Andrew Wilson, Remaking the World - 1776

 

Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West

Andrew Wilson

Crossway, 2023 (ISBN: 9781433580536 hb, 360pp)

 

I have really loved this book. It is an education from poetry to economics. If you are at all interested in history or ideas or understanding yourself and your world, I couldn’t recommend it highly enough.

 

This is a fascinating and compelling account of something of our WEIRDER (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic, Ex-Christian and Romantic) age, its origins and how Christians might respond.

 

The cover depicts Wilson ten object related to 1776:

 

The quill pen

Thomas Pain’s, Common Sense

A rose (to represent Romanticism)

The cylinder from James Watt’s steam engine

Cook’s ship, HMS Resolution

Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Gear from the Watt steam engine

Flywheel from the Watt steam engine

A Revolutionary War-era flintlock pistol

 

Wilson argues that grace, freedom and truth provide a pathos (how we feel), ethos (how we act) and logos (how we think) which speak especially powerfully to the spirt of our age.

 

Some jottings follow:

 

The American Declaration of Independence’s self-evident truths haven’t seemed obvious to most people. Andrew Wilson writes: “The Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov expressed the non sequitur at the heart of Western civilization with a deliciously sarcastic aphorism: “Man descended from apes, therefore we must love one another.” Yuval Noah Harari says: “There are no such things as rights in biology.” Expressed in biological terms, the Declaration might have said: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men evolved differently, that they are born with certain mutable characteristics, and that among these are life and the pursuit of pleasure.” (p131)

 

* * *  

 

At the age of 30, Richard Trevithick was the first to build a working locomotive. Without warning and to widespread astonishment, he rode his Puffing Devil up Camborne Hill on Christmas Eve 1801. However, when the drivers went off to the pub for the evening, leaving the engine running unattended in a shed, everything burnt down.

 

Trevithick started work on a tunnel under the Thames which he never finished and was declared bankrupt. He went to South America to make his fortune in mining but got caught up in the fight for independence, designing a new gun for the army. He fled from the Spanish in Peru across the jungle, narrowly escaping being eaten by a crocodile and ended up in Colombia, where he bumped in to Robert Stevenson who leant him £50 for the journey home.

 

John “Iron Mad” Wilkinson was so obsessed with iron that he had an iron coffin made for himself and kept it in his office. Unfortunately, when he died the coffin was found to be too small for his body and then too large for his grave. He was buried four times in total, most recently in 1928.

 

The making of British manufacturing was made by metals, mechanization, management, marketing and money. (pp173f) 

 

The HR department at Jedediah Strutt (b. 1726)'s factory was kept busy. Offences included riding on each other’s backs, throwing tea on Josh Bridworth, calling thro' window to some soldiers, putting Josh Hayne's dog in a bucket of hot water, throwing water on Ann Gregory very frequently. (p177)

 

* * *

 

The English Puritan John Owen published over eight million words. The Banner of Truth edition of his works is 16 volumes. Yet Carl Trueman points out the remarkable fact that he never mentions the loss of his wife and all eleven of his children. (p190)

 

* * *

The difficulty of defining Romanticism and an eight-word sketch:

Inwardness

Infinity 

Imagination 

Individuality 

Inspiration 

Intensity 

Innocence

Ineffability 

(p189f)

 

William Blake, “Britain’s greatest Romantic genius” – ‘I went to the Garden of Love’ poem (p205) – Chapel, “Thou shalt not” writ over the door – etc. (p206)

 

Rousseau – “the greatest autobiography since Augustine (Confessions), the most important work on education since Plato (Emile)… the most influential piece of political thought of his generation (The Social Contract), and the eighteenth century’s bestselling novel (Julie).” (p207)

 

Rousseau’s talent for opening lines – footnote p207

 

Inwardness – Truthfulness, sincerity, authenticity (p208) – free to follow your heart

 

Robert Bellah, “expressive individualism”; Philip Rieff, “triumph of the therapeutic”; Charles Taylor, “age of authenticity” (p209)

 

Romanticism + Marx, Nietzsche, Darwin, Freud

 

Donna Tart, The Goldfinch – be yourself / follow your heart – “What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can’t be trusted?” and for some reason leads you towards ruin, self-immolation, disaster etc. – See Wilson, p211

 

* * *

 

The transformation of health, wealth and prosperity – the great escape / the great divergence / the great enrichment / the European miracle (p214)

 

A thousand years of living standards pretty constant for most people.

 

GDP per person per year roughly $550 for Shakespeare and King David

 

The Malthusian Trap was first described in 1798, just as people were beginning to escape from it for the first time (p214)

 

“Today, human beings consume around seventy times more goods and services than we did two centuries ago – an increase… of 7,000 percent – while world population has only increased by a factor of seven….. the average person today … has a standard of living around ten times higher than in 1776. If the Pilgrim Fathers lives on $2 a day in today’s terms, and the average person in the eighteenth century lived on $3 a day, the average person now lives on more like $30. In richer countries, it is closer to $100.” (p214)

 

Graphs – p215f – income per person, life expectancy, social development index (energy capacity, organisation, IT, capacity to make war – a proxy for the sophistication of a society – Ian Morris)

 

Adam Smith – kidnapped by a gypsy woman? (p218) – terribly absent minded etc. – Samuel Johnson called him “a most disagreeable fellow” who was “as dull a dog as he had ever met” (p218)

 

“led by an invisible hand” (p219)

 

The productivity of labour and Gross Domestic Product (p219f)

 

 Reasons for this economic explosion: institutional, socioeconomic, ideological and cultural, geographical (pp220ff)

 

Secure property, law, contracts, representative government, religious pluralism etc. p221f

 

Acemoglu and Robinson, Why Nations Fail

 

Ferguson, Civilization

 

 William Cobbett, Britain as “Old Corruption” (p223)

 

Gregory Clark: The IMF & World Bank might have rated Britain better in the medieval period than today (p223f)

 

GREED – Guns, Resource Extraction, Enslavement, Death (p224)

 

Thomas Thistlewood – “the worst man in the world” (p226)

 

Monopolies and slavery as counterproductive (p227)

 

A modern breakfast & luxury goods (p227)

 

An industrious revolution? (p227)

 

Consumer culture & cotton (p228)

 

The “lords of the loom” (industrial revolution, cotton etc.) depended on “the lords of the lash” (slavery, colonialism) (p228)

 

The effects of the black death – 1/3 of population died, wages increase, peasantry empowered, feudalism destabilised, agricultural improvements incentivised (p228, fn)

 

Bejamin Franklin as a most modern person – pragmatic, cosmopolitan, sense of humour, his career & abilities, inventions, wit etc. – diligent, frugal, prosperous, normal, can-do, upwardly mobile, middle class, democratic, optimistic, Protestant-lite (p229)

 

A culture of growth, curiosities, novelty, improvement (p230f) – discovery, possibility

 

“virtually all cultures put a higher value on tried and tested ancestral wisdom than on newfangled, unproven contemporary innovation” (p231)

 

Christianity – individualistic, self-obsessed, control-oriented, non-conformist, analytical (p231) – town folk (p232)

 

Rejection of Jesuit astronomy in China (fn, p231)

 

A. N. Whitehead on the importance of “the rationality of God” and his providence etc. for science (p232)

 

Yuval Noah Harai increases in knowledge leading to “the discovery of ignorance” – there is so much you don’t know, you are driven to investigate (p232f)

 

A divided church, a heliocentric cosmos & America! (p233)

 

The reception / partial rejection of Aristotle in this period (p233)

 

Books in Europe and China – movable type printing, Protestantism, a relatively free press, literacy, correspondence etc.

 

Cf. attituded to maths and money in Shakespeare and Johnson (p234)

 

Competition, productive fragmentation – independence and connection (p235)

 

Walter Scheidel – polycentrism / “competitive fragmentation of power” (p236) – competition, diversity, innovation, options

 

Maps not chaps (p238)

 

The Eurasian steppe and pastoral nomads (p238f)

 

Separation of church and state but also Christianity / language etc. in common (p239) – political fragmentation and cultural connection in Europe (p240)

 

The republic of letters – a market of ideas (p239)