America's media and political leaders did give a fuck about Africa even when the President was black.
Anyone else remember this virtue signaling gem?
And 'our girls' still haven't been brought back.
But it did get a shitload of retweets.
Has really been to the better though? The decline of religion and the rise of nationalism saw the brutal colonization of Latin America, Africa, and Asia and ultimately led to the two World Wars. And now we're seeing the nation-state model implode all around the world leading to bloody civil wars such as in Syria and Yemen. You can try to bring up the wars of religion but they pale in comparison to the wars of nationalism in terms of scale and horror.
People? Which people? The people living in the collapsing nation-states spread by the West? They seem to be suffering immensely. How about the people who paid for the current order? The hundreds of millions who died in the 20th century as a result of the so called "progress" you allude to? Make no mistake, things are great now because countless others paid the historical bill for you but the price was immense, unlike anything ever seen in human history. Very easy to say it all worked out when you didn't pay that bill and aren't paying it today like Syrians, Nigerians, Congolese, Yemenis, Rohingya, Palestinians, Kurds, Kashimiris etc.
My argument is that its not as consequential either way. I don't think Christianity was the reason for the rise of the West but I'm also pushing back against the notion that it was the source of our ills and that secularism is necessarily th best way to organize society. Like I said, England to this day has a national church and so does Denmark. You can say the population isn't religious but at the institutional level those states are not secular and yet they are immensely wealthy.
Not really, certainly not in terms of scale. The scale of plunder, exploitation, and violence massively increased with the waning of the power of the church and the rise of nationalism and the empires that brought with it(Spanish, English, French). Its not that the Church was a bulwark against those things, its that the nationalist order in Europe allowed for those things more so than the pre-national one which was founded more so on the Church.
I never claimed that you said it was the source of all our ills, so that's the actual strawman here.
It does matter because the implication of your original argument is that separating church and state is led to Western dominance despite the fact the quintessential Western world power, the British Empire, had and still has a national church. The nation-state is still the dominant mode even within that country but they did not need to formally become secular to "progress"
But you said separation of church and state, not society. State and society are not the same thing.
Its not just technology, its politics as well. In the prenational era armies were basically mercenaries. With the rise of nationalism you see the use of conscript armies which force millions of people who would otherwise not join the army to die for "their nation". So the increase in scale very much has to do with the rise of nationalism which correlates with the waning of the church.
They didn't need rights because they didn't have them? Huh? That makes no sense, that's precisely when you need them. So why didn't people agitate for rights in the same way? Because their social, political, and economic structures didn't require it. They didn't live in anonymous industrial societies, they lived in close knit, local communities were such things were regulated by local custom with little input from their distant rulers.
But the point is there are at least a few historical examples that betray that claim, best of all being the ascendancy of a non-secular world power in the British Empire. Being Protestant was very much a part of their identity even if the power church had been eclipsed by the state by then.
But religion is related because the waning of religion was caused by the ascent of nationalism and it was the ascent of nationalism that led the to rise of conscript armies and the bloodiest wars in history.
The law hardly mattered much outside of major urban centers where only a minority of the population lived. For most people the state was a relatively distant entity before the rise of the nation-state and the issues you're talking about were governed by local customs. Was it perfect? No but the point is much of the rights that were granted arose out of the necessities engendered by the rise of the industrialized nation-state model itself. It was solving a problem that it itself had created.
