Find all blog entries at A Commoner Manifesto Substack.
Merker: Beginning of the Modern
At the beginning of the last millennium, writes Bjorn Merker in Perishing Promise, Europe believed in a simple faith.
[It was an] attempt to promote Christianity as the exclusive and all-encompassing framework for the conduct of human affairs and the fount of final answers to all human questions.
In the First Millennium Christianity picked up Greek philosophy and its primacy of “reason.”
Epistemological primacy of reason, such as Plato and his Theory of Forms.
Moral efficacy of reason, that to know what is right leads directly to acting right.
Ontological primacy of reason, where “nature is held to be pervaded by a universal reason.”
That fitted well into the world of Christian theology, and “a long line of Christian thinkers saw reason as the handmaid of the faith” helping make its doctrines intelligible to the intelligent.
But then came the rediscovery of Aristotle, in the century from 1125-1250, “driven by translations from Arabic and Greek manuscripts in Spain and Sicily.” And that put the cat among the pigeons. Aristotelian empiricism tended to challenge the notion of Christianity as the “repository of ultimate and all-encompassing truth” and its comfortable relationship with Platonism.
It led to a war at the University of Paris between the Faculty of Theology and the Faculty of Arts. The theologists “attempted to control the Aristotelian studies in the Faculty of Arts.” It ended with the Bishop of Paris in 1277 forbidding the philosophers from disagreeing with the theologians. It drove philosophy underground for a century or so.
In Islam, in the 11th Century, “Al-Ghazali’s Incoherence of the Philosophers helped Islamic orthodoxy put and end to the philosophical activity that threatened its doctrinal commitments.” No such luck in Christendom.
Christian orthodoxy… never succeeded in stamping out the philosophical ferment stimulated by the reception of Aristotle.
Instead the “reception of Aristotle” began the long process that separated reason from faith, philosophy from theology, natural philosophy from metaphysics, and science from philosophy.
Naturally, the Church tried to put a stop to this, with philosopher and astronomer Giordano Bruno burned at the stake for heresy in 1600 and the 1633 arrest and trial of Galileo. But it failed, and theology diminished in importance, and inquisitive minds started to go their own way to answer unanswered questions.
For Merker, the Protestant Reformation represents the definitive end of the medieval hope for a “Comprehensive Christian Culture.” Now Christians would practice their faith in denominations, and scholarship detached itself from the Christian framework.
But it wasn’t until Newton and the Enlightenment and the French Revolution that Christianity itself came under attack.
More to come.
| Mon, 10 Aug 2026 20:39:47 GMT |
The Socialist Kiddies Don't Know Nuttin'
This came up on my X-feed. A socialist student telling Ben Shapiro how a pencil factory wouldn’t be nothing without the workers.
Capital need labor infinitely more than labor needs capital.
Not the case, says Ben Shapiro. Because “millions of people” are willing to work for wages.
Actually, I’d say that everything needs everything else. A pencil factory owner needs “wood, paint, graphite, rubber and aluminum,” as the student asserts. But he also needs a factory and a market and wholesalers to buy his pencils, and on and on. And he needs the prices for labor and materials and energy and money to add up to a profit. Because if the sums don’t add up there are no pencils, no jobs, no profits, no nothing.
And do you know how that all comes together? In the market and its prices, including prices for workers, equipment, money, real estate, and on and on.
If you do not understand that, dear socialist friend, you know nothing, and you certainly should not be pontificating in public, or running for office, or conducting peaceful protests, or administering the pencil industry from a government bureaucracy.
But the bigger issue is that it does not matter if you know nothing and do not understand capitalism and markets and prices. You can know nothing and still survive and thrive in a market economy.
All you need to do is show up at the supermarket with money and pay the price for the groceries you buy. You don’t have to know about butchering cows, or bottling milk, or making butter. That all happens off stage, and is the result of it all is the price the supermarket wants you to pay. If you don’t like the prices or the products you can go somewhere else.
All you need to do is apply for a job and decide whether the wage offered is good enough for you to take the job. If you work at a job for six months and you don’t get a raise, you can always quit and go find a job somewhere else.
All you need to do to get a roof over your head is find a house to rent. You do not have to have the skills to build your own house, only to demonstrate that you can make the rent.
Maybe the true miracle of the market economy is that you don’t need to know nuttin’ about it. The people that created the market economy knew nuttin’ about it. The rulers that allowed cities to create local market economies knew nuttin’ as to how the market works. Workers migrated from rural serfdom to wage labor in the cities without knowing a thing about how to live and work in an industrial city. We live in houses filled with gadgets that we know nothing about, except how to use them — sorta.
And yet it works. And yet it has visited unimaginable wealth on all of us.
And in every generation some dumb kid thinks he knows better than the millions of minds and lives that created the life he lives and takes for granted and complains about.
Remember the song:
I’ve danced with a man, who’s danced with a girl, who’s danced with the Prince of Wales
You never know what might be going on a couple of connections away from your own little life.
What a world!
| Fri, 07 Aug 2026 21:51:32 GMT |
Switch to Substack for more blog posts
Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
When people start to feel the heat, that is when they start to cheat.
Politics is downstream from culture (Breitbart) is downstream from religion (Wright) is downstream from the meaning of “life, the universe, and everything” (Chantrill).
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: Government is Protection Against Enemies
