Even today, the public discussion about moral and political issues is no longer framed in an explicitly religious context, but the change in terminology only conceals the all-pervasive influence of the unexamined theological ideas underlying it. Our vocabulary has changed, of course: We no longer speak about the soul but about the psyche; we have exchanged original sin for inherited, psychological guilt. But the cultural soil on which these ideas flourish has remained the same, and all too often our worldview is inherently religious without our even realizing it.
…Christianity is the religion of the suffering God. Christ was made flesh and had to die, to be tortured to death, thus allowing God the Creator to forgive humanity for its wickedness. Holbach and Diderot wrote all there is to be written about the perversity of this argument, but even the most irreligious of Westerners still believe in the positive, transformative value of suffering. We have all internalized the Romantic stereotype of the solitary, suffering genius (a figure almost singlehandedly invented by Rousseau in his Confessions). We love stories in which people triumph over adversity, in which they are almost crushed by wickedness or misfortune, only to emerge again, to be resurrected. This kind of story is found in many cultures, but not in all. The ancient Greeks attached no moral value to suffering. After journeying around the Mediterranean for twenty years and surviving many dangers, Homer’s Odysseus is older—but not a wiser or better man.
I’m liking this book a lot already. The desire to root out “unexamined theological ideas” underlying supposedly non-religious principles, at least for examination if not eradication, has been one of my own personal little missions. Souls, afterlives, moral significance permeating the universe, a teleological progression to existence, apocalyptic/utopian thinking, and so many other manifestations of an essentially religious frame of mind are very common even among people who complacently pride themselves on not taking direct orders from preachers and holy books.
Chris Hedges is indeed wankeriffic when he gets on his anti-atheist hobbyhorse, but I do think Ebonmuse is being slightly unfair to him here:
As I’ve written before, Chris Hedges is a nihilist. He flatly denies the possibility of moral progress, and vehemently asserts that any efforts to improve humanity will inevitably end in mass slaughter and destruction. He says so bluntly at the beginning of his book:
Those who insist we are morally advancing as a species are deluding themselves. There is little in science or history to support this idea. Human individuals can make moral advances, as can human societies, but they also make moral reverses… We alternate between periods of light and periods of darkness. We can move forward materially, but we do not move forward morally. The belief in collective moral advancement ignores the inherent flaws in human nature as well as the tragic reality of human history… All utopian schemes of impossible advances and glorious conclusions end in squalor and fanaticism. (p.10-11)
Previously, he countered Hedges by saying:
First, moral progress, though it may be slower than we would like, is real and it is undeniable. A glance over human history would offer as examples the abolition of slavery, the granting of equal rights to women and minorities, the emancipation of state from church, the flowering of democracy worldwide, the increasingly greater efforts at avoiding war through diplomacy, and many more. This is not to say that there aren’t many evils remaining, nor that no new ones have arisen.
A stickler might note that the examples he cites are common in the West, but hardly worldwide. And conceding, even as an afterthought, that this is not to say that no new evils have arisen, well — isn’t that a large part of Hedges’ point? We make progress on this or that specific front, but overall, plus ça change. The larger themes remain, with new variations on them appearing. As John Gray put it:
History is not an ascending spiral of human advance, or even an inch-by-inch crawl to a better world. It is an unending cycle in which changing knowledge interacts with unchanging human needs. Freedom is recurrently won and lost in an alternation that includes long periods of anarchy and tyranny, and there is no reason to suppose that this cycle will ever end. In fact, with human power increasing as a result of growing scientific knowledge, it can only become more violent.
The core of the idea of progress is that human life becomes better with the growth of knowledge. The error is not in thinking that human life can improve. Rather, it is in imagining that improvement can ever be cumulative. Unlike science, ethics and politics are not activities in which what is learnt in one generation can be passed on to an indefinite number of future generations. Like the arts, they are practical skills and can be easily lost.
This is a tragic view, as well as a staunchly conservative one, but it’s hardly nihilism. As Hedges said, we do make moral advances, but we also make moral reverses. Cyclical, not linear. And it’s foolish to put so much stock into state-granted “rights” as an indicator of deep-rooted progress. That which can be granted with the stroke of a pen can be taken away easily, too. Shall we go talk to some Japanese families on the West coast about what good all those Constitutional rights as American citizens were for their grandparents in the 1940s in the face of jingoist hysteria? Do we need to revisit some of the more ominous recent polls showing a worrisome number of Americans willing to trade their own rights for an illusion of security, let alone those of others like Muslims and Latinos? The United States a hundred years from now could just as likely be a Franco-style military dictatorship with severely curtailed civil liberties or a failed state with no worldwide influence, as it could a sorta-democracy with an uneasy tolerance for gays and atheists. As Gray also notes in other places, authoritarian states like Russia and China have proved that popularity, stability and economic power are not necessarily linked to an acceptance of American-style individual rights.
Voltaire dared to criticize and question the ruthlessness of the Catholic Church’s power and its coordination with the oppressive government of Louis XV. Armed with pen and paper, he faced a government and church that wielded the power of life and death. If Voltaire was not an action-hero, he was a hero all the same, and if had to throw a joke-bomb and run, let him run! Mankind is the better for it. Voltaire promoted tolerance as the most important tenet of civilization and mocked fanatics of all stripes. For this, of course, he was hated and reviled by the powers of his time, and even some of our own.
Despite the indifferent review, I’d be interested to read this book. “The Vile Scribbler” was actually an epithet I could have sworn I heard someone say in reference to him, but when I tried to find the source again later, I couldn’t. Maybe I just hallucinated the whole thing. I do recall Mozart referring to him as a “godless arch-rascal” upon his death, which, come to think of it, would have been a pretty cool pseudonym itself.
I realize I should just accept that Generalisimo Jeebus Galt—who wants to starve the poor, punish retailers who don’t celebrate his birthday loudly enough, invade random countries, and hate teh gay—has nothing in common with the hippie Jesus described in the New Testament.
I’ve written before about the absurdity of trying to project twenty-first century political and social ideals backward over two millennia onto a possibly-fictional guy whose foremost concern was, uh, gleefully anticipating the, um, imminent end of the world, not the creation of an ideal, long-lasting society. But the other thing that strikes me as so funny about this tendency of both liberals and conservatives to politicize Jesus is summed up by Bart Ehrman:
Each of these authors—as two of them actually tell us— inherited his stories from earlier written sources. Each of these sources had its own perspective as well. And before anyone bothered to write stories about Jesus, they had been circulated by word of mouth for years and years, among Christians who recounted them for a variety of reasons: to magnify the importance of Jesus, to convince others to believe in him, to instruct them concerning his relationship with God, to show how he understood the Hebrew Scriptures, to encourage his followers with the hope that his words could bring, and so forth. As the stories circulated orally, they were changed to suit the purposes at hand. And they were modified yet further when they were written down in such lost documents as Q and further still when rewritten by the authors of our Gospels.
It is important to recall that this view is not based simply on scholarly imagination. We have evidence for it, some of which I have laid out in earlier chapters.
Precisely because these documents were of such importance to people who believed in Jesus as the Son of God, their concerns, to put it somewhat simplistically, were less historical than religious. They were not interested in providing the brute facts of history for impartial observers, but in proclaiming their faith in Jesus as the Son of God. This was “Good News” for the believer. But it is not necessarily good news for historians, who are invested in getting behind the perspectives of the authors of the Gospels, and those of their sources, to reconstruct what Jesus really said, did, and experienced. How can “faith documents” such as the Gospels—writings produced by believers for believers to promote belief—be used as historical sources?
Sometimes, I like to try to look at this afresh, because it’s really amazing when you stop to think about it. Serious people in the twenty-first century still appeal to the authority of a book of pure mythology and propaganda for support in arguments over how this aforementioned, possibly-fictional, platitude-spouting apocalyptic zealot, this olio of various Fertile Crescent savior-gods, would vote today. I don’t think it could be any more surreally amusing to me if serious people in positions of power started having impassioned debates over the true message of some comic book character.
Thanks to Brian for passing this tidbit along to me:
“Military leaders … tell us that when more than one in four young people are unqualified for military service because of their weight,” the first lady says in the prepared remarks, “childhood obesity isn’t just a public health threat, it’s not just an economic threat, it’s a national security threat as well.”
You know, I still have an old certificate from high school tucked away in storage proving that I had earned the Presidential Physical Fitness Award, “in recognition of outstanding physical achievement and exceptional dedication to the ideal of a sound mind in a strong body,” with the Gipper himself congratulating me on this accomplishment. Yet even in those glory days of missile defense shields and Red Dawn, I can’t say I recall any of my gym teachers, in between mouthfuls of Diet Pepsi and glazed pastries, urging us on to tally more sit-ups, more pull-ups and faster fifty-yard dashes in the name of being ready to beat back the commies from our sacred shores. What was it Jennifer Hecht said about this strange fetish for physical fitness…?
Through studying history, I came to believe that gyms are occupying precisely the role they did in Ancient Sparta and in Fascist Germany. Being obsessed with bodies is actually a pretty rare thing in human history and we’re in lousy company.
…So what is the real story with gyms and gym bodies? What does the cult of exercise really mean?
Whenever it pops up in history it means the same thing. It always means: We are strong even though the peons do all the real work for us. We have special arenas marked as leisure where we get muscled at play.
…When we see this behavior in Ancient Sparta (where the population of Helot slaves outnumbered the Spartans) and in Fascist Germany, and we see the art of those two cultures focusing on the beauty of the toned but clean and uncallused body, we know what we are looking at. It’s more than shallow, it is military, it is deluded, it is oppressive, and a bit grotesque.
If you hang out much with thinking people, conversation eventually turns to the serious political and cultural questions of our times. Such as: How can the Americans remain so consistently brain-fucked? Much of the world, including plenty of Americans, asks that question as they watch U.S. culture go down like a thrashing mastodon giving itself up to some Pleistocene tar pit.
One explanation might be the effect of 40 years of deep fried industrial chicken pulp, and 44 ounce Big Gulp soft drinks. Another might be pop culture, which is not culture at all of course, but marketing. Or we could blame it on digital autism: Ever watch commuter monkeys on the subway poking at digital devices, stroking the touch screen for hours on end? That wrinkled Neolithic brows above the squinting red eyes?
…Two hundred years ago no one would have thought sheer volume of available facts in the digital information age would produce informed Americans (Given the following context,I assume he meant to say “would fail to produce” – TVS). Founders of the republic, steeped in the Enlightenment as they were, and believers in an informed citizenry being vital to freedom and democracy, would be delirious with joy at the prospect. Imagine Jefferson and Franklin high on Google.
The fatal assumption was that Americans would choose to think and learn, instead of cherry picking the blogs and TV channels to reinforce their particular branded choice cultural ignorance, consumer, scientific or political, but especially political. Tom and Ben could never have guessed we would chase prepackaged spectacle, junk science, and titillating rumor such as death panels, Obama as a socialist Muslim and Biblical proof that Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs around Eden. In a nation that equates democracy with everyman’s right to an opinion, no matter how ridiculous, this was probably inevitable. After all, dumb people choose dumb stuff. That’s why they are called dumb.
But throw in sixty years of television’s mind puddling effects, and you end up with 24 million Americans watching Bristol Palin thrashing around on Dancing with the Stars, then watch her being interviewed with all seriousness on the networks as major news.
Yada, blah, etc. Yes, it’s another ventose jeremiad from Bageant about Myrrhkin misology, indistinguishable from every other one he’s ever written. I do like how he references “Babbitry” at one point, but seems to forget that H.L Mencken, who coined this particular variation of the term from Sinclair Lewis’s novel, was railing against the “booboisie” long before television existed to puddle their minds. But anyway. We all complain like this at times, of course, but not all of us are fortunate enough to parlay it into a writing career. The profits of doom, indeed.
Complaining about specific instances of idiocy and the destructive results that follow is one thing, but the type of whinging that he and others like Morris Berman have made their stock-in-trade is more generic, more in line with the ancient Hebrew prophetic tradition of excoriating the chosen people for failing to uphold their covenant with God and warning of the apocalyptic results to come. Apparently they feel that we modern Americans made a similar covenant with Reason and Enlightenment that we’ve been steadily betraying ever since, which would probably have been surprising news to the majority of the population that didn’t consist of highly educated, aristocratic intellectuals. But since we’re talking about the idealism of certain eighteenth-century Founders here, let’s also mention that others like John Jay and James Madison felt that those who owned the country ought to govern it, and that the Senate was designed to be more deliberative than the House in order to stave off mob rule. And it’s right there in the Declaration, isn’t it? “Life, liberty, pursuit of happiness.” Nothing about an imperative to live the examined life in there that I can see. So how about we quit with the lamentations and rending of garments and lay the prophetic voice down to molder alongside the other rotting bones of monotheism?
Because of the limits on his funds, Bazalgette could afford to take the sewage only as far as the eastern edge of the metropolis, to a place called Barking Reach. There mighty outfall pipes disgorged 150 million gallons of raw, lumpy, potently malodorous sewage into the Thames each day. Barking was still twenty miles from the open sea, as the dismayed and unfortunate people all along those twenty miles never stopped pointing out, but the tides were vigorous enough to haul most of the discharge safely (if not always odorlessly) out to sea, and ensured that there were never again any sewage-related epidemics in London.
The new sewage outfalls did, however, have an unfortunate role in the greatest tragedy ever experienced on the Thames. In September 1878, a pleasure boat named the Princess Alice, packed to overflowing with day-trippers, was returning to London after a day at the seaside, when it collided with another ship at Barking at the very place and moment when the two giant outfall pipes surged into action. The Princess Alice sank in less than five minutes. Nearly eight hundred people drowned in a choking sludge of raw sewage. Even those who could swim found it nearly impossible to make headway through the glutinous filth. For days afterward bodies bobbed to the surface. Many, the Times reported, were so bloated with gaseous bacteria that they wouldn’t fit into normal coffins.
People have been pointing to natural disasters as proof against the existence of a loving God for centuries. What moral lesson can be drawn from mass destruction and casualties following an earthquake? What does the “free will” justification so often used to explain evil in the world have to do with fires and floods?
That kind of suffering is bad enough, but I wonder why events like this don’t get similar attention. After all, this isn’t just a case of needless death on a grand scale. It’s almost like this was designed to additionally inflict the maximum loss of dignity just for the sheer, gratuitous hell of it. But if it was designed, rather than symbolic of an uncaring universe, you’d have to conclude that God is one seriously disturbed motherfucker. Or even more terrifying, perhaps God is something like a character from a Mike Myers or Wayans brothers movie gone stark raving mad, forcing humankind to endure real-life toilet humor just to make Him giggle.
Malachi 2:3 — “Behold, I will corrupt your seed, and spread dung upon your faces…”
It’s difficult to say what amuses me the most about the way our revanchists do their utmost to deny the separation of church and state. On the one hand, you would think people who are so extremely concerned to make sure that every citizen regularly displays a gaudy excess of sentimental patriotism, lest the nation collapse from a lack of self-esteem, would be constantly harping on one of the things we Myrrhkins can all be justifiably proud of. As I mentioned recently, we’ve grown so used to the idea that metaphysical differences are not worth bloodshed that it can be easy to forget just how long it took for us to get to that point. Fifteen hundred years of Christianity being synonymous with state power, and we never did get around to acting on all those supposed ethics at its core, but a mere couple hundred years of secularism have already accomplished far more. Even many colonial religious groups understood this, realizing it would be in most of their better interests to keep any one denomination from enjoying state favoritism.
On the other hand, this is a situation that would appear to be tailor-made for the ideological template they favor — in a country where the government got out of the religion business, where it established a, shall we say, free marketplace of religious ideas, religion in all its forms flourished as a result, and has maintained a dynamic vibrancy ever since. In Europe, where many nations still nominally have an official state religion, the practice of it has become a hollow, empty ritual that no one even cares enough about to bother ending it. But where are the teabaggers with misspelled signs demanding you keep your government hands off their religion? Most of them seem to be just fine with the idea that the full muscle power of the government should be used to make sure no citizen goes five minutes without being reminded that Jesus died for them (the pathetic insecurity underlying this incessant need to preach and proselytize to a captive audience is pretty hilarious in its own right).
There are days when I just say bring it on. Let me just nestle into a nice, remote spot out of the way with plenty of refreshments and watch all these idiots battle in the streets over which group of Southern Baptist splitters gets to preside over the terminal decline of their tradition into meaningless irrelevance.
The problem is that this tidy narrative is an American myth. The real story of religion in America’s past is an often awkward, frequently embarrassing and occasionally bloody tale that most civics books and high-school texts either paper over or shunt to the side. And much of the recent conversation about America’s ideal of religious freedom has paid lip service to this comforting tableau.
From the earliest arrival of Europeans on America’s shores, religion has often been a cudgel, used to discriminate, suppress and even kill the foreign, the “heretic” and the “unbeliever”—including the “heathen” natives already here. Moreover, while it is true that the vast majority of early-generation Americans were Christian, the pitched battles between various Protestant sects and, more explosively, between Protestants and Catholics, present an unavoidable contradiction to the widely held notion that America is a “Christian nation.”
…America can still be, as Madison perceived the nation in 1785, “an Asylum to the persecuted and oppressed of every Nation and Religion.” But recognizing that deep religious discord has been part of America’s social DNA is a healthy and necessary step. When we acknowledge that dark past, perhaps the nation will return to that “promised…lustre” of which Madison so grandiloquently wrote.
This is what I was saying a while back with regards to another popular myth, most commonly expressed in the form of those COEXIST stickers and t-shirts. And I do mean “myth” in the specific sense of a story that expresses aspirations, values or perennial themes rather than historical truth. Let no one doubt that I’m all in favor of aspiring to create a society where religious beliefs are treated in the same way as other lifestyle choices: expressions of personality, peccadilloes at worst, not worth fighting about. But if you’re a religious person, you might regard me warily upon hearing this. Why would a fire-breathing atheist and aspirtualist like myself be supportive of this? Don’t I want a scorched-earth campaign against all metaphysical woo-woo to eliminate it for once and for all? Well, no, actually, partially because a society that demands of its members that they subordinate their beliefs about God, the human soul, the afterlife and holy books to a general principle of living and letting live is already a fully secular one.
What irritates me to no end about the COEXISTers is that they act as if this has been the inherent character of religion itself all along. It’s almost like a form of ingratitude — they refuse to recognize what a truly revolutionary innovation it was to separate church and state and how beneficial it was for everyone, especially believers. That is what permeated our cultural consciousness to the extent that we can hardly comprehend a person who thinks doctrinal differences are matters of life and death; after all, aren’t all religions just different paths to the same truth, different names for the same God? But at the time that Jefferson and Madison were implementing these new ideas, you could still find examples of people in Europe being tortured and executed as a result of sectarian fanaticism and mob rule, or for such heinous offenses as being rumored to have failed to remove one’s hat before a religious procession, as well as possessing a copy of Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary. That sort of thing was still typical behavior in “civilized” Europe, and had been ever since Constantine. It didn’t change until it was forced to. By all means, enjoy this postmodern form of domesticated religious tolerance that’s so commonplace now! Just don’t forget that it was secularism that gave it to you.
What projects will you pursue now that you have the funds?
There’s a project that [“The Wire” co-creator] Ed Burns wants to do that reflects on the 1880 Haymarket bombing in Chicago, which was an elemental point in terms of capital and labor in our society. There’s a book I’m working on with [longtime Simon collaborator] Bill Zorzi about the drug economy of Baltimore in the ’50s and ’60s. We’re trying to reach as many of the surviving players before they pass on. I’m working with Ed and [Baltimore Sun reporter] Dan Fesperman on beating out scripts for the history of the CIA from 1947 on. That’s a long-term project. This grant may enable me to hold onto writers for projects that aren’t greenlit yet.
And while I’m in an ecstatic trance over the thought of David Simon doing a TV show about the anarchist and labor movement, Ima link to this excellent (and very long) interview he did with Vice last year. Just because.
I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, but the perpetually aggrieved Bill Donohue is a steaming, whistling little teakettle of a man, forever boiling over one thing or another. What is it this time, Bill?
The pope did not go far enough. Radical atheists like the British Humanist Association should apologize for Hitler. But they should not stop there. They also need to issue an apology for the 67 million innocent men, women and children murdered under Stalin, and the 77 million innocent Chinese killed by Mao. Hitler, Stalin and Mao were all driven by a radical atheism, a militant and fundamentally dogmatic brand of secular extremism. It was this anti-religious impulse that allowed them to become mass murderers. By contrast, a grand total of 1,394 were killed during the 250 years of the Inquisition, most all of whom were murdered by secular authorities.
Yawn. Same old, same old. I’ve heard this so many times it’s starting to sound in my ears like the way adults talk in the Peanuts TV shows: Mwuh mwah muh mwah mwah mooah. Hitler an atheist? Nope. Stalin and Mao primarily driven by radical atheism? Pick your favorite response.
But let’s leave Mr. Donohue to his angry jitterbug on the stove burner and take a closer look at the more interesting theme here. One thing all three of those famous monsters actually had in common with Christianity was a belief in the teleological progression of history toward utopia, as well as in the redemptive, cleansing power of blood and violent sacrifice. Biblical scholars are united in saying that Jesus, assuming he actually existed as a historical person, was just one in a long line of Jewish apocalypticists. I know they don’t tend to emphasize this in devotional readings for some reason, but the entire point of his ministry was to prepare anyone who would listen for the coming end of the world, with violent retribution for all whom he felt deserving, followed by endless paradise. Since then, whether it’s based on visions of heaven, the classless society, or living in perfect harmony with nature, this idea that the ends justify the means pops up repeatedly throughout history. Utopia is waiting just around the bend, right after we get through the great purification by flood, fire, earthquakes or mass murder. It honestly has nothing to do with religion or the lack thereof. It’s an abstract concept of perfection that isn’t exclusive to anyone in particular.
As I’ve said before, I expect that we’re in for some hard times in the next few decades as the glory days of life in America fade further into the past, and we face choices over how far we’re willing to go to maintain our privileged position in the world, especially as nations like India and China look to get some of our standard of living for themselves. Perhaps some more equitable, balanced lifestyle will be the end result of our downward spiral, but human nature being what it is, I’m not optimistic. And because of that, I don’t see any reason to gleefully anticipate the chaos and upheaval that may come. Hell, I’d be happy to be wrong. For me, a rule of thumb is that if you’re so attached to your ideological convictions that you would rather see widespread suffering on a massive scale than to have to revise those convictions, if you can envision that sort of suffering while feeling smug over having accurately predicted it, you might just be the kind of zealot we’re talking about here.
So, my parents have gotten into the whole “raw milk” thing, thanks to some quack doctor they went to see. Just to make sure I didn’t space out through science class all those years ago and hallucinate about the whole reason we started pasteurizing milk to begin with, I did some looking around on the Internets. This made me laugh…
Food scientists can hardly believe that so many consumers have turned their back on one of the most successful public health endeavors of the 20th century. In 1938, for example, milk caused 25 percent of all outbreaks of food- and water-related sickness.
…and it also reminded me of a recent righteous rant by Ed about an outbreak of pertussis in California, related to the trendy anti-vaccination movement.
See, there’s a part of me that appreciates this on some meta-level, the counterintuitive “victim of our own success” phenomenon. Science has done such a good job of freeing people from having to worry about dying from contaminated food and drink or formerly terrifying diseases that they’ve become complacent and ignorant, enough so to become contemptuous of their benefactor and deny that they ever needed its help in the first place. Of course, public policy deserves a lot of the credit as well, and it, too, has ironically helped breed a superbug of stupidity in the form of so many Joe Republicans, convinced that they never got nothin’ from no one and don’t see why they should have to pay taxes to help anybody else. Indeed, how sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have so many thankless, functionally retarded children.
And if you need further proof that history is not progressive but cyclical, not a steady advance of knowledge and compassion but alternating periods of high-minded cosmopolitan and knee-jerk provincial values, consider the fact that Upton Sinclair’s famous exposé The Jungle was written in 1906. What do you think the reception would be for a book like that today, 104 years later? An earnest portrayal of the hopeless plight of the working class, the corruption of unregulated business and the need for social programs, written by an unabashed !socialist!, of all things?
I have always been a great admirer of Isaiah Berlin, the Russian-Jewish-British political scientist who spent his life cautioning the West about the dangers of coercive systems such as that of the former Soviet Union. In his famous Oxford University inaugural lecture of 1958, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” Berlin defined “negative freedom” as freedom from; it is the freedom to do what the heck you please as long as you don’t infringe on anyone else. “Positive freedom,” on the other hand, is freedom to; it is the freedom of a directive ideal, one that holds up a vision of the good life (whatever that might be) and encourages–or forces–people to conform to that image. Going back to at least the 17th century, negative freedom is the Anglo-Saxon conception of what it means to be free; and as far as Berlin was concerned (as a good British subject–he became Sir Isaiah the year before his inaugural lecture), that was the only freedom around; the other variety, he believed, was inevitably dangerous. The only problem is, without a positive vision of the good life, the good society, what are we? How could we be anything else except a ship without a rudder? This, to me, is the Achilles heel in the Berlinian edifice, for negative freedom finally affirms nothing–as the example of contemporary America clearly demonstrates…
There is no doubt, of course, that “vision” can get out of hand; this was Isaiah Berlin’s whole point. But what Berlin failed to understand was that lack of vision can also get out of hand, as Harvey Mansfield makes abundantly clear.
I don’t think Berlin “failed to understand” that point; I think he simply accepted that we might not be able to hammer out any sort of consensus on what the good life is, how we can achieve it, or what we need to do and when we need to do it. Just like how it was understood early on that a functioning democracy required an informed and engaged citizenry, the possibility (or even likelihood) of failure was always part of the deal. The price of freedom and all that.
And of course, Berlin wasn’t merely focused on extreme examples like the former Soviet Union; his point was that when an Enlightenment-derived faith in the ability of reason and science starts to assume that social questions can be investigated and their answers determined with the same sort of accurate practical results that the natural sciences had demonstrated, a refusal or inability to get with the program in any way would eventually lead to some sort of oppression “for your own good”, since you were obviously too mentally ill or otherwise deviant to clearly see what you needed to do to fulfill your proper role in the scheme of things. It’s the same reason why Sam Harris’s latest endeavor has caused such a furious uproar.
Agreement on the nature of the “good life” and the means of living it is never going to be workable beyond small groups anyway, in my opinion; certainly not on the level of a modern nation-state. How could it?
Maybe I’m wrong and we do need a national “dialogue on race,” but my guess is that if Barack Obama figures out a way to turn the economy around and create some real paying jobs, a lot of this racial angst will disappear pretty quick. If you tune out the hottest parts of the Tea Party rhetoric and just focus on who these people are, what you’ll basically see are a bunch of middle-aged white people who spent their teens listening to Eddie Murphy albums and deep down are a lot more worried about their credit card debt than they are about ACORN taking over the government. Add a little more disposable income to that crowd and this whole debate will recede to tolerable levels. Or maybe not — but we can all hope, I guess.
Yeah, and if my aunt had balls, she’d be my uncle. No, really, turning the economy around and creating real paying jobs? That’s a pretty big “if” to hinge this scenario upon.
For once, I have to totally disagree with Taibbi. I don’t think this is just displaced anxiety over economic woes. As he seems to understand earlier in his post, oddly enough, this is a really deep psychological issue for the teabaggers, real lizard-brain stuff, this fear that the other races are taking away everything that’s rightfully theirs, and they’re either failing to stop it, or they’re being restrained from doing so by bleeding-heart liberals. I read something (don’t remember where) shortly after Katrina, when there were all sorts of stories about supposed looting, raping, murder, etc. floating around (and as it turned out, it looks like cops and vigilante rednecks were actually the ones taking advantage of the opportunity to kill people). The long and short of it was that whites have always lived in fear of blacks rising up and exacting revenge for slavery on them, dating back to the days of Toussaint L’Ouverture and Nat Turner at least, and that periodically, one thing or another will trigger another outburst of hysteria and projection, with whites typically lashing out in fear somehow, usually with violence. White people sure do love them some preemptive warfare.
On that note, it’s worth remembering that in fact, most of our shrill, moralistic, anti-drug hysteria came about as a result of whites noticing minorities indulging in these substances that had previously been seen as just another way to enjoy oneself (among civilized people, that is). It was really stunning to see front page articles in the New York Times from the 1920s soberly discussing the way cocaine transformed the Negro into a violent beast with almost superhuman strength whose only concern while under the influence was rapin’ him some white women. Always with the innocent white women being victimized! Some of the urban legends of the time, involving drug dealing minority gangs who kidnapped and trafficked in – you guessed it – our white daughters, who were turned into drug addicts and sold into prostitution, are almost too incredible to believe when you read them today.
The ’60s, then, represented a time when our children! happily consorted with those people! while indulging in those drugs!, not to mention men and women looking indistinguishable and refusing to play their role in continuing all we had worked for up to that point. I’m not sure it’s possible to overstate how much of a near-psychotic break this induced in a certain conservative mindset, one that will be around for another generation or two, at least.
So I think we could have been enjoying a renaissance of the postwar standard of living for the last few years, and the election of our first black president would have still led to the spectacle we see today. I guess we should just be glad that so far, rhetoric aside, actual violence has been almost nonexistent, unlike previous episodes of Honkies Gone Wild. Progress?
Take something everyone with half a brain and/or education knows to be true – evolution, say, or the fact that many of the most important Founders were more deist than Christian – and dispute it with fallacious reasoning “backed up” by a bunch of cherry-picked facts, if not outright lies. Then, demand a “serious discussion” about whether evolution is really real, or whether America was actually founded as a Christian nation.
The only proper responses to this, of course, are to laugh at it or ignore it. Anything else is a complete waste of time that could be better spent trying to grapple with the genuinely serious issues this country faces.
If you ask me (and even if you don’t), I’d say that one of the biggest wastes of time I know of is fruitlessly complaining about how things should be different than what they are. What makes this extra amusing to me is seeing how often progressives (rightly) delight in epicaricacy over the way Republicans seem determined to alienate Latinos, the largest minority group in the country, and the fastest growing. Uneducated people, though, can go get stuffed. We’re too busy with, uh, genuinely serious issues, like ineffectually boycotting upscale grocery stores, to bother trying to reach them.
This arrogant complacency about settled knowledge and accepted facts, though — see Roman Empire, Decline and Fall of, The. It took close to a thousand years for Europe to relearn, with a big assist from the Arabs, what the Greeks already knew. Knowledge is not cumulative. There is no guaranteed, orderly progression toward enlightenment. It’s only been a month since I last quoted this from John Gray, but it looks like I need to do it again:
In science, progress is a fact, in ethics and politics it is a superstition…Post-modern thinkers may question scientific progress, but it is undoubtedly real. The illusion is in the belief that it can effect any fundamental alteration in the human condition. The gains that have been achieved in ethics and politics are not cumulative. What has been gained can also be lost, and over time surely will be.
History is not an ascending spiral of human advance, or even an inch-by-inch crawl to a better world. It is an unending cycle in which changing knowledge interacts with unchanging human needs. Freedom is recurrently won and lost in an alternation that includes long periods of anarchy and tyranny, and there is no reason to suppose that this cycle will ever end. In fact, with human power increasing as a result of growing scientific knowledge, it can only become more violent.
The core of the idea of progress is that human life becomes better with the growth of knowledge. The error is not in thinking that human life can improve. Rather, it is in imagining that improvement can ever be cumulative. Unlike science, ethics and politics are not activities in which what is learnt in one generation can be passed on to an indefinite number of future generations. Like the arts, they are practical skills and can be easily lost.
Many Enlightenment thinkers accepted that scientific advance might slow down or stop, as in previous periods of history; and in that case social progress would stall as well…What none of the thinkers of the Enlightenment envisaged, and their followers today have failed to perceive, is that human life can become more savage and irrational even as scientific knowledge advances.
And that last line is especially important, because despite Tristero’s attempt to consign the whole phenomenon to irrelevance with a dismissive wave of his hand, there are tens of millions of Americans who get their information about the world from people like Glenn Beck. I should know; I’m related to some of them. They apparently didn’t get the memo that said they were expected to have intellectually progressed beyond the knowledge their provincial-minded, illiterate grandparents had. They never will as long as people who know better refuse to “waste time” telling them any different, insisting instead that they should, well, pull themselves up by their bootstraps somehow and figure everything out on their own.
…[T]his attitude was relatively new. What people admired was wholeheartedness, sincerity, purity of soul, the ability and readiness to dedicate yourself to your ideal, no matter what it was.
No matter what it was: that is the important thing. Suppose you had a conversation in the sixteenth century with somebody fighting in the great religious wars which tore Europe apart at that period, and suppose you said to a Catholic of that period, engaged in hostilities, `Of course these Protestants believe what is false; of course to believe what they believe is to court perdition; of course they are dangerous to the salvation of human souls, than which there is nothing more important; but they are so sincere, they die so readily for their cause, their integrity is so splendid, one must yield a certain meed of admiration for the moral dignity and sublimity of people who are prepared to do that.’ Such a sentiment would have been unintelligible. Anyone who really knew, supposed themselves to know, the truth, say a Catholic who believed in the truths preached to him by the Church, would have known that persons able to put the whole of themselves into the theory and practice of falsehood were simply dangerous persons, and that the more sincere they were, the more dangerous, the more mad.
No Christian knight would have supposed, when he fought against the Muslim, that he was expected to admire the purity and the sincerity with which the paynim believed in their absurd doctrines. No doubt if you were a decent person, and you killed a brave enemy, you were not obliged to spit upon his corpse. You took the line that it was a pity that so much courage (which was a universally admired quality), so much ability, so much devotion should have been expended on a cause so palpably absurd or dangerous. But you would not have said, `It matters little what these people believe, what matters is the state of mind in which they believe it. What matters is that they did not sell out, that they were men of integrity. These are people I can respect. If they had come over to our side simply in order to save themselves, that would have been a very self-seeking, a very prudent, a very contemptible form of action.’
Berlin credits the Romantics with the invention of this mentality, and the point I’m making with regard to the last post is that our modern notion of individuality, the right of people to follow their own conscience in religious/contemplative matters and the obligation of others to respect the integrity of that choice even if they disagree with it, is a direct descendant of it, and a thoroughly modern one. Revisionists who pretend that this mindset has always been a prominent feature of the world’s great religions make me think of archaeologists salting a dig site, though an archaeologist would know full well he was perpetrating a fraud. But through the mysteries of human psychology, the people who claim that all religions basically carry the same positive message have apparently managed to convince themselves that they’ve genuinely uncovered something that was there all along.