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Big post. I have to agree that Christianity had little to do with the rise of the West. I’m not persuaded by the esoterics and I see it from a different angle. Cultural practices that developed alongside Christianity, and may have taken a Christian flavor, were responsible for Western hegemony. These cultural practices involved:
Obeyed internalized hierarchies (in all facets, not a monarch or anything). There was agreement on the superiority of virtuous and great people, and secular as well as religious events glorified great people.
restrictions of women, restrictions on obtaining sex. Women are bad at choosing mates based on what is best for society, and sex is a reward for men.
Leisure emphasizing glory, awe, and longsuffering which orients a human toward longterm goods. This implicates the Church in its architecture and theology, but is not limited to any special ingredient of Christianity. Art often showed aspirational and inspiring scenes of glory. The Church emphasized the everlastingness of God. The architecture emphasized permanence. This orients a man’s entire mind toward the achievement of lifelong glory, whether they involves a risky trade expedition to the New World, spending years writing a novel, whatever. It is important here that achievement is forever praised, whether in titles or reputation, and superior over novelty and frivolity.
A deemphasis of novelty and frivolity. The Church criticized frivolous spending and displays of wealth, eg spending that is not oriented toward glory.
Something apparent when you read history is that Westerners focused on results and not appearances. They tolerated a large breadth of weird, autistic, and even antisocial faults provided that the person could achieve great results. Men did not have to focus unduly on fashion, mannerisms, and other vapidity to obtain a wife (there were subcultures were this happened, but it was not the norm). So you have someone like Napoleon who would sit on your lap and pull your ears, singing horribly and cheating at games, who would brag about how soft his hands were and had all kinds of bizarre habits. And these did not factor into his reputation whatsoever. Since the decline of the West, enormous energy is spent by men to not appear cringe (and this goes back all through 20th century), to look manicured and beautiful like a woman. All of that mental energy was spent more prosocially by the masses of men in Western history.
what is best for society is a question which there is a lot of variance in people's answers to. what sort of men do you think women should be rewarding instead?
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