Book review: “Of Popes and Unicorns” by David Hutchings and James C Ungureanu.

 

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How the “Conflict Thesis” threatens both Christianity and Science.

 

 (The review is based on a purchased copy.)

The authors set out both the history of the Conflict Thesis and the historical reality behind the version of history behind that thesis (that Christianity is, and always has been, the regressive enemy of Science and all progress, enlightenment and freedom) and they do this by researching and publishing rather more actual facts than the authors of that thesis, Draper and White, ever did. In doing so, they find (and go a long way towards proving) that not only did Draper and White misrepresent Christianity to the modern world, they also sold the world’s intellectuals a version of history itself that is not only untrue, but ludicrous. To take just one example of this: the idea that when Christians ruled in the Middle Ages, the streets were all ankle or even knee-deep in human and animal excrement. As George Orwell (who kept a lot of farm animals and planted a lot of fruit-trees in his time) would probably observe: to believe that one you really do need to be an intellectual and not a farmer. Because not even Hutchings and Ungureanu seem to fully grasp just how idiotic that “factoid” which so many clever people believe and endlessly repeat, actually is:

Prior to the invention of super-phosphate fertilizers, human and animal excrement (and bones) were too important to agriculture to be wasted in this manner. Even in the 19^th century, there were dung-piles near the Glasgow tenements, so that the dung could be efficiently collected and removed to the fields outside the city where it was needed! And the great clean Victorian clean-up with all its undoubted health benefits, of the Glasgow dung-heaps and the river Thames in London, only happened AFTER the availability of industrial fertilizers allowed it. If it had happened prior, too many nutrients would have been lost and there would eventually have been crop failures. This is also why we do NOT find huge numbers of graves full of bodies from great historical battles before about 1840: the dead went into mass graves until they had rotted to bones and bones were dug up again and ground to fertilizer. (French local authorities sold licences to mine the battlefield of Waterloo for bonemeal.)

That factoid is just one of a whole barrage of non-truths which Draper and White (and, importantly, their supporters) laid down to sustain their thesis. Actually, they did this so systematically and consistently that it is hard to believe that they had very many actual truths at their disposal to support their case! Now, Draper and White were not actually working together as such and they had different motives for doing what they did. The consistency comes from those who chose to support them, to recommend and promote the books that they wrote and the talks that they gave.

The determining factor behind the consistency was (and still is) an agenda, which both philosophies and institutions were created to serve.

Of Popes and Unicorns is Published by Oxford University Press, 2021.

Book Review of The Giant on the Skyline by Clover Stroud

 

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Memoir of a real-life decision influenced by the spirit of a landscape.

(This review is based on a free review copy from the publisher, via Net Galley UK)

Initially at sea in (not-very) rural England where she is driven by the need for affordable living space, Clover has adapted to the life, even though her partner is largely absent, travelling abroad and increasingly working in the United States, to pay the bills incurred by bringing up their five children. One might note at this point that a house-price boom which consistently outpaces even the cost of living crisis is the G7’s version of the Chinese Communist Party’s demographically-catastrophic “One Child” policy, now abandoned as one BILLION unlived-in apartments are being blown up to make space for new building which is also not needed by the dwindling population.

Clover’s partner, Pete, finds himself unable to make a good-enough living to support his partner and offspring outside of a corporate setting in Washington DC (only those in elite jobs can afford to reproduce) so he wants Clover and the children to abandon the life they have, in order to join him in making a new life there. Clover has come to love the landscape of the English-Welsh borders which she initially found very alien, but she’s still desperate to live with Pete full-time, so she is torn and even frightened by his plans to move the family to America.

The thing is, in that landscape she is surrounded by people making very much less money than Pete, who somehow manage anyway: mostly by doing things of such direct practical value to others that the others are willing to pay cash-in-hand for them! The gulf between Pete and the people Clover deals with on a daily basis is a great deal wider than the great circle route from Swindon to Washington DC.

Not only does he feel that he needs much more money, he can only hope to earn that money within a business model that separates him from most contact with or awareness of those at the base of the economic pyramid: the people who help Clover every day and care for her and about her.

Just as Pete cannot make his way in rural England, it is very unlikely that Clover’s friends who can manage that without much complaint, would last long in Pete’s world. Perhaps Clover’s friends and neighbours cope by lacking the same sense of entitlement which Pete NEEDS in order to survive in a more privileged, but cut-throat and rule-bound, corporate environment?

Clover manages to say goodbye to the landscape she has come to love and takes her youngest children to be with the man she can’t stop loving. The two older children seem to be left to make their own choice and make their own way.

The Giant on the Skyline by Clover Stroud is published in the UK as of the 9^th of May 2024 by Random House