More on Islamic Reformation

The M4 Monologue has a comment of Where there is injury let me sow pardon about Chrenkoff's Blog Interview with Stephen Schwartz.

What interested me about this interview is Stephen Schwartz's version of the Protestant Reformation, especially in view of my own uninformed rant on the subject at American Wahabbis and the Ten Commandments :

I believe we make a mistake in thinking that historical and social success is determined by religious success; I believe the opposite is true. To me, Protestantism flourished because it took root in nations living on the North Sea where navigation and commerce were impelled by individual initiative, from which Protestant theology, for various reasons, benefited. Spanish Catholicism fell into decline because it conquered the richest provinces of the New World, and the country choked on all that gold and silver. Similarly, the Islamic world has been slow in its social development; first, because it conquered ancient and overcrowded societies where progress was always slow; second, because it gained control of the main global trade routes.

Firstly, my ill-informed comment about the Protestant Reformation is that before the rise of Capitalism in the 16th Century CE, there were outbursts of reform in various guises from Hus in Central Europe, St Francis of Assisi in Italy, the Anabaptists in Germany, etc. These were basically communist in outlook but the political and economic developments were not ready for these movements so they were crushed or assimilated by the temporal powers. This kept bubbling along until Martin Luther, in Germany, rebelled at an oppotune time and was able to find a political protector. The rise of Capitalism and Protestantism feed off each other - there was a positive feedback loop in that the Protestant justified the work of the Capitalist and the Capitalist became a Protestant. Capitalism arose in Northern Italy and Germany before moving to the Netherlands where the merchant class became the capitalist class.

In the more successful empires of Islam and China, there was no independent incentive to develop their economies further. Their bureaucracies controlled everything. Anyone who wanted advancement in those societies became a soldier, bureaucrat, merchant, or a scholar. Their brand of feudalism was not as rigid as the European one where birth determined your status in society. Their success was a product of their more developed sense of equal opportunity. The European had to break the feudal society to gain opportunity.

The blindness of the present ruling class is no more apparent than in the above quote: all of those ruling empires are now dust. Do they think the USA is immune to the laws of history? Especially the more ruthless laws of a Capitalist system?

Then there is this vain hope:

I believe Iraq shows us that as capitalist democracy advances, friendship with the United States, the most successful capitalist democracy in history, will also prevail.

Capitalist economies are ruthless competitors. Old and stagnanting economies will be devoured by the new comers. The Dutch overcame the Spainards; the English overcame the Dutch; the Americans overcame the British.

My vision of global capitalist democracy is not a fantasy of "the end of history" or eternal peace and security, in contrast with the false claims of Francis Fukuyama. It is based on entrepreneurship, not compulsory collectivism, meaning that competition will always be a factor in society, and competition inevitably leads to contention. History will not end until humanity ends, and in later generations wars and revolutions may again take place. At the same time, however, their extremity may be ameliorated. Still, we have no guarantees for the future. History, like the human mind, plays tricks, and we can only do the best we can to secure liberty for the greatest number of people, act morally, and defend our rights.

This is the intellectual basis for Capitalism: because of competition, we must have a competive economy. Even though great wars have been fought, are being fought, and will be fought for control of resources, competition is good. I think there is conflation of many different degrees of competition here: from a competition between atheletes to the deadly struggles of world domination. They are not all the same.

When people speak of democracy, they do not consider democracy in the workplace. There tyranny rules and is alright by the ruling class for some strange reason. And liberty means the freedom to strave if you cannot find work. And how can one act morally in an economy in which ruthless competition rules? Whose rights are to be defended: the bosses' or the workers'? You must choose which side you are on. As GWB says, we might fight tyranny everywhere it exists: in the workplace, in the national security state, in the World Bank, in the IMF, in the WEF.