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OK, OK, restarting w/some corrections. For comments. https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1544296263822213120 pic.twitter.com/US4P4JhU3T Tom Holland holds an edge over other current authors and intellectuals: the rare coupling of wide erudition and remarkable clarity of mind, two attributes that appear to be negatively correlated, as if the presence of one caused the other one to flee. This confers the ability to spot things other professionals don't catch immediately, in spite of sharing the same ensemble of information - what in my trading days we used to call "connecting the dots". And these discoveries, in spite of being hard to detect, appear obvious, even trivial after the fact. Holland is effortlessly ahead of his time: ten years ago, he was savagely attacked by the high priest of late Antiquity, the extremely decorated Glenn Bowersock, for his book on the conditions surrounding the birth of Islam. Then, only half a decade later, Bowersock quietly published a book making similar claims. So this entire book revolves around one simple, but far-reaching idea. By a mechanism dubbed the retrospective distortion, we look at history using the rear view mirror and flow values retroactively. So one would be naturally inclined to believe that the ancients, particularly the Greco-Romans, would seem like us, share the same wisdom, preferences, values, concerns, fears, hopes, and outlook, except, of course, without the iPhone, Twitter, and the Japanese automated toilet seat. But, no, no, not at all, Holland is saying. These ancients did not have the same values. In fact, Christianity did stand the entire ancient value system on its head. The Greco-Romans despised the feeble, the poor, the sick, the disabled; Christianity glorified the weak, the downtrodden, and the untouchable; and does that all the way to the top of the pecking order. While ancient gods could have their share of travails and difficulties, they remained in that special class of gods. But Jesus was the first ancient deity who suffered the punishment of the slave, the lowest ranking member of the human race. And the sect that succeeded him generalized such glorification of suffering: dying as an inferior is more magnificent than living as the mighty. The Romans were befuddled to see members of that sect use the cross - the punishment for slaves -as a symbol; it had to be some type of joke in their eyes. There is also the presence of skin in the game. Christianity, by insisting on the Trinity, managed to allow God to suffer like a human, and suffer the worst fate any human can suffer. Thanks to the complicated consubstantial relation between father and son, suffering was not a video game to the Lord but the real thing. The argument "I am superior to you because I suffer the consequences of my actions and you don't" applies within humans and in the relationship between humans and God. This extends, in Orthodox theology, to the idea that God by suffering as a human allowed humans to be equal to Him. Christianity had the last vindication when Julian The Apostate, falling for the retrospective distortion, decided to replace of the Church of Christianity by the Church of Paganism along similar organizational lines, with bishops and all the rest (what Chateaubriand called the "'Levites ). For Julian did not realize that paganism was a soup of decentralized individual or collective club-like affiliations to gods. What has been less obvious is that while we are inclined to believe that Christianity descends from Judaism, some of the reverse might be true. The mother-daughter relationship between Judaism and Christianity has been, as of late, convincingly challenged. "Without Paul, there would be no Akiva" claims the theologian Israel Yuval as we can see in Rabbinical Judaism the unmistakable footprints of Christianity. Further East, Shite Islam shares many features with Christianity, e.g. the same dodecadic approach, with twelve apostles, the last of whom will accompany Jesus Christ, plus self-flagellation rituals around the memory of martyrdom; these can be possibly attributed to a shared Levantine origin. But it is clear that the latest position of supreme leader has been guided by the Catholic hierarchy. Christianity has been slow to spread its values from text to execution, and that may be the point of this book. Yes, Christianity glorifies the poor: but it took seventeen centuries from "the eye of the needle" in Matthew 19:24 to the conception of communism. Likewise it took more than a millennia for the "neither slave nor free" in Galatians 3:28 from epistle to execution. As to the "neither Greek nor Jew", alas, we are still waiting for full implementation as we have witnessed with the birth of nationalism in the late 18th C., a moral degradation and a step away from universalism with the modern contraption of the nation state -the murderous nation state. I recall vividly the TV ads in the early 2000s, promoted by Democrats to attack George W. Bush's policies in Iraq; they kept showing the tragedy that 3,800 people died in the invasion. They omitted to mention the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis -lest the Republicans question their patriotism. These foreign casualties do not seem to count because nationalism establishes clean balance sheets: countries are only responsible for their own citizens.View all 5 sources
