Likewise, one side of Erickson’s correlate in his phyco-social dichotomy of the next stage, the 3-5 age group, is initiative. Like the early monotheists the four-year-old is keen to test their interpersonal skills with their fellow toddlers. The role of the parent who encourages the traits of sharing and cooperation is taken by the apostles, prophets and clerics.
Other aspects of demonstrating initiative for the 4-year-old centres on their ability to lead and make decisions. Much of these traits are evident in how a world trading system was developed from as early as 727AD when the presence of Arab and Persian sea traders in Chinese ports was first recorded. (Before European Hegemony, J L Abu-Lughod,1989)
In those early centuries in the common era, it was definitely Islam rather than Christianity that provided the social, political, moral and economic underpinnings of a fully functioning multi-polar world trading system which spread from west to east and back. That functionality was achieved by mutually agreed systems of financial exchange; actuarial services; adequate protection along well-established overland routes; towns with all the necessary artisanal and legal infrastructure and lastly, buoyant markets for traded goods. The role of Islam in that system was to inculcate “honest business practices and charitable social services” in the milieu Arabs and Muslim Indians operated in. (Abu-Lughod p.308) Another demonstration of initiative in Islam’s civil society “…were business partnerships and the waqf. This was an endowment society, a non-governmental institution based on the principle that the living had a duty to the future, that they were obliged to prevent unfair accumulations of property and riches by ensuring the whole community, especially its least powerful members, were provided with access to land and various kinds of benefits, all for the purpose of guaranteeing that they did not lose their dignity before others, and in the eyes of God.” (The Life and Death of Democracy, John Keane, 2009, p. 136) This egalitarian system mirrors the 4-year-old’s acute sense of fairness. In addition to the waqf the mosque functioned as a miniature multi-function polis. A political, economic and social hub where people, including women of all faiths were welcome to trade, to rest, to be medically treated and appeal to justice in the name of the community. This fortuitous state of affairs partly explains why Islam spread so quickly from the Middle East to Java. The religion was not simply a set of motherhood injunctions to behave morally but a detailed methodology facilitating every aspect of complex societies– plural.
A major society which provided a considerable portion of humanity’s initiative at this stage without Islam was, of course, China. If China was our 5-year-old, she was extremely precocious. By only age 3 she had invented woodblock printing to leverage the functionality of her previous invention– paper. Forget her European brother, Gutenberg, she’s moving type around 500 years earlier. This particular initiative allows her to circulate paper money which was tightly controlled by the state thus establishing a reliable and mutually favourable means of exchange between local and foreign merchants. Now, if you really want to get ahead of your peers you’ve got to be using coal to make high quality iron and steel from an early age. This is what China was achieving since 700 CE and by the first millennium the “…scale of metallurgical production…was not equalled anywhere until the 19th century.” (Abu-Lughod) All this heavy industry facilitated the use of canons on ships by 1300 having first recognized the potential of gunpowder in 650 CE.
In sum, during the Sung and Yuan dynasties, 960-1368, China had achieved such technological superiority to the rest of the world they decided, for reasons still hotly debated, that that backward world had nothing to offer them. However, that glib assessment holds only a glimmer of truth. The bulk of the reasons for China’s reversal of her hegemonic aspirations lie beyond the decisions of any leader. Essentially, world systems of business and trade have always experienced cycles of expansion and contraction. The contraction in this period was kicked off by the plagues which decimated the Chinese population which precipitated the collapse of the Mongol Yuan dynasty and hence access to the central Asian land link was blocked. Critically, on top of the many contractionary economic forces was the desire to assert indigenous Chinese culture to distance itself from the exiting Mongols. The salient feature of the Ming’s nationalist project was the adoption of Confucianism which opposed commerce and afforded much higher status to government officials than businesspeople. So, in a society where status was a primary concern the mercantilist bourgeoisie were unlikely to gain the ascendency.
The other side of initiative at this stage of a child’s development is guilt. It is more than a psychological trait opened up by belief in a transcendent god, it is one of a number of cognitive emotions such as love, shame, embarrassment, pride, envy and jealousy that has evolved along with the neo-cortex over the last 60 million years for good survival reasons. (Emotion: Science of Sentiment, Dylan Evans, 2001) Feeling guilty means you have a conscience about doing the right thing by others. Therefore, you are more likely to be trusted by others. If we agree with Aristotle that there is no such stage in human society as ‘pre-political’ because it was in humans’ nature to cooperate and evolve ways of distributing power within bands and tribes of hunter gatherers, then we can appreciate the utility of such emotions as guilt.
Just as the parent or caregiver of a 5-year-old might use guilt to manipulate behaviour so the church in the middle ages also used it as a form of social control. Somehow religious instruction managed to persuade ordinary people that “…guilt signifies an alienation from God as a result of sin (but) can be absolved by God (and more importantly) by his temporal office bearers.” (Journal of Spiritual and Mental Health, Apr.2013, The origins of Jewish Guilt: Psychological, Theological and Cultural perspectives. Simon Dein). Unfortunately, religion turns guilt into a prescription of how you ought to behave. Thus, “…concepts of sin, guilt, remorse and penitence were differentiated, codified and judged.” (Dein, 2013) No institution performed these acts of social control with more ruthless efficiency than the Inquisitions which made their first appearance in 1231.
Putting the invention of paper and printing to use as a facilitator for trade and commerce is a definite positive for humanity’s initiative at this time but when it oiled the wheels of bureaucratic minutiae in the service of violent discrimination of minorities, it was an unalloyed evil. Due to the precise record keeping by Bernard Gui, an Inquisitor appointed by Pope Clement V in1307, we know the breakdown of the cost of combustible materials and the executioner’s fee for burning heretics. (God’s Jury, Cullen Murphy, 2012, p.45) Echoing Hannah Arendt, evil doesn’t get more banal than that!
Articles 