by Morris, Ian;
Plenty of points of disputation remained, but by 200 Christianity was becoming a disciplined faith with (reasonably) clear rules about salvation. Like Mahayana Buddhism, it was distinctive enough to get attention, offering practical paths to salvation in troubled times, yet familiar enough to be comprehensible. Learned Greeks even suggested that second-wave Axial Christianity was not so different from first-wave Axial philosophy after all: Plato (the Athenian Moses, some called him) had reasoned his way to the truth and Christians had had truth revealed to them, but it was all the same truth.
When high-end state institutions started breaking down, bishops were well placed to step into the gap, mobilizing their followers to rebuild town walls, fix roads, and negotiate with Germanic raiders. In the countryside conspicuously holy men, renouncing the world as vigorously as any Buddhist, became local leaders. One ascetic achieved empire-wide fame by living in a tomb in the Egyptian desert, fasting, and battling Satan, all the while wearing a hair shirt. His greatest promoter insisted, “He neither bathed his body with water to free himself from filth, nor did he ever wash his feet.” Another holy man sat on a fifty-foot column in Syria for forty years, while other renouncers wore animal skins and ate only grass, living (briefly, presumably) as “fools for Christ.”
All this struck fastidious Roman gentlemen as bizarre, and even Christians worried about wild men who inspired fanatical followings and answered to no one but God. In 320 an Egyptian holy man named Pachomius found a solution, herding local hermits into the first Christian monastery, where they pursued salvation through labor and prayer under his rigid discipline. Pachomius and the Chinese Dao’an surely knew nothing of each other, but their monasteries were strikingly alike and had similar social consequences. In the fifth century Christian monasteries and convents often moored local economies when larger structures broke down, became centers of learning as classical scholarship waned, and provided monkish militias to keep the peace.
Christianity spread even faster than Buddhism. When Jesus died, around 32 CE, he had a few hundred followers; by 391, when Emperor Theodosius declared Christianity the only legal religion, more than 30 million Romans had converted, although “conversion” is necessarily a loose word. While some highly educated men and women were going through torments of doubt, working through the doctrinal implications with great logic and rigor before accepting the new faith, all around them crowds thousands strong could be won over by Christian or Buddhist wonder-workers in a single afternoon. Consequently, all statistics remain crude; we are doing chainsaw art again. We simply do not know, and probably never will, exactly when and where the pace of conversion accelerated and when and where it slackened, but since we know that both Christianity and Buddhism started with a few hundred followers and eventually had 30-million-plus, Figure 6.9 shows what the average growth rates for each religion must have been across these centuries, smoothed out over the whole of China and the Roman Empire. On average, Chinese Buddhism was growing by 2.3 percent each year, meaning that it doubled its following every thirty years, but Christianity grew by 3.4 percent, doubling every twenty years.
The lines in Figure 6.9 march up, while those for social development in Figure 6.1 fall steadily down. The obvious question—is there a connection?—already recommended itself to Edward Gibbon back in 1781. “We may hear without surprise or scandal,” he observed, “that the introduction … of Christianity, had some influence on the decline and fall of the Roman empire”—but the influence, Gibbon held, was not of the kind that Christians themselves liked to believe. Rather, he suggested, Christianity sapped the empire’s vigor:
The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity; the active virtues of society were discouraged; and the last remains of military spirit were buried in the cloister: a large portion of public and private wealth was consecrated to the specious demands of charity and devotion; and the soldiers’ pay was lavished on the useless multitude of both sexes, who could only plead the merits of abstinence and chastity.
Figure 6.9. Counting souls: the growth of Christianity and Chinese Buddhism, assuming constant rates of change. The vertical scale is logarithmic, as in Figures 3.6 and 3.7, so the constant average rates of growth (3.4 percent per annum for Christianity, 2.3 percent for Buddhism) produce straight lines.
Patience and pusillanimity were as much Buddhist virtues as Christian; so might we extend Gibbon’s argument and conclude that ideas—the triumph of priestcraft over politics, revelation over reason—ended the classical world, driving down social development century after century and also narrowing the gap between East and West?
The question cannot be shrugged off lightly, but I think the answer is no. Like first-wave Axial thought, the second-wave Axial religions were more the consequence than the cause of changes in social development. Judaism, Greek philosophy, Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, and Jainism all emerged between 600 and 300 BCE, when social development pushed past the level (roughly twenty-four points) at which the Western core had collapsed around 1200 BCE. They were responses to high-end states’ reorganization and disenchantment of the world. Second-wave Axial religion was a mirror image of this: as the Old World Exchange destabilized high-end states, people found first-wave thought wanting and salvation religions filled the gap.
Unless the averaged-out growth rates in Figure 6.9 are wildly off the mark, Christianity and Chinese Buddhism were marginal before the Old World Exchange. By 250, though, there were about a million Christians (roughly one Roman in forty), which was apparently some kind of tipping point. Christianity now started seriously annoying the emperors; not only was it competing for revenues in one of Rome’s darkest hours, but its jealous God also ruled out the god-when-I’m-dead compromise that had helped rulers justify their power for so long. The emperor Decius began major persecutions in 250, just before the Goths killed him. In 257 Valerian started another pogrom, only for the Persians to kill him, too.
Despite these discouraging examples and the obvious fact that using force to intimidate people whose highest goal was to die as horribly as Jesus was bound to be a losing proposition, emperors tried on and off for another fifty years to wipe Christianity out. But with congregations growing on average by 3.4 percent each year, the miracle of compound interest took church membership to around 10 million members, a quarter of the empire’s population, in the 310s. That was apparently a second tipping point: in 312, in the middle of a civil war, the emperor Constantine found God. Instead of trying to squelch Christianity, Constantine worked out a new compromise, just as his predecessors half a millennium earlier had worked out compromises with the equally subversive first-wave Axial thought. Constantine transferred massive wealth to the church, made it tax-exempt, and recognized its hierarchy. In return the church recognized Constantine.
Over the next eighty years the rest of the population turned Christian, aristocrats colonized the church’s leadership, and the church and state between them plundered the empire’s pagan temples—perhaps the biggest redistribution of wealth the world had yet seen. Christianity was an idea whose time had come. The king of Armenia turned Christian in the 310s, as did Ethiopia’s ruler in the 340s. Persia’s kings did not, but that was probably because Iranian Zoroastrianism was evolving along similar lines to Christianity anyway.
Chinese Buddhism seems to have passed through rather similar tipping points. In Figure 6.9 it hits the million-member mark around 400, but because conditions were so very different in northern and southern China, the growth of the faith had different consequences in each region. In the unsettled north, Buddhists tended to cluster for safety in the capital cities, which made them very vulnerable to royal pressure. By 400 Northern Wei, the strongest of the kingdoms, had set up a government department to supervise Buddhists, and in 446 it started persecuting them. In southern China, by contrast, instead of concentrating in the capital at Jiankang, Buddhist monks scattered down the Yangzi Valley, where they could get powerful aristocrats to protect them against the cou
rt and could force emperors to make concessions. In 402 an emperor even accepted that monks should not have to bow in his presence.
Figure 6.9 suggests that there may have been 10 million Buddhists in China by 500, and when the new faith reached this second tipping point, rulers (in northern China as well as southern) made the same decision as Constantine and lavished wealth, tax exemptions, and honors on the flock’s leaders. In the south the genuinely pious emperor Wudi supported vast Buddhist festivals, banned animal sacrifice (people had to consume pastry imitations instead), and sent envoys to India to gather sacred texts. In return, the Buddhist hierarchy recognized Wudi as a Bodhisattva, the redeemer and savior of his people. The kings of Northern Wei got an even better deal, asserting the right to pick their own chief monks and then having the monks pronounce that the kings were reincarnations of the Buddha. Constantine would have been jealous.
Patience and pusillanimity did not cause the decline and fall of East or West. The paradox of social development did that. To some extent the declines and falls followed the script written in the West around 1200 BCE, when the expanding core set off chains of events that no one could control, but to some extent the sheer scale of social development by 160 CE rewrote the script, transforming geography by linking East and West together across central Asia and creating an Old World Exchange of microbes and migrants.
By 160 CE the empires of the classical world were much bigger and stronger than the kingdoms of the Western core had been in 1200 BCE, but so, too, were the disruptions that their primitive version of globalization set off. The classical empires could not cope with the forces they unleashed. Century after century, social development slid. Writing, cities, taxes, and bureaucrats lost their value, and as the old certainties stopped making sense, a hundred million people sought salvation from a world gone wrong by giving new twists to ancient wisdom. Like first-wave Axial thought, second-wave ideas were dangerous, challenging the authority of husbands over wives, rich over poor, and kings over subjects, but once again the mighty made their peace with the subversive, redistributing power and wealth in the process. By 500 CE states were weaker and churches stronger, but life went on.
If I had been writing this book around the year 500 CE I might well have been a long-term lock-in theorist. Every millennium or so, I would have observed, social development undermined itself, and for every two or three steps forward there would be one step back. Disruptions were getting bigger, now affecting the East as well as the West, but the pattern was clear. During steps forward, the West pulled away from the East; during steps back, the gap narrowed; and on it would go, in a series of waves, each cresting higher than the last one, with the West’s lead varying but locked in.
But if I had been writing a century later, things would have looked entirely different.
7
THE EASTERN AGE
THE EAST TAKES THE LEAD
According to Figure 7.1, 541 ought to be one of the most famous dates in history. In that year (or somewhere around the middle of the sixth century, anyway, allowing for a certain margin of error in the index) the East’s social development score overtook the West’s, ending a fourteen-thousand-year-old pattern and disproving at a stroke any simple long-term lock-in theory of why the West rules. By 700 the East’s score was one-third higher than the West’s, and by 1100 the gap—nearly 40 percent—was bigger than it had been for two and a half thousand years (when the advantage had lain with the West).
Why did the East pull ahead in the sixth century? And why did its social development score rise so high over the next half-millennium while the West’s steadily fell behind? These questions are crucial to explaining why the West now rules, and as we attempt to answer them in this chapter we will encounter quite a cast of heroes and villains, geniuses and bunglers. Behind all the drama, though, we will find the same simple fact that has driven East-West differences throughout the story: geography.
Figure 7.1. The great reversal: the East turns its decline around and for the first time in history pulls ahead of the West
WAR AND RICE
Eastern social development began falling before 100 CE and continued until 400, and by the time it bottomed out it stood lower than it had been for five centuries. States had failed, cities had burned, and migrations—from Inner Asia to northern China, and from northern China to southern—had convulsed the whole core. It was out of these migrations, though, that the Eastern revival began.
In Chapters 4–6 we saw how rising social development transformed geography, uncovering advantages in backwardness and opening highways across the oceans and steppes. Since the third century, though, it had been shown that the relationship also worked in reverse: falling social development transformed geography too. As Roman and Chinese cities shrank, literacy declined, armies weakened, and living standards fell, the cores also contracted geographically, and the differences between these contractions largely explain why Eastern social development recovered so quickly while Western development kept falling into the eighth century.
Figure 7.2. The East bounces back, 400–700. Figure 7.2a shows the states of Western Wei, Eastern Wei, and southern China’s Liang dynasty in 541. The Sui dynasty united all three in 589. Figure 7.2b shows the greatest extent of the Tang Empire, around 700.
We also saw in Chapter 6 that the Eastern core’s old heartland in the Yellow River valley fragmented into warring states after 300 and millions of northerners fled southward. The exodus converted the lands south of the Yangzi from the underdeveloped periphery they had been in Han times into a new frontier. The refugees entered an alien landscape, humid and hot, where their staples of wheat and millet grew poorly but rice flourished. Much of this land was lightly settled, often by people whose customs and languages were very different from those brought by the north Chinese immigrants. Amid the sort of violence and harsh dealing that characterizes most colonial landgrabs, the immigrants’ weight of numbers and tighter organization steadily pushed the earlier occupants back.
Between 280 and 464 the number of people listed as taxpayers south of the Yangzi quintupled, but the migration did not just bring more people to the south. It also brought new techniques. According to an agricultural handbook called The Essential Methods of the Common People, no fewer than thirty-seven varieties of rice were known by the 530s, and transplantation (growing seedlings in special beds for six weeks, then moving them to flooded paddies) had become the norm. This was backbreaking work, but guaranteed high yields. The Essential Methods explains how fertilizers let farmers work fields continuously rather than leaving them fallow, and how watermills—particularly at Buddhist monasteries, which were often built by fast-flowing mountain streams and often had the capital for big investments—made it cheaper to grind grains into flour, mill rice, and press oil from seeds. The result was the gradual development of a new frontier of agricultural opportunities, rather like the one the Romans created when they conquered western Europe in the first century BCE. Gradually, over the course of centuries, the south’s rural backwardness was turned into an advantage.
Cheap transport began to complement cheap food. China’s rivers were still no substitute for the waterways that the Mediterranean had provided Rome, but little by little human ingenuity made up for this. Underwater archaeologists have not yet provided statistics like those for Roman shipwrecks, but written records suggest that vessels were getting bigger and faster. Paddleboats appeared on the Yangzi in the 490s, and from Chengdu to Jiankang rice fed growing cities, where urban markets encouraged cash crops such as tea (first mentioned in surviving records around 270 and becoming a widespread luxury by 500). Grandees, merchants, and monasteries all got rich on rents, shipping, and milling in the Yangzi Valley.
The ruling court in Jiankang, however, did not get rich. In this regard its situation was less like the Roman Empire’s than like eighth-century-BCE Assyria’s, where governors and landowners, not the state, captured the fruits of growing population and trade—until, of course, Tiglath-Pileser t
urned things around. Southern China, however, never got a Tiglath-Pileser. Once in a while an emperor managed to rein in the aristocracy and even tried to reconquer the north, but these efforts always collapsed in civil war. Between 317 and 589 five successive dynasties ruled (after a fashion) from Jiankang.
The Essential Methods suggests that sophisticated agriculture survived in the north into the 530s, but well before then long-distance trade and even coinage had faded away as mounted robbers plundered widely. At first this breakdown produced even more political chaos than in the south, but gradually new rulers began imposing order on the north. Chief among them were the Xianbei, who came from the fringes of the steppes in Manchuria. Like the Parthians who had overrun Iran six centuries earlier, the Xianbei combined nomad and agrarian traditions, and had for generations fought as an equestrian elite while extracting protection money from peasants.
In the ruins of northern China in the 380s the Xianbei set up their own state, called Northern Wei.* Instead of just robbing the Chinese gentry, they worked out deals with them, preserving at least some of the salaried bureaucrats and taxes of the old high-end states. This gave Northern Wei an edge over the disorderly, brawling mobs that ran north China’s other states; enough of an edge, in fact, for Northern Wei to unite the whole region in 439.
That said, the deals Northern Wei cut with the surviving remnants of the old Chinese aristocracy remained rather ramshackle. Most Xianbei warriors preferred herding flocks to hobnobbing with literati, and even when the riders did settle down they generally built their own castles to avoid having to rub shoulders with Chinese farmers. Their state remained determinedly low-end. So long as they were just fighting other northern robber states that was fine, but when Xianbei horsemen approached the suburbs of Jiankang in 450 they discovered that although they could win battles and steal everything not nailed down, they could not threaten real cities. Only a proper high-end state with ships, siege engines, and supply trains could do that.