Tim Stanley, writing in The Daily Telegraph, says that Trump’s America reminds him of the decline of the Roman Empire. I find that some of the things we are seeing over here remind me of those distant times, though in quite a different way.
Censorship
What we see today is a move away from freedom of speech, even freedom of thought, when someone like Kathleen Stock loses her job as professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex because of her views on gender.
Back in the 4th century AD the same sort of thing was happening when Christianity was becoming the official religion of the Roman Empire. We can certainly see differences between those far off days and our own. But there are some curious similarities.
Conversion
In 306 AD the city of York (then called Eboracum) became temporarily the centre of the universe. Constantine was proclamed there as Roman Emperor.
He must be one of the most influential men in history, even world history. Apart from founding the city of Constantinople, which went on to be capital of the Roman Empire (even though only the eastern part) for more than a thousand years, he converted to Christianity (on his death bed) and set in motion the process by which Christianity was adopted as the official religion of the Roman Empire. And certainly, the rest is history, as the saying goes.
Freedom of thought
One of the aspects of life during the centuries before Constantine that should impress us today is that there was relative freedom of thought and particularly freedom of religious belief. (But what about the persecution of Christians - I hear you cry. Bear with me - we’ll come to that.)
For over a thousand years, Athens and Rome had been the centres of intellectual enquiry and debate. Plato probably kicked it off. Someone said that all subsequent philosophy is a footnote to Plato (although I’m not sure what that means). Certainly no one had to stick to a party line. Aristotle seemed to disagree with much of what his tutor, Plato, thought and said, as depicted in Raphael’s famous painting in the Vatican, The School of Athens. Thought and religious belief were free.
How can we get a feel for this? An indication is the existence of libraries. The greatest library in the ancient world was in Alexandria. It had 490,000 “books”, including 350 works of philosophy by 250 authors. (Of course, they didn’t have “books”; they were papyrus rolls.)
This freedom was coming under pressure with the advent of Christianity after Constantine’s death. But a pagan intellectual called Themistus felt the need in AD 364 to stress the ancient virtues of freedom, bravely addressing the new (Christian) Emperor Jovian. He said “You must be aware that a king cannot compel his subjects in everything . . . for example the whole question of virtue, and above all, reverance for the divine”. He maintained that God (yes, even he, a pagan, spoke of God) “lets the manner of worship depend on individual inclination”. John Stuart Mill would have been impressed.
What about the early Christians suffering martyrdom for their beliefs? The problem was partly political. Christians, with their monotheistic beliefs, refused to honour the traditional Roman gods. Your Roman citizen was frightened that this would upset the said gods and cause trouble. Can’t these people just do the traditional sacrifices like the rest of us?
The Emperor Trajan, one of the “good emperors” of ancient history, was asked by Pliny the Younger (he whose father died in the eruption of Vesuvius) what to do about these tricky Christians. Trajan’s reply is worth quoting in full as it gives a flavour of what he referred to as the “spirit of our age”:
"You observed proper procedure, my dear Pliny, in sifting the cases of those who had been denounced to you as Christians. For it is not possible to lay down any general rule to serve as a kind of fixed standard. They are not to be sought out; if they are denounced and proved guilty, they are to be punished, with this reservation, that whoever denies that he is a Christian and really proves it - that is, by worshiping our gods - even though he was under suspicion in the past, shall obtain pardon through repentance. But anonymously posted accusations ought to have no place in any prosecution. For this is both a dangerous kind of precedent and out of keeping with the spirit of our age."
End of toleration
This spirit of toleration came to an abrupt end very soon after Constantine, specifically in AD 381. The Christian Emperor Theodosius then issued a form of decree saying that essentially Christianity was compulsory and also that it had to be the right version of Christianity.
The previous years had been fraught with the arguments among Christians that are almost too rarified for 21st century Christians to follow. Jesus is part of the Trinity, that is, divine, even part of God. But how did this work? Did this mean that he was God right from the start of creation? Or just after he was born? At the risk of oversimplification, Arius from north Africa thought the latter. But no, he got it wrong. It had been agreed at the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD that Father and Son were equal in substance - “consubstantial” and “coeternal”, words that still feature in some of our modern creeds . Arianism was a heresy.
Theodosius was keen to stress that the Nicene version of Christianity was the only correct one. Other versions were heresies and would be punished by the state and the divine judgement of God. He also banned most forms of pagan worship. Quite a change in less than 20 years.
Advent of Wokery
Do we see parallels today with the advent of what we think of as “wokery”?
The most obvious examples of wokery are related to so-called gender theories. Famously, J K Rowley stepped out of line in the minds of adherents of the new theories by insisting that there were only two sexes. As I understand it, she was thought to be being hostile to people who change their sex - “transphobic” as the saying is. It was useless for her to deny any such feeling. Luckily her books are so popular (and, doubtless, her wealth so substantial) that she can withstand the cancellations inflicted on her by parts of the literary establishment and the disowning of her by the young actors who owe their fame to her amazing talents.
Similarly, as I’ve already mentioned, the philosopher Kathleen Stock was sacked by the University of Sussex for her views. Happily, she must have made more of a name for herself as a commentator and public guru than she ever did in the censored and illiberal confines of the University of Sussex.
These two eminent ladies are presumably better able to look after themselves than people less in the public eye. A 17 year-old girl in her girls’ football team asked a bearded person in the opposing team whether he was a man. What a shocking question! She was suspended from her football team. (Her case is being taken up by Toby Young’s Free Speech Union.)
There are also instances of people who would have assumed that they were “progressive” and even “diverse” getting it wrong. How similar to the problems faced by the followers of Arius in the 4th century AD.
In 2018 a group of lesbians wanted to march with placards saying “Lesbian = female homosexual”. The organisers of a Pride event denounced them as “shocking and disgusting” demonstrating “a level of bigotry, ignorance and hate that is unacceptable”.
The journalist Mark Steyn gave another example. At Wellesley College in Massachusetts, a girl student who identified as a “Masculine of Center Genderqueer” named Timothy, was told that she couldn’t be a diversity officer because she’d become a white male, and wasn’t therefore diverse any more. As Mark Steyn said, she’d diversified a weeny bit too far.
It’s very easy to laugh at all this. But it’s worth looking a little deeper. The differences between what Arius maintained and what they said at the Council of Nicaea are too intricate (and unimportant) for most 21st century Christians to comprehend. Similarly, with the 21stcentury woke arguments.
These 21st century creeds have so many of the characteristics of religious creeds - in particular, intolerance of others.
One of the clearest examples of this has been a quite different creed, that of climate alarmism. The fear that we are headed for climatic disaster and the support for drastic government action in the shape of Net Zero (to some extent mitigated by realisation of the costs) have acquired the status of a creed that it is dangerous to dispute. Various eminent scientists describe how they have been vilified for publishing the results of scientific research (facts, not opinions) that contradict the official narratives (listen to what Professors Henrik Svensmark and Nir Shaviv describe in Climate: the Movie). Professor Will Happer of Princeton, now of Emeritus status and no longer needing to worry about his future career, says that, if he were 30 years younger, he would be tempted to keep quiet about his views on the climate. Followers of the theologian Arius would understand.
Nigel Lawson reflected on this when in 2008 he published his book, An Appeal to Reason: a Cool Look at Global Warming. Even then, he had difficulty getting his book published. He commented on the religious overtones.
He also went further. And it’s worth quoting what he wrote nearly 20 years ago, partly because it now also resonates with so many of the other creeds we are subjected to:
“I suspect that it is no accident that it is in Europe that eco-fundamentalism in general and global warming absolutism in particular, has found its most fertile soil; for it is in Europe that traditional religions have the weekest hold. Yet people still feel the need for the comfort and higher values that religion can provide, and it is the quasi-religion of green alarmism and what has been well described as global salvationism . . . which has filled the vacuum, with reasoned questioning of its mantras regarded as little short of sacrilege.”
Today we see many new creeds: fighting climate change; Net Zero; transgender rights; critical race theory; de-colonising; even the whole web of ideas encompassed within “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” at the extremities of those, in theory, worthy objectives. And because of their quasi-religious nature, we see Heretics - often accompanied by the hatred and vilification that J K Rowling and Kathleen Stock know all about and would have been only too familiar to the Heretics of earlier centuries.
Tony Herbert
12 December 2024
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