The recording of the sum of human knowledge for the betterment of humankind was not a high priority in the Ages of Faith in Christian Europe, or for most of the history of the Muslim East. It was never considered that humanity could be improved — the idea of human progress was a secular humanist achievement. It is therefore dishonest to crow about the great libraries of the Middle Ages (which includes the Dark Ages), and the romantic fiction of the monks preserving the classics, without telling us just how many volumes these so-called great Christian libraries comprised.

We have archeological evidence of great libraries in Assyria — an ancient kingdom centered in Iraq but encompassing most of the modern Middle East — and libraries in Egypt, dating to about 1300 BCE. The Library at Alexandria, founded in the 3rd century BCE, collected manuscripts from the entire ancient world, and was a world-class center for teaching and study, copying of documents, and a collection of over 400,000 scrolls. The collection ebbed over the years, possibly due to fire and deliberate depredation, until the whole library had vanished sometime after the murder of Hypatia by a Christian mob in 415 CE.

But look at the solidly Christian period of 500 to 1300: not a library can be found in all of Europe with more that 2,000 volumes, many of them copies of the same title. The well-worn 19th century myth that the monks of the Middle Ages preserved the classics for posterity is doubly false. Not only had there been a great Christian holocaust of books from the old Empire, but only one or two abbots, out of thousands in Europe in any century, ever set their abbots to copying anything but religious works: that was the Benedictine Rule, after all. It wasn’t entirely the monks’ fault: in the greatest abbey of the 13th century, the Abbey of St. Gall, not a single monk could read!

That largely illiterate, cloistered monks would copy and preserve Latin classics infused with an abhorrent paganism beggars belief. What modest copying that did occur in Christendom was centered in Ostrogoth lands where they hated the popes. The only library of the Middle Ages that even approached the depth and breadth of the Alexandrian was the Caliph’s library of the skeptical 10th century of Muslim Spain — at the very time Greek learning had died out in Christian Europe and the Latin classics were denounced as “Devil-inspired.”

The 18th century Enlightenment, which Immanuel Kant aptly described as “man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity,” brought real scholarship and dissemination of knowledge to large numbers of people. It is also what made all great libraries possible — including the one nurtured with a gift from freethinker Thomas Jefferson of more books than any library of the Middle Ages — the Library of Congress, founded on this date in 1800.

Wealth and Democracy What has wealth to do with democracy, anyway? Everything and nothing, as political and economic commentator Kevin Phillips points out in his incisive and devastating Wealth and Democracy. As the author says in his Preface, this would have been a very different book if it had been written in 1999, before the tech stock collapse and 9/11, rather than in 2002. In ten data-stuffed chapters plus an Afterword, Phillips supports his thesis, poetically summarized by the Goldsmith quote above, that in the modern U.S., laissez-faire “is a pretense. Government power and preferment have been used by the rich, not shunned. As wealth concentration grows, especially near the crest of a drawn-out boom, so has upper-bracket control of politics and its ability to shape its own preferment.” In the next 474 pages, Phillips goes on to cover the “political and economic history of U.S. wealth, the U.S. record of speculative finance, the Anglo-Saxon proclivity for technology manias, the overlap between watershed technological innovation and economic inequality, and the connections between wealth concentration and the corruption of politics, government, and public policy.”

A Gilded Age Ball
The party before the hangover:
The financial élites of Spain, Holland and England “partied like it’s 1999” on the eve of their declines. Phillips lists the symptoms before the slides, all of which infect the U.S. today.Wealth and Democracy is not a Socialist critique of Capitalism, but rather a Capitalist critique of excess. Phillips seems more in love with democracy than he is in awe of the invisible hand of the marketplace. As he pointed out in a November 13 interview, unregulated Capitalism inevitably leads to abuse of the system. What he takes pains to point out in his book, however, is that this fact is not only not new, the world has seen its pattern followed at least three times before.

The tilting of the US economy from production to finance as a source of wealth will spell the end of our economic dominance — just as it spelled the end of the Spanish (1530-1588), Dutch (1600-1702), and British (1815-1914) economic dominance. We’re already the world’s largest debtor nation. We’ve had a good run from 1945 to the tech bubble bust in 2001. What happens when our creditors call in their loans?

My particular favorites in Wealth and Democracy are Chapter 4, from which I drew for the symptoms of decline, and Part III, about how “American wealth nourished itself on government influence and power — and vice versa.” In the four chapters comprising Part II, Phillips explains that corporate socialism has been popular since, oh, 1787. That’s when the first Constitutional Convention went on record encouraging industry and “mechanics,” promoting fisheries, forges, factories and new technologies. Why do you think patent protection was written into the Constitution?

Kevin Phillips
Kevin Philips
A 30-year veteran of political and economic commentary, Phillips is the author of The Politics of Rich and Poor (1990) and a commentator on National Public Radio. Federal land grants and tariff suspensions on iron subsidized several private fortunes for railroad entrepreneurs: Vanderbilt, Gould, Sage, Harriman, Hill and Astor (who bribed his way to a fur fortune and profited from the state-financed Erie Canal). That of course required steel, which Carnegie, Frick and Phipps supplied. And oil, which JD Rockefeller (the first billionaire), W Rockefeller, Payne, Rogers, Flagler and Harkness supplied. Of course, financing all this speculation and industrial expansion were the moneylenders: JP Morgan, A Mellon, R Mellon, Green, Baker, Stillman and Schiff. And government granting of exclusive franchises only cemented the relationship between state power and private fortune.

Eli Whitney was one of the first federal contractors. Samuel Colt profited out of gunmaking during the Civil War. And industry still has their hands out for those fat government contracts. That’s how the major fortunes were made in this country. War is always good for business, and for war profiteers, dating back to the Revolution and the Civil War, but continuing through WW I and WW II, on through Korea and Vietnam (technically, the last two were “police actions”). Hey, maybe it’s not too late for me to invest in the US-Iraq War?

Government subsidy of pharmaceutical research (from penicillin in WW II to 2/3 of all government biomed spending by 1965, with nothing for the public in return), telecommunications ($90 billion spectrum giveaways, with nothing for the public in return), and the development of the Internet (a Defense Department project) are only the most recent fortune-builders… for the private sector. And that doesn’t even count the state and local governments subsidizing public works through private contractors — especially stadiums for millionaires, like the ones in my hometown of Baltimore.

If there is a cautionary tale in Wealth and Democracy, it is that a U.S. government “concerned with protecting wealth may do so at the expense of democratic procedures and may try to blame terrorism rather than flawed policy for hard times.” As we enter the second dip of a W-dip recession, Wealth and Democracy sounds like a book for our time.
Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich by Kevin Phillips, 2002. 474pp, index, bibliography, notes. New York: Broadway Books (Random House). ISBN 0-7679-0533-4