Over the last two decades, academics and pundits have tried to answer this question. Most begin their search for the birth of the modern world somewhere over the last few centuries: the discovery of the Americas, the invention of the steam engine, perhaps the outbreak of the French Revolution.

Yet the research of two path-breaking economists suggests that these answers are misplaced. In separate works, they argue that the invention of capitalism and liberalism in Western Europe should be traced to one surprising source: the medieval Catholic Church.  

The research program of Jonathan Schultz, an economist currently attached to the Culture, Cognition, and Coevolution research group at Harvard, is built on a simple observation: Western Europeans—and their cultural descendants in places like North America and Australia—think differently from people raised in other cultures. This is not a unique observation. Over the last two decades, psychologists have asked questions like “Do you think most people can be trusted?” and “Is it important to think up ideas and be creative, to do things one’s own way?” They’ve complimented these questionnaires with games cleverly designed to test how willing subjects are to trust strangers, punish rule breakers, break rules themselves, and treat friends and family impartially.

Schultz and his team drew on 20 of these cross-cultural experiments (including several “natural” experiments, such as the likelihood that a diplomat at the U.N. from a given country would call on diplomatic immunity to get out of a parking ticket) to sketch a psychological profile of the Western mind. They found that on average, Westerners are more individualistic, more trusting of strangers and public institutions, more likely to donate anonymously, less concerned with the opinions and judgments of their peers, less likely to cheat or bend rules (especially for the sake of friends and relatives), and far less tolerant of nepotism than those from other parts of the world.

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/how-the-catholic-church-created-our-liberal-world/

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 GUS:

This is total bullshit… Well not entirely. As explained in my major work “The Age of Deceit” (still in progress), We Westerners are better at deception — including the religious deception. But I am glad that Tanner Greer concluded that:

… their work presents a compelling account of the origins of modernity. Capitalism and liberalism are the twin pillars upon which the modern world was built. And both of them were built, unconsciously, by the priests and popes of the medieval Catholic Church.

Big words indeed.

The whole lot could have unraveled at the Battle of Poitiers — where Charles Martell defeated the Muslims. This battle was the most important, the pivotal point in the whole “Western civilized” structure that followed. And we cannot forget the Cathars either, a religious entity that endorsed the equality of men and women. Since the defeat of the Cathars, by king and pope, the Western World women (WWw) have been bearing the brunt of ongoing discrimination as well. The Church (sort of) normalized non-kin relationships through marriages and this may have had a certain influence on the status of our civilization.

But far more than Capitalism and Liberalism, stemming from “kings abandoning the popes in favour of merchants”, the psychopathy and the sociopathy of our leaders were the main bearers of these “Western civilised” gifts. Deviousness was the key “to stay on top” — a deviousness that has been sold to us as capitalization — a process in which what we created was kept and added to with more creation and ruthless ownership, through valuing fictitious profits and robbery through deficits — and liberalism — a devious process with which we (our Western societies) chose to destroy other cultures through war or enslave them. See: tired of being the cake of kings and of emperors, after the opium wars and being the US slave factory...

The qualities of dishonesty that would let someone to claim diplomatic immunity to get out of a parking ticket are not exclusive to other civilisations, snigger snigger. The West is full of this shit, including nepotism, trust me, and many of us in the West are good at hiding (except Donald Trump who does it in the open) that we’re deceiving kings, coniving fools and flattering knaves. In our present ways, we, the plebs, huddle in our inane cotton-wooled comforts while we let our officials, which we elect knowingly or blindly, do the dirty deeds which we have to describe as “just” or as “crusade” in order to maintain our moral slate clean.

And our “news” are a cultivated form of distraction, disinformation and bullshit that help us maintain this disparity between reality and morality.

The West rose “above the rest” by preventing the rest to rise — or be itself. The “West” used various ruthless tactics such as colonialism, slavery and war. The Catholic Church was often a tag along, also used to send its missionaries to prepare the ground for invasions and provide the “mind control” thereafter.

On the scientific front, the new thinking was designed to counteract the idea of god. Sciences have actually been the best driver of our morals than the Church. But behind the scene the psychos and sociopaths are using every tricks to make us swallow greatness when it is a precarious illusionary and contemptuous concept.

Presently the “West” (read the USA) is fighting to retain this ugly-gained “control”. We are fighting dirty. 

"Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, and Developed”? Yes we have comforts that we do not understand the price is paid on credit to the planetary demise.

The “sins" of the Western civilisation are quite extensive:

Extra CO2 through industrialisation

War

Poverty (at home and abroad)

Freedom illusions under various hegemony 

Pollution

The destruction of Nature

The desolate inane mindset of a distracted Western population, with “entertainment” and gadgets, that does not see what its elite (church, merchants — aka multinationals — and governments) are doing.

Gus is an atheist.