How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (21 page)

Freedom and Capitalism

C
ompare Shakespeare’s tragedies with those of the ancient Greeks.
¹
Not that Oedipus was without faults, but he did nothing to deserve his sad end—he simply fell victim to his destiny. In contrast, Othello, Brutus, and the Macbeths were not the captives of blind fate. As Cassius pointed out to Brutus, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”
²
And in the end, each of these Shakespearian characters got what he or she deserved.

One of the most important ideas facilitating the rise of the West is the belief in
free will
. Whereas most (if not all) ancient societies believed in fate, Westerners came to believe that humans are relatively free to follow the dictates of their conscience and that, to a substantial degree, they make their own fate. This belief had remarkable behavioral consequences. Most important, perhaps, it created a tendency for people not to be resigned to things as they are but rather to attempt to make the situation better. Moreover, belief in free will led directly to valuing the
right
of the individual to freely choose, with the result that medieval Europe rejected slavery—the only culture ever to have done so without external compulsion. (Of course, eventually the West had to do it again in the New World.) The value placed on individual freedom, combined with the legacy of Greek efforts at democracy, led to new democratic experiments in the medieval Italian city-states. Meanwhile, the rise of large monastic estates having extensive commercial activities led to the invention of capitalism and to the reformulation of theological doctrines in ways
favorable to commerce. Subsequently, capitalism gained a firm footing in the newly democratic Italian city-states, transforming them into major centers of banking, trade, and even manufacturing.

Free Will

Unlike the Greeks and Romans, whose gods lacked virtues and did not concern themselves with human misbehavior (other than failures to propitiate them in the appropriate manner), the Judeo-Christian God is a judge who rewards virtue and punishes sin.
³
This conception of God is incompatible with fatalism; the admonition to “Go and sin no more” is absurd if we are captives of our fate. Judaism and, later, Christianity were founded on the doctrine that humans have been given the capacity and hence the responsibility to determine their own actions. As Deuteronomy (30:19–20) puts it: “I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him.”

Saint Augustine (354–430) wrote again and again that we “possess a will” and that “from this it follows that whoever desires to live righteously and honorably, can accomplish this.”
⁴
The notion of free will, Augustine added, is entirely compatible with the doctrine that God knows ahead of time what choices we will make. Writing in refutation of Greek and Roman philosophers, he asserted “both that God knows all things before they come to pass, and that we do by our free will whatsoever we know and feel to be done by us only because we will it. But that all things come from fate we do not say; nay we affirm that nothing comes to pass by fate.”
⁵
In other words, God knows what we will freely decide to do but does not interfere; it remains up to us to choose virtue or sin.

Augustine’s views were echoed across generations of Christian thought. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), for example, taught that “a man can direct and govern his own actions” and that “the rational creature participates in the divine providence not only in being governed but also in governing.”
⁶

The idea of free will was not exclusive to the Judeo-Christian heritage. The Roman philosopher Cicero (106–43 BC) expressed views somewhat similar to Augustine’s.
⁷
But for Jews and Christians, free will was not an
obscure philosophical matter. Rather, it was the fundamental principle of their faith, without which the Ten Commandments were nonsense. Thus both Moses and Jesus taught that each individual must atone for moral lapses precisely because these are
wrong choices
.

Being central to Jewish and Christian thought, the doctrine of free will called into question the legitimacy of social structures and customs that limited the individual’s ability to choose freely—especially slavery and tyranny.

The Abolition of European Slavery

If each of us has free will and is to be judged by our actions freely taken, what is the duty of Christians with regard to another’s freedom to act? As the church fathers pondered the implications of free will, they grew increasingly uncomfortable with the institution of slavery and, especially after the fall of Rome, opposed it.

The historical record shows that slavery is far older than the pyramids and has been universal to all societies sufficiently affluent to afford it, including many aboriginal societies: the American Indians of the Northwest, for example, had extensive slavery long before the arrival of Columbus.
⁸
Moreover, according to the U.S. State Department’s annual report, as many as twenty-seven million people around the world are exploited in modern slavery, most of them in Muslim nations and in central Africa.
⁹

A slave is a human being who, in the eyes of the law and custom, is the possession, or chattel, of another human being or of a small group. Ownership of slaves entails absolute control, including the right to punish (and often to kill), to direct behavior, and to transfer ownership.

The existence of slavery is a function of human productivity. There will be a demand for slaves when the average person can produce sufficient surplus so that it becomes profitable to own them—when the costs of maintaining and controlling slaves are more than offset by their production. Slavery also can exist as a form of consumption, wherein sufficiently affluent people use slaves in nonproductive roles as personal servants, concubines, entertainers, and even bodyguards. Consumption slavery has been typical in Islamic societies.

All early empires made extensive use of slave labor. But as the classical scholar M. I. Finley explained, the Greeks and Romans achieved
the first truly “slave societies,” becoming highly dependent on “the large-scale employment of slave labor in both the countryside and the cities.”
¹⁰
In fact, at the height of the empires, slaves may have outnumbered free citizens in both Athens and the city of Rome. There is no record that any voices were raised against slavery in either Greece or Rome.

Slavery began to decline in the latter days of the Roman Empire as a direct result of military weakness. No longer were victorious commanders dispatching throngs of prisoners to the slave markets. Since fertility was very low among Roman slaves, due both to privation and to a lack of women, their numbers declined.

But the successful military expeditions of the Germanic kingdoms produced a new source of slaves. Although no one really knows how many slaves were in Europe during, say, the sixth century, they seem to have been plentiful and their treatment was, if anything, harsher than in classical times. In the legal codes of the various Germanic groups that ruled in place of Roman governors, slaves were equated not with other humans but with animal livestock. Nevertheless, several centuries later slavery was on the way out.

Some historians insist that there was never an end to medieval slavery—that nothing happened other than a linguistic shift in which the word
slave
was replaced by the word
serf
.
¹¹
These historians are the ones playing word games. Serfs were not chattel; they had rights and a substantial degree of discretion. They married whom they wished and their families were not subject to sale or dispersal. They paid rent and thus controlled their own time and the pace of their work.
¹²
If, as in some places, serfs owed their lords a number of days of labor each year, the obligation was limited and more similar to hired labor than slavery. Although serfs were bound to a lord by extensive obligations, so too was their lord bound by obligations to them.
¹³
No one would argue that medieval peasants were free in the modern sense, but they were not slaves.

The brutal institution had essentially disappeared from Europe by the end of the tenth century. Although most recent historians agree with that conclusion, it remains fashionable to deny that Christianity had anything to do with it. As Robert Fossier put it, “The progressive elimination of slavery was in no way the work of Christian peoples. The Church preached resignation, promised equality in the hereafter … [and] felt no compunction about keeping large herds of animals with human faces.”
¹⁴
Georges Duby also dismissed any church role in ending slavery: “Chris
tianity did not condemn slavery; it dealt it barely a glancing blow.”
¹⁵
According to such historians, slavery disappeared because it became an unprofitable and outdated “mode of production.”
¹⁶
Even the Yale scholar Robert S. Lopez accepted this view, claiming that slavery ended only when technological progress such as the waterwheel “made slaves useless or unproductive.”
¹⁷
In this view, the end of slavery was not a moral decision but one of self-interest on the part of the elite. That same argument has been made concerning the abolition of slavery in the Western Hemisphere. Both claims are consistent with Marxist doctrine—but quite inconsistent with economic realities. Even as late as the start of the American Civil War, Southern slavery remained a profitable “mode of production.”
¹⁸

The fact is that slavery pays. But it is equally true that slaves are not nearly as productive as self-interested individuals performing the same tasks in pursuit of their own economic gain. That is,
owners
benefit from the possession of slaves, but
societies
gain far more from a free workforce. For example, Rome had a far stronger economy (and army) before the small independent farmers were pushed out by the slave-based estates (
latifundia
). Consequently, overcoming slavery gave Europe an immense economic advantage over the rest of the world.

But economics was not the decisive factor. Slavery ended in medieval Europe
only
because the Church extended its sacraments to all slaves and then banned the enslavement of Christians (and of Jews). Within the context of medieval Europe, that prohibition was effectively a rule of universal abolition.

In the beginning, the Church asserted the legitimacy of slavery, but it did so with a certain ambiguity. Consider the most-cited New Testament passage on slavery. Writing to the Ephesians (6:5–9), Paul admonished: “Slaves, be obedient to those who are your earthly masters, in fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as to Christ … knowing that whatever good any one does, he will receive the same again from the Lord, whether he is slave or free.” Those who eagerly quote this passage seldom go on to quote the next verse: “Masters, do the same to them, and forbear threatening, knowing that he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and that there is no partiality with him.” That God treats all equally is fundamental to the Christian message: all may be saved. This encouraged the early Church to convert slaves and when possible to purchase their freedom—Pope Callistus (died 223) had himself been a slave.

So long as the Roman Empire stood, the Church continued to affirm the legitimacy of slavery. In 324 the Christian Council of Granges condemned anyone who encouraged discontent among slaves,
¹⁹
which suggests, of course, that such activities were taking place. But tension grew between support for slavery and the emphasis on the equality of all in the eyes of God. With the demise of the empire, the Church extended its embrace to those in slavery, denying them only ordination into the priesthood. The historian Pierre Bonnassie expressed the matter as well as anyone: “A slave … was baptised [and] had a soul. He was, then, unambiguously a man.”
²⁰
With slaves fully recognized as human and Christian, priests began to urge owners to free their slaves as an “infinitely commendable act” that helped ensure their own salvation.
²¹
Surviving wills show many manumissions.

The doctrine that slaves were humans and not chattle had another important consequence: intermarriage. Despite being against the law in most of Europe, mixed unions seem to have been prevalent by the seventh century, usually involving free men and female slaves. The most celebrated of these unions took place in 649 when Clovis II, king of the Franks, married his British slave Bathilda. When Clovis died in 657, Bathilda ruled as regent until her eldest son came of age. Bathilda used her position to mount a campaign to halt the slave trade and to redeem those in slavery. Upon her death, the Church acknowledged Bathilda as a saint.

At the end of the eighth century Charlemagne opposed slavery, as did the pope and many other powerful clerical voices. As the ninth century dawned, Bishop Agobard of Lyons thundered: “All men are brothers, all invoke one same Father, God: the slave and the master, the poor man and the rich man, the ignorant and the learned, the weak and the strong.… None has been raised above the other.… There is no … slave or free, but in all things and always there is only Christ.”
²²
At the same time, Abbot Smaragde of Saint-Mihiel wrote in a work dedicated to Charlemagne: “Most merciful king, forbid that there should be any slave in your kingdom.”
²³
Soon, no one “doubted that slavery in itself was against divine law,” as the historian Marc Bloch put it.
²⁴
During the eleventh century both Saint Wulfstan and Saint Anselm campaigned to remove the last vestiges of slavery in Christendom, and, according to Bloch, “no man, no real Christian at any rate, could thereafter legitimately be held as the property of another.”
²⁵