One of my favorite TV shows used to be the animated FOX series Family Guy. I say used to be because it has tended in recent years to fall prey to the tendency that often afflicts highly popular shows, that its creators begin to feel that they can do anything they want and become self-indulgent. Like most people in show business, Family Guy creator Seth MacFarland is politically liberal and with the success of his program, he has tended recently to indulge in left-wing sermonizing at the expense of both humor and factual accuracy. (The most egregious recent example was an episode last season in which the baby Stewie and the dog Brian visit Nazi Germany. At one point Stewie is forced to don an SS officer’s uniform and finds that there is (what else?) a “McCain-Palin” button pinned to the tunic. Apparently MacFarland has never read Jonah Goldberg’s excellent work “Liberal Fascism” and found out what the real philosophical wellsprings of the National SOCIALIST movement were.)
Still, when he does not attempt political humor, MacFarland’s show is often quite amusing and I have to admit we both share a love for the great American popular music of the Golden Age from 1930 to 1960 and Broadway musicals. (Also, if I refused to watch or listen to any popular entertainment written, acted, produced or directed by leftists these days, I would find scant pickings anywhere in Hollywood or on the stage.) , So I did tune in to the premiere episode of FG last night.
Overall, this was a better than usual outing, again starring Stewie and Brian (originally secondary characters who have taken over the leads in this show in much the same way as Dr. Smith and Will Robinson took over Lost in Space). In it, Stewie had developed a device that allowed himself and Brian to travel through the “multiverse,” a series of parallel versions of our universe, each different from ours in some interesting way.
A couple of these were quite clever, like universes which were based on The Flintstones, Robot Chicken and Walt Disney animated features (although this one was ruined at the end when it gave credence to the canard that Disney was an anti-Semite.)
However, two of the parallel worlds were again excuses for MacFarland to press his own philosophical agenda. The first was a Buck Rodgers style futuristic world with people using jet packs and the like. Stewie explains that this world is so much more advanced than our own because Christianity never developed here and thus never held back scientific development.
The trouble with this notion is that if Christianity actually impeded technological progress, how does MacFarland explain the fact that from approximately 1400 (when the printing press with movable type was invented by Gutenberg) to the present day, the Christian nations of Western Europe and later the Western Hemisphere, gained and quickly expanded such a decisive lead in technological infrastructure and scientific advances that only within the last few years have the non-Christian portions of the world even managed to attain a rough equality?
You can argue I suppose, that without the “oppressive restrictions of the Christian Church,” the West’s advantage over the rest of the world would have been even greater than it was, but it is certainly clear that whatever restrictions there were (if any), they did not place the Christian world at any competitive disadvantage with regard to the non-Christian portions of the globe.
For that matter, under MacFarland’s analysis, why did not the abolition in the 20th century of organized religion in the Communist world, in the Soviet Union and Red China, for example, give them an edge against their still-Christian rivals within the West? Instead, we now know that the fall of the Evil Empire was precipitated by the realization of the Soviet leaders that they lacked the technical know-how to compete in the race to construct a shield against ballistic missile attack that Ronald Reagan asked them to join.
No, the myth that the Christian church was an impediment to progress is a pervasive one, but a myth all the same. Even modest scholars of history such as myself are aware that during the worst years of the so-called Dark Ages, it was often the Church itself that was one of the few institutions that preserved the knowledge of the past and even attempted to expand it, through its personnel, often the sole concentrations of literate individuals within their societies and its monasteries, where scholarly texts were written and copied and distributed to the laity. I am afraid Mr. MacFarlane has allowed his ignorance and his fashionable anti-religious bias to lead him astray here. There is no sound evidence that the existence of Christianity slowed the progress of Western Civilization and a great deal of evidence that it facilitated it.
Finally, Brian and Stewie also visit another multiverse that has seen a nuclear war because JFK was not elected in 1960 and a President Nixon voted into office eight years early mishandles the Cuban Missile Crisis. It is of course, impossible to know how Nixon might have responded differently than Kennedy in this situation, but certainly Tricky Dick had far more experience of foreign policy and defense issues as eight years as Vice President under Eisenhower than did Kennedy, a second term Senator so it is difficult for me to believe that he would have done less well than the Democrat, particularly in view of the numerous foreign policy triumphs of his own actual Presidency (the opening up of Red China, helping to assure Israel’s survival in the Yom Kippur War, the Paris Peace Treaty which brought the Vietnam War to a reasonably satisfactory conclusion (until a Democratic Congress cut off the necessary military aid to South Vietnam), etc.) For one thing, Nixon might have avoided the missile crisis entirely if he had given the proper support to the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Castro regime had been overthrown, instead of remaining in power for half a century due to Kennedy’s blunders. No Castro, no missiles in Cuba, no missile crisis.
So I would advise Mr. MacFarland to do a little basic research before trying to make his own political points using alternate history scenario. At the moment, Harry Turtledove can rest easy!
