I’ve been having a discussion with John Ray over Christianity and western civilization, especially liberty. Below is a response I e-mailed John (with minor editorial corrections):
Good post-I might jump into this at some point, I’ve had debates about this
before, back on the newsgroups. My general position about the generalizations about Christianity (and its special characteristics that fostered liberalism) is “perhaps” to a lot of the assertions-but it seems that (as you would probably point out) not all Christian cultures become liberal-the Orthodox, Monophysite and to some extent Catholic cultures never developed liberalism (one could argue that the modern day liberalism of Catholic western Europe is a function of the imposition and domination by Anglospheric values because of American conquest of Europe after WW II).
Goes to your ideas about Germanic paganism-though I would qualify that I
think it was a coincidence of particular cultures at different stages that happened to come into contact on equal footing-a powerful and articulate Greco-Roman tradition that melded with a basically pre-literate tribal system which managed to somehow not be overwhelmed by the centralist tendencies that civilization seems to find so natural. In other words, many groups, in India, East Asia, even the Middle East, had ancient traditions of liberty (Greeks, Romans, Sakyas, Hebrews, Hittites, etc.) that eventually became subsumed by their absorption into a larger cultural matrix (culminating in the Pax Romana in Europe, the Middle Kingdom in China, and the social claustrophobia of caste in India). In contrast, northern Europe managed to preserve its tribal liberties in the face of the late Greco-Roman tradition of government autocracy exemplified by Diocletian.
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