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

In the last half of last year, I heard Richard Chin mention this book twice. He thought it was a great book to explain why our society thinks and acts in certain ways. We normally assume that what we think and know is universal and that all people from all time think the same logical thoughts, but that is not the case. And the author of this book says in order for us to understand who we are, we have to go back to 1776, for in that year, it triggered a few things that shaped our current way of looking at the world.

You may have heard that we in the West are WEIRD. Wilson adds an extra ER to the end of that to say we are actually WEIRDER: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic, Ex-Christian, and Romantic.

For some reason:

Humility in others is more attractive to you than pride. Love is more appealing to you than honor. 

you see your identity as something you choose and construct for yourself rather than something you are given. 

You do not barter, and you do not store most of your available wealth in physical form. You may never have seen a dead body. You have never offered an animal sacrifice. 

You have been educated in a wide variety of subjects that make very little difference to your day-to-day life.

Because you are literate, you will continue to learn superfluous information throughout your life without thinking you are wasting your time (which includes reading books just like this one). 

By law, you have the right to vote. You take it for granted that your governments have the right to tax you, and that you have the right to boot out your officials if you disapprove of them.

(and this selected description goes on for a whole chapter)

This book seeks to work out why it is we come to assume a bunch of things that are not universal. This is a history-of-thought book, a little like The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self by Carl Trueman and Escape From Reason by Francis Schaeffer, and I loved those kinds of books.

After the introduction chapters, it starts out by asking 

Why was it that Europeans had sent a ship to the Pacific islands, carrying guns and botanists and telescopes, rather than the other way around?

What was it about the English who sought to travel the world for trade, resources and scientific discovery and not the Islanders who were making boats and sailing for Rome? A bit of the answer was the climate, and if the land produced enough resources for people to then spend time in the arts and science. Pretty much life was on hard mode for the Aboriginals, but in both Europe and China, the climate meant food and supplies were easier to come by. But that is not the whole reason. While China had plenty of rice, wealth, resources and technology, they did not need to explore and find anything more. They had everything they needed. While the Chinese had the better techolonogy it didn't ensure they would dominate the world. All private trade was illegal, and they operated really as a central system for those in power, who were big enough and happy enough as they were. The English, by comparision were much smaller, but had a more curious (or expansionist) temperament and willingness to learn and trade.

There was a very long chapter on the Declaration of Independence, removing some myths about the day and who was doing what. I didn't learn about that in my primary school, so a lot of the details were new to me. But what was interesting was that in 1775, no country claimed to be democratic, and yet today only six countries claim not to be (Qatar, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Brunei, which has technically been under martial law since 1962. The last is Vatican City.) Whether the other countries are actually democratic is another story, but for some reason, everyone wants in on this democracy thing. Why is that, since it is a relatively new thing to come across human civilisations?

America was breaking away from the English monarchy and so sought a different path, but one steeped in a whole new set of assumptions. Government was meant to be for the welfare and happiness of all people. And people themselves should be free to seek their own happiness. What they were doing was mixing stable English ideas with French revolutionary ideas, and somehow they found a way forward that didn't implode.

The great basis for most of this was the idea that we have self-evident rights independent of any religious system. However, this book points out that is simply not true and not self-evident. These ideas come from a particular theological belief. 

They are neither innately obvious axioms nor universally accepted empirical truths nor rational deductions from things that are.

They are Christian or maybe even Ex-Christian ideas that have been run through the Enlightenment and Romantic period. But nevertheless, the root is Christianity and not Confucianism.

There was much more in here on inventions and the seeking to discover and test things; our view of love and sex and the individual, along with commerce, free trade and an explanation on how these might have come to be valued today. But for the sake of time, what I found helpful, beyond just learning a bunch of superfluous information that might not have much impact on my day-to-day life, was the last chapters on how the Church can respond to this world that we are in.

Since our world is one made up of our own choices, it means we need to find ourselves, work hard, use our privilege well and that we really have no one else to blame when our hopes and dreams do not happen. This is why people may turn to substances, have mental health issues and high suicide rates.

In a world powered by works and measured by achievement, there is something deeply refreshing about the unmerited, transforming favor of God, given without regard to the worth of the recipient.

God's grace can powerfully speak into our lives. Because of Jesus, God freely takes us in, for those who do not deserve it. We don't work or achieve any of our salvation; it is by God's grace alone. Our identity, then, isn't self-constructed, but it is given to us. We become a new creation in Christ.

Freedom is something that is valued and praised today. Those on the right want freedom from the Government, and those on the left may want freedom from the systemic historical structures that oppress people. In these, oppression is external to the person; we are constrained by governments, laws and systems. But we are also restrained by internal things like sinful desires and so to be truly free we need freedom to choose things that help us grow. We need to be free from lust, pride, greed, envy etc so we can make wise choices. And Jesus came to save us from being slaves to sin.

Truth is still kinda of a big deal. Truth and power are tied up in a tangled mes. Today, people are arguing over what is fake news, or AI slop and what is actually true. Different outlets see the same bodycam footage but come up with different narratives of what actually happened. Jesus entered our world, who didn't just claim to be speaking the truth, but was actually the truth. Pilate asks, "What is truth?" not really wanting an answer, and Jesus shows love and integrity, and challenges the power and dies. And yet He rose again, and now we can have certainty about who God is, and how creation is coherent and created with a purpose that can be known, and history is going somewhere. The implication for know this truth was historically "known as knowledge, dignity, providence, and hope. Today we call them science, human rights, meaning, and progress."

I did like this book and Wilson's take on history and our contemporary society. This was perhaps a little American-heavy, although James Cook did get a bit of airtime. The idea about the year 1776 sort of works in a sometimes tenuous way, in that one thinker may have been alive at that time, but perhaps their seminal work wasn't written in that exact year. But it was quite interesting to think so much went down in the latter 1700's, and the shadow it cast. It would be hard to think that ideas and events from 2000 to 2050 will still be impacting the world 400 years later.