Murray (on political history)

History and Theory of Psychology: An early 21st century student's perspective

Appendix 1:

Political, Religious, and Economic Aspects of Western Culture

Extract From: Murray, D.J. (1983). "Prologue: Political History" (pp. 1-7). A History of Western Psychology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. [Bold-text added]

*Although written preceding the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall (and the 1990s era of disbanding of Communist parties in former Soviet Block countries), the following extract from David Murray's (1983) text nicely summarizes the main political, religious, and economic aspects of the rise of Western culture (from ancient times up to the relative present). It is useful to read because many of the historical eras he describes will be mentioned in this course as the background for the ideas and themes of various figures who contributed to the history of psychology. [P.B.]

"The history of psychology forms a branch of history that has recently come to be known as intellectual history (Stromberg, 1975). This includes the history of ideas and of scientific discoveries and inventions; in part it tries to explain trends reflected in the history of the various arts. Other branches of history are political history, the story of the rise and fall of kingdoms, dynasties, empires, and nations and how these are affected by changes of fortune such as those imposed by economic events; and social history, the account of everyday life and conditions in various periods. Clearly in a history of psychology we shall be little concerned with political and social history -although the effects of various social attitudes such as those towards scientific inquiry or mental illness run like undercurrents through the history of psychology. But it is perhaps best to start this account with a brief survey of the main events of Western experience. The student should be familiar from the outset with terms such as Hellenistic, medieval, Renaissance, and Reformation. This section will briefly introduce these terms; they will be dealt with in more detail in later sections.
The earliest Western civilizations of which we have written records -that is, the earliest civilizations that had invented writing- were those of the Tigris and Euphrates valleys in what is now Iraq and those of the Nile Valley in Egypt. The former probably influenced the latter. We know the names and approximate dates of their kings back as far as about 3000 B.C.; these civilizations flourished until about 600 B.C. Their political history is mainly one of war and conquest, but their social history reveals that they had [p. 2] domesticated animals, grew crops in the fertile river valleys, produced metal, pottery, and cloth, had developed complicated and mainly polytheistic religions, believed in an afterlife, had slavery to some extent, and had developed systems of simple mathematics and medicine. Astronomers in both valleys kept records of the heavens, and from them the Egyptians adopted a year of 365 days. Although there were many physicians, priests, and artists during these centuries, few individual names are known to us. Hammurabi, a king of the Babylonians, caused the first known set of laws to be written down in about 1700 B.C. The Egyptians had books describing one's supposed conduct in the afterlife, and there was one king, Akhnaton (about 1347-1361 B.C.), who tried to persuade his people to worship one solar deity. There was a surge of poetry and naturalistic art during his reign, but his attempt failed and in the later periods of Egyptian civilization the people reverted to the older, polytheistic system.
Many unknown scribes, sculptors, and painters recorded the events of these centuries, often simply to satisfy the vainglory of their royal patrons. From Egypt we have certain medical documents that reveal something of primitive surgery and physiology.... Although Akhnaton failed to persuade his nation of the virtues of monotheism, another tribe, the Hebrews, did come to worship one god, Jehovah, and from this belief would later spring both Christianity and, to a much lesser extent, Mohammedanism [Islam]. The early history of the Jews is recorded in the Old Testament: They settled mainly in what is now Israel perhaps 1400 and 1200 B.C. and were later joined by another group of Jews who had escaped from a slavelike existence in Egypt. The leader of this latter group was Moses who, like Hammurabi, set up a code of laws that has persisted as part of Judaism to this day.
Between 2000 and 1000 B.C. civilization was also beginning around the Aegean Sea in such areas as Crete, Mycenae, and Troy. The people of the Mycenae region, known as Achaeans, attacked Troy. The people of the Trojan War in the long epic poems of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Following invasions from the North, however, these civilizations died away and were replaced by many small colonies -city-states- across the areas now known as southern Greece and western Turkey. The best-known were Sparta and Athens, but intellectual life was now focused in the Turkish colonies (the region then called Ionia). Gradually, however, Athens came to dominate and founded an empire; the fifth century B.C. is the period of "classical" Greece when Athens, although somewhat tyrannical towards her subject colonies, nevertheless became a center of culture and relative freedom. It is in this period that modern drama, sculpture, philosophy, historical writing, political theorizing, physics, and other sciences originate...
In 338 B.C., however, Philip of Macedonia conquered Athens and the other small states and became the king of Greece. Two years later he was assassinated and his son, Alexander, who had been educated in Macedonia [p. 3] by Aristotle, succeeded him. Alexander began a career of new colonization when he took his Greek troops and conquered the Turkish region, the Valley of the Euphrates, most of the Middle East, including Persia, and the Nile Valley. The period that then ensued -during which all these areas learned from Greek culture and in turn contributed to Greek culture- is known as the Hellenistic period. It is also during this period that Greek thought comes into contact with Jewish thought, though the Jews where rather resistant to incorporating those aspects of Greek thought likely to turn them away from the worship of Jehovah. The Hellenistic world fell to a new nation, the Romans: It is sometimes stated that the end came in [331] B.C. when Alexander was lost to [his] people.
Italy during this early period had been settled by various tribes from the North and had also been colonized by the Greeks, but according to Roman tradition, Rome itself was founded at an important river crossing in 753 B.C. or thereabouts. After internal strife and wars with neighboring tribes, the Romans succeeded in conquering Italy and, later, North Africa and Greece. By the time Alexandria was taken, Rome had an empire stretching from Britain in the North to Spain in the South and to the Euphrates in the East. The power in Rome was consolidated in large part by Julius Caesar, and its cultural and political pride was at its zenith under the reign of the emperor Augustus. The Empire extended over what is now Israel, and this area thus represented a mixture of Greek, Jewish, and Roman influences: It was into this atmosphere that Jesus was born and founded a new sect dedicated to the belief that Jesus had atoned before Jehovah for the sins of man. At first this was a small Jewish sect, but St. Paul spread the new religion to non-Jews in the Middle East and Turkey, and later to Greece and Rome.
The three hundred years or so following Jesus' death are marked by a slow decline in the power of Rome and a slow rise in the acceptance of Christianity. In 313 Constantine, then emperor, declared Christianity to be a tolerated religion of the Roman state; shortly afterwards, partly because of attacks on Rome by peoples from northern Europe, he moved the capital from Rome to Byzantium (later called Constantinople; today called Istanbul). Rome fell in 410 to the Goths but still retained its importance as a bishopric [archdiocese, district]; even as this was happening, St. Augustine, a bishop of the church in North Africa, was writing his authoritative theological works. The following period, from about 500 to 1000, is known in Europe as the Dark Ages. Greek and Roman books were destroyed or lost; little progress was made in literature or science; life consisted of surviving the attack of one form of pillager or another. However, Byzantium and Rome preserved the teachings of Christianity, and at Baghdad, Cairo, Cordoba, and other centers the proponents of another new religion ...(Islam), kept alive the culture of the Greeks and Romans. There was a time when Islam threatened [p. 4] Europe: The Arabs were defeated at the battle of Poitiers (sometimes called the battle of Tours) in 731. On the other hand eastern Turkey became [Islamic] after the battle of Manzikert in 1071. Also in 1054 there was a schism in the Church between the beliefs of those centered in Byzantium and those centered in Rome. The latter came to dominate western Europe.
The period from about 1000 to 1500, known as the medieval period, or Middle Ages, is marked by the Church's being at the peak of its power; the Pope was essentially the lord of Europe, and at his instigation the various kings of the nations of Europe sent missions to the Middle East to recapture Jerusalem for Christianity [a.k.a. Crusades]. This venture had a short-lived success, but the positive result of the Crusades was to reestablish links between the Europeans and those peoples of the Middle East who had preserved classical culture. By the time of the theologian and scholar Aquinas (1225-1274), the works of classical Greece could be read again, although the real revival of classical culture took place two centuries later in the period known as the Renaissance -the rebirth. To recapture the spirit of the Middle Ages in a sentence or two is impossible, but it is during this period that the traditional structure of Western society emerges: A monarch is in charge of aristocrats who in turn both defend and are paid tribute to by an agricultural peasantry. In spiritual matters all these groups acknowledge the authority of the Church. Individual countries, often unified by a common language, begin to emerge, and cities became places where trade was carried out and where a new class, the merchant class, began to achieve power and status.
A number of isolated incidents brought about the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of modern Europe. In 1453 Constantinople was conquered by the Turks, thus making it difficult for Europe to trade with the Far East. The result was that explorers moved out in the opposite direction, to the Atlantic; the most famous consequence was Columbus's sighting the West Indies in 1492. Gunpowder was devised during the fifteenth century, thus changing the nature of warfare, and the invention of printing allowed the propagation not only of Christian doctrine but also of classical learning and of individual opinion. By 1500 the Renaissance is associated with the rediscovery of secular scholarship and the burgeoning of art and architecture, particularly in Italy; by 1517, in Germany, Martin Luther was beginning to argue against some of the abuses of the Church. The Reformation is the name given to the movement whereby the protesters following Luther -that is, the Protestants- broke away from traditional Catholicism.
The common characteristic of both the Renaissance and the Reformation is the stress on individualism, but it must not be forgotten that the Church in the sixtieth century was still a powerful force and fought vigorously both against the propagation of secular science and the various new Christian sects who did not acknowledge the Catholic church as the arbiter of doctrine. The sixteenth century, therefore, is marked by fierce religious warfare throughout Europe, but it is also the century of Michelangelo, [p. 5] Shakespeare, Rabelais, and Cervantes. The major scientific events of the century were Vesalius's contribution to anatomy and Copernicus's theory that the earth moved round the sun and not vice versa. In the New World, the Spanish and Portuguese settled in and colonized California and Central and South America; on the other side of North America the coastline was known but there was little in the way of permanent settlement.
The seventeenth century is a turning point in Western history in several ways. First, there was an enormous growth of science, particularly in physics, during this period; the three major figures were Galileo, Harvey, and Newton. Second, in northern Europe, where the Catholic church was less powerful, there was a growth in freethinking and religious toleration, an attitude that spread to may of the newly founded colonies in North America. Third, the British rebelled against the more tyrannical aspects of monarchy, and the subsequent civil war (1642-1653) led to a rule by Cromwell's military junta, later replaced by a system of checks and balances between king and Parliament that was the forerunner of many democratic governments today. Fourth, we see France at the pinnacle of power; Paris became the literary and cultural capital of Europe. However, all was not necessarily progress: The Thirty Years' war, a confused religious war, brought devastation to Germany during the first half of the century; French Protestants (Huguenots) were persecuted in France during the second half of the century and many emigrated; slavery was an institution throughout the Americas.
The eighteenth century is frequently called the Age of Enlightenment. The intellectual heroes in Paris were Newton and the philosopher Locke. Knowledge of biology and chemistry was greatly advanced, particularly when oxygen was discovered. The courts in Prussia, Austria, and Russia imitated those of France and were centers of new nationalistic movements. Nevertheless, it was also the period of three great revolutions, one social [socio-technical] and two political. First, the Industrial Revolution began in Britain and in America. Machines were invented that could do the work of many laborers and manufacture goods of consistent quality. Factories took the place of farms, and colonization in America, Australia, and elsewhere took a new turn when it was realized that raw products could be cheaply sent back to the home country and there turned into finished goods by machines. It was in this context that Adam Smith wrote one of the pioneering economic texts, The Wealth of Nations (1776), in which free capitalism, with little government intervention, was advocated. Second, the settlers in the North American colonies rebelled against the laws emanating from Britain itself: At Philadelphia in 1776 a meeting of deputies form the few states then founded issued the Declaration of Independence; the American Revolution finished in 1783 with the United States being recognized as a nation in its own right.
Finally, the tyrannical power of the French monarchy became intolerable to the working classes, and in 1789 the French Revolution broke out. [p. 6] Its results were curiously mixed: On the one hand many archaic and unjust laws were replaced with more popular and fair ones; on the other, the various factions who had supported the revolution squabbled among themselves and there was a great deal of bloodshed. Out of this chaos arose a single leader, Napoleon Bonaparte, who attempted to revive the greatness of seventeenth century France by founding an empire. He conquered, by force of armies, much of Europe; however, Great Britain, Prussia, and Russia resisted his advances, and he was finally defeated at Waterloo in 1815.
There was also an intellectual reaction against the emphasis on reason of the first half the century; the reaction is generally called the Romantic movement, coinciding roughly with the period of Napoleon and a decade or so afterwards. Revolution against autocracy was one of its facets, but other facets included a reemphasis on intuition and passion, which greatly influenced the arts, and revival of religion.
Although persons living in the nineteenth century saw it as the age of progress -the advances of technology and science led to better living conditions, the spread of democracy led to reduction of power to the aristocrats and to a growing socialism, the opening up of trade around the world led to increased wealth among the industrialized Western nations- it was also a period of strife in many places. European powers sought to colonize the newly discovered areas in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere, often through force. In Europe many monarchies persisted in quelling revolutionary movements among intelligentsia and the working classes until a series of small and abortive revolutions broke out in 1848. In the United States the individual states were driven to civil war (1861-1865) by disagreements on states rights and on slavery. But the final outcome was indeed a raising of living standards in the West, and in Europe many small states banded together to form the countries now known as Germany and Italy. In particular, Germany had a tradition of freedom in its universities, which gave it an academic leadership that was emulated by other countries, including the United States. By the end of the century the industrialization of the United States put it well to the front in the economic competition between nations; tragically, this competition also ultimately led to warfare between Germany and other major powers in 1914.
Social and intellectual history in the nineteenth century has many crosscurrents. The emphasis on individual freedom, a legacy of the Romantic movement, culminated in a new concern among intellectuals to illuminate social inequalities and hardships. We thus find Dickens, Hugo, Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, and Zola writing realistic novels in which the differences of class are subordinated to the depiction of the similarities in emotional needs of all classes. The theories of Darwin led directly to attempts to improve humanity's own status and to a more enlightened understanding of the place of humans in the animal kingdom. Research on electricity led to the inventions [p. 7] of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century of scientists such as Edison and Bell. Improved transport shortened travel around the globe and made people more cosmopolitan. By the end of the century the West was characterized by a technological sophistication and by an economic wealth that were the envy of the rest of the world.