Astral Codex Ten

Church

12 min read

Church

Article

Church is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between September 02, 2022 and November 17, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “We’re done with the Church, and with God too!””; “the Church also took other actions to achieve the same goal”; “At some point it no longer needed the Church as a carrier vehicle”. It most often appears alongside Egypt, Europe, God.

Metadata

  • Category: Organizations
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: September 02, 2022
  • Last seen: November 17, 2023

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

The Prophet And Caesar's Wife
September 02, 2022 · Original source
“Woe unto you!” said the Prophet, “The people of Cragmacnois are poor and hard-working, and they loathe the rich and the corrupt. Rightly do they hate you for spending the Church’s money on your own lavish lifestyle.”
“Actually,” said the Bishop, “my brother the Prince lets me use this spare palace of his and its well-stocked wine cellar. If I refused, he would just give it to someone else, or leave it empty. I’m not stealing church resources, and there’s no way to divert the resources to help the poor. And I am secure in my faith, and won’t be turned to hedonism by a glass of wine here and there. So what’s wrong with me enjoying myself a little?”
“Woe unto you!” said the Prophet. “For the people of Belazzia are rich and sophisticated, and they mock you for your poverty and uncleanliness. Does the Church not give you enough funds to build a golden palace and wear silk robes? If you were the most resplendent citizen of this nation of splendor, would they not take you more seriously?”
Your Book Review: The Weirdest People in the World
August 11, 2023 · Original source
Trust strangers more and are more honest. This psychology might make societies richer, for fairly well-known and plausible reasons. The Weirdest People in the World (henceforth just WEIRD) sets out a causal chain from cultural change to psychological change to modern economic growth. The start of that chain is surprising: an obscure set of rules pushed by the medieval Catholic church, which banned marriage between cousins. The most important argument of the book is that these rules created WEIRD psychology. How it worked: these marriage regulations served to dismantle intensive kin networks, which are the social cement of society almost everywhere else in the world. For most people in history, family hasn't just been the place where children grow up and couples spend time together. Family has been the basic human group, and there have been extensive and precise rules dictating who counts as family (or clan) and how each person should act with respect to different relatives. The Church's regulations, the Marriage and Family Programme (MFP), aimed to replace intensive kinship, and over many centuries it was more or less successful in doing that. We'll come back shortly to why it wanted to. So, the causal chain looks like this3: WEIRD's key evidence is the link between the places where the Church promulgated the MFP and a set of psychological and social outcomes: the level of cousin marriage, the psychology of people living in those places today, social capital and economic growth. This is the scientific story of European history, and Henrich's answer to the most important question in the world. These maps from one of the scientific articles behind WEIRD show the basic causal claim: the medieval church reduced the intensity of kinship institutions. He tells it with an extraordinary mastery of a very wide range of sources from anthropology, psychology, behavioural economics, economic history, and historical narrative. This book is for everyone, but the connoisseur will enjoy the bibliography: if you think it's important and relevant, it's probably in there, and there was also plenty of work which I did not know, and now feel I should. It takes a very smart person to keep this many balls in the air. Being at Harvard probably doesn't hurt either – that's the “collective brain” of the human network, which makes an appearance later on in the book. So this book really sets down a marker: the anthropologists are returning from the Amazon, the Sudan and Polynesia, and coming for Western history and economics. It will be interesting to see how those target disciplines react. Is it true? Economists and historians think about Western history very differently. Historians love irony and contingency. They enjoy byways. Triumphalist, linear narratives of progress are distrusted as “Whig history”. Growth economists, by contrast, are all about the linear bigness. They have a relentless focus on the one question of how the West got rich, and if you call that triumphalist, they will take out a chart of South Sudanese child mortality and laugh at you. Both historians and historical economists — a more appropriate name than “economic historians” nowadays — are interested in causality. But economists have a crunchier, more “scientific” standard for what counts as proof of causality. You've got to have a treatment and a control group, and by default if you claim there are no confounds, they won't believe you. You need you some plausible exogeneity. A random river where Napoleon's armies stopped. The distance from Wittemberg where Luther nailed up his theses. And then, how does that affect something that matters today (if it doesn't, then who cares?) Of course, the longer ago the exogenous treatment, the more impressive the result. You can see the incentives that these disciplinary demands might set up, and that might worry you. At worst, you might get a kind of “underground river” concept of history, where X happened long ago
Inline links: 3, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!1pe5!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F65c52bab-c319-4239-988c-73c141e995a6_935x214.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!FA2x!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F910f2b34-1235-412a-a43d-ed00fa1b1dc9_882x767.png, one of the scientific articles behind
These maps from one of the scientific articles behind WEIRD show the basic causal claim: the medieval church reduced the intensity of kinship institutions. He tells it with an extraordinary mastery of a very wide range of sources from anthropology, psychology, behavioural economics, economic history, and historical narrative. This book is for everyone, but the connoisseur will enjoy the bibliography: if you think it's important and relevant, it's probably in there, and there was also plenty of work which I did not know, and now feel I should. It takes a very smart person to keep this many balls in the air. Being at Harvard probably doesn't hurt either – that's the “collective brain” of the human network, which makes an appearance later on in the book. So this book really sets down a marker: the anthropologists are returning from the Amazon, the Sudan and Polynesia, and coming for Western history and economics. It will be interesting to see how those target disciplines react. Is it true? Economists and historians think about Western history very differently. Historians love irony and contingency. They enjoy byways. Triumphalist, linear narratives of progress are distrusted as “Whig history”. Growth economists, by contrast, are all about the linear bigness. They have a relentless focus on the one question of how the West got rich, and if you call that triumphalist, they will take out a chart of South Sudanese child mortality and laugh at you. Both historians and historical economists — a more appropriate name than “economic historians” nowadays — are interested in causality. But economists have a crunchier, more “scientific” standard for what counts as proof of causality. You've got to have a treatment and a control group, and by default if you claim there are no confounds, they won't believe you. You need you some plausible exogeneity. A random river where Napoleon's armies stopped. The distance from Wittemberg where Luther nailed up his theses. And then, how does that affect something that matters today (if it doesn't, then who cares?) Of course, the longer ago the exogenous treatment, the more impressive the result. You can see the incentives that these disciplinary demands might set up, and that might worry you. At worst, you might get a kind of “underground river” concept of history, where X happened long ago
Inline links: one of the scientific articles behind
Y is correlated with X today Indeed this does seem to skip all the interesting, contingent bits: On the other hand, if you want to explain an all-important outcome like the take-off into modern economic growth, then you can't just mumble “one damn thing after another” or “irony and contingency”. That a hundred things randomly conspired to make the West Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic is not a satisfying story. Why would the die rolls keep favouring this one place? (And you can't invoke the law of large numbers. There are only five continents in the world, and modern economic growth did not have to happen anywhere at all.) To get from Europe 1 AD to modernity, while paying reasonable attention to the many accidents along the way, there are really only two possible narrative genres. The first is the rock falling down a mountain. It starts with one big, random event. This then triggers other events, and they trigger others, and now you have an unstoppable landslide. But the chance is at the start. The second is the cyclist pushing his bike up a mountain. It takes an actor who deliberately over time overcomes one obstacle and dodges another, until eventually they get to the top, and from there it's a downhill ride. WEIRD belongs firmly in the landslide genre. The big event is the Marriage and Family Program of the Western Church. This sets off a landslide, which the later chapters detail: the decline of kin institutions, the rise of Italian communes and city-states in the middle ages, the idea of individual rights in the European law merchant, the development of Protestantism, and finally the trifecta of science, commerce and democracy. WEIRD psychology is there, as an unobserved helper, for each stage of this journey, but each stage also builds on the previous ones. It's not by chance that WEIRD tells the West's story as a landslide. First, this is part of cultural evolution's baggage of intellectual commitments. Homo culturalis doesn't figure out solutions to his problems by abstract thought; he's not a natural optimizer. Instead he feels his way towards solutions. In a now famous example from The Secret Of Our Success, nobody just sat down and worked out how to detoxify manioc. Cultures which did this job better just had an evolutionary advantage. Second, the “bicycle push uphill” story would threaten the clean causality of the natural experiment. Suppose the Western Church promulgated the MFP with the deliberate plan of creating WEIRD psychology and causing the take-off into modern economic growth. Okay, that's unlikely, but suppose it promulgated the MFP with a plan that was somewhat related to increasing human welfare (in this world, not the next). Then we might suspect two things: Maybe in doing so the Church was reacting to existing conditions: reading the human situation and responding “hey, what we need here is less intensive kinship”.
Inline links: detoxify manioc
Book Review: I See Satan Fall Like Lightning
November 17, 2023 · Original source
So how does the Hebrew Bible escape this failure mode? Girard says divine intervention. God (here meaning literal God, exactly as the average churchgoer understands Him) tried to break the reign of Satan (here meaning metaphorical Satan, the single-victim process) over the Jewish people, by constantly providing them with examples of the single-victim process being bad and ensuring those examples were written up accurately. He got the Israelites to obsess over these examples and worship them as a holy text, trying to hammer the whole thing into their heads. Finally, He sent His only begotten Son as the perfect victim, who would undergo the process in its entirety and have it be written up with unprecedented attention to detail. This extra-compelling example finally penetrated the Israelites’ thick skulls. Although Peter and the other disciples sort of joined the mob in denying Jesus at the beginning, after the Resurrection they started thinking previously barely-thinkable thoughts, like “what if our mob was in the wrong?” and “what if mob violence is bad?”
At some point it no longer needed the Church as a carrier vehicle. Like Oedipus, it killed its parent. The Church, it might seem, is not maximally designed to help victims. It has all these extraneous pieces, like prayers and cathedrals and Popes. And isn’t prayer offensive when we should be engaging in direct revolutionary action to free the oppressed? Aren’t cathedrals are a gaudy celebration of wealth, when that money should be used to feed the poor. Doesn’t a celibate clergy create conditions rife for child sexual abuse? As the single divine Word grew louder and louder, Christianity started to seem morally indefensible, and began to wither away like the pagan faiths it supplanted.