A group blog to promote discussion, debate and insight into the history, particularly religious, of America's founding. Any observations, questions, or comments relating to the blog's theme are welcomed.
Rodney Stark's Debunkathon: How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity
Around here, we all love a good debunking of the acceptive narratives, and Rodney Stark takes a whack at the whole megillah. From Marvin Olasky's review over at WORLD mag:
Baylor professor Rodney Stark’s The Triumph of Christianity was WORLD’s 2012 book of the year. His latest, How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (ISI, 2014), is equally worth reading for all the myths Stark busts. He consistently shows how decentralization and competition, rather than government domination, form the base for progress.
Stark was a journalist before entering the academic world, and his clear writing shows it. He skewers classicists who mourn ancient Rome’s downfall, and calls the fall of Rome “the most beneficial event in the rise of Western civilization, precisely because it unleashed so many substantial and progressive changes…Disunity enabled extensive, small-scale social experimentation and unleashed creative competition among hundreds of independent political units.”
In a chapter entitled “The blessings of disunity,” Stark goes on to show that the Dark Ages weren’t dark, the Vikings and the Crusades have gotten a bad rap, the medieval church fought slavery, the Middle Ages witnessed global warming and then global cooling, and the Black Death contributed to the end of serfdom.
And more debunking: Native Americans did not have a reverence for the earth, the European settlement of the Americas was not a brutal act of genocide, Spain following the Age of Exploration never declined because it never truly rose, Islam never had a golden age and was not tolerant, Christianity was not hostile to science, and European nations did not profit from colonialism...