gat

Superficially, you might argue that the success of the West is the result of its guns being better.
But really, Western civilization flourished because our story of hope is superior to any other.
Codes Of Meaning
This unique moral chronicle led to an everyday behavioral code which worked so well that in a
matter of centuries it became the dominant perspective of Europe, and soon it made inroads into
every belief system across the planet. But the sheer extent of its success caused it to run afoul of
three other competing systems for producing meaning, each of which held common people in
contempt or worse. These competing codes viewed Christianity antagonistically because of its
power to liberate ordinary people from the bondage of fear and envy.
Those competing codes of meaning gave us formal schooling, public and private. The first
competitor, the aristocratic code, comes out of pagan traditions. It is still the philosophy taught in
upper-class boarding schools like Middlesex and Gunnery, and through home training and
particular class institutions. Its operating principles are leadership, sportsmanship, courage,
disdain for hardship, team play, self-sacrifice (for the team), and devotion to duty—as noble
traditions define duty. The boardrooms of certain global corporations are one of the great
preserves of this exclusive but universally attractive pagan attitude.
The second code in competition with Christianity was taken from the practice of great commercial
civilizations like the Hanseatic League of medieval times or the society of Holland in the
seventeenth century. This behavioral code makes security, comfort, health, and wealth the central
purpose of life. The main thrust of this kind of seeking is radically anti-Christian, but the
contradiction isn’t obvious when the two come into contact because commercial cultures
emphasize peaceful coexistence, tolerance, cooperation, and pragmatism. They reject the value of
pain, and take principled behavior with a grain of salt, everything being relative to security and
prosperity. Pragmatism is the watchword.
The wealth that a commercial perspective delivers produced a dilemma for Puritan society to
wrestle with, since the intense neo-Christianity of Puritanism was yoked to an equal intensity of
business acumen, a talent for commercial transaction. In the Calvinist vein, this contradiction was
resolved by declaring wealth a reliable sign of God’s favor, as poverty was a sign of His
condemnation. Both pagan and mercantile ethical codes operated behind a facade of Christianity
during the Christian era, weakening the gospel religion, while at the same time profiting from it
and paying lip service to it. Proponents of these different frames called themselves Christians but
did not live like Christians, rejecting certain tenets of Christianity we’ve just examined, those
which interfered with personal gain. Yet in both cases, the life maps these competing theories
tried to substitute were not, ultimately, satisfying enough to stop the spreading influence of
Christian vision.
Stated more directly, these competing moral codes were unable to deliver sufficient tangible
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