PREVIEW： Brokenomics ｜ The Evolution of Christianity
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Summary
In this episode of Brokonomics, Faraz and I have a heated debate about the origins of Christianity and how it relates to the pre-Islamic Middle Eastern civilizations. We discuss the role of religion as a civilisational technology, and why Christianity is different from all other religions in that it is monotheistic.
Transcript
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Hello and welcome to Brokonomics. Now last week Faraz and I had a very interesting chat about
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the formation of civilisation and when it comes time to look at the layers that Christianity
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builds on that or what Christianity builds around that, Carl has some strong opinions
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because it includes the desert people who of course he identifies with often. So Carl.
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No I don't. I like pre-Islamic Middle East because it's so alien. It's such a different
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civilisation than anything that we have had in our history that is fascinating and it's
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Well I'll set the argument and we're joined by Faraz of course. So I'll set the argument.
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What I'm basically saying is I'm looking at religion as a civilisational technology and
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what is special about Christianity is it adds something every environment that it moves
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through. And essentially what I'm saying is, and we've got a mix here, somebody who isn't
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particularly religious, somebody who is trying to be religious and somebody who actually is
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religious, I'm not actually going after the religious angle on this.
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Yeah but that's because I have to. Because I think it's good for the kids and my wife wants
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There must be some sense of trying to engender a bit of religiosity somewhere.
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It's not a feeling. It's an act of will. Slight difference.
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So what I'm saying is, is that what I think religion really is, aside from the moral stuff
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which we won't get into on this occasion, it is a civilisational technology for lowering
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the cost of governance by making enforcement cheaper.
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But religion has different forms and different areas, right?
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That's fair. I am focusing on making Christianity.
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Often it was designed to bind a group together in order to enforce dominance over other groups.
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And the thing about Christianity is it's really peculiar.
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I mean there was a statement from Avi Yemeni the other day where it was like, because Epstein
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He's like, dear goyim, we love you unless you hate us.
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You know, I like that person unless they hate me.
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But Christianity is really unique in the love thy enemy because a Christian can't say that.
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A Christian can't say, we love you unless you hate us.
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And we will, you know, forgive you, turn the other cheek, whatever it is that the Christian
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So Christianity is actually really unusual in the scheme of West, like the religions of
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the West, because it has such a different perspective on what it is to be moral.
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In every way for Christianity, being moral is something transcendent, right?
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I mean, all of Christianity's promises are in the afterlife.
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Whereas pagan religions promise glory and victory now, right?
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Islam and Judaism follow the same moral structure as the pagan religions.
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I mean, like in Judaism, it is a pagan Middle Eastern religion.
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It's just that the Middle East was usually, I mean, and early Judaism is very much henotheistic,
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As in, it only worships one God, but it does concede other gods exist.
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And it's only later on in the development of Judaism, probably like 400 BC or something
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So, from the Christian perspective, Judaism recognizes the presence of other powers, as
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The way that Judaism operated was to recognize that reality and then slowly purify its monotheism.
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And it was a gradual process because in the Christian worldview, most peoples and most religions
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have grains of truth in them that should be developed and nourished where they are found.
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However, it is only Christianity that contains the fullness of truth.
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So, that's the view of Christianity on this question.
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Well, the point I was going to make is basically, the reason that the Middle Eastern religions
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that are not, like Christianity is a very European religion, right?
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I don't think it's a coincidence that it is the product of European occupation for hundreds
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of years of the area of the Near East that it came from, that gave it the form that it has.
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Sorry to not imply that it's the divine revelation or anything, but from a philosophical perspective,
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it's stamped with European ideas all over it, whereas Judaism and Islam are not.
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And this just follows the ancient tribal pattern of Middle Eastern religiosity, which is, this
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Our tribe had, it took a long time for, like, syncretism to emerge in the Middle East, right?
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So, it would, you know, back, like, you know, 5000 BC, each tribe had essentially its god,
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and it was understood that there'd be other powers in the world, and these belonged to other
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tribes, and eventually you end up with a pantheon of gods, that, like, each city in, you know...
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Well, as they conquered a city, they might not get rid of the god, but they would subordinate
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It's not even that they conquer them, because it used to just be that the god lived at the
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top of the temple in the statue of the city, right?
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And it's not that the god was trapped in the statue, it would just, when you are...
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The thing is, monotheistic religions don't give the pagan theology a fair shrift, which
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I'm not pointing fingers, it's understandable why they wouldn't, right?
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In the same way that, you know, I don't tend to give communists a fair shrift in their ideology.
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But the pagans viewed the statue as being a sort of temporary seat of the god.
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So, when you perform a ritual, the god will come and sit in the statue and actually be
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So, it's not that the idol itself was worshipped, it's the idol was just a part of the religious
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But the god resides, when interfaced with, at the top of the temple in the city.
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So, the capturing of other god's statues, which is what happened all the time, when you
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I mean, the Assyrians had dozens of statues of other gods in the great templar Asher, right?
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Because the great god Asher would conquer every city, and they would just loot their statues,
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parade them through the streets, and then lay them face down at the feet of Asher.
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So, depending on how many the king had conquered, you get, you know, how many...
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The first point is the way that, essentially, after the exodus and the reign of King David,
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the Hebrew god got his own house in the temple.
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And he says to King David, no, I don't need that, I don't want that, and I will bestow that
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honor of building me a temple on your son Solomon.
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With Islam, the Kaaba, where the Muslims go for their pilgrimage, used to be the home of
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And Muhammad goes in and destroys the other idols, saying that he did what Abraham did,
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which I think is in some version of the Jewish Mishnah or something like that,
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where there's a story about Abraham destroying the other gods.
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So, there is this evolution of religious thought.
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But going to your point on religion as a social technology, yes, to a certain extent.
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The other side of it is that you will never find a people anywhere, even at the most primitive
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So, it's not just a technology, it's a naturally emergent property of human beings.
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And it distinguishes human beings from other species.
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Just on that point, though, you could still frame it as a technology.
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As far back as we have any records for, I mean like cave drawings on a wall, there's
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a metaphysical element that is attached to everything in the world, right?
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So, we have animistic beliefs where the river is the spirit, and the trees have spirits.
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But what these do, in a technological way, is give the people a kind of respect and awe
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As in, in that sort of primitive condition, the world's a very dangerous place, right?
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You can't just mess around in the river, there might be a crocodile in there, or the current
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And to show respect for the natural world is the first way to not get killed or eaten by
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And so, it still has a technological aspect, even though it, of course, is entirely moralized.
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Well, shall I run through very quickly what the argument is with the diagram I'm going
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This is where we get to a fundamental disagreement, which is fine to have, obviously, which is whether
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So, I'm not saying it's a purely material question.
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But to elaborate very briefly, the disagreement is that, is this merely necessary for survival,
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or does this reflect something that is within us, namely, to give it a religious name, a soul?
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It doesn't matter what the actual reality of the thing is, right?
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What kind of matters in this regard is what we believe is the case and how we act.
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And even the most ardent materialist acts as if every human being has a soul, right?
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Notice how, you know, they're like, oh, you know, we're just a floating ball of dust in
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the middle of space, but don't you dare say something racist?
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I mean, if you were a genuine materialist, what's stopping you from acting like an Assyrian
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Seriously, if there's no moral consequence in the afterlife, why do you care?
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No, I'm just going to enslave the neighbouring tribe.
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If you can give me the crime and get away with it, kill somebody, why not?
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But they don't act like this, because they don't really believe it.
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Well, they do think that there is a moral telos to the universe, and it is about respecting
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the soul of the individual, even if they wouldn't use that word.
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I'm just looking at it as a civilizational technology.
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My argument is basically, without any religion, your method of conflict resolution is going
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to be two guys who have a disagreement, go at it.
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But my point is, that is an extremely expensive form of order, because you lose people as you
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When you get to the desert layer, where I'm kind of starting my analysis of Christianity,
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at that layer, you're bringing in presumably a king or something like that, a tribal chief,
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Don't do anything to your neighbor's goat or kill their son or whatever it is.
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And if you do, there is going to be a messy, painful, public execution at this level.
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And what this is, is trying to minimize the conflict by saying, these are the rules, and
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if you break them, you will die, which is not actually trying to get to sacrifice
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What it's trying to do is stop them from doing the crime in the first place.
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When you move up to the Mediterranean, this is basically where Christianity meets the Greeks
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and the Romans, and the legalistic system, and their more oligarch-type system.
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And it ceases being so much about the one individual who's laying down the law.
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We're basically adding legitimacy of this layer.
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Because we're adding that legitimacy layer, we're adding the systematic layer to it.
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We are then adding process to this, which again makes conflict resolution less expensive.
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And then the great revolution was the Northern European layer.
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Because at this point, what you're saying is, you're getting everybody to internalize it.
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And you're saying that everybody has to be moral within themselves, which is the least
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expensive enforcement, because people don't want to commit the crimes in the first place.
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So I think that you are right to identify three different layers.
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And I think the difference is the philosophical groundwork of them.
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So the desert layer is entirely based on an argument from authority, right?
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So when you say a king, every Middle Eastern lawgiver is essentially a prophet.
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Like Hammurabi or Ur-Nammu, like going back to literally the very oldest codes of law,
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something like 2400 BC, the code of Ur-Nammu, begins with the great god Utu empowered me
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to provide his divine providence across the land, and therefore here are 10 laws.
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Or no, it's not even 10 laws, it's actually really short.
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But then you get Hammurabi, he's like, right, well, I've got 33 laws for you.
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Now, you know, the great god Shamash has informed me that these are the laws, and I have to impose
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these on a benighted and blighted land full of criminals, evildoers, lawbreakers, scum
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Well, here are the Ten Commandments straight from God.
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You've got to do it, because otherwise we're not.
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And then you get essentially the Koran, which is the product of this, which is just a really,
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really developed version of this code of rules.
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But this is just in the process of standard Middle Eastern religious development, because
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it begins with only a handful of laws, and it ends, I mean, there's the Assyrian, Middle
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Assyrian code of laws, which is hundreds of pages of divine commandments from Asher,
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which are just, don't do this, don't do that, don't do the other, and this is the punishment
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It's all exactly this way, and you've got hundreds of pages, and then you've got essentially
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Whereas it's just, when you sit there and say, these are the rules and you have to follow
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them, well, you have to account for every eventuality.
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And so the book of rules just keeps getting longer and longer and longer and longer until
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you've literally encompassed everything a human being can do.
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But that lets you scale up, because that pushes down the amount of violence and the amount
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No, that increases the amount of violence, right?
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Because this is entirely predicated on an argument from authority.
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At some point in history, someone with sufficient political power imposed this on the civilization.
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It's not necessarily the way they'd normally live.
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In fact, many of the times, it's directly contradictory to how they are actually living.
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The Israelites are not doing as they're supposed to be doing, according to God's own divine
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He's like, right, no, and I'm going to impose this fight through war.
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War on whatever tribe, you know, the Babylonians are fighting with or the Assyrians are fighting
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It's directly imposed hierarchically, top down, because the only legitimacy from it is pure authority.
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The authority of the God and the force the God has imbued in me.
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They always preface their laws by saying the great God, X, has empowered me to beat
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So this is, sorry, this is a fundamental difference with Christianity.
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Let me, let me lay out the tree list, because I'll show you why I think Christianity
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So what this means, it, what, there are advantages to the desert land, right?
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And that means that power can be wielded very effectively and quickly.
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And because it is the God that is empowering him, there's literally no one to appeal to
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So the Assyrians created what is probably the largest empire you can create under this
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It's like the King of Kings, like with the Persian Empire, right?
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But he doesn't actually, I mean, it is, it is the case that they did actually incorporate
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But most of the time, for most of Assyria's history, the King of Assyria would just have
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And therefore that meant his God was the most strong.
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And so he'd go to this kingdom or the city or whatever, kick the living daylights out
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I mean, there's the, one of the earliest references of the Israelites is them supplicating
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themselves to the King of Assyria, where the, is the, the Israelite King is literally banged
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down and kissing the feet of the Assyrian King because he's got the most powerful God.
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And this is one of the reasons that you've got like Sennacherib's assault on Judea because
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Hezekiah decides, you know, I just don't feel like paying my tribute.
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It's like, okay, that's mental because you are a tiny backwater kingdom and the King of
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Syria can field 250,000 men and they're professionals.
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And if the King of Syria says he wants Greenland, you have to give it to him.
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He will put up Steli saying, oh yeah, I climb these mountains, destroy these people.
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I traverse these deserts, destroy the, that's all he does.
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And so that, that is, it gives you a very strong core of power and it legitimizes basically
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If you're in a very competitive, disparate environment where you've got lots of different
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tribes, lots of different people and you need security, right?
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No, we're just going to build the biggest goddamn army and smash the crap out of everyone around us.
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Now in the Bible, there's some honestly justly earned references to Assyria.
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Because eventually you make so many enemies that they all just realized, do we all hate
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Falling is a massive coalition of people, sack their cities, essentially erase them.
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There's something like 4 million of them in the entire world after 2,500, 3,000 years
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after the original extermination of the Assyrians.
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So it makes them strong but brittle by relying on just this one innovation.
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Because one of the problems that the Assyrians had is that essentially they've been campaigning
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And they're 1,000 miles away from where their cities are.
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And it's just like, guys, I think now's the time.
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And it's a longer story than that, but that's the summary of it.
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So that's built on a different moral justification.
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Because, okay, the great god Asher is only great while his army is present and beating
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If it ever loses, then the great god Asher falls and topples and he's gone forever.
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But with the Mediterranean layer, that's not how they organized themselves.
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So it was incredibly common, especially for the Greeks, but also elsewhere in like Italy
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and the Etruscans and things like that, for them to send a philosopher to another city
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And they would choose this guy from some other city because, and it's the same thing
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in the same way that the sort of Europeans would choose a new king from overseas
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because he doesn't have personal investments here.
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There's a particular story of like the Russian principality in the Middle Ages
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who literally couldn't decide on who their prince was going to be.
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So they just import some random foreign prince.
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Because you can't choose one from among you because you're like, oh, right,
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William of Orange is a great example of this, right?
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If we choose a guy from that tribe or that team over there in the city we're living in,
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well, he's just going to privilege his friends and family.
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And they're like, well, the same for the other way.
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Now, there are loads of examples of this, of people like Solon, Draco.
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Plato went over to Syracuse to try and give, was it Hyrule?
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Whatever the Syracuse and Thailand is a set of laws.
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But the thing is, Syracuse is a bit of a strange entity.
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So Plato came back going, no, that was a mistake.
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But the point is, it was really common for you to get some distinguished gentleman philosopher
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to come over and give you a rational settlement.
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And so the laws the Greeks always used had this kind of universal tinge to them.
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It was like an individual, like the rational European philosophy is,
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and you can see in Aristotle to this day, what does the individual man do?
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Well, if the individual man does X, then that's every man who can do X.
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And this is why Christianity takes on a very different tone to other Middle Eastern religions.
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The instructions Moses gives to the Israelites are not for the Gentiles.
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This is the covenant that God has with the Israelites.
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It's the same as Harambi's 33 laws or whatever.
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But Hammurabi, for him, it's whoever he controls as the king.
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No, Moses specifically stipulates the Israelites.
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The laws for the Gentiles under the Jews are different from the laws for the Jews themselves.
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And it's the same for Islam because it's understood that this is a law for a particular nation.
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So in the same way that Jews view themselves as a nation, Islam views itself as an Ummah.
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So you're saying that Christianity was universal even at the desert layer?
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Because the desert layer of Christianity is Judaism.
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So the Mediterranean layer, the Greek layer, begins in a rational animal, as in the Aristotelian
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And so you get this very rationalistic, individualistic perspective on morality that comes from the Greeks.
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And this is what essentially Greek philosophy is.
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And you end up in a kind of Kantian categorical imperative when you go down that line.
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Any rational person should be able to understand the argument made for the moral position that you're in.
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And therefore there's no particularity that's baked in to the moral philosophy itself.
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But at the Mediterranean level, they're still dealing with Mediterranean people.
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So you're going to need a mechanism for dealing with sin.
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Sin kind of is not really something they thought about.
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Plato had some conception of it, but a very undeveloped one.
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And how widespread would that have actually been?
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I guess what I'm getting at is the contrast with the layer above it, the European level, where
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So the point is, the Mediterranean layer is expressly rationalistic.
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You get codes of laws that are imposed, but they're imposed because of a person who is
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not necessarily appealing to a god, but is appealing to what would be good for a particular consequence.
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And a great example of this is Lycurgus, right?
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Lycurgus wants to essentially impose a socialist republic on Sparta because he realizes that they
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will always need 10,000 professional trained soldiers to be able to defend the Peloponnese.
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And this means that he needs to impose a particular order on it.
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And so it is literally, it looks like an American city.
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You know, American city is very rationally constructed.
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Well, he literally grids up Sparta and parcels out the land to a soldier.
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And that soldier has an assigned number of helots, which are Greek slaves that are from a neighboring
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And the soldier is forbidden from working the land, but he has to contribute to a shared mess.
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And therefore, it essentially turns into a kind of militaristic socialist experiment.
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And then Lycurgus, after instituting this, goes to the Oracle of Delphi.
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And he asks the Oracle, is this a good order and will it preserve Sparta?
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And the Oracle says, yes, on the condition that basically, as long as they hold your laws,
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And so Lycurgus is like, right, okay, well, I told them, hold the laws until I come back
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And so he realized that he can't go back if he wants them to do this thing in perpetuity.
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So he has to wander off into the desert and starve himself to death, right?
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He was like, right, okay, if we just do this, then Sparta's great.
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I'm going to get the sanction of the god afterwards.
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I just made sure that God thinks this is a good idea.
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So the source of it is the human mind and it's sanctioned by the god.
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It's an appeal to reason that is the layer the Greeks operated on, right?
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And so that's the layer in which Christianity comes out of this, right?
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Because Christianity does have the shape of Greek thought in it, which is fine
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and which is probably why it spreads so wildly because it's intuitive, right?
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Yeah, no, actually, you know, I am a decision making person.
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And therefore, as a rational human being, I can reason into the position that I'm in.
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00:27:51.440
then why don't you go over to lotuseaters.com where you can watch the whole episode for as little as £5 a month,
00:27:58.440
which really is not much money at all and you get loads of really good content.
00:28:04.440
Which African American kids are paired with you once,
00:28:09.440
Yeah, look at the BC and I'm unlike the country.
00:28:11.440
And with the UK that I think is something like this.
00:28:13.440
And you all have to create a conjunction with you in the world that is making these same candidates.
00:28:16.440
As a virtuous side, the evolution of the CSはいPellt and that is doing what you can take on task.