Hey there. I go back and forth on Europe’s Protestant Reformation, which kicked off 500 years ago this year. But I have come back around, and I think it really does represent the birth of the Modern World. Let me explain.

The Reformation is part of the standard story of the Progress of Western Civilization. Typically it’s white washed as a courageous stand for individual conscience and freedom. Our modern Enlightenment ideas of individual rights are supposed to have grown out of the stand that people like Martin Luther and John Calvin took against the Catholic Church. In the early 1900’s German Sociologist Max Weber took it farther, arguing that there was something called the Protestant Work Ethic that explained capitalism and the “natural dominance” of Germanic and Anglo-Saxon cultures.

The closer I have looked into it, the more convinced I’ve become that this is largely bullshit. The true ideological successors of the Reformation aren’t Bill Gates and Barack Obama, they are Osama Bin Laden and Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi. Yes, it’s great that the power of the Catholic Church was broken, but it was broken because these guys believed that religion should be more extreme, and should dominate life more than it already did. The reformation was not about freedom. The followers of John Calvin in particular thought that everybody should live in a Theocracy. Some protestants were just as happy to burn heretics as the Catholics were, and some were even more bloodthirsty.

But the Reformation jihadis did bring us the modern world. It was an unintended consequence, but it may be one of the most important things that has ever happened. The reformers believed that everyone should read the bible. This meant that everybody should learn to read.

In 16th century Europe this was a pretty revolutionary concept. Back then it was only a subset of priests, merchants and government officials who were literate. 80 to 90 percent of everybody else worked the land, and there was no reason for them to read. From the 1500s on, certain rulers, most notably in Scandinavia, started to make broader literacy a priority.

I’ve thought a lot about development lately, and I’ve become convinced that widespread literacy is the most important thing that can happen to a country. I love all eras of history, and have spent years studying ancient Rome, and Medieval Europe. But I sometimes question whether any history before widespread literacy really matters. It’s the ability to read and write that makes a person a real actor in society. Knowledge really is power.

The story of the world before 1700 or so, in every country, may look different, but it’s basically the same thing. Most of us human beings are agricultural laborers. There’s a small elite with all the power, and they squabble. They fight over lands and people, and the suffering is often terrible. New elites come out of the steppes, or across the seas, replace the old elites, increase the suffering for a bit, introduce some new ideas, but never really improve things all that much. We like to romanticize these old Kings, Conquerors and Caliphs, but they are all really just gangsters.

What changed all this was literacy. Mass literacy gave us the world we know. Mass literacy eventually led to mass politics, and makes power for a broader slice of people possible. Perhaps unwittingly the religious fanatics of the Protestant reformation set all this in motion. Places like Sweden and Switzerland are widely admired for their levels of development. Their development leadership started because their rulers wanted everybody to read the bible. Weirdly, The unintended consequences of that choice made the modern world. More on this soon.

Thanks for watching, please subscribe, and there are only 17 days left to save this channel. I’ve been humbled and amazed by the outpouring of support, but we’ve still got 45 bucks to go before this channel can be considered viable. Click on the Patreon link to find out how you can help save this channel.