In his excellent book Sapiens: A brief history of human kind , Yuval Noah Harari makes the stunning, but, upon further reflection, obvious observation that it is humans' ability to create and believe in fictions, such as ideologies, religions, and the rule of law that sets us apart from other living organisms.
Fictions play a critical role in creating order in human societies, given our very large numbers – literally millions of individuals. Unlike ants, which act like progammed robots human beings are somewhat more free-thinking, so coordinating our actions is a far greater challenge; without fictitious system of control it would be impossible to maintain order.
Take the rule of law. Dating back as far as the Code of Hammurabi of 1754 BCE, human societies have invented rules and laws to regulate conduct (and punish breaches). In today's society, we label these systems 'The Law'. However, there are no laws in nature. Our laws are entirely meaningless to, say, lions or cows. They only exist in books we ourselves have written and in our collective imaginations, and they only impact our lives to the extent that we believe in them and behave accordingly.
Rule of law belongs in the same family as other fictional systems of control, such as religion and cultural nationalism, which are equally bereft of biological foundations and objectivity (see here for example). The human sperm and egg, which carry our DNA, do not care one iota about the caste or class or race of the man and the woman, whether they are religious or not, what languages they speak, or what are their political views. As far as DNA is concerned, the only things that matter are that: (a) man and woman are of reproductive age; (b) the man has an XY chromosome; and, (c) the woman has an XX chromosome.
The greater the number of people, who trust in the rule of law the greater its efficiency as an instrument of social control. In rich countries, the vast majority of people believe in the rule of law, so it is very effective, but in lower income countries, where many people are too poor access the legal system there is not widespread trust that it will work for them, so it is not uncommon for people to invent their own systems of justice on the spot, such as lynching thieves. As far as the poor are concerned, the formal legal system might as well not exist.
Like other fictional systems of control, we have adorned the rule of law with solemn rituals and complex ceremonies to shore up trust in the system. We only grant powers to change laws to a select few called parliamentarians, who are chosen in fiercely constested competitions called elections. This is because we want to convince ourselves that only our fittest are given the right create the laws that will govern us. In order to dispense justice, we have similarly established elabrate processes to aid credibility, including, in some countries, requiring judges to wear robes and funny wigs and to pass difficult exams before they earn the right to sentence the rest of us.
Although it is fictional, our system of laws is far from irrelevant to our existence. In fact, quite the contrary. Due to our widespread trust with in the system, we can land in very hot water if we fail to obey the fictional system of control. All human societies have prisons to lock up those who trespass aganist the law. Some countries even execute so-called criminals.
Due to their fictional nature, systems of laws are usually completely subjective to the society in question. Consider the treatment of homosexuality in different legal systems. Homosexuality constitutes a crime punishable by death in Uganda, while homosexuals are allowed to marry with equal status as heterosexuals in South Africa. Nature, of course, passes no judgement on homosexuality. To it, homosexuality simply is. The fact that our legal systems treat homosexuality so differently underlines their fundamental subjectivity. Each society invents its own laws, which it believes to be universal, even though clearly they are not.
Nor does anything guarantee that our fictional laws deliver ‘good’ or ‘fair’ societies. In fact, throughout history most human societies operated within human-made parameters that were extremely inegalitarian by design, often drawing authority from an invented deity, and usually enforced through extreme violence. Unsurprisingly, our laws therefore tend to give rise to recurring conflicts and change. Change has been the only constant, so the only constant has been change. Instability is not all bad, however, because it ensures that we leap from one fictional system of laws to the next, and perhaps there is improvement along the way. Or perhaps not.
Judge for yourself. Take the period of Visigoth rule in Spain. It perfectly illustrates Harari’s ideas about the role of fiction in controlling human society. It demonstrates, in particular, how the Catholic Church worked tirelessly - and went to extraordinary lengths of immorality - to maintain a fundamentally exploitative social structure that exclusively served the interests of the powerful, including the Church itself.
Palaeolithic peoples first arrived in the Iberian Peninsula some 35,000–40,000 years ago. Little is known about these early peoples except that they made extraordinary cave paintings (see here). Immediately prior to the Middle Ages, Celts, Phoenicians, and Greeks had made Spain their home and imposed their own particular systems of control on the people who lived there. Then, starting around 240 BCE, the Carthaginians gave it a go until they were kicked out by the Romans in 218 BCE. Then followed some eight hundred years of Roman rule during which Spain was thoroughly re-engineered to make sure the people lived accordingly to how the Romans saw fit. Indeed, so rigorous was the Roman cultural brainwashing of the Spanish people that many of Rome's most important fictions, including Catholicism and much of the Roman legal system are still with us to this day.
Roman domination of Spain weakened in the first half of the first century CE. Aside from the Roman Empire’s growing internal divisions, a major threat came from Germanic tribes, which had first begun to expand southwards, eastwards, and westwards from their northern European homelands around 500 BCE. An alliance of Germanic tribes defeated the Romans at the Battle of Teutoburg in 8 CE, an event to which Rammstein makes reference in the opening scene of their awesome video ‘Deutschland’. To enjoy, click below and turn up the volume!
Rammstein's Deutschland (Source: YouTube)
The Romans suffered another important defeat at the hands of the Germanic Thervingi tribe, a precursor for the Goths, at the Battle of Adrianople in 378 CE. Then the Goths sacked Rome in 410 CE. Germanic victory was finally complete in 800 CE, when Frankish leader Charlemagne conquered Rome and assumed the title of Holy Roman Emperor.
As far as Spain is concerned, the transition from Roman to Germanic domination began when Suebis from near the Elbe along with Vandals from Southern Poland and nomadic Alans from present-day Iran entered Spain between 407 CE and 409 CE, occupying large swathes of the country.
They were soon followed by Germanic Goths (see here). Or to be more precise Visigoths, Visigoth referring to Goths based in Western Europe as opposed to Ostrogoths, who were based in Eastern Europe.
The Visigoths quickly increased their influence in the Iberian Peninsula, because unlike the Suebis, Vandals, and Alans, the Visigoths were highly Romanised and even had treaties in place with Rome, which greatly aided their expansion.
When the Western Roman Empire fell in 476 CE, the Visigoths broke with the Romans. By the early 500s CE, the Visigoths had established full control of nearly all of Spain and moved their capital to Toledo from Toulouse.
Visigoth hegemony was to last 300 years until the arrival of the Moors in 711 CE.
Visigoth rule in Spain was characterised by dramatic centralisation of power and homogenisation of culture, particularly its religious aspects. The process of homogenisation was brutal and largely orchestrated by the Catholic Church. We know this because, remarkably, the bishops of the Catholic Church in Spain kept minutes from the eighteen synods that were held during Visigoth rule. The synods were called Councils of Toledo (see here).
Due to the widespread belief in a literal God in Spain at the time and the Catholic Church's claim to a direct link to God, the bishops played a key role as de facto law-makers in Visigoth society. In effect, the Councils of Toledo served the function of parliamentary session, whose edicts had the status of laws.
The First Council of Toledo was convened in 400 CE. Its primary aim was to root out competition to Catholicism from Priscillianism, a rival Christian sect. Followers of Princillianism held that angels and human souls emanated from God, but that human bodies were created by the devil. In their view, human souls were joined to the human body deliberately to remind and punish us for our sins (see here). By the time the First Council of Toledo was held, Priscillian himself, the sect's leader, had already been put to the sword. Naturally, he had been executed in 385 CE for "holding nocturnal meetings with shameful women and praying while naked" (see here).
With Priscillian no longer around, the Catholic Church clearly sensed an opportunity to further weaken the Priscillians. Armed with the authority of the synod, the bishops went after the remaining adherents of Priscillianism over the following two hundred years until all members of the sect had been annihilated. The main beneficiaries of this purge were the Jews, who made up about 3% of the Spanish population at the time. Jews were not yet seen as a threat and were even allowed to occupy some high positions in society in the early years of Visigoth rule in Spain.
Having effectively dispensed with Priscillianism, the Second Council of Toledo of 527 CE took it upon itself eradicate members of another Christian sect, the Arianists. Early Visigoth arrivals in Spain had been Arianists, who had frequently clashed with the Catholic Hispano-Roman population. Catholics regarded the Arianists as heretics and the Arianists despised Catholics. Their disagreement boiled down to a single point of scripture: Arianists believed that God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit were three separate entities, while Catholics insisted – and still do – that the Holy Trinity of Father (God), Son (Jesus) and Holy Spirit are aspects of same divine being. This rather ridiculous dispute – over a purely man-made fiction – led to bloody conflict between Visigoths and Hispano-Romans for the next sixty years.
Everything changed in 587 CE, when Visigoth King Recared converted to Catholicism and immediately set out to make sure everyone else did the same. The king’s conversion to Catholicism massively increased his power by securing the support of the Church and aligning him with the majority of the Spanish population, which was Catholic. Seeing the writing on the wall, the few remaining Visigoth Arianists soon converted, but the Jews stubbornly clung on to their own fiction, Judaism. This suddenly made them stand, like a small, isolated, and conservative obstacle in an otherwise by now almost uniform religious landscape.
And so it came to pass that the Third and Fourth Councils of Toledo of 589 CE and 633 CE turned their vitriol on the Jews. The synod forbade Jews from having Christian wives, concubines, or slaves. Jews were also disqualified from holding any office which involved punishment of Christians. Christian slaves that had been made to participate in Jewish rituals of any kind were to be freed. Children of unions between Jews and Christians were required to be baptised and stringent measures were put in place to prevent relapses to Judaism. (1)
When they were not busy persecuting Jews, the Catholic bishops spent a great deal of time buttering up the king and shoring up the feudal system. Visigoth society was based on a rigid and highly exploitative hierarchy. Slaves were at the very bottom and the king at the very top. In between were farmers, nobles, and bishops, in rising order of importance. Kings always sought the blessing of the bishops in order to lend credence to their inevitable claims to hereditary power. Church blessings mattered, because the nobles – led by five dukes – frequently tried to kill kings in order to usurp their power.
Apart from propping up the king, the bishops also ensured that the great unwashed did not rise above their station. It blessed as inalienable rights the nobles’ ownership of land, which farmers were forced to cultivate in exchange for food and shelter. The bishops also blessed slavery and had powers to create new slaves. This made bishops extremely powerful, because slaves made up the bulk of the army, which was jointly owned by the nobles, but could be lent to the king in the event of war.
In the spirit of preserving feudalism, the Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Councils of Toledo (638 CE to 653 CE) granted religious sanction to feudalism by decreeing special protections for the the king and higher nobles. Punishments, including excommunication, were introduced for anyone caught plotting against the king. The synod also gave formal church approval of mass executions of offenders.
In order to protect the Church’s own carefully constructed image of purity and sanctity in the eyes of ordinary people, without whose unwavering faith the Church would instantly implode, it was occasionally necessary to purge from within the church's own ranks, particularly among horny bishops. With logic as clear as mud, the Ninth Council of Toledo of 655 CE thus stipulated that children sired of clerics be made slaves of the church.
It was also deemed important that once someone had been cajoled into joining the Catholic Church they should be kept on a tight leash. To this end, the Ninth Council decreed that henceforth all converts were required to attend all religious ceremonies in person to demonstrate their faith, and failure to attend even a single ceremony would be punished with flogging or enforced starvation.
By now, being so powerful, the Catholic Church had become extraordinarily corrupt. Other than fornication, most common type of corruption was ‘simony’, a method of immoral enrichment by senior clergy, whereby bishops offered positions within the church hierarchy to the highest bidder. In a rather superficial effort to give the appearance of stamping out this practice, the Eleventh Council of Toledo of 675 CE condemned simony, but never imposed harsh punishment. After all, simony was an incredibly efficient way for bishops to get rich. Simony continued on the sly.
In spite of - or perhaps because of - the laws passed by the Councils of Toledo, Visigoth society never achieved stability. Constant struggles for power saw king after king deposed and assassinated. At root, the lack of stability was due to the absence of an effective constitution and proper balance of powers as well as the exploitative nature of the feudal system itself. As time passed, the game of musical chairs in the Visigoth court only became more and more frenetic. In turn, this compelled the Bishops to hold even more synods and pass even more laws so as not to appear impotent. The increase in the frequency of synods towards the end of Visigoth rule can be seen in the chart below.
Source: Data from here)
In 656 CE, the bishops finally - inevitably you might say - committee fully to the most time-honoured of all tactics to detract attention away from own weaknesses, namely scapegoating of Jews. The Tenth Council of Toledo expelled from the Church all clerics, who were caught trading Christian slaves with Jews. Then, in 681 CE, the Twelfth Council of Toledo enacted no fewer than 28 laws against Jews and required that the new laws be read aloud in all churches in Spain. Converted Jews were also prohibited from returning to Judaism at pain of death. At the same synod, the bishops also suppressed laws against violence to slaves, probably to help nobles maintain control over the army.
Meanwhile, by the late 600s CE, so many nobles had tried to kill kings that these rebel nobles could no longer be ignored as a political force. The bishops, ever sensitive to even the tiniest shifts in the balance of power, began to align themselves with these erstwhiletraitors. In the Thirteenth Council of Toledo of 683CE, the bishops took a decisive step towards the nobles by formally offering immunity from prosecution for any noble who had acted against the king in the past. This shift benefitted the bishops by aligning them more closely with the increasingly powerful nobility, but hardly served Visigoth society as a whole. By reducing the cost of rebellion, it encouraged nobles to undertake even more treasonous acts, which only made the political instability worse.
Even as the bishops aligned themselves more closely with the nobles, they never ignored the interests of the king. In the Fifteenth Council of Toledo of 688 CE, the bishops decreed that newly appointed kings would no longer be required to honour commitments they had made to previous kings, that is, the the king they had just deposed. This measure encouraged deceit and backstabbing, but it was popular with newly appointed kings and put the bishops back in their good books.
Throughout these political machinations, the bishops never forgot the importance of maintaining the mystery of the Church. After all, it was critical to maintain the trust of the faithful. To this end, the bishops showed off their intellectual gravitas and general import to Visigoth society by dedicating no fewer than two synods – the Fourteenth and Fifteenth – to the riveting question of whether Jesus only had divine will or human will as well.
Intellectual naval-gazing out of the way, the bishops quickly got back to social engineering in the Sixteenth Council of Toledo of 693 CE. They defrocked a bishop who had dared to rebel against the king. After all, this act had broken the sacred rule that bishops must at all times serve at least two masters. Then they got on with approving punishments for homosexuality, including castration, whipping, and execution. The bishops did not forget to scapegoat Jews either; they introduced a new requirement that converted Jews must prove their faith by eating non-kosher food and introduced punishments for Christians who traded with unconverted Jews.
This treatment of the Jews soon proved far too lenient, however. Just a year later, in 694 CE, the Seventeenth Council of Toledo, at the bidding of the king, decreed that all Jewish property be given to Christian slaves and that all Jews be made slaves. In a particularly clever move, the bishops gave the power to decide which nobles would get ownership of the newly minted slaves to the king, thereby granting the king an important tool for currying favour with rebellious nobles, albeit a finite one. It was also decided, you see, that all Jewish children be removed from their parents at the age of seven and married off to Christians. Finally, slave owners had to sign a contract that they would never allow the Jewish religion to be practiced. Clearly, the objective was to entirely eradicate Judasim from Spain, a kind of final solution.
By now, Visigoth society was crumbling. The very last Council of Toledo before the Moorish invasion took place in 703 CE. It was deemed so controversial that no minutes were kept, but rumour has it that the synod proposed to legalise marriage for bishops. Obviously, this could not stand.
Looking back, it is fortuitous that the minutes of the eighteen Councils of Toledo were preserved for posterity. They expose in its full glory the Catholic Church’s role in the oppression that accompanied Visigoth rule in Spain, particularly following Visigoth conversion to Catholicism.
Visigoth kings sought to impose hardcore cultural homogeneity on Spain in a bid to hold on to power and the Catholic Church was a willing hand-maiden. As elsewhere, cultural homogenisation had very negative consequences for ordinary people and especially minority groups, including non-Catholic Visigoths and Jews.
The minutes of the Councils of Toledo disabuse us of any notion that the Catholic Church in Spain served a ‘higher’ moral purpose, or acted for 'the good of the people'. Rather, the Catholic Church was machiavellian and, on many occasions, acted with grotesque viciousness. The Church acted in its own interest, the interest of the king, and occasionally in support of the nobles. It never acted in the interest of the meek.
The Catholic Church was instrumental to keeping in place a deeply exploitative and flawed feudal system, shoring up royal dictators, buttering up selfish and violent nobles, participating in and protecting the institution of slavery, approving of and in some cases decreeing mass-murder, and leading numerous campaigns to persecute members of other faiths, notably Jews. In short, the Catholic Church was a heinous instrument of social control.
In the end, however, even the efforts of the Catholic Church proved inadequate. Visigoth society was turning and turning in a widening gyre and in the end the centre could not hold. In 711 CE, Tariq ibn-Ziyad crossed the Strait of Gibraltar at the head of an army of 7,000 Arabs and Berbers, meeting very little resistance. Visigoth rule collapsed almost overnight. The arrival of the Muslims in Spain was particularly welcomed by the Jews, who to this day refer to the first 200-300 years following Tariq ibn-Ziyad’s arrival as the Golden Age of Judaism in Spain (see here).
At the most fundamental level, Visigoth rule in Spain was a tragedy, because the Catholic Church’s power to exploit ordinary people emanated from the exploited themselves. It was ordinary people's belief in the fiction of religion – sustained through a combination of brainwashing, coercion, and ignorance – that underpinned the fictional systemof control that kept them enslaved.
The End
Notes:
(1) Why is baptism a controversial issue for Jews? Christianity requires people to be baptised in order to become Christians, but Jews believe that baptism is not required, because Jewish babies are born members of the Jewish religion, since Jews are “a people”. Both religions are, of course, completely bonkers. These beliefs clearly have no basis in reality.