Christianization and the Culture of Growth
A Review of a Book by Joel Mokyr
This is a book review, in that it's motivated by gratitude for a good book and gives advice to read it, how and why. But I won't summarize and assess it so much as use it as a springboard for thoughts of my own. Anyway, the book is Joel Mokyr's excellent The Culture of Growth, which is one of the few leading contemporary development economics books that is available in audiobook format.
My recommendation: Yes, listen to it. Read it to learn about economic development and intellectual history, science and technology and the birth of the Industrial Revolution. It has relevance for poverty relief today. Some of the discussion of "cultural evolution" is a bit silly, and I would worry that I might have blasphemed if I had written, as Mokyr does, that Jesus is a "cultural entrepreneur" and that "deification" is sometimes the fate of cultural entrepreneurs, citing Jesus and Karl Marx together to support the point. But never mind. You need to be a bit thick-skinned to become wise and broad-minded through reading, and The Culture of Growth teaches far more than it misleads or offends. It's a thoughtful, informative study of how elite minds during the Enlightenment helped usher in modern economic growth.
Above all, read it to be inspired by "the republic of letters," a transnational community of thinkers who collaborated by correspondence down the centuries and birthed the ideas and thought-ways that, in Mokyr's view, made possible the Industrial Revolution that enriched billions, and have now brought the worldwide end of poverty within reach. Is he right? Probably so, for the most part.
And that's why Christians who want to practice the Golden Rule towards all their fellow human beings, if they have the aptitude for it, should strongly consider careers in science, engineering, business and/or finance, and get at the cutting edge of technology and venture capital, and add to the arsenal of useful ideas by which the human race produces material plenty and combats scarcity and poverty and misery and want. There is still a lot of poverty and suffering in the world, and the progressive exploration and exploitation of the space of technological possibilities by inventors and their commercial and financial enablers is what can give us the economic power to fix that.
Now for the odd twist: to review Mokyr's book about economic development and the technological acceleration that made the modern world, I feel the need to put on my Christian apologist hat.
More generally, I'd like to see a comprehensive integration or fusion of development economics and Christian apologetics. Whenever I read development economics books, except those of Rodney Stark, I am, at some level, continually finding fault with the authors for not being Christian apologists, which limits their ability to understand the historical origins of modern economic growth. For the biggest reason why some nations are so rich and others so poor is because of Christianity. To prove that is too long a business for this post, but I'll try to give you some idea of what I mean.
Empirically, the connection between Christianization and economic development is the big obvious fact that you notice when looking at the map:
Western Europe and its offshoots, with well over a thousand years of Christianity under their belts, have long been the richest, freest, most powerful and innovative societies.
Latin America and the Middle East, with a few centuries of Christianization (Latin America since Columbus, and the Middle East before the Muslim conquest and gradual Islamization), are middle income regions.
Russia and Eastern Europe, likewise, have less historic Christianization due to later conversion and phases of Muslim rule, so they're middle income.
The poorest regions, like Afghanistan, India and Pakistan, and sub-Saharan Africa, have little or no Christianization (widespread Christianity in Africa being too recent to have accomplished much transformation of society).
Some exceptions have a way of proving the rule. Hong Kong and Japan are rich with very little Christianization, but their institutions were imposed by Christian nations, and their prosperity comes from borrowing knowledge that originated in Christendom, and by trading with Christendom. Ethiopia has a lot of historic Christianization and is still poor, but its Christianization was always somehow incomplete, with lots of Jewish holdovers and lingering polygamy, a strong Muslim presence as well as continuing polytheism, and Ethiopia was cut off from the mainstream of Christian history, etc.
Of course, Christianization is certainly not the only factor that helps economies develop. Access to the sea is useful because it facilitates trade and globalization. Temperate latitude is useful because it allows for use of the best package of crops and livestock, and because winter kills tropical diseases. And any kind of deep civilizational heritage tends to be helpful as a source of knowledge, virtue, and order. But even all these advantages together didn't make East Asia rich except in the orbit of the West.
As for theory, when it comes to causal explanations of why Christianization promotes economic development, there's an embarrassment of riches:
Christianity promotes good behavior, not only through true moral teachings, but also through promises of reward and threats of punishment in the afterlife. And good behavior is generally good for the economy.
Christian churches, as institutions, have a certain variable but ultimately ineradicable autonomy from the state, and supply checks and balances that promote limited government.
Christianity demands monogamy, thereby limiting male-on-male violence and competition, or channeling it in productive directions, while also promoting investment in the human capital of offspring.
Christianity teaches a divinely ordered universe with laws discoverable by human reason, since man is "made in the image of God," and thereby gives birth to science.
Christianity upholds tradition to some extent, yet limits its authority, allowing for a fertile mix of creativity and continuity.
Development economists largely miss or underrate the Christianization factor, to the extent that, to someone like me who understands the causal power of Christianization in explaining development, the whole field often feels like a grand conspiracy to miss the point and obfuscate the obvious. I mentioned that Rodney Stark is an exception. Why? Because his excellent books largely do fuse Christian apologetics with development economics, and highlight and celebrate the myriad ways in which Christianity has driven the forward progress of mankind. He's the best development economist on the market, not because he's the smartest by any means, but simply because he happens to have embraced, and made his calling card out of, the one true theory of history, namely, Christian triumphalism. He doesn't get everything right, but he comes much closer than others do.
And by the way, it's worth addressing the puzzlement that some may feel at my calling Rodney Stark a development economist at all. Isn't he a sociologist of religion, turned into a kind of historian?
Yes, but that's outdated thinking.
Development economics has become very multi-disciplinary. It has to be, even at the cost of a lot of amateurism. Economic development simply can't be understood as a merely economic phenomenon. It's possible to be merely an economist if one is studying contemporary industrial organization or business cycles, focusing on prices and markets and money. You can take a certain cultural, institutional, and moral environment for granted. But in the grand sweep of history, everything's to play for, and everything is connected. Leading development economists have therefore all transgressed disciplinary lines flagrantly in their quest to understand the wealth and poverty of nations. Jeffery Sachs became a geographer and epidemiologist (decent), Deirdre McCloskey a virtue ethicist (mediocre), Daron Acemoglu a political scientist (disastrous), and Joel Mokyr– to circle back after this long digression– an intellectual historian (successful). A reader new to the field might not recognize from reading The Culture of Growth the author is an economist. He seems more like an intellectual historian with an odd propensity to overtheorize and overapply economic concepts, and occasionally naive reasoning, but laudable ambition to understand and explain, and a peculiar fascination with the connection between science and technology during the Enlightenment.
Anyway, with development economists morphing across disciplinary lines all over the place, it's only fair that a sociologist like Stark who turns his attention to economics and world history should be recognized as having morphed into, among other things, a development economist. And the reality is that scholars like Mokyr and Stark are part of the same grand conversation, and the best path to insight is through comparison and counterpoint among their books. Classifying these books by the field of the PhD that the author got long ago is not very helpful. Read Stark and Mokyr together. You'll learn more from the diversity of perspectives on heavily overlapping material.
Joel Mokyr's The Culture of Growth is a solid, valuable, successful book, which is well worth reading, even for those who don't particularly buy into Mokyr's pet theories. He is not overbearing about those theories, but they guide how he selects and organizes facts, which has a lot of mnemonic value. His main thesis is that the breakthrough into modern economic growth sprang from the intellectual Enlightenment, which brought with it a new way of looking at nature, and a systematic effort to understand natural laws and exploit them to meet human needs. Or to reiterate one of my favorite slogans, the Enlightenment fast-forwarded "the exploration and exploitation of the space of technological possibilities." Or did it?
I agree and disagree with Mokyr's thesis. I am fascinated by the discovery and cataloging of natural laws and the systematic exploitation of them to develop technological principles that can meet human needs, mitigate poverty, and enrich the human race. And a lot of that was happening in the 17th and 18th centuries. But I'm not sure how strong the connection is between science and technology, between the scientific pursuit of knowledge and the technological pursuit of power, efficiency, and wealth. Mokyr wants to see a very strong causal link between the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, on the one hand, and the Industrial Revolution, on the other. But I'm not sure he clinches his case. Mokyr's probably right that the Enlightenment's scientific mindset helped accelerated technology and industrialization, but it's a hard thing to prove.
And I'm unconvinced that there was any particular breakthrough in the 17th and 18th centuries, as Mokyr seems to follow convention in believing (though without great stress on the point). Looking back on history, I see a story of sustained scientific and technological progress throughout the Middle Ages, of which modern economic growth is merely a continuation. Modern economic growth perhaps represents the moment when this cumulative momentum broke free of Malthusian traps once and for all, at least in Europe and its offshoots, generating broad-based enrichment. But when you understand Malthusian logic, it might take only a slight uptick for economic growth to outpace population growth. Sustainable mitigation of poverty might not require any fundamental or drastic changes to the economy's engine. The Enlightenment helped get a few things out of the way, like tyrannical absolutist monarchies and religious wars, and that may suffice to explain why growth that had already been underway for centuries by the time the Enlightenment arrived turned into the Industrial Revolution. By this counter-thesis, technological progress, maybe fueled by science, was a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the Industrial Revolution, and it wasn't new.
And by the way, I'm not endorsing the counter-thesis either. I think it's theory rather than history that is going to have to rise to the challenge here.
While I learned a lot from listening to Mokyr's mustering of facts to make his point, I often felt frustrated by a lack of clarity that no efforts of the historian can fix. Better theory is needed. I've intermittently tried to supply that, e.g., in my dissertation, Complexity, Competition and Growth: Key Ideas from Adam Smith, Modeled Using Agent-Based Simulation, or at the blog Reinventing Economics, but I've never found enough of an audience to justify the effort of continuing the work. There isn't really an appetite in academic economics for theory of the caliber that would be required to develop, understand, and test the kind of theories that could really hack a trail through the jungle of history to a better explanation of modern economic growth. There's too much complacency, too much conservatism, too much deference to an inherited body of ideas, too much resting on laurels, too much intellectual protectionism and snobbery. There's way, way, way too much citation. Not enough of the revolutionary spirit of Socrates and Descartes. Not enough willingness to take all comers in the level playing field of debate. The oligarchs of the academic establishment send bright young grade students off to run nonthreatening, endless, largely futile, very forgettable regressions, crunching numbers and making inept interpretations, reducing economics to statistics, and burying the coherence of the field under a rubble of unorganized and misunderstood facts. Mokyr found a refuge from that by writing intellectual history, and has succeeded in writing a book that's worth reading out of a rather wayward and stultified field. Good for him! But I think a real breakthrough would have to come from iconoclastic theorizing, not historiography.
Still, let me zoom in on the heart of the book, its most central and inspiring idea.
The hero of Mokyr's story is "the republic of letters," a kind of informal institution or elite cultural phenomenon that he traces from the Renaissance down through the 18th century. It was a transnational society of intellectuals linked by correspondence. The word "letters" seems to have a double meaning here: on the one hand, education and writing and reading and the life of the mind; on the other hand, the specific business of writing and sending letters.
It was an epistolary culture, in which people felt an obligation to answer letters. Mokyr makes this fascinating claim several times, without providing much support for it, but I assume that he's probably right, and it was simply difficult to get a body of direct supporting quotations that wouldn't be unreasonably long and/or context-dependent. At times, Mokyr seems to betray a feeling that the republic of letters is the forerunner of contemporary academia, which continues to embody its spirit of collaborative inquiry. But I had the opposite impression: that today's tenured intellectuals in their siloed sub-sub-disciplines, hoarding their citations and indifferent to practical affairs and popularity and large, existential questions, are very unworthy heirs of the tradition of the republic of letters, shamefully inferior to the probing, adventurous, audacious philosophical minds of the glorious past that Mokyr is describing. And the idea of a culture in which there is an obligation to answer letters provides a poignant focal point to understand and lament the difference. A modern professor who feels an obligation to respond to every email and every comment on his blog, because he cares so much about truth that he cannot let any seeking mind go unenlightened, would be an exotic figure today, almost as odd as Don Quixote wandering the countryside of 17th-century Spain. Academia is a lot less open-minded and egalitarian than that, and too busy, too, in its treadmill, rat-race way that has little to do with zealous pursuit of truth. Reading Mokyr's account of the republic of letters, I can't help but aspire to refound it.
Maybe Substack is trying to do that. Maybe they're succeeding a little bit. Which is a good segue into inviting you to subscribe to mine!
It's unfortunate that the phrases "trickle-down theory" and "trickle-down economics" have been spoiled. The truth is that trickle-down economics is as inevitable and commonsensical as everyone who earns more by working for someone else than they could in self-employment, or whose quality of life is enriched by inventions made by other people. People's contributions to the effective creativity, coordination, and capital investment that make a modern economy are very unequal; the many are lifted up by the few. Mokyr tells the story of how a relative handful of dead white men in the 17th and 18th centuries, collaboratively exploring intellectual frontiers through thinking and tinkering and writing books and letters, pioneered a package of ideas that has trickled down and enriched vast multitudes. Readers of a Marxist or populist or multiculturalist turn of mind may choose to be offended by that story as too elitist, and I don't really want to waste time rebutting them, although of course Mokyr's story is incomplete, and one could tell more populist stories that would also be true. Development economics has, fortunately, made enough progress that the general beneficence of market capitalism doesn't need to be argued for but can simply be assumed, but outside economics, there's a lot of militant ignorance about capitalism that will lead some to resist parts of The Culture of Growth that Mokyr takes to be uncontroversial. And the worst of it is that the great Christian apologists that I admire most, such as G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, and David Bentley Hart, dabble in this kind of wayward thinking. To this I'll return. But first, let me follow Mokyr's argument to the end.
Mokyr is not satisfied to extol the republic of letters in Europe. He wants to explain why it happened then and there, especially there, since he's not fixated on the start date, but on the place. Above all, Mokyr agonizes at great length about why the emergence of a republic of letters leading to a culture of growth and industrial enlightenment didn't happen in China, where the circumstances seemed so promising. China had stability, literacy, a large population and agricultural surpluses, a critical mass of brain power, the rule of a meritocratic intelligentsia, a capacity for foreign trade and exploration, big cities, and was the pioneer in key technologies like paper and gunpowder and the use of coal as an energy source. But somehow the breakthrough to modern economic growth never came. Somehow science remained backward, and technology never gained momentum. He reviews the careers of lots of Chinese intellectuals and schools of thought who might have done it, and chases theory after theory, but comes up rather empty-handed. China's intellectual xenophobia, its reluctance to embrace foreign ideas because of a sense of superiority, is a factor. But why? It's an explanation in need of an explanation.
In this long tournament of hypotheses, the best performing, the one that's most convincing and that Mokyr seems to like best, is that Europe was a cultural unity amidst political diversity. The cultural unity enabled a transnational project of truth seeking and intellectual inquiry to emerge and persist. People of different nations had enough in common to understand each other in correspondence. The Latin language, now seen as a medieval relic, was still the lingua franca of elite Europeans, and was important to the Scientific Revolution. Political division served as an insurance policy against repression by local rulers. Galileo was safe in Venice before he made the mistake of going to Florence. Voltaire lived near the border because he might get in trouble in either Geneva or France, but probably not in both places at the same time. Holland and Britain were refugees for many freethinkers. Science waned now in Italy, now in France, but never everywhere. National cultures also produced national biases that preserved enough diversity of ideas to sustain critical thinking. In this way, mild intellectual xenophobia itself could even serve, ironically, as a helpful insurance policy against fashionable errors, in a context where cultural interconnections were too tight to prevent the contagion of truth for long. And anyway, Europeans couldn't afford to indulge in much intellectual xenophobia because geopolitical competition served as an incentive to explore and exploit this space of technological possibilities in order to get a military edge. Fear dispelled complacency, and scientists and technologists were often a key strategic resource.
And here's where I layer my "because Christianity" spin onto Mokyr's well-researched thesis. Why was Europe a cultural unity amidst political division? To put it another way, why was Europe able to sustain enough cultural unity for collaborative transnational scholarship to keep flourishing in the midst of national and political division, geopolitical competition and frequent war? Because Christianity, of course.
Europeans officially, and to a great extent at the level of real feelings and beliefs as well, held the same things sacred, shared the same moral convictions and historical reference points, and read the same texts with reverence. They understood each other. Christianity was a common language, a common culture, a common project, which knit them together in a single civilization, even as Europe remained emphatically divided. Some of the intellectual paths that the republic of letters explored seemed to begin to lead out of Christianity, though a lot fewer of either the men or the ideas were definitively post-Christian as the retrospective impressions of modern academia tend vaguely to suppose. But Christianity was still the sea in which all these minds swam, and enabled them to meet and mingle and weave an empire of exhilarating correspondence in the midst of the legacy institutions of the Middle Ages racked by the conflicts of the Reformation. It's one of the many ways that Christianization underlies the culture of growth and the rise of industrial development. It's a case of what I've generally found, that almost all explanatory roads in development economics lead to Christianity in the end, even if development economists are reluctant to follow them there.
Now, when I referred earlier to a fusion of Christian apologetics and development economics, I had in mind a two-way street. It's not just that development economists would do their work better if they became Christian apologists, but that Christian apologists are neglecting the duty by not becoming development economists, just as any Christian neglects a duty by not giving alms to the poor as his means permit.
There is an old saying: give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, but teach him man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. By the same token: give a developing country emergency food aid, you feed it for a year, but foster pro-growth institutions and policies through skillful development aid informed by economics, and you can lift it out of poverty forever. That those pro-growth institutions include market capitalism has been obvious enough for long enough now that for any public intellectual to fail to embrace and endorse and promote and encourage and lionize market capitalism is simply to fail to love the poor. And Jesus taught:
“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’
“They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’
“He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’" (Matthew 25:41-45)
In light of all the development economists really do know about how science and technology and market capitalism have fueled economic growth and alleviated poverty, the Christian duty to get food to the hungry and drink to the thirsty, clothing to the naked and help to the sick and freedom to the captives includes a duty, if you have the fortune to be a public intellectual, to advocate for science and technology and free market capitalism. Christian apologists need to get past letting their economics be biased by Marxist snobbery and/or medieval nostalgia, and to serve the least of these our brethren through the understanding and practice of development economics. And reading the books by Rodney Stark and Joel Mokyr is a good way to work your way into the insights of this worthwhile field of study.