Amerika

Most likely, the West adopted Christianity as a simplified religion that would control the lower classes and lessen the squabbles between European nations. A bad deal was made to abolish culture and replace it with a control system based on universalist/egalitarian individualistic morality.

In no time at all, the church banned usury as a means of penalizing the rich to benefit the poor, the classic egalitarian equation:

In the 4th century CE, Christian councils denounced the practice, and by 800, the emperor Charlemagne made the prohibition into law. Accounts of merchants and bankers in the Middle Ages frequently include expressions of anguish over their profits.

Moreover, as the economists José Scheinkman and Edward Glaeser have noted, usury laws also acted as a kind of social insurance that reduced inequality. Since charging interest (especially extortionate interest) was condemned, poor people could get emergency loans quite cheaply, and the rich couldn’t easily and passively turn their wealth into more wealth. At least that was the idea – in reality, people often turned to loan sharks, or to wealthy Jews who were quite literally demonised for moneylending.

Christians, as egalitarians, believe in symbolic/mental purity over consequences in reality, so were overjoyed at steps toward a spiritual Utopia achieved by forcing equality upon the population. In addition, they enriched Jews, entrenching a form of diversity in Europe by making it necessary for commerce:

In Italy the usury prohibition was undermined in a different way. Secular authorities first began licensing pawnbroking. The Church responded by sponsoring Jewish loan-banks, in an attempt to limit Christian usury, and then by recognizing the establishment of monti di pietà. The first indication of a relaxation of the prohibition was a change in the attitude of the Church toward Jewish moneylending. This was an attempt by the Church to control, and profit from, the moneylending took place despite the prohibition. A number of Jewish loan-banks were established during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries across Italy with the support of the Church. Poliakov writes that ‘papal authorization …became an indispensable condition for the conclusion of an agreement in the fifteenth century’ (Poliakov, 1977, 1965, 58). The papacy was able to extract some of the rents associated with Jewish lending through the fees it charged the owners of the loan-banks. These fees became an ‘important new source of revenue for the papacy’ (Gow and Griffiths, 1994, 294). In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Church had opposed Jewish lending, but by the fourteenth century, it had come to see Jewish lending as the lesser of two evils. As Sisto Medici phrased the matter in mid-sixteenth century Venice, if ‘the worst crime of the Jews is their infidelity and perfidy, which offends God, since our mother Church tolerates these why not tolerate their usurers when the latter are not contrary to the public good?’ (quoted in Calimani, 1988, 21).

Whether the Christians intended this outcome or not, it has spiraled out of control over the centuries, to the point where not just usury but diversity have taken over Europe and feast upon its democratic corpse.

Tags: charlemagne, diversity, interest, jews, usury