WHAT MAKES NATIONS THRIVE AND OTHERS DIE?

We rise and fall according to our ideas. This principle does not only pertain to individuals but also to nations. Elsewhere, I have argued that if we live according to Biblical ideas, we thrive. It is also obvious that if nations live according to Biblical ideas they too will thrive. Those nations that retain Biblical habits have thrived as a consequence, but why?  Why do certain nations fail while others abundantly succeed? Indian economist Vishal Mangalwadi concluded that trustworthiness was a major factor. He began by asking questions like this:

·       Why are the Dutch or the English able to trust each other in a way that the Indians or the Egyptians cannot? What makes some cultures more honest, less corrupt, more trustworthy, and therefore more prosperous? And why is the postmodern West discarding the moral secret of its success? (Truth and Transformation: A Manifesto for Ailing Nations)

Mangalwadi became convinced that the way we believe is the way we behave and even grow the economy. He observed:

·       People in the Netherlands had money to give because generation after generation was taught to work hard and give tithes and offerings to God. The Dutch made money to give to the poor in India because the Bible taught, “He who has been stealing must steal no longer, but must work, doing something useful with his own hands, that he may have something to share with those in need” (Eph. 4:28).

In contrast to the Christian worldview, Mangalwadi observed that Hindu philosophy is directly related to the impoverishment of India:

·       India’s religious philosophy taught that since the human soul was divine, it could not sin. In fact, our most rigorous religious philosophy teaches that everything is God. God is the only reality that exists, and therefore there is no ultimate distinction between good and evil, right and wrong.

If we believe that we are gods or part of the one god-conscious, we do not believe in a standard higher than ourselves to which we must confirm. Consequently, it is not wise to transact a business deal with someone who believes that he is above moral constraints. Instead, it is wiser to do business with someone who has such a high commitment to moral truth that he is committed to act ethically.

Mangalwadi concluded that economy and technological advance are inseparable from morality, and morality is inseparable from religion, specifically the Christian religion, while Hinduism not:

• Our monks did not develop technical aids to improve their eyesight. They took pride in closing even perfectly good eyes in meditation. (The Book that Made your World, 108)

Why? The Hindu religion lacked those ideas that promoted the welfare of their people. For one thing, if this material world is illusory, then work and technological advancement are counter-productive:

• It is virtually impossible to find a Brahmin guru in traditional India who resembles the apostle Paul – a rabbi who made tents for a living. Brahmins said that manual work was the duty of lower castes, a result of bad karma from their previous births. Mahatma Gandhi was the first Indian leader who used a spinning wheel to try to import the Pauline work ethic into India: “No work, no food.” (109)

Their disdain for hard work kept India backward for centuries. However, it was technology and the Christian theology that inspired it and had enriched the West. Mangalwadi gives several examples:

• The peasants’ humble wheeled plow generated the economic strength that helped save Europe from colonization by Islam. During the Middle Ages, Islamic forces were able to invade Europe almost at will. Muslims conquered southern Spain and Portugal and invaded France in the eighth century. In the ninth century, they conquered Sicily and invaded Italy, sacking Ostia and Rome in 846. By 1237, they had begun to conquer Russia. Constantinople was captured in 1453, and the battles of 1526 in Hungary and 1529 in Vienna suggested that it was merely a matter of time before the mullahs, caliphs, and sheikhs would rule cities like Rome, Vienna, and Florence. Equipped with a coulter, a horizontal share, and a moldboard, Europe’s new plow increased productivity by tilling rich, heavy, and badly drained river-bottom soil…The net result was the gradual elimination of starvation, the improved health of the people, and a strengthening of the economic foundations of the West relative to Islam. (101-102)

The Book of Proverbs claims that “Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a disgrace to any people” (Proverbs 14:34). A heightened concern about sin and its evil power exalted the West. Could sin and our denial of it be the problem that underlies the West’s decline? Mangalwadi provides an illuminating example from his own country. In 1631, the monsoon failed to come. Consequently, there was a great famine. A British traveler relates the devastation he saw:

• From Surat to this place all the highway was stowed with dead people, our noses never free from the stink of them…women were seen to roast their children…a man or a woman no sooner dead but they were cut in pieces to be eaten. (112)

Mangalwadi reasoned, “My people did not starve because they were stupid, lazy, or unproductive.” Instead, immorality killed them! They were taxed 80% of their produce. This left them with little and nothing to store for an emergency. The only way for the people to have any money was to “join their exploiters.”

Virtue exalts a people. Mangalwadi relates a revealing experience. He was experiencing frustration trying to purchase tickets from a machine on an Amsterdam tram. He asked a couple of American tourists for assistance. They responded:

·       “Why do you want to get tickets?” they responded. “We’ve been riding around for a week. No one has ever come to check any tickets.”

Mangalwadi was startled more by their hardness of conscience than by their theft-of-service:

·       Their shamelessness shocked me more than their immorality. They represented the new generation, liberated from “arbitrary” and “oppressive” religious ideas of right and wrong. University education had freed them from commandments such as “You shall not steal.”

Someone has to pay the price for sin. Eventually, the Dutch will have to hire additional personnel to collect the fares. Who pays for them? Everyone! I too have met many such travelers. They are intelligent, likeable, knowledgeable, highly educated, and even sensitive to victimization in its various forms, but they were unable to connect the dots to their own behaviors. Not a twinge of shame!

However, their conduct serves as an omen of the coming tsunami that will inevitably submerge the economy along with everything we value. It is already at our door, but no one sees it. When I talk about this coming destruction, my secular friends look at me as if I am from another planet. Instead, their hope is in this world, and it is just too difficult to question their sustaining hope. Mangalwadi also marvels at what is happening in the West:

·       This good news [of the Christian faith] became the intellectual foundation of the modern West, the force that produced moral integrity, economic prosperity, and political freedom. If moral integrity is foundational to prosperity, why don’t secular experts talk about it? The reason is that the universities no longer know whether moral laws are true universal principles or mere social conventions made up to restrict our freedoms. And why don’t they know? Economists have lost the secret of the West’s success because philosophers have lost the very idea of truth. Why? The truth was lost because of an intellectual arrogance that rejected divine revelation.

The West is removing the roots that had once nourished them. I think that it is not simply a matter of arrogance but also the disdain of the West towards objective moral does-and-don’ts. The West wants to be free from such judgments – anything that will tell them that they are wrong, anything that will cause them to feel guilty or shamed.

However, their quest for absolute freedom has made them slaves and has deprived them of their dignity as human beings. They are so intent to escape from guilt, shame, and their resulting negative self-images that they have adopted philosophies that will degrade them. They have exchanged the concept of human culpability for the belief that we are simply products of our society and upbringing, convinced that this belief will give them the freedom from their painful feelings. After all, they are just a product or result, right?

However, when we degrade ourselves in this manner, we pay a big price. Psychologist James Hillman observes that we can deaden our lives through the way we interpret them:

·       We dull our lives by the way we conceive then… By accepting the idea that I am the effect of…hereditary and social forces, I reduce myself to a result. The more my life is accounted for by what already occurred in my chromosomes, by what my parents did or didn’t do, and by my early years now long past, the more my biography is the story of a victim. I am living a plot written by my genetic code, ancestral heredity, traumatic occasions, parental unconsciousness, societal accidents. (The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, Random House, 6)

Some even go a step further and deny freewill, opting instead for the belief that everything that we do has been predetermined by previous bio-chemical events. Therefore, they claim that we needn’t feel guilty for anything we do, since we could not have done otherwise. They have even become evangelists for this new faith. One gentleman, with whom I have had considerable contact, leads a group entitled, “The illusion of freewill,” and insists that once we understand that freewill is an illusion, we will be liberated.

I joke that “I don’t talk to machines, even wet machines.” More seriously, it just becomes too easy to cheat your business partner, if you believe that you couldn’t have acted otherwise. In fact, it becomes too easy to give into any temptation. In the absence of any substantial rational resistance, we become slaves to our impulses.

·       The evil deeds of a wicked man ensnare him; the cords of his sin hold him fast. He will die for lack of discipline, led astray by his own great folly. (Proverbs 5:22-23)

Once we do wrong and refuse to admit it, we condemn ourselves to a never-ending pattern of rationalizations. We deny our guilt whether through denying freewill or through the many methods of “mindful” dissociation, which have never helped those nations that have practiced them.

Instead, the introduction of Jesus into a culture, even where conversions have been lacking, has edified that culture or nation. Robert Woodberry, professor of sociology, University of Texas, has devoted the last 14 years to investigate why certain countries develop thriving democracies, while neighboring countries are failed states.

Woodberry was discovering that a long denigrated ingredient was actually central to the creation of successful states – the missionary. He writes:

“Areas where Protestant missionaries had a significant presence in the past are on average more economically developed today, with comparatively better health, lower infant mortality, lower corruption, greater literacy, higher educational attainment (especially for women), and more robust membership in non-governmental associations” (Christianity Today, Jan/Feb 2014, 39).

In America's Blessings: How Religion Benefits Everyone, Including Atheists (2012), Sociologist of Religion, Rodney Stark, provides further evidence that Christian love has profoundly impacted those among whom it had been planted. Jerry Newcombe, whose notes I am drawing from, writes:

·       He notes that religion benefits everyone, even the non-religious, who feel the residual effect.

·       Those who attend church more often tend to donate much more often. For example, he writes, "…religious people dominate the ranks of blood donors, to whom even some angry humanists owe their lives."

·       Religious Americans are far more likely to contribute even to secular charities, to volunteer their times to socially beneficial programs, and to be active in civic affairs.

·       Religious Americans enjoy superior mental health---they are happier, less neurotic, and far less likely to commit suicide.

·       Religious Americans also enjoy superior physical health, having an average life expectancy more than seven years longer than that of the irreligious. A very substantial difference remains even after the effects of ‘clean living’ are removed.

·       Religious people are more apt to marry and less likely to divorce, and they express higher degrees of satisfaction with their spouses. They also are more likely to have children.

·       Religious husbands are substantially less likely to abuse their wives or children.

·       Although often portrayed as ignorant philistines, religious Americans are more likely to consume and sustain ‘high culture.’”

Such neighbors will inevitably exert a positive impact on their communities. In contrast, the Communist ideal has been to treat everyone in the same manner. However, each of their failed states suggests that brotherhood cannot be imposed from above but must radiate out from concentric circles of intimacy. Love must begin at home if it is to benefit anyone.

I often ask if we can learn any lessons from the past. The answer is usually, “No! The situation is now different and requires a different solution.” They can anticipate my next question, “What then has made the West successful,” and skillfully avoid it. Why be encumbered by the lessons of past, if this will interfere with finding the “truth” within one’s own desires!

The thinking of young adults is also largely reflected by this explanation that I had once received from a millennial:

·       Who would have dreamed 30 years ago about the internet? No one! In earlier times, who would have dreamed about TV or interplanetary travel? We therefore have learned to dream.

While there is a place for dreams, there is also a place for learning lessons from our past mistakes, but lessons are not as exciting as dreams. Idealistic dreams provide food for the ego, while a sober look at the past is humbling.

It is noteworthy that Christian presuppositions have profoundly benefitted humanity. Meanwhile, modern idealistic versions, which should have benefitted from the findings of science and history, have often plugged those they promised to help into chaos. How is it that the Bible had captured such needful wisdom from goat-herders and fishermen? It is the contention of this book that they had been inspired by God.