The state of scholarship
Let's look at the origins of the modern, Western study of language, belief, and knowledge. A case might be made for early Jesuits as pioneers here,[180] but most historiographers find a sea change in the early nineteenth century, which saw major advances in both scholarship (cuneiform, hieroglyphics, Sanskrit) and public interest.
DNA tests serve us poorly in the polyamorous world of scholars' ideas, where paternity is arbitrary and disputed, but foremost among the claimants, the most frequently named fathers of the modern study of language, belief, and knowledge - called in their early days comparative linguistics, the scientific study of religion, and the history of science - are William Jones (1746-94), Max Muller (1823-1900), and George Sarton (1884-1956).William Jones was a puisne judge in British Bengal, and his practical approach to the administration of empire encouraged his scholarship. His linguistic and epistemological horizons globalized step by step: enthusiasm for the Hebrew Psalms encouraged the study of Arabic, which took him to Persian, whence he became a student of “Peruvian” (less seriously), Chinese (more), and Sanskrit, where he made his most famous conclusion, essentially
Belief, knowledge, and language
Figure 6.1 Tesla coil XKCD cartoon (www.xkcd.com).
that “bhartr” and “frater” (and “brother”) are brothers, descendants from a common ancestral Indo-Aryan word. His motivations ranged from the practical - Sanskrit gave him access to the Law of Manu, to improve Indian jurisprudence by incorporating local law where it complemented British law - to the ideal - Persian poetry might inject vitality into the moribund English literature of his era.[181]
Comparative philology begat comparative theology.
Jones' idea to group languages into families soon extended to the idea to group religions into families, a strategy central to the new “science of religion”. That term, rendering the German Religionswissenschaft, was promoted especially by Max Muller, professor of comparative philology at Oxford. “There is no science of single things”, Muller proclaims, “and all progress in human knowledge is achieved through comparison, leading on to the discovery of what different objects share in common, till we reach the widest generalisations and the highest ideas that are within the ken of human knowledge.”[182] [183] He can thus apply Goethe's dictum “He who knows one language, knows none” to religion, and so implicate “thousands of people whose faith is such that it could move mountains, and who yet, if they were asked what religion really is, would remain silent.”11 This comparative approach occasioned a relativism of religious revelation. Muller affirms that “we share in the same truth, and we are exposed to the same errors, whether we are Aryan or Semitic or Egyptian in language and thought”.[184] Christian contemporaries disagreed, and managed to have the Bible excluded from Muller's series of sacred world literature, lest their Bible become merely one among the bibles of humanity.Our third pioneer, George Sarton, was founder of the history-of-science journal Isis (1912) and its associated History of Science Society (1924), and author of the five-volume, but still hugely incomplete, Introduction to the History of Science (1927-47). Sarton's internationalism was explicitly opposed to the nationalism to which he as a Belgian may have been particularly sensitive. He understood his history of science as an internationalist movement of a “new Humanism” leading towards universal truth. “I can reject Islam or Buddhism without making myself ridiculous”, Sarton testifies, “but I cannot deny the sphericity of the earth without ruling myself out of the community of rational beings, irrespective of race, nationality or religion.”[185] His practice was as ecumenical as his theory.
Naming his journal after an Egyptian goddess augured his future. When he came to appreciate the importance of Muslim thinkers for the history of science, Sarton moved mid-career in his mid-forties to the Middle East to study Arabic, a professional courage today few could safely emulate. He also studied Chinese, and became a member of the Da'irat al-Ma'arif al-‘Uth- maniyya in Hyderabad.[186] [187]None of our three fathers set out to establish a particularly world history of his subject, yet, unexpectedly, much of what made their studies revolutionary was their global range. Our pioneers were sometimes animated by nationalism (Muller sought in the Vedas an Aryan replacement for the Hebrew Old Testament, and Jones could rush a Persian translation to race a French competitor), but the first “modern” histories of language, belief, and knowledge were also global, and not uncontroversially so. Muller had to confess that
the very title of the Science of Religion jars on the ears of many persons, and a comparison of all the religions of the world, in which none can claim a privileged position, must seem to many reprehensible in itself, because ignoring that peculiar reverence which everybody, down to the mere fetish worshipper, feels for his own religion and his own God. Let me say then at once that I myself have shared these misgivings... I do not say that the Science of Religion is all gain. No; it entails losses, and losses of many things which we hold dear.15
Similarly, Jones' own pitch for the study of other religions is instructive, both for what it says of him, and his times, and for its pragmatic rhetoric that we globalistas today might do well to emulate. In the introduction to his “A Hymn to Lacshmi" (1788), Jones writes,
We may be inclined perhaps to think, that the wild fables of idolaters are not worth knowing, and that we may be satisfied with misspending our time in learning the Pagan Theology of old Greece and Rome; but we must consider, that the allegories contained in the Hymn to LACSHMI constitute at this moment the prevailing religion of a most extensive and celebrated Empire, and are devoutly believed by many millions, whose industry adds to the revenue of Britain, and whose manners, which are interwoven with their religious opinions, nearly affect all Europeans, who reside among them.[188]
Jones assumes a parochial attitude (“wild fables of idolaters"), maintains this critical attitude while switching to his own position (“misspending our time"), and then justifies an extra-European scholarship by the demographic strength of those non-Europeans, and finally by the cultural and economic impact it will have on the British, abroad and at home, themselves.
Two centuries passed between William Jones and the emergence of the “new world history" in the 1980s. This is not a simple story of ever-increasing global scope. Instead we have an ecumenical and optimistic first act, followed by a retreat and break-up into the steadier ground of neatly circumscribed regional and sub-regional studies of thick description - in the case of science, this is compounded with a more narrow conceptual sense of the subject and its geography. As historians of language, religion, and science improved their knowledge their pioneers' broad outlook became unwieldy, and less attractive. Even the new world historians were slow to take up these questions, and their early triumphs were in fields less ethereal, primarily in economic history. In Europe and the People Without History (1982) Eric Wolf shamed both the historians who ignored non-European peoples, and the anthropologists who ignored their histories. Having brought history to the “people without history", could historians after Wolf go on to discover the history of these people's knowledge?
The most high-profile recent meditation on the place of Euro-centric thought in history is Dipesh Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe. The density of the work, which the author has frankly described as “cryptic", makes summary dangerous. Broadly speaking, the book argues that we should question the universality of European ideas, categories, and assumptions, a universality often and dangerously unacknowledged, and instead establish their origins in a particular time, place, and tradition. Chakrabarty, however, does not advocate abandoning the Euro-centric, for “European thought is a gift to us all now”; rather, he seeks to renew the Euro-centric “by and from the margins”. The core values of the European Enlightenment endure. For example, today not even “radical” historians defy the Enlightenment's disavowal of undomesticated deities; local claims pointing to the local god Thakur as the instigator of the 1855 Santhal rebellion, we are told, must be “anthropologized” until compatible with core Euro-centric thought (paralleling the inconvenient scriptural passages “allegorized” by the faithful).
We are left with a Euro-centre reinforced by troops called up from the Wider World with their “subaltern pasts, pasts that cannot ever enter academic history as belonging to the historian's own position”.[189]How does this work in practice? We look now at how historians and others have treated four key moments in the history of knowledge and belief, and specifically at what role the Wider World plays in their scholarship. The four inflection points are familiar: hominization (the prehistoric process of becoming human), the Axial Age of religious development, the European Scientific Revolution, and recent and continuing secularization. Because we are using our language, knowledge, and beliefs to study language, knowledge, and belief, we are in a bit of a self-referential intellectual swamp, and so will work in reverse chronological order, much as a nurse secures a fracture by working from the point of maximum relative stability. As we look back a century, a half millennium, two millennia, and hundreds of thousands of years, we see these four joints bearing the greatest explanatory burden.