an intervening catastrophe and without pausing, for a moment, to pay lip service to the widespread notion of decay. But to deny decay does not require the denial of change.

 

The fall of Rome was, in fact, the most beneficial event in the rise of Western civilization, precisely because it unleashed so many substantial and progressive changes.

 

After Romes fall, Europe was blessed with lasting disunity; periodic efforts to reestablish empires failed. Disunity enabled extensive, small-scale social experimentation and unleashed creative competition among hundreds of independent political units, which, in turn, resulted in rapid and profound progress. Thus, just as the Greek miracle arose from disunity, so too European civilization owes its origins and raison dêtre to political anarchy, as Nobel Prize winner F.A. Hayek explained.

 

Not surprisingly, most of the early innovations and inventions came in agriculture. Soon most medieval Europeans ate better than had any common people in history, and consequently they grew larger and stronger than people elsewhere. They also harnessed water and wind power to a revolutionary extent. In addition, faced with constant warfare among themselves, medieval Europeans excelled at inventing and adopting new military technology and tactics, all of them consistent with the Western principles of warfare initiated by the ancient Greeks. In 732, when Muslim invaders drove into Gaul, they encountered an army of superbly armed and trained Franks and were destroyed. Subsequently, the Franks conquered most of Europe and installed a new emperor. Fortunately, the whole thing soon fell apart and Europes creative disunity was reestablished.

 

 

The myth of the Dark Ages........

 

(Snip)

 

How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity

Rodney Stark