Civilization #33: The Rise and Fall of the Byzantine Empire

Today we are examining the Byzantine Empire, and I will be looking at three questions.

1. Why do we have the Byzantine Empire? Historically, we have seen the Byzantine Empire as a continuation of the Roman Empire. We have the Byzantine Empire because Constantine the Great, in 330 CE, transferred the capital of the Roman Empire from Rome to Byzantium, which he called New Rome and which was eventually renamed Constantinople. So, why did he make that transition?
2. How did the Byzantine Empire rise and endure? It lasted from 330 until 1453 when the Ottoman Turks overran the capital of Constantinople. Lasting for over a thousand years, it is arguably the most enduring world empire in human history. How was it so successful?
3. Why did it ultimately decline? Why did it collapse? What were the factors that led to its eventual demise?

First, I want to present the scholarly consensus—what is generally accepted and believed about these three questions. Then, I want to present my own perspective in order to refute that consensus.

The Scholarly Consensus

This is the Roman Empire in 117 CE. As you can see, it is huge; it spans across the Mediterranean. This is Spain, and over here is Anatolia, Egypt, and the Levant. It is a huge world empire, and that's a problem. It's just much too big.

Unlike China, it has no natural boundaries, and throughout most of its history, it was invaded by what the Romans called barbarians—basically, these Germanic and Gothic tribes from the north. It also had a major adversary in the Persian Empire. At this time, they were fighting against the Parthians, but later on, they would fight against what we call the Sasanian Persian Empire. This was not a really sustainable empire.

Internally, there was a contradiction: they were an empire, but they believed themselves to be a republic. It was important for them to maintain republican institutions like the Senate, even though it was to the detriment of the management of the empire. What I mean by that is that throughout this time, on paper and in theory, it was ruled by committee. The Senate was really in command, and the Senate is composed of the Roman aristocracy—the ruling houses of Rome. When you have rule by committee, when power is divided up evenly among the ruling houses of an empire, the only thing they can really agree on is to be corrupt together. The Senate was a huge problem because they basically monopolized wealth, and there was a lot of discontent in the provinces and among the people.

The Romans tried different solutions to this, but none of them worked. Eventually, we had something called the Crisis of the Third Century, which basically meant the Roman Empire was about to disintegrate. There were civil wars, invasions from the north, economic collapse, and a plague. In the 3rd century, it really seemed the Roman Empire was on the brink of complete implosion. Then, a military genius by the name of Diocletian reunited the empire. He recognized that they needed to change the system and make radical changes in order to save the Roman Empire.

As you can see, it is extremely difficult to protect Rome against the barbarian invaders. Over time, the western portion of the empire would be overrun by these barbarians, who we call the Germanics, the Goths, the Slavs, and the Huns. Basically, these are the successors to the Yamnaya people, and they come from the steppes, so they are extremely aggressive, mobile people who would eventually overrun the Roman Empire. They would establish the tribes that will eventually give us the modern states of Germany, Britain, and France. Basically, these are the ancestors of Western Europeans.

These barbarians established their own empires, and all that was left after about the year 500 is the Eastern Roman Empire, which is the successor to the Roman Empire. Even though they called themselves Romans and identified as Romans, historians refer to the Eastern Roman Empire as the Byzantines. They themselves did not call themselves the Byzantines; it's what later historians call them.

The man who makes this transition, who is basically the founder of the Byzantine Empire, is Constantine the Great. What he does that's very important is that he shifts the capital from Rome to Byzantium on the Bosphorus. Today, we call this place Constantinople; it's still there. If you want to visit, it's called Istanbul in Turkey, and it's a beautiful city—definitely one of the most beautiful cities in the world.

Why Move the Capital? The Strategic View

The question then is, why was this move made? Modern historians believe that this was a strategic decision.

First of all, Rome was not easily defended. It was very common throughout its history for it to be overrun by a provincial military governor. Think of Julius Caesar, but there were others as well who did the same thing—who were extremely successful in the provinces, took their military, and conquered Rome. It was very easy to overrun Rome and then declare oneself emperor. By moving to Constantinople, the capital is now impregnable. It is impossible to besiege and is easily defensible.

The other thing that's really important about this transition is that Constantinople is really at the center of the empire. Rome was too far to the west, and most of the Roman Empire's wealthiest and most important provinces—like Egypt, Anatolia, and the Levant—were actually in the East. It was a recognition of the fact that the center of gravity in the empire was really in the East.

The third reason is that throughout most of its history, Rome's main competitor was the Persian Empire to the East. By moving to Constantinople, it allowed the emperor to most easily and most directly respond to the threat of the Persians. This is the scholarly consensus. But as I will show you later on, I disagree with this consensus. I think there was a much more important reason why Constantine made this move.

The Rise of a Christian Empire

The Byzantine Empire becomes the birthplace of modern Christianity. Constantine the Great is the first Christian Roman Emperor. He converts to Christianity, but not only that, he lays the intellectual basis for modern Christianity through something called the Council of Nicaea. The pronunciation is different; it's properly pronounced Nicaea, but most people pronounce it Nicaea. The Council of Nicaea was established to answer a theological debate in the Christian world: What is the nature of Jesus? What is his relationship with God?

One of the more popular interpretations was the idea of Arianism, where Jesus is a lesser divinity to God. The Council of Nicaea established the idea of the Holy Trinity: that God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are co-equal. They are separate, but they are co-equal. We call this the Holy Trinity, or the Godhead. That is Constantine's major contribution.

After Constantine, one of his successors, Theodosius, makes Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. There's now a crackdown on both paganism, which used to be the religion of the Roman Empire, as well as heresy, especially the idea of Arianism. He also built something called the Theodosian Walls, which makes Constantinople basically impenetrable. It makes it an impenetrable fortress and allows Constantinople to stand for a thousand years.

As you can see from the Theodosian Walls, they are huge. This is just a person for scale. You can see that there are two walls and a moat protecting it. For about a thousand years, these walls protected the city. You didn't actually need that many soldiers to protect against invaders. These walls are still standing today. You can actually get on a plane, fly to Istanbul, and visit these walls. They were basically designed to stand for all eternity, and that was the idea of Constantinople: the Eternal City.

They also had sea walls, so not only could you not attack Constantinople by land, you couldn't even attack it by sea. One of the great inventions of Constantinople is the idea of Greek Fire. The story is that they were being attacked by the Muslims in the 8th century when the Muslims were expanding throughout the world, conquering both the Sasanian Empire as well as the Roman Empire. They wanted to overrun Constantinople, and ultimately what saves the city is the invention of Greek fire, which is basically kerosene. You take kerosene, you throw it at someone's boat, and the boat is lit on fire. The story is that this was invented by a Hellenized Jew who converted to Christianity. He has this great idea and then approaches the emperor with this invention, and the emperor believes that he is an angel sent by God to save the city. It was impossible to actually launch a naval expedition against Constantinople because they'll just burn down your ships.

The Golden Age of Justinian

At the height of the Byzantine Empire, it almost re-establishes and reconstitutes the entire Roman Empire. This is the year 565. At this point, the emperor is Justinian, and the one who is leading the military of the Byzantines is named Belisarius. He's considered the last great Roman general. His military genius is on par with that of Julius Caesar and Hannibal—all the great generals. Through his military conquests, the Byzantine Empire is able to expand its influence.

But as we've learned, once you reach the peak of an empire, there are problems.

1. Overpopulation and Plague. Your city becomes overpopulated, and when it becomes overpopulated, it becomes susceptible to plague. There's something called the Justinian Plague, which wiped out anywhere between 50 to 60% of the entire population of Constantinople. At this point, the population of the city was about 500,000—half a million. The plague killed 300,000 people. That's a lot of people. Even today, scholars debate where this plague came from. Originally, we believed it came from grain ships from Egypt, because Constantinople imported all its food from Egypt. There were rats on these ships, and these rats spread the bubonic plague. Now, historians believe that it actually came from the steppes with the Huns and through their invasion. We don't know what happened; we just know it killed a lot of people, and this greatly reduced the power of the empire.
2. Overextension. When you have these military conquests, you become overextended. It is very difficult to maintain this empire.
3. Emperor-General Conflict. Whenever there's a military expansion, the emperor comes into conflict with the general. Even though Justinian and Belisarius were great friends—their wives were great friends—they themselves had a lot of personal conflict. In fact, towards the end of his life, Belisarius was actually tried for treason. There were many times when Belisarius was on military campaign that it was clear Justinian was trying to sabotage him because, obviously, if you're an emperor, you're afraid that your great conquering general will eventually come back and take your throne.

Because of what happened between Justinian and Belisarius, this was basically the last time that the Byzantines embarked on a massive military campaign. From now on, they're defensive. They also focus on diplomacy—basically bribing their enemies not to attack them, especially the Huns, but also the Arabs as well as the Persian Empire.

This is the Hagia Sophia, the cathedral to wisdom, and this is the great monument, the great legacy of the Byzantine Empire. It's absolutely beautiful. What's amazing is it's still there. You can actually get on a plane, go to Istanbul, and visit this place. It's absolutely gorgeous and definitely worth visiting.

The Fall of Constantinople

Why did Constantinople fall? Even though Constantinople itself was impenetrable and invincible, it was still an empire, and its regions were eventually overrun by great enemies. For example, in about the year 1450, three years before the eventual fall of the city, the Ottoman Empire had basically taken over the Byzantines. The only city left standing was Constantinople.

The Ottomans were able to conquer the city because of the invention of siege engines. These cannons were as big as houses, and they basically overwhelmed the walls and allowed the Ottomans to overrun the city. Now, what's important to understand is even though the Byzantines were Christian and the Ottomans were Muslim, and even though the Turks overran the city, the Turks were extremely respectful to the citizens of the city. They were considered the heirs and successors to the Roman Empire, and this was the center of what we call the Orthodox Church. The citizens were treated extremely well.

The Significance of the City

The city was the center of the world for hundreds of years, both intellectually—because it was the heir to not just the Roman Empire but also to Greek civilization—and in terms of trade. It was the capital of the world because it was the meeting place of both the Aegean, which leads to the Mediterranean, as well as the Black Sea, which leads into what is Russia today. If you wanted to go anywhere, you basically had to go through Constantinople. It was really the center of the world, and through taxing trade, the city became extremely wealthy.

Also, because it was the center of the world, it was very multicultural and cosmopolitan. You had basically all major ethnicities living inside the city. Jews, Christians, and Muslims were all treated with extreme tolerance; they basically had their own quarters within the city. At its height, the city was extremely beautiful and very wealthy. It was really, for hundreds of years, the capital of the world—the capital of the universe, basically.

As you can see, it is almost impossible to besiege. You can never cut it off from supplies; you can never isolate the city because it is the meeting place of so many waterways.

A New Perspective: The Cultural Revolution

Now I'm going to explain my theory to these three questions: Why did Constantine make the move from Rome to Byzantium? Why did it rise? Why did it decline?

Was there a cultural pull toward the Greek East?

An audience member asks: "I remember reading that in the early years of the Roman Empire, under Augustus and Tiberius, the elite culture was Greek, with the emperor writing in Greek and that kind of stuff. I know the move to Constantinople was a couple hundred years after, but was there a certain cultural pull at the time? Were certain Roman elites feeling like they needed to be closer to the core culture?"

That's a great question. Culturally, were the Romans at this time Greek or Roman? You're actually right in that Greek culture—Hellenism—is so much superior to Roman culture. Romans really were peasants who built an empire, but the Greeks basically built Western civilization. You had Homer, Plato, Herodotus. The Romans were aware of this, and this was a conflict within Roman culture and civilization for a long, long time because they felt that even though they had conquered the world, they were about to be conquered culturally by the Greeks.

The Romans were aware of this and they rebelled against it. Augustus Caesar sponsored the writing of the Aeneid in response to the hegemony of Greek culture. So even though you're right that most of the Roman aristocracy embraced Greek culture—such as Mark Antony, who saw himself as more Greek than Roman—there was a lot of pushback from the empire against this. But eventually, as we'll see, Greek culture does triumph.

The Problem with Rome: A Crisis of Culture

During the time of Augustus, we today see him as the first Roman Emperor, but he didn't see himself as the first emperor. He just saw himself as a citizen of Rome. He called himself the princeps, which is where we get the modern English words "prince" as well as "principal." It just means "first citizen."

The problem with Rome was that you had the aristocracy, through the Senate, monopolizing all wealth and power, and this led to a lot of contradictions and conflicts. The solution that Augustus proposed was to make the princeps the CEO. It's still rule by committee, but he would be the coordinator. The idea here was that even though this was not a great system, it did preserve the culture, the history, the legacy, and the traditions of the Roman people. What was important was to protect and preserve the culture, especially the idea of libertas (liberty).

But this system didn't really work. You had civil wars and a lot of provincial riots and rebellions. This system simply didn't work, and this led to the Crisis of the 3rd Century when the Roman Empire was about to collapse. A commander named Diocletian saved the Roman Empire by reuniting it. At this point, he's like, "This system doesn't work. What we need to do is study the Persian Empire because even though we don't like the Persians, their empire seems a lot more sustainable and continuous than our empire."

This started a period of what we call the Dominate: the idea of starting an imperial bureaucracy and centralizing power with the emperor. The Romans hated this idea. What emperors discovered was that this cultural shift was something the Romans just found absolutely disgusting. Go back to the assassination of Julius Caesar. The Romans are extremely culturally arrogant. Why did they assassinate Julius Caesar? The people who assassinated him were his best friends. In fact, we believe Marcus Brutus, who was one of the lead conspirators, was actually his biological son. Why? Because Julius Caesar was threatening the cultural traditions of Rome. They were afraid that Julius Caesar would become king.

What these emperors, first under Diocletian but especially under Constantine, discovered is that it's really hard to change culture. And there's really one solution to this problem.

To understand this, let's run a thought experiment. We're at a school, and this school is known for being innovative and student-centered. It focuses a lot on activities and extracurriculars. That's great. But let's just say that the school brings me in as a consultant and asks me to help improve the school. I spend months interviewing students and teachers, and I feel this school is great in terms of innovation, but it needs to focus more on academics. Kids need to read more, kids need to focus more on test scores, and then you'll have a perfect balance. That's my solution. Well, I'm pretty sure if I tried that, I'd be fired within a week. The reason why is that I am attacking your cultural traditions. I'm attacking your identity, your sense of self. If I want to implement my vision, I can't force my vision on you. The only thing I can really do is switch schools and build my own school.

That's why Constantine made the move to Byzantium. He recognized that if he was going to build an empire—and Rome needed to be an empire if it was to endure—he needed to switch cultures. The best way to switch cultures is by moving your capital from Rome to Byzantium. When he did that, the entire culture shifted.

The Great Cultural Shift: From Roman to Byzantine

Let me very quickly explain the cultural shift.

The Byzantine Empire is a very distinct entity from the Roman Empire. Historians today argue the Byzantine Empire is a continuation of the Roman Empire, but that's only a superficial and shallow understanding. Culturally, the Byzantine Empire was a radical departure from the Roman Empire or the Roman Republic. I will explain what these differences are, because it's going to inform our understanding of future events in Western civilization.

Deconstructing the Worldviews: Pagan vs. Christian

Let me first explain the difference in worldview between the Pagan and the Christian. I will have to make a lot of generalizations, but it's a useful framework for understanding ancient cultures.

The Pagan Worldview: Gods, Fate, and Cosmic Balance

In the Pagan worldview, there are different layers to your understanding of the world.

1. The Gods: The supernatural forces that you interact with intimately are the gods. The gods are really a metaphorical way to understand nature. In nature, there are all these natural forces that we can't really see—for example, the wind. We can't really see the wind, but we also can't really see creativity or luck. In the Pagan worldview, these hidden, invisible forces are rendered and expressed as gods. The gods are those that we interact with every day on an intimate basis. It was very important for us to maintain good relations with the gods by making ritual tributes to them. Sacrifice and rituals were a very important part of the Pagan worldview.
2. Higher Forces (Fate/Fortune): Above the gods are even higher invisible forces that no one has control of, which includes fate and luck (Fortune). There are these invisible forces that even the gods must submit to.
3. Cosmic Laws: At the highest level are what are called unwritten and immutable (unable to change) eternal laws of the universe. Think of this structure as giving the universe some order. Think of gravity; it's an unwritten and immutable law of the universe. What they really mean by this is the idea of karma or justice. If you do good in the world, good will happen to you. If you do evil in the world, evil will happen to you. It may not happen to you, but it may happen to your children. There is a cosmic balance to the world.

The Christian Worldview: A Personal God

The Christian worldview is very simple. There's you, and then there's God. The thing that matters is your personal relationship with God. That's it.

Three Foundational Differences

The Christian worldview introduces into the Roman world three ideas that really didn't exist before in the Greek and Roman tradition: Truth, Evil, and the Individual.

Think back to the Iliad. Achilles says that before he came to Troy, he was told his fate: he could either die old back at home, or he could die young in Troy, but by dying young in Troy, he'll become famous and be remembered forever. For Achilles, that's not really a choice. What he's being told is, "You must come to Troy, and you must die, and that will win you eternal glory." It's the idea of action.

Also, think of the Romans. In their legends, they have a man named Mucius. At the beginning of the Roman Republic, the Romans are besieged by the Etruscan king. Mucius is a young, normal man, only 20 years old, and he decides to assassinate the king in order to free the Romans. He swims across the Tiber and is about to do his deed, but it's payday, and the king is with his secretary. They dress alike and look alike. Mucius is hiding with his dagger, and he knows it's 50/50. For us, we'd be like, "You know what, 50/50 is terrible odds. Let me come back another day." But for Mucius, fortune favors the bold. He's like, "50/50 is great odds. I'm never getting better odds." So he takes his dagger and kills the secretary. He misses. Then he's captured by the king. The king wants to torture him and force him to confess, and the king threatens him, saying, "I will burn you alive." There's a great fire beside Mucius. "If you do not tell me the truth..." And what Mucius does is he puts his hand into the fire and lets it burn in front of the king. That scares the king. That's the idea of action. You make your fortune through your action. You cannot sit and wait. You cannot deliberate. You cannot be clever. You just act. You're just brave. That's a pagan worldview.

The people who will feature in our course who follow this worldview are also the Vikings. The Vikings share a similar pagan worldview.

For the individual versus the community, why is Achilles fighting in Troy? Why is Mucius sacrificing himself for Rome? Because they want to be remembered by their community. Think about Hector in the Iliad. He is the greatest Trojan warrior, and he's destroying the Greeks because Achilles refuses to fight. But then Achilles enters the battlefield, and at this point, Hector's lieutenant tells him, "Hector, Achilles is back. Let's go home. Let's go hide behind the walls of Troy. We'll be fine." But Hector says no, fortune favors the bold, the gods are with me. Of course, Achilles and the Greeks destroy the Trojans, and they're all forced to run back to the walls of Troy. Every Trojan enters Troy except for Hector. Hector stays outside the walls of Troy and waits for Achilles to come. He knows for a fact that Achilles will kill him. Achilles is a god—he's a great warrior, but he's not a god. At this point, he knows he's about to be killed. Most of us would just sneak back into the walls of Troy. He can't do that because he's afraid of being laughed at by his lieutenant. He's afraid of shame. He has to die for his community.

Also, think about Lucretia. She was the noblewoman who was raped by the son of Tarquinius Superbus, the last king of Rome, and this is what starts the rebellion that overthrows the Roman monarchy. Lucretia is raped, and then she kills herself because she's dishonored. Augustine, in City of God, writes about this. From his perspective, it was a crime for Lucretia to kill herself. Why? Because we are all the creation of God; therefore, we are the property of God. When we kill ourselves, we're committing a sin against God. We are basically stealing from God, and that's why if you commit suicide, you'll be condemned to hell forever. Augustine explains Lucretia killed herself because she was afraid of the shame that she would have to endure if she lived. She was afraid that she'd be laughed at by the other women of Rome. That's the idea of community versus the individual.

Contrasting Attitudes: Sex and Violence

It's a radically different worldview, the Pagan versus the Christian. Let me explain some other differences, for example, the attitude towards sex. Because we live in a Christian world, we know that sex is bad. Sex should only happen between husband and wife, and it should only happen for the purpose of procreation. We shouldn't do it because we enjoy it. The pagans had the complete opposite attitude towards sex. Sex was to be embraced, enjoyed, and celebrated. Why? Because if the gods didn't mean for us to have sex, they wouldn't make it so much fun. Sex was a very important part of pagan life, as was violence. They also embraced and celebrated violence. Think about the Vikings, think about the Romans—they loved violence. The Christians hated violence.

The argument is that the Christian worldview is an improvement on the Pagan worldview because the pagans had things like orgies, child sacrifice, and genocide. This is all bad. But remember, these are just two different worldviews, and it's hard for us to objectively assess which one is better. We can only say that they both have their benefits and they both have their consequences.

It's easy for us to be culturally arrogant and say we are so much better than these ancients, but it's all a matter of perspective. If we were to go back in time and look at the Pagan world, we'd be disgusted by the murders, by the violence, by all the sex going on. But at the same time—and this is really hard for us to understand—if they were to time travel and come here and see our world, they'd be disgusted. From their perspective, we behave like slaves. Achilles is out winning glory on the beaches of Troy while we are in school memorizing useless facts so that we can get useless pieces of paper so that we can make useless pieces of money. They would not understand why we're doing this to ourselves. So I would keep that in mind: the Pagan worldview is very different from the Christian worldview, and that's it. In fact, we will later discover that there are some thinkers, such as Friedrich Nietzsche, who believe that the switch from the Pagan worldview to the Christian worldview was a major setback for civilization.

Deconstructing the Political Systems: Republic vs. Empire

Now let's move on to the idea of republic versus empire. The differences are pretty stark.

Egalitarianism vs. Hierarchy

In a republic, there's usually egalitarianism. Everyone's opinion does matter. In an empire, there's a hierarchy. In the Persian Empire, if you were to meet the emperor, what you would have to do was prostrate yourself first and then kiss his feet. That's the idea of empire. But in the Republic, you didn't do that. In fact, even though Rome was becoming a wealthier city, a major tradition in Rome was that you didn't lock your doors. You didn't have guards. A senator who was in charge of Gaul—he could literally put millions of people to death if he wanted to—didn't lock his door. The lowliest Roman could just walk into his house and have tea with him and talk about life. That was the tradition in Rome.

Another thing is when Roman senators walked the streets of Rome, they always carried an umbrella. The reason why is this: Roman houses were two stories, and they didn't have a sewage system. If you needed to go to the bathroom, you did so using a bucket on the second floor. If you saw someone you didn't like walk the streets, you would actually take your bucket and throw all of its contents at him. That's literally what they did. So if you're a senator, you could be the most powerful man in the world, but you could still literally risk having that thrown at you. That's the Roman world. It was egalitarian.

• In an egalitarian world, it means there's openness. People are open to new ideas; there's debate. Literally, anyone could propose a new idea.
• In an empire, it was a very closed system. They didn't like new ideas. Go back to the example of Greek fire. A guy had to go to the emperor and get his approval before the military could adopt it. That's really inefficient. The Greeks would have just gone and done it. The Romans would have let the commanders make their own decisions. It would not have been the decision of the Senate; it would have been the decision of the military commander that was appointed by the Senate.

The republic would be much more innovative than the empire because the republic would be much more open. There would be a lot more diversity in a republic, and in an empire, things would be much more conformist. You would have a lot more creativity and diversity within a republic than within an empire. That's kind of counterintuitive because if you think about it, an empire has so much more people and so much more wealth and resources than a republic. But historically, we found that republics and democracies are much more innovative and creative than empires. The reason has to do with the idea of a bureaucracy.

The Double-Edged Sword of Bureaucracy

Something that a democracy or a republic does not have is the idea of an imperial bureaucracy. They have bureaucracies, but they're not that big, and they're not imperial.

In the beginning, bureaucracies are good for empires because they bring:

• Centralization: They are able to centralize the empire and unite it.
• Systemization: They keep records and create laws.
• Standardization: This creates uniformity, getting people to speak the same language, use the metric system, and use money.

This creates tremendous wealth within the empire in the early years. Because you have the creation of money, a legal system, and a monopoly on violence (meaning neighbors don't fight anymore because there are police and courts), this leads to contracts, trade, and increased economic activity. You have peace and prosperity. People feel safe, and they feel that life is predictable, so they do more and work harder. This leads to tremendous prosperity in the early stages of an empire.

But over time, this bureaucracy will ossify, meaning the people within the bureaucracy will think of how to use it for their own personal benefit. We can call this corruption.

• Centralization leads to corruption, where just a minority of people with all the power use it for their own personal benefit. They're basically parasites. The technical word we use for this is rent-seeking. Think of landlords who charge rent to their tenants. If it's a monopoly, they can charge as much as they want, and there's nothing you can do about it.
• Systemization leads to ultimately stagnation. There's nothing new going on.
• Standardization leads to conformity or homogenization, where everything becomes the same, where everything is bland.

How Bureaucracy Triumphs

This happens because even though the bureaucracy is only one institution among different institutions, it eventually triumphs. You have the imperial bureaucracy, but they are competing against the court system (basically the emperor and his court, usually controlled by eunuchs), the nobility (the traditional power of society), the military, and the church. There are different institutions that can counter the bureaucracy. But over time, in periods of peace and prosperity, if things are really stable, eventually the bureaucracy triumphs over all these other institutions.

The reason why is this:

1. The bureaucracy can monopolize status and mobility. If you're just an ordinary person, the best way to rise in society is through the bureaucracy. This is certainly true in China, where everyone wants to be a bureaucrat because that's seen as the mechanism for achieving social status as well as social mobility.
2. The bureaucracy monopolizes information. It controls what information flows into the system. It controls what the emperor sees. We can say this is about censorship and sycophancy.
3. The bureaucracy monopolizes the narrative. It controls the production of culture, and it does this mainly through the process of writing history. History is the creation of a cultural narrative to bind people together, and it's usually the imperial bureaucrats who do this.

In other words, the bureaucrats have a monopoly on literacy and knowledge. They control the schools, the media, and history writing. They control how you think and write. Even though there are competing institutions, the bureaucracy, by controlling this meta-reality that is culture, controls the way these other institutions behave.

The Godhead as a Bureaucratic Invention

The example I want to use is the idea of the Godhead. My argument to you is that the Godhead is really a bureaucratic invention. Remember, during the Council of Nicaea, there's a debate as to the nature of Jesus. There are the Arians who believe that Jesus was a lesser divinity. Then there were people who believed in modalism, who just believed the Holy Spirit, Jesus, and God were different forms of the same entity. Then you have partialism, which says that they are a part of the same entity. These three different explanations make intuitive sense. The idea of the Godhead—where God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are co-equal, separate, but the same thing—makes no sense.

The reason why they would do this is to create a sense of mystery, distance, and secrecy. And that, my friends, is the definition of a bureaucracy.

I'm not sure if you've dealt with bureaucracies; I have. They suck. They dehumanize you. I'll just use a silly example. In America, there's something called a census, and on the census, you have to write down what racial group you belong to. The racial group I belong to as an American is "Asian-American." Guess who else belongs in that group? Indian people, Vietnamese people, Japanese people, Korean people. That makes no sense. We know that in Asia, Indian culture is vastly different from Japanese culture, which is vastly different from Korean culture and Chinese culture and Vietnamese culture. These are different people with their own belief systems. But in a bureaucracy, it just categorizes everyone together, almost randomly or indifferently.

The Paradox of Multiculturalism

That's why I would make the argument that ultimately, multicultural societies are not as creative as tribal societies. Think about the multicultural societies that are around us today. Singapore is a multicultural society. Canada is a multicultural society. They're not very creative. They're very bland, very conformist, very bureaucratic.

Very tribal societies, like the Greeks, were extremely tribal. They were extremely xenophobic. They were extremely creative. As were the Europeans. As are the Vikings. The reason why is that tribalism is energetic. It makes you passionate. It makes you think deeply about the world. Whereas in a multicultural society, people have to spend their energies getting along with each other. It's important not to be offensive.

It's because of these three reasons—the cultural construct of the Byzantine Empire being Christian, multicultural (or cosmopolitan), and bureaucratic—that the Byzantines were not a very creative people. Even though they had access to every culture in the world, even though they had access to the classics like Plato, Homer, Herodotus, as well as Virgil, they were not that creative. In fact, if you had a genius like Homer or Dante living in the Byzantine Empire, he would just become a bureaucrat. We would never know the genius of Homer and Dante. Homer and Dante could only arise in tribal societies.