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Steven Pinker's Odd Ideas about Rome

6/15/2013

4 Comments

 
Over the past two days, I’ve looked at Steven Pinker’s views on the fictive history of Homeric Greece and the imaginary world of the Hebrew Bible. Today, I’m going to look at his ideas about the Roman Empire because, well, apparently most of his critics have focused (understandably) on his mathematical and ideological arguments in The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011). Nothing in his book is what it seems, and it is perhaps telling that in this chapter’s overview of historical incidents of violence, he does not travel beyond the West—nothing of ancient China, or Vedic India, or the various peoples of Mexico.

His first task in critiquing violence in the Roman world is to dismiss the New Testament as a collection of plagiarisms framed around an ideology of violence. Regular readers will gasp in horror when they see what Pinker considers evidence for pagan Christs:

A number of pagan myths told of a savior who was sired by a god, born of a virgin at the winter solstice, surrounded by twelve zodiacal disciples, sacrificed as a scapegoat at the spring equinox, sent into the underworld, resurrected amid much rejoicing, and symbolically eaten by his followers to gain salvation and immortality.

And what is his source for this hoary old chestnut? B. G. Walker’s “Pagan Jesuses: ‘The Other Easters,” Freethought Today, Apr. 2008, pp. 6–7. Freethought Today is a newspaper of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, and “B. G. Walker” is Barbara G. Walker, a feminist with an ideological bias in favor of finding “Indo-European Neolithic matriarchies.” As a committed feminist, she has worked to deconstruct modern religion as a patriarchal fantasy, but sadly that means that she relies on wildly outdated sources for her material. In one instance, she claims that the Greek heroes Iasion and Jason were pagan Christs, following the work of J. Rendell Harris, whose Boanerges (1913) made this case in the context of his belief that all religion was the worship of twins. (The Greeks used “Jason” as a transliteration of Yeshua, the Hebrew name of Jesus, for secular purposes, but they transliterated Jesus the Christ as Iesus.)

The zodiac idiocy comes from the Christ Myth school, exemplified in the work of Edward Carpenter, and thoroughly discredited nearly a century ago. The idea of gods who were intentionally sacrificed is a leftover bit of James Frazer, but it too finds no foundation in fact, for most resurrected gods (and there are many) were not sacrificed. The best known, Dumuzi or Tammuz, probably wasn’t dragged to the underworld on the equinox but rather at the summer solstice. I am not aware of any other gods whose bodies were ritually consumed; this is an old chestnut associated (falsely) with Mithras by the Christ Myth school. How could one eat a god in the pagan conception? They were not of flesh and blood, or even matter.

Pinker discounts the Pax Romana as “alleged” peace because the Romans engaged in external wars, though strangely he thinks that the past fifty years of the Pax Americana have been astonishingly peaceful despite America’s external wars. He rightly condemns the cruel spectacles of the Roman circus games, but these blood sports were not simple exercises in cruelty. At their core, they were extensions of a religious ideology of human sacrifice, where the spilled blood nourished the souls of the dead. Many of those killed in the Coliseum were criminals, who were given the sporting chance of fighting for their lives rather than facing execution. According to an estimate by Cameron Hawkins of the University of Chicago, about 5,000 gladiators died in the Coliseum each year, and no amount of revision can make the savagery of their deaths less troublesome.

However, against the Empire’s fifty or sixty million inhabitants, or even the one million of Rome itself, this number is not especially massive, certainly not enough to significantly move the meter on the overall violence of society. However, it does represent one of the most grotesque of the ancient world’s displays of casual cruelty. The Romans themselves, of course, recognized this but gave the common people their circuses to calm their inborn delinquency (Tacitus Dial. 29; Pliny the Younger Ep. 9.6). Seneca wrote that the games were “an act that was nowise human” (De brev. vit. 13.6). Death as entertainment was still a popular pastime in the nineteenth century, when families would gather to watch hangings. Today we have simply substituted simulated mutilation and execution for the real thing, though every few years there is a debate over the educative value of televising executions.

Pinker next condemns crucifixion as “an orgy of sadism,” as though the purpose of the painful, protracted ordeal were to gain pleasure from the suffering of the criminals. The purpose, for what it’s worth, was the same (regardless of whether you believe it effective) as the public hangings of the Victorian period and the chemical executions of today: deterrence and retribution. As a public display, it was meant to warn off others from committing offenses and to punish the offender in the most humiliating, painful way possible. That is why, though Pinker will not tell you, it was not an everyday punishment but one reserved for enemies of the state, pirates, and slaves—the last because the Romans considered it a warning to other slaves to keep in line. Archaeologically, the remains of only one crucified person from the early Roman Empire have ever been found, and while crucifixion could be extended into unbearable cruelty, accounts suggest that the Romans in practice typically hastened death so that the ordeal was over in a few hours, which is not necessarily crueler than the modern American practice of keeping inmates fearful of their execution for decades until it finally comes, sometimes after several false starts.

But Pinker is undoubtedly correct that the ancient Romans engaged in much more casual cruelty than we, with unspeakable tortures inflicted on those who opposed the state. He describes the (almost certainly exaggerated) ordeals of the Christian martyrs and how the Christians longed for the mortification of their flesh to send their souls skyward. Yet Pinker chooses to cite Prudentius, an author who simply made up imaginary tortures (such as those of St. Romanus of Caesaria—later applied by Scott Wolter to the “Celts” of Oklahoma) to better glorify the righteous suffering of the martyrs. Candida Moss, in the recent book The Myth of Persecution (2013) has made a strong case that these stories are all forgeries and lies, meant to create “noble” deaths analogous to those of pagan tradition.

“By sanctifying cruelty,” Pinker writes, “early Christianity set a precedent for more than a millennium of systematic torture in Christian Europe.” This confuses me. I thought Pinker’s point was that violence was declining and that the Romans had been torturing away for centuries. Now violence is increasing and becoming systematic? I don’t think, though, that there is any serious doubt that the fractured state of medieval Europe, with its hundreds upon hundreds of competing microstates, was on the whole a violent place, at least during campaign season.

Pinker then tours more recent history, highlighting various forms of atrocity, concluding with this thought about the special place of America today:

Readers of this book (and as we shall see, people in most of the rest of the world) no longer have to worry about abduction into sexual slavery, divinely commanded genocide, lethal circuses and tournaments, punishment on the cross, rack, wheel, stake, or strappado for holding unpopular beliefs, decapitation for not bearing a son, disembowelment for having dated a royal, pistol duels to defend their honor, beachside fisticuffs to impress their girlfriends, and the prospect of a nuclear world war that would put an end to civilization or to human life itself.

Really? While such acts of violence are no longer the explicit goal of state and organizational actors, we have our own equivalents today. To wit: (a) there are more than a thousand sex trafficking incidents in the U.S. each year, which does not count individuals like Ariel Castro, accused of holding women captive as sex slaves; and more than 700,000 women and children are trafficked as sex slaves worldwide each year, according to the International Justice Mission; (b) genocides have recently occurred or are occurring in areas as diverse as the Balkans, Rwanda, and the Sudan, while civilized countries engage in non-lethal ethnic cleansing and call it “deportation” to an uncertain and insecure external land; (c) bizarre and cruel tortures are practiced throughout the world, and even here in the United States a disturbing number of people consider forced anal sodomy to be a “legitimate” or “expected” component of a prison sentence; (d) the unpopular beliefs punished with cruelty have changed and are now associated with interminable prison sentences for use of substances disfavored by the elite; (e) anyone who doubts that duels and fisticuffs are gone has never been to a bar or a college campus on a Friday night—we may not call it “honor” today, and they may not be stylized or organized, but fights to defend one’s masculinity are in essence the same; and (f) nuclear weapons did not vanish with the fall of the Soviet Union, and it is possible now that non-state actors could get hold of such a weapon and set it off in a populated area without warning.

So, if you’re a rich, white American (preferably male and usually middle aged) in an upscale community, Pinker is absolutely right: You live in a world free from violence. But if you are not, then your life is probably about as likely to be violent as that of the average person of Roman times: This, though, strikes at the heart of Pinker’s idea. He wants us to compare only the ten years from 2001 to 2011 as representative of modern peacefulness (indeed, he notes the 1960s and 1970s were very violent) to the thousands of years of Antiquity, compressing all of the wars and atrocities of those thousands of years into one orgy of violence. How does he know that these ten years are not anomalies? How does he know that, for example, the ten years from 150-160 CE or 1750 to 1740 BCE were not, on the average, less violent? What, after all, is an average person of an era? The peasant farmer who might never see a solider or anyone beyond his home village, or the urban elite engaged in power politics? Until the modern era, the lonely farmer was numerically the representative person, not the violent rich who left us our historical records.

4 Comments
Ben Wentworth
6/20/2013 02:57:10 pm

You've got two (e) in the second to last paragraphs.
And oh yeah, this is a great example of how often people can miss the parts of the world that they do not experience. Too often we humans believe that our way of experiencing the world is 'the way the world is' and that anyone else's experiences are distorted, misunderstood, or somehow 'wrong.'

Reply
Jason Colavito link
6/21/2013 08:14:31 am

I fixed the typo.

Reply
Josh Thompson
1/18/2019 03:12:12 pm

Thorough and quite helpful. I took issue with Pinker’s oversimplification of Old Testament violence in the earlier chapters, and his reliance on Bart Ehrman for some help in the New Testament department. Many commands to make war, or to pillage and plunder, were really commands to execute God’s judgment based on the Law. You break God’s Law, God sends his judgment. We see this quite clearly in the story of Habakkuk, where God sends Babylon to take Judah in response to their moral and spiritual deterioration. God is not wrathful, vengeful, or violent in the way Pinker describes, rather, if you believe that God is all-good you must accept that God would allow evils to bring about some greatest Good. These days, that is following the time of Christ, God differs his judgment (John 5:22) to Jesus and Jesus takes that judgment upon himself (Isaiah 53:5, John 8:15).

Secondly, when Pinker says that there is no evidence for anything Jesus ever said or did, he cites Bart Ehrman. Ehrman is the most frustratingly dishonest man in academia. He studied under the legendary biblical Greek textual critic Bruce Metzger. Basically, if you’ve read anything on Greek translations, you were most likely reading Metzger’s work. I started reading Metzger in high school. My dad and some of his friends in seminary studied under Metzger. Ehrman was a close associate of Metzger’s and worked in some capacity as an editor and T.A. to Metzger. Though Metzger is an ardent believer and a conservative Christian, Ehrman came away from his time with Metzger an unbeliever. Ehrman sometimes attributes his leaving the faith to seeing the sheer amount of punctual and grammatical errors in the Greek manuscripts. No one denies that the source manuscripts for the New Testament are chock-full of errors. And Ehrman knows exactly why biblical source texts are inconsistent and contain errors, yet, he tries to use those errors as proof that the Bible was hastily put together by groups of fallible men rather than divinely inspired to individual authors.

Again, no Christian denies that source manuscripts contain inconsistencies. They didn’t have spellcheck and the printing press back then. To make copies, the Bible was dictated to rooms of scribes who hand-wrote their copy down. When I write by hand I make all kinds of errors, many of which I totally fail to catch as I’m trying to write so fast. So yes, errors exist. You’ll see notes on each error at the bottom of the page in your Bible.

Ultimately, though, here is where Ehrman is so frustrating: In his book, Misquoting Jesus, he attributes his leaving the faith to the existence of pain and suffering in the world and not to the textual errors. “Why would God allow pain?” That’s his big qualm with Christianity. The Bible doesn’t deny the existence of suffering. In fact, it affirms that in life we will suffer. An all-good God must allow evil for the advancement of the greatest Good. That’s why I say Ehrman’s intellectually dishonest. If he had blamed his leaving the faith on the textual errors, that’s something we could have a lively debate over. But he knew that argument wasn’t strong enough to warrant his unbelief so he supplemented it with the oldest atheist argument in the book, the problem of evil, which is no problem at all. For an EXCELLENT refutation of the problem of evil (Epicurus’ Trilemma) look up a short book by Alvin Plantinga called God, Freedom, and Evil.

Pinker goes on to handle Homer’s works and the Bible with equal weight, as if they’re equally important documents. In doing so, he ignores an inconvenient truth, that the Bible has WAY more documentation from antiquity (over 5800 original manuscripts or manuscript fragments) than the works of Homer (643 manuscripts) or Plato (210 manuscripts).

Reply
Chris H
4/13/2020 12:24:19 pm

Wow the absurdity of much of not just this blog but it's comments by Josh something above. Selective reading. I don't have the time or inclination to go in depth to this blog that I happened across, more than to address a couple things that stuck out, briefly. Pinkers research is thoroughly backed up but I won't get into that. Ehrman is not dishonest at all. He goes out of his way to be even handed and nice to Christians. There are more Christian than Pagan manuscripts because Christianity controlled the world, burning or losing many classical works. We do have inscriptions that show the unoriginality of Christianity predating it by thousands of years such as with Osiris and Innana and many pre Christian writings. We only have copies of copies of copies of Christian manuscripts, the vast majority of which are from the middle ages and beyond. On evil: you know, free will is very dubious scientifically and it just looks like a world without any benevolent god protecting anyone or answering any prayers. In fact the worst places on earth are the most religious with the most prayers emanating from them. So your apolegtics to try to answer the problem of why the world with hurricanes and cancer randomly slaughtering children doesnt match up with the assertion that there is a good intervening god are just utterly weak and tired and transparent and shameful.

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