Making Wonderful

In Making Wonderful, Martin M. Tweedale tells how an ideology in the West energized an economic expansion that has led to ecological disaster. He takes us back to the rise of cities and autocratic rulers, analyzing how respect for custom and tradition gave way to the dominance of top-down rational planning and organization. Then in response came a highly attractive myth of an eventual future rid of all of humankind's ills, one in which life would be "made wonderful." Originating in Zoroastrianism and, through Jewish apocalyptic works, flowing into early Christianity, this myth produced utopian beliefs that set the West apart from the other civilizations. Tweedale shows how these beliefs became popular among Western elites in the early modern period and eventually resulted in the distinctly Western doctrine of progress. This doctrine, an almost religious faith in the capacity of science and technology to improve human life, released economic expansion from traditional constraints and has led to our current environmental emergency. Exploring sources from philosophy, religion, and the history of ideas, Making Wonderful is for all readers who are intellectually curious about the roots of our eco-catastrophe. Documents how the West came to have an ideology that has promoted environmentally destructive economic expansion. "Making Wonderful is a vast, multi-disciplinary analysis of the ideological roots of the prevailing "eco-catastrophe" that locates it in certain dramatic shifts in the climate of ideas in European and European-colonial cultures. Martin M. Tweedale makes a compelling claim for the power of ideology and its cultural imaginary in his account of the roots of the ecological crisis." Jason M. Wirth, Seattle University "Making Wonderful stands out both for the breadth of historical scholarship and for the masterful manner in which Martin M. Tweedale shows how a plurality of distinct ideas came together to form an ideational whole whose effects far exceed those of its parts." Philip Rose, University of Windsor "The madness that drove us to the brink of making the only planet we have unlivable for our descendants has its ultimate origin, Tweedale tells us, in the rise of cities in Mesopotamia some 6,000 years ago.... Tweedale's argument makes a lot of sense." Alex Rettie, Alberta Views Magazine, January 1, 2024



• Acknowledgments ix


• Preface xi


• Introduction xvii


• 1 Human Life before There Were Cities 1


• 2 The Trauma of Urban-Dominated Civilization 19


• 3 Designers of the Inner Self 39


• 4 From Zarathustra to Revolutionary Millennialism 77


• 5 Apocalyptic Thought in the Medieval West 139


• 6 Reformation and Utopia 167


• 7 Secularizing the Millennium 225


• 8 The Cult of Science 277


• 9 The Vulgarization of the Millennium 317


• Conclusion Unleashing the Western Gesellschaft 359


• Notes  381


• Works Cited 411


• Index 417