Two Noted Things

by Cliopatria

The Bulwer-Hanson Awards: David Noon started this thing. He wrote this parody of Victor Davis Hanson. [Er, David corrects me. Hanson actually wrote that stuff!]* So, now there's a contest for the Best Parody of Victor Davis Hanson. Noon calls it"sort of an Edward Bulwer-Lytton Award for historical hackery." What would the Hanson admirers over at Big Tent do with that? If Chris Bray doesn't hear about it and get inspired, everyone else has a chance to win! Click on the link for rules, deadlines, prizes!
*Or, see this.

Sic et Non: Andrew Sullivan and Josh Marshall have been reflecting on the possibility that chaos in Iraq could plunge the whole Middle East into religious wars comparable to those that Europe experienced in the 16th and 17th centuries. Marshall seems to think that the mention of it reveals the superficiality of widespread earlier observations that what Islam needs is a Reformation. Such calls ignored the century and a half of European warfare before they were settled."Not to worry, though," says Marshall.

By 2146 or so, after a century or so of bloodletting, there may be a broad political and ideological consensus in favor of relegating religion to the private sphere and leaving the whole thing to personal conscience.

Sullivan and Marshall are right to warn about the horror of the Reformation's unleashing the dogs of war. But I'm stunned by Marshall's conclusion. He's a historian, after all. One of the standard essay questions, when I used to teach Early Modern Europe, was to compare and contrast the Peace of Augburg, the Elizabethan Settlement, and the Edict of Nantes. They brought peace to Germany, England, and France, but the settlements differed remarkably in interesting and important ways. Whatever their similarities and differences, however, none of them represented"a broad political and ideological consensus in favor of relegating religion to the private sphere and leaving the whole thing to personal conscience." Dr. Marshall risks failing History 2.

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Martin White - 12/12/2006

One more point more or less in defense of Marshall. In the last sentence of his original post he refers to evolution to religious tolerance. However, the thrust of the post as a whole is to warn advocates of a Muslim reformation of the massive, frequesnt, and extended civil and international religious warfare that followed the Christian Reformation. Arguably, Wesphalia marks the end of this period of the post-Reformation sequellae. (And, while I may be overinterpreting, in his original post Marshall refers to a historical process lasting almost two centuries and to a rough ride of about 150 years, suggesting that he has in mind a European historical process lasting longer than the period of major religous war.)

Also, remember, if the Islamic world is sort of repeating the European Reformation (I personally have serious doubts about the analogy, though I haven't thought hard about the issue and I am not an expert in any of the relevant field) they are doing it on Internet time.

Ralph E. Luker - 12/12/2006

Thanks. I think that's a very helpful suggestion. I suppose that I'd put greater emphasis on the handwaving than others might -- because, as I understand it, Westphalia only extended Augsburg's formula of "cuius regio, eius religio" from Lutherans and Catholics to Calvinists. That is, after Westphalia, if a prince were a Calvinist, the people of his realm were to be Calvinists. There's really no principle of toleration there -- except as a settlement among princes -- because it still assumes the desireability, indeed, the necessity of religious uniformity within a realm.

Martin White - 12/12/2006

Based on his timetable (2146 or so), I suspect Dr. Marshall is using the Treaty of Westphalia as a marker for the end of the period dominated by Reformation-related religious wars in Europe. At a certain level of approximation, this is not unreasonable. Moreover, while the Treaty of Westphalia, as far as I recall, did not endorse individual liberty of conscience, it has often, if oversimplifiedly, been identified by scholars as marking a shift in the international political system that substantially downgraded the sigficance of religion in that sphere relative to concerns of state power. And with a little bit of handwaving, you could argue that that political shift helped set the stage for the Enlightenment and for the slow groth of forms of pragmatic statecraft that viewed a (limited degree) of religious tolerance as in the interest of the state (e.g., the Netherlands, post 1688 Britain) subject, of course, to the odd royal fistula here and there.

Ralph E. Luker - 12/6/2006

Seems unlikely, either that Josh thought that or that it would happen. I'm inclined to think that Josh substituted his own teleology for history.

Oscar Chamberlain - 12/6/2006

Maybe Marshall thinks that Middle Easterners will learn faster.