At Our Wits' End, page 25
There were even attempts by the Roman authorities to incentivise the upper classes to have more children, notes Meisenberg, but they simply didn’t work. With access to contraception, the Roman elite were able to limit their fertility while still enjoying sex. This was not really possible for the Early Modern elite because the knowledge of contraception had been lost in the Dark Ages, but it was possible for the Roman elite and, to some extent, it would likely have permeated further down the society. The result was quite predictable: in the absence of modern medicine to check the mortality rate, the population would decrease in general, which it certainly did. The population of Italy fell from about 7.4 million in the age of Augustus to a mere 2.4 million by 600 AD. In addition, clearly, the population would have lost g, as, in each generation, the higher-g members of the society failed to reproduce, or failed to reproduce in sufficient numbers.
It is likely that an important dimension of this fertility decline is the decline of religion. As we have seen, religiousness—in the sense of believing in and worshipping supernatural powers—is weakly negatively associated with g. As g increases, people, therefore, tend to become less religious. This can even be seen across the human lifespan, as g rises throughout childhood and adulthood to a peak in middle age, and, thereafter, cognitive decline sets in. Very young children tend to adhere to fairytale beliefs, in which almost everything can be explained by some kind of supernatural agency. Hence, they are happy to believe in Father Christmas, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy. Older children, aged around 9, tend not to hold these beliefs, but they almost all believe in God. They tend to start questioning this belief when they are teenagers and, by middle age, atheism is at a peak. In much the same way, we would expect religiousness to go into decline as the society’s level of g rises. Another dimension of religiousness, as we have seen, is stress. Those who are low in stress are generally less religious.[8]
This being the case, we shouldn’t be surprised that the middle era of the Roman Empire, in which it was at its height, sees the questioning of traditional religious values by members of the Roman upper class. A level of g and of material comfort has been reached whereby those who are highest in g and are consequently the most materially comfortable are in a psychological position where they are able to do this. Also, as we have discussed, they can gain socioeconomic status from displaying their g via signalling their altruism, pushing for a new religion based around equality. We see, in a way that had already occurred in Ancient Greece, the rise of secular philosophies, which were originally developed in Ancient Greece, such as Stoicism, which are highly questioning of traditional religion. Accordingly, some people begin to consciously renounce worldly ideals, just as already happened in Greece. In effect, argues Meisenberg, a growing group of—mainly elite —people have taken control of their lives. They no longer believe, for example, that whether or not they end up with a large family is simply in the hands of the gods. And to the extent that traditional religion might encourage fertility, they don’t really care. As such, the rise in g would be likely to go hand-in-hand with a decline in religiousness. This would compound the decline in fertility among those with the highest g in the Roman world. In the absence of the massive Flynn Effect, set off by the Industrial Revolution, these factors would be sufficient to bring on a collapse in civilisation within a few centuries, and this is precisely what happened. As already noted, by the time of Julius Caesar, Rome has degenerated into chaos and, as Spengler would predict, the response to this is the collapse of democracy, Caesarism, and Rome’s Second Religion.
At around the same time, however, we see the rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire. This begins as a religion of the poor and dispossessed and, therefore, those who are likely to have relatively low g. Following Ibn Khaldun, it is the religion of Rome’s desert tribesmen and it is quickly able to spread to its own dispossessed people. As the g of Roman society declined, society became increasingly stressful to live in, and even the Second Religion became debased, Christianity began to make its way through Roman society. The Roman historian Tacitus (56–120) noted that the Jews held contraception to be taboo and Christians inherited this taboo relating to contraception. Accordingly, we can reasonably assume that the fertility of the Roman lower classes, which would already have been relatively high compared to that of the upper classes, would have been further increased by the rise of Christianity. This would have helped to further reduce the average g of the Roman people. In this regard, Meisenberg has done some rough calculations of the impact. He writes:
‘Let’s assume that during the 14 generations from A.D. 50 to A.D. 400, Christians raised on average 20% more children than their pagan compatriots because of these religious injunctions. Without any conversions at all this would have raised the percentage of Christians in the Roman Empire 10 fold, from, say, 2% to 20%. This is almost enough to explain the rise of early Christianity.’[9]
This process, as we have already discussed, would have been rendered even more pronounced by the Christian emphasis on not being ‘worldly’, which encouraged monasticism and renunciation of sex. Thus, Christians who were both high in g and highly religious would be discouraged from having any children, further reducing the average g of the population. In addition, Christian Rome banned abortion and exposure of unwanted infants, which would normally have been practised by those of low g. This would have further helped to decrease the g of the population. Following Ibn Khaldun, Rome’s g and religiousness were lowered by weakened group selection. This was because Rome was declining rather than expanding as it was no longer competing as strongly with other groups. In addition, as we have seen, religiousness can be understood as being a group selection phenomenon. Accordingly, not only would levels of Roman genius have been reduced but it would also have lacked sufficient ethnocentrism and solidarity, being religiously split. It was duly invaded by barbarians, its very own desert tribesmen.
So, in Ancient Rome, we can see a process that neatly fits with the social cycle model of the rise and fall of civilisations. In essence, the society’s level of g became too high, the people too comfortable and, although it seems callous, really rather too kind for their own good. All of this coalesced into a decline in g, as the higher-g portion of society lowered its fertility, leading to fewer people, as a percentage of the population, who could maintain the mechanics of the civilisation. As g declined, society started to become religious, but, at first, this form of religion would have reduced the society’s average g even further. As a religion of the poor, it was based around promoting equality and was, therefore, low in ethnocentrism, by virtue of being universalist. So, the pagan religion, which had imbued Rome with martial values and a strong sense of its own superiority, had been displaced. At the same time, remnant paganism was much less united and clear than Christianity, instead being something of a jumble of local traditions and rituals.
Clearly, it is more difficult to prove empirically that Roman g rose and fell, because there is less surviving evidence. However, one of the measures that we have used for Western civilisation is per capita rates of macro-innovation and these have been calculated for the Classical period. It has been shown that the rate of macro-innovation, in the period of Roman dominance, reached a peak somewhere between 500 and 350 BC and then went into sharp decline down to a low level by around 350 AD at which point it essentially flat-lined until the end of the Dark Ages in roughly 1050 AD.[10] The worldwide macro-innovation rate for this period is graphed in Figure 11.
This evidence of the rise and fall of Roman genius (and thus of its average g) is consistent with the other evidence that we have presented, including low fertility among the upper class in the 2nd century BC and the collapse of Roman democracy in the 1st century AD. It shows us that Rome did indeed rise and fall and this roughly paralleled the pattern of other proxies for the rise and fall of Roman g and evidence of low fertility among those with higher g in the Roman Empire.
Figure 11. Rate of innovation based upon Bunch and Helleman’s list. Points are an average over 100 years, fitted to a third-order polynomial curve.[11]
Contraception and Christianity
But, if we want to get down to the basic cause of the collapse of Rome, it is that its level of g rose too high and this set off a process of g decline, because those with the highest levels were both able and willing to limit their fertility. This is the fate of all advanced civilisations. If they become too comfortable, which they do if their g reaches a certain level, they lose their religion, they lack a sense of the eternal, they run out of steam, and they start to decline. But why, then, did Roman civilisation collapse before it had time to achieve an Industrial Revolution?
Gerhard Meisenberg has made the very insightful point that the decline of Western civilisation was very likely delayed by its absolute prohibition of contraception. In Genesis 38:9, God killed Onan for practising the contraceptive method of coitus interruptus:
‘He knowing that the children should not be his, when he went in to his brother’s wife, he spilled his seed upon the ground, lest children should be born in his brother’s name. And therefore the Lord slew him, because he did a detestable thing.’
This was used by the Church Fathers to condemn all sex that might not lead to procreation. St Jerome’s views in Against Jovinian (1:19) summed up this perspective fairly well:
‘But I wonder why he set Judah and Tamar before us for an example, unless perchance even harlots give him pleasure; or Onan, who was slain because he grudged his brother seed. Does he imagine that we approve of any sexual intercourse except for the procreation of children?’
This taboo on contraception remained in place until well into the 19th century and meant that selection for g could continue until the first Industrial Revolution was able to take place.[12] In Ancient Greece, Rome, and the Middle East—where contraception was acceptable—they possibly got to about the level of early 18th-century Europe and then declined.
Another difference proposed by Meisenberg is the nature of Christianity itself. Unlike the polytheistic religions, monotheistic Christianity—in its undiluted form—is strongly anti-rational. God is not to be negotiated with through sacrifices but obeyed without question. You do not aim to become like God, but simply to prostrate yourself before Him. God does not have a personality, like Roman Gods do, He is simply perfect. He does not exhort you to comprehend His creation. In fact, attempts to do so—such as eating from the Tree of Knowledge or building the Tower of Babel—are punished by God. Leading Christian figures condemn ‘wisdom’, in other words ‘rational thought’. St Paul proclaims: ‘For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight. As it is written: “He catches the wise in their craftiness”’ (I Cor. 3:19). Elsewhere he asserts, ‘Jews demand signs and Greeks search for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles’ (I Cor. 22–24). This world, in contrast to Heaven, is considered a sinful place and everything about mankind is sinful and to be repented for. ‘Rational thought’, if it questions God’s revealed truth, is thus a form of pride and sinfulness. Your membership of the community is not via blood bonds or ritual observance but through the acceptance of certain doctrines, which are superficially illogical, such as the Trinity.[13] As Tertullian put it, in the most infamous Christian condemnation of rational thought, ‘I believe it because it’s absurd!’
Those who don’t accept these doctrines are bound for Hell or condemned as heretics. Indeed, Christianity has condemned people to burn at the stake over the most inconsequential deviations from orthodox dogma. In essence, the Church developed a view of the world based on supposed revelation and it was not to be questioned. These included an understanding of the nature of history and the cosmos. By contrast, Islam did not develop such an unworldly theology. The world is not a sinful place, but a holy place full of pointers to comprehending the nature of God. Though those who insult the Prophet Muhammad or deny the existence of God are condemned, Islam does not impose a model of the world on its adherents to the same extent. This is a subtle difference but it does place Islam closer to paganism, where the world also tends to be understood as a sacred thing to be comprehended through observation. Meisenberg argues that Islam developed out of Jewish and Christian ideas at a later stage, when the society from which it developed was becoming more rational.
The Christianity exported to Europe, argues Meisenberg, not only reflected an earlier stage of development in the Middle East but reached Europe at a time in which g was in decline. Accordingly, Christianity is explicitly anti-rational, very strongly discouraging people in Christian societies from questioning its dogmas in pursuit of, for example, science, although by the 19th century European Christianity had essentially been reinterpreted in such a way so as to promote scientific inquiry in the form of Neo-Thomism—no doubt reflecting the high level of g of these populations.[14] Islam shares some of these dimensions but it can be seen as less pronounced. In the Hadith, the Prophet Muhammad (c.570–632) specifically exhorts Muslims to value knowledge of the world.[15] This is in stark contrast to St. Paul, as we have seen. It is written in the Hadith that: ‘the Messenger of Allah said: “Whoever is asked about some knowledge that he knows, then he conceals it, he will be bridled with a bridle of fire”’ (Hadith, 2649); Muhammad said: ‘The seeking of knowledge is obligatory for every Muslim’ (Hadith 74), and ‘The Prophet also said: “Acquire knowledge and impart it to the people”’ (Hadith 107).
It is possible that the consequence of this difference is that European civilisation only adopted contraception, for example, at a much higher level of g than did other civilisations. It only began to question its religiousness at a higher level of g. This crucial difference permitted it to keep going for long enough to reach the breakthrough of the Industrial Revolution. Ironically, the extreme rationalism of the Enlightenment was borne directly from the adoption of extreme irrationalism.
Islamic Civilisation
Rome is far from the only historical civilisation that can be plausibly explained in terms of changes in the level of average g. In fact, we would argue that it is true of most of them, at least those that are not destroyed by natural disasters or sudden, unpredicted invasions. Let’s turn to Islamic civilisation, which was the dominant power in the West during what, for Europe, was a ‘Dark Age’ in the wake of Rome’s collapse.
Islamic civilisation began in the 6th century, led by the Prophet Muhammad. Like Christianity, it initially attracted the poor and dispossessed, in their case from among the herdsmen of the Arabian Peninsula. Fired up by religious fervour, Muhammad began a process of conquest and conversion, taking over vast areas that had previously been Christian or pagan, taking Islam as far north as Spain. Due to internal power struggles, what we might loosely call the ‘Islamic World’ was, rather like modern Europe, divided into a series of separate polities. However, the dominant one was the Caliphate, centred in modern day Iraq. During this process, there would have been on-going selection for higher g, something that would have been particularly pronounced, in comparison to the Christian world. This is because the Muslims were polygamists, females strongly select for status (hypogamy), and status is significantly achieved through g. In addition, unlike in Christianity, there was no prohibition on marriage for the imams, the preachers and scholars who might be regarded as roughly equivalent to priests.
Accordingly, average g would have increased each generation. This continued until the civilisation flowered into the so-called ‘Golden Age of Islam’, which clearly reflects a very high level of g. This period is conventionally understood to have lasted from about 800 to the sacking of Baghdad in 1258. Under the reign of Harun Al Rashid (756–809) the ‘House of Wisdom’ was established in Baghdad. Scholars were invited there from around the known world and funded to translate Classical knowledge into Arabic and contribute to knowledge themselves. This period saw the introduction of a simpler writing system and of paper, substantial contributions to optics, mathematics, and science, including al-Jahiz’s concept of the ‘struggle for existence’ in zoology, and Nasir al-Din al-Tusi’s proto-evolutionary idea that humans were descended from animals. There were also contributions to medicine, such as the understanding that hospitals should be placed in areas where meat putrefies slowly. The Banu Musa brothers invented an automatic flute. The Muslims invented an early sextant, a simpler system of numerals, and even the fork. This was all underpinned by a desire for knowledge, which was felt to be demanded by certain interpretations of the Hadith, and a firm belief in freedom of expression.[16]
However, there were a number of factors that undid this civilisation. Islam—which had helped to build up the civilisation—became increasingly liberal, reflecting the low stress and high standard of living which had been created. The parallels with the Fall of Rome are quite striking. There was the rise, for example, of Sufi Islam; a mysticism-based version of the faith which was also strongly focused around helping the poor. Helping the poor can be understood, to some extent, to mean helping those who have relatively low g to survive and procreate. The ascetic, monastic movement in Christianity—as well as the (celibate) priesthood—would have enticed those with high g who would be more educated and have more space to contemplate. Likewise, Sufism involved a highly ascetic movement and many of its followers—known as dervishes or fakirs—were world-renouncing celibates.[17]
Islam prohibited both infanticide and, other than very early in the pregnancy, abortion. Meisenberg has noted that we expect both of these, due to their repulsiveness or dangerousness, to be done out of sheer desperation and thus involve women of low g. By contrast, Islamic advances in medicine—and an historical lack of prohibition on coitus interruptus—meant that relatively reliable contraception was developed in the Islamic world.[18] Even though Islam condoned polygamy, we would expect that, as with Rome, those with higher g—in a context of lower child mortality—would be better at using contraception and would be more likely to only want a small family. They would also be less fervently religious and less motivated by religious injunctions to breed. Accordingly, those with lower g and who were more religious would ultimately outbreed them and the Gates of Learning would close. A form of Islam that was far less intellectual would thus arise. This would explain why 64% of important Muslim scientists in The Encyclopedia of Muslim Scientific Pioneers lived before 1250 and almost 100% lived before 1750.[19] If we restrict the range to those who died between 700 and 1699, then 50/195 (25.6%) of the Islamic scientists on the current Wikipedia article ‘List of Muslim Scientists’ died in the 1000s, the largest group by century of death.[20] This is in a context in which there was no significant population increase. So we would suggest this is the peak of Islamic macro-innovation. Interestingly, this is also the approximate centre point of the ‘Golden Age of Islam’ and in the following centuries there is decline in macro-innovation, until 1258, when the Golden Age is considered to be over. This would be consistent with the argument that changes in average g help to explain the rise and fall of Islamic civilisation.
