eliminated the British colonial presence and, with it, the need for the victorious revolutionaries to accommodate an old guard. In this sense, the American Revolution was less a revolution than a war of national liberation against a foreign occupation. Since American Liberals, unlike those in Europe, never had to compromise with the residues of feudal opposition, their vision remained unalloyed. This produced a country so politically homogenous that its revolutionary ideology became almost invisible.1 The result was that America emerged into the twentieth century as a unified economic and military giant, showing in stark relief all the greatness and the flaws of this quintessentially modern, Western paradigm of the good life.
In Civilization, his lively and penetrating comparative history of the rise of Western civilization, the conservative historian Niall Ferguson identifies what he calls six “killer apps” (using unintentionally sinister cyber-slang) for the institutions that most distinguished the West from “the Rest” and that are most responsible for its dramatic rise to global dominance.2 All the apps were products of the three revolutions of modernity. They are: competition based on a degree of decentralization of political and economic life; science; property rights; medicine, as an application of science; the consumer society; and the work ethic. They were applied aggressively and inventively in the four hundred years between 1500 and 1900 to transform the position of the West from relative insignificance to comprehensive domination of the global population and economy.3 Western dominance is now in question, says Ferguson, because this quintessentially Western package has become global. “The Chinese have got capitalism. The Iranians have got science. The Russians have got democracy. The Africans are (slowly) getting modern medicine. And the Turks have got the consumer society.”4
Ferguson keeps the faith that the Western formula still offers human societies the best available set of institutions: “the ones most likely to unleash the individual human creativity capable of solving the problems the twenty-first century faces.”5 His concluding recommendations for the West to retain its edge are surprisingly timid: educational reform, perhaps reinstituting “formal knowledge” and “rote-learning” and reading the classics. He lists his “great books” — the King James Bible, Newton’s Principia, Locke’s Two Treatises on Government, Adam Smith’s Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations, the complete works of William Shakespeare, and so on.
But Ferguson’s Civilization operates like most conventional historical analyses, within the time frame of the past 5,500 years of written history. To grasp the larger significance of the crisis of Liberalism, we need to invoke the perspective of big history, within which civilization itself is a very recent event on an evolving earth. From this perspective, the world of industrial capitalism, ushered in by Liberalism, can be seen as dramatically intensifying some of the most conspicuous, defining aspects of civilization: division of labor, hierarchies of wealth and power, specialization in knowledge, and application of instrumental rationality to the mastery of nature and its conversion into wealth. This civilizational trajectory has reached a dead end. The Liberal narrative is exhausted and its institutional forms in their present state are undermining the very conditions necessary for civilization to flourish. The time for a radically more life-affirming vision arrived.
The “big history” perspective helps us see how some of the killer apps are becoming truly deadly. The metaphysics of modernity had a contradictory effect on the truth quest. Liberalism originally supported the truth quest in a number of crucial respects: it liberated the individual from ossified feudal structures and clarified and systematized the scientific method. It also made possible an explosive increase in the human population and our immense achievements in science, art, and the material quality of life. On the other hand, Liberalism’s emphasis on an instrumental, mathematical rationality, minimal government, and the invisible hand of the free market effectively eliminated the need for the individual to consider the good of the whole. So here we have a stark irony: Liberalism emerged from the pursuit of the truth quest but its consequences undermined the very quest responsible for its truth. The result is an increasingly corrupt political culture based on self-interest and avarice, while our policies and institutions are leading us to civilizational collapse.
The challenge for our age, in essence, is to advance, deepen, and in a sense complete the Liberal revolution by bringing to bear the larger perspective. This will involve recovering some of the oldest traditional wisdom that Liberalism rejected and then integrating it with some of the newest.
The Medieval Roots of Our Modern Crisis
One could sum up by saying that the missions of science, the Reformation, and the capitalist revolution converged in a single imperative: to exclude religious, spiritual, and philosophical concerns from political and economic affairs in the interest of transforming nature into ever-larger quantities of wealth. This formula succeeded beyond any of its founders’ wildest dreams. But its greatest achievements are now becoming some of its most destructive flaws. We can understand this more clearly when we see Liberalism as an inversion of the feudal worldview, its one-sidedness an extreme reaction to the traumatic collapse of the medieval order and to three centuries of repeated crop failures, famines, plagues, and almost incessant warfare.
The fourteenth century opened with price inflation; ruined harvests in northern Europe then caused a serious famine between 1315 and 1317. This was followed by a massive typhoid epidemic. In 1318 cattle and sheep were decimated by disease. This was followed by another bad harvest and famine in 1321. In Languedoc, poor harvests occurred twenty times between 1302 and 1348, by which time the weakened population was only too vulnerable to the first of a series of bubonic plague epidemics. The Black Death broke out in England in 1361, then again in 1368, 1369, 1371, and 1375. Altogether it killed approximately one-third to one-half of the population. Collective suffering was intensified by “the Hundred Years’ War” — actually a series of wars between England and France from 1337 to 1453 — which shattered faith in divine benevolence and the harmonious Great Chain of Being. The result was a profound sense of pessimism and failure.6
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Europe was still scourged by disease, famines, riots, popular uprisings, and war. It should not be surprising to find that the ideology that emerged out of this collective sustained trauma was radically oversimplified and overstated. The result was the replacement of a corrupt religious order and an aristocracy of birth with an increasingly corrupt aristocracy of wealth.
Our focus sharpens as we go further back. Feudalism emerged after the collapse of the Roman Empire as a decentralized, agrarian society based on relatively self-sufficient manorial estates, called fiefs or feudums, which were loosely held together by local custom, remnants of Roman law, and Christian-Aristotelian cosmology. Peasants swore an oath of loyalty to a warrior aristocracy of knights and lords, who in turn provided defense and administered justice. The whole static order was seen as part of the divine Chain of Being, under the custodianship of the Catholic Church. Trade and craft production were limited and carefully regulated through guilds, which were as concerned with spiritual life as they were with material production. The guilds would set the prices an artisan could charge for a product, with a “just price” being the amount calculated to cover the costs of production and maintain the artisan at his customary place in society. Moneylending for interest — the lifeblood of a capitalist economy — was despised as usury and declared a mortal sin, since it took advantage of the needy to enrich the wealthy. The simple act of buying wholesale and selling retail, known as regrating, was seen as intrinsically exploitative and became a punishable offense. The ethos of feudal economics was precisely the opposite of a modern market society and could be summed up by the medieval aphorism homo mercator vix aut nunquam deo placere potest — “the merchant will never be pleasing to God.” Making a profit was inherently sinful.
A story from the tenth century of one pious lord, St. Gerald of Aurrilac, illustrates the stark opposition between medieval and modern attitudes regarding profit. Upon returning from a pilgrimage, St. Gerald showed some Italian merchants a magnificent pallium (a religious garment) he had bought in Rome. When they heard what he paid for it, they congratulated him on his bargain. But instead of being delighted, St. Gerald was deeply disturbed and quickly sent the merchant additional money lest he be found guilty in