Amos's River of Justice

Our Season of Creation

  • This article presents the views of Professor David Harvey on class, nation and nationalism. Harvey’s recent video, published by Politics in Motion, touches on an important element of the Pinker-Mearsheimer debate about the Enlightenment. I review the relevant points here.

    Introduction of the argument with relevant ideas from of the Mearsheimer-Pinker debate

    In part two of John Mearsheimer’s case against the effectiveness of Enlightenment, he says that because people are social animals, they belong to tribes. We still belong to tribes. Today tribes are called ‘nations’. Because human beings are tribal, their identity is bound up with the tribe or nation. Their interests, their ways of looking at the world, and their views of justice are affected by this identification. And because people belong to different tribes, they often can’t reach political and moral consensus.

    David Harvey’s relation to the argument

    Mearsheimer was refuting the position of Steven Pinker, who argued that people are first and foremost individuals. Pinker thinks that because people are individuals, they ought to be able to use reason to reach a consensus. Here, David Harvey focuses on the idea of nations and nationalism in relation to capital. But his arguments have much to say about the social nature of human beings. This offers perspective on individualism versus the collective tendencies of human beings. It also urges caution in the exploration of nationalism. Harvey’s approach also requires us to rethink our understanding of environmentalism.

    Nation, nationalism, capitalism, and the nation-state

    How we are to understand the concept of the nation and the role of nationalism? Related to this is the question of what nationalism might do to our theoretical descriptions of how capitalism works. For example, what happens when we put the word ‘nation’ in front of the word ‘state’? We normally assume the nation-state has a different character from the bourgeois state.

    It is also important to mention that there is some confusion as to what the argument might be about. For example, Marx in the Communist Manifesto, said the nation doesn’t matter when it comes to thinking about terms of class. The workers have no country, therefore, they wage class struggle. Talking about class struggle is different from talking about the nation. This problem was taken up after Marx’s time.

    At that time there was an argument about how to understand the nation and the right of self-determination of populations. In 1915, Stalin wrote one of the original treatises on the role of the nation-state in politics. So did Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin, and others. The debate continues in Marxist circles. Harvey’s plan in this and subsequent videos is to discuss how and why the nation-state came about and also what its origins might be. He also wants to talk about its consequences.

    Origins and consequences of the nation-state

    In the early 1920s, Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States from 1913 to 1021, said the following.

    Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him and the doors of the nations which are closed against him must be battered down. Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process. Colonies must be obtained or planted in order that no useful corner of the world may be overlooked or left unused.

    This is Wilson’s description of how relations between nations are connected together. Harvey says we need foundation concepts in order to discuss Wilson’s speech and this subject in general. And and these concepts don’t exist in the Marxist literature. Therefore Harvey uses concepts from another domain which has always been historically important. He derives three concepts from his own professional association as a geographer.

    • Questions of the environment: We must distinguish between raw nature (untouched and unmodified by human hands) and the modified environment. We need to discuss the relationship between capital circulation and the environment, what capital absorbs from the environment, and what capital does to the environment, for example, building cities and new environments.
    • Space and space-time: As he has pointed out previously, capital itself is concerned with production of space and new temporalities. Capital accelerates everything. Marx called this the annihilation of space through time. This is a dynamic place for looking at how spacial temporality is transformed. Once spacial temporality is transformed, we have to adapt to it. Capital is constantly transforming the space-time coordinates of its actions and at the same time reshaping the environment and space-time through its actions.
    • Place: Place is not a favorite concept amongst Marxists. However, capital makes places. Capital is born in places and has a certain importance in terms of who we are and what we think about.
    Aristotle’s influence on Marx

    First, Marx was a classical scholar and a great admirer of Aristotle. Aristotle said human beings are political beings, or social beings. In Marx’s language of capital, we are political animals. This means we are always about forming collectives of some kind. Those collective forms of action are sometimes very extensive. As political animals, we have to think of the way in which capital is politicized and socialized in terms of its forms of circulation. (This aligns with Mearsheimer’s argument.)

    Second, when Aristotle talked about the meaning of market exchange and started to analyze the nature of the market, he noticed that it rests on the ideas of equivalence and equality. These ideas are also stressed in Marxism. So the political definition of equality and equivalence becomes fundamental to any society based on commodity exchange. However, Aristotle was not able to develop a labor theory of value. This is due to the fact that in Greek society, all the work was done by slaves. Wage labor was one of the preconditions of Marx’s theory of value.

    Finally, there was a concept that Marx did not take up from Aristotle, but which was foundational for how Aristotle thought. This is the concept of place. Aristotle said place is the priority or feature of all things. (Mearsheimer seems to have echoed Aristotle.)

    Place, space and the environment: a geographer’s view

    Harvey wonders if geography is about place, space and the environment, should we look at those things separately, or as a totality? He answers that he prefers to think back to the totality. A particular place exists in a certain spacial and temporal field, and has certain environmental qualities, both natural and humanly constructed. Therefore, the production of place is as important as the production of space, space-time and environmental transformations.

    Since the field of geography is about the relations between space, place and the environment, we have to start to analyze the spacial moment, the environmental moment and the place movement. Since Harvey has previously talked about the environment and spacial temporality, he will concentrate here on the notion of place.

    What Aristotle means when he says place is the priority or feature of all things is that all of us have a place of our origin. And that place, where we were born, how we are raised, plays a defining role in who we are. Therefore, we don’t have to start off with the abstractions of space-time and the question of whether or not the environment is human-made. We should start with the concreteness of the fact that we were born into a particular place. We have a certain set of experiences that shape us for much of our lives.

    The dialectical view of place

    When we say place is the first of all things, we mean that is where we begin upon our search to understand the world. That search will redefine not only who we are particularly, but how the world around us is made. It will also redefine what it is made of and how its transformations come back to transform us further. In other words, we take a dialectical view in which we say we change the world in order to change ourselves. One of the ways in which we change the world is by building different places. The concept of place becomes foundational in this way of thinking.

    We see that this concept is very distinctive when we reflect on the nature of what place is about, how place works and all the environmental and cultural elements that are attached to it. Harvey contends for example, that in a place like the United States you could probably look at the postal zone someone comes from and have a pretty good idea of what sort of person they are. He has observed that when American students meet each other in Europe they ask each other where they are from. Place enters into the personality and the understandings of the world. We develop these understandings from our upbringing and other surrounding influences. So when Aristotle says place is the first of all things, he means that where we begin and how we experience that place is very critical.

    Born in Gaza

    The Documentary Born in Gaza was filmed shortly after the 2014 Gaza War. It examines how violence has transformed the lives of 10 Palestinian children who survived that war. At the time of filming, these children still didn’t understand how or why people did those things to them, or what it meant. It’s likely that those kids became the back bone of Hamas today. ‘That kind of treatment can ‘form the cadre for a different kind of political world’. Harvey says we should take this carefully into account because it is shaping future generations and laying the foundation of many things that will happen later.

    So, when we say place is the first of all things, we mean it’s very likely that if you were born in Gaza and experienced these things, you would probably end up joining a political movement. Then the political animal would start to come out and lead to the formation of something like Hamas.

    A word of caution

    So, place is an important starting point. However, there is a problem with this starting point. This has to do with the fact that Aristotle is stating something very significant.

    When Aristotle says place is the first of all things, what he’s doing is stating something that is very significant, but it is taken up in other things…the notion of place played a very important role in a lot of philosophical thinking.

    Professor David Harvey

    One of the people who took up Aristotle’s notion of place was the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Heidegger was tolerant of Nazism, and he associated himself with it philosophically. This was true even after the end of the second world war. In fact, he never disavowed it. For this reason, Harvey Heidegger is a problematic figure. Heidegger is someone you may not want to listen to, in Harvey’s opinion.

    However, he acknowledges Heidegger had a ‘distinctive’ notion of place. For example, Heidegger said that ‘Place is the locale of the truth of being‘. In this, he was close to Aristotle, but he took it deeper. He was saying there is a certain truth that attaches to the notion of place, and that truth is essential to being or becoming.

    If you go on to interrogate where Heidegger was coming from, you will find that some of his passages are anti-capitalist. Harvey quotes a rather long passage about how distances in time and space are shrinking. (Marx would phrase it as ‘annihilation of space through time’.)

    I’ve decided not to include Heidegger’s passage in this review. I’ve come across certain concepts and beliefs in the course of writing this blog that I consider dangerous. In this case, I take Harvey very seriously when he says we may not want to listen to Heidegger. We can’t be sure where certain harmful influences come from–whether from logical argument or from the general tone and atmosphere. It’s impossible to know which attributes have won people to this way of thinking in the past. So I chose not to include it here. I’m aware that this omission will cause many readers to go directly to the video to find out what he said. Of course they are free to do so, but at least I haven’t had to spend my time typing it.)

    Heidegger’s similarities and differences with progressivism

    According to Harvey, the passage in question is interesting in the way it talks about logical space and time in a Newtonian way. Also, it seems Heidegger was a great enemy of cosmopolitanism and market exchange. Many of his writings are anti-capitalist. But again, there is that note of caution. ‘There is something different in Heidegger’.

    What Heidegger is doing is an ultimate critique. It’s very Marxist in its own way, but Heidegger is a very conservative figure. The theory of place has been dominated by Heideggerian thinking, and includes questions of dwelling, how we appropriate the world and work with the things around us. Due to this influence we do it in such a way as to appropriate the world to the self. We start to internalize much of what we find in the place we are in.

    This is the kind of work which is these days coming back into left thinking. This is particularly the case with the effort to better understand indigenous culture and places. ‘There is the sense of feeling, the sensitivity to environmental variation, the closeness of things, which we can appropriate, how we understand them at the same time as those things can be very distant in mere physicality.’

    Heidegger’s dwelling vs Lefebvre’s inhabiting

    The idea of place is foundational for how we think about how people dwell. Dwelling was one of Heidegger’s main concepts. It was a critical feature for him. He did not use the term alienation, but he suggested that we can be alienated from nature, from space-time, from each other. Marx would understand it as general alienation from commercial culture, market related structures and capital accumulation. He would agree that this world, which is being built by capital, is a world full of alienation. And part of alienation is set up by an attempt to recuperate the realness and sensitivity that comes from dwelling.

    But, what Heidegger does is claim that places are sacrosanct, that they are places of memory and encounters. This has been taken up on the left by Lefebvre, who studied Heidegger before his Nazi sympathies became well-known. Lefebvre has changed Heidegger’s term, dwelling into inhabiting. ‘We are who we are by virtue of the kinds of places we inhabit.’ And he is not talking about ‘planting yourself on top of things’, but about trying to wrestle with the reality of environmental conditions, space-time relations, etc., and trying to incorporate them in our collective sense of self. It is that which develops the concept of nation and nationhood.

    According to Harvey the result is a form of environmentalism close to what Nazism was about. He thinks it has an ecological feeling, like Nazi youth camps in the forest. This isn’t as strange as it seems. Some writings of that time depicted Germany as one of the first ecological states in the sense of a close assemblage between the natural world and submission of one’s self to the conditions of life in that world.

    The significance of Marx in this context

    This is rather ‘bothersome’ in Harvey’s view. But he thinks it explains something significant about Marx. Marx understood there were nations and they needed to be talked about. He took up the idea of national self-determination and was particularly concerned with the case of Poland’s fight for independence. In fact, Marx was supportive of it, as he thought it might be a first step to socialism. In other words, Poland’s struggle was progressive.

    On the other hand, Marx was not supportive of Czechoslovakian independence. The Polish people fought for independence from Tzarist rule. But in Czechoslovakia, the ruling class was trying to pull the people back into serfdom. This sort of judgement is characteristic of the Marxist approach.

    Brexit and Scottish independence: a Marxist illustration

    Harvey illustrates his own experience with this type of judgement with two recent events. One was Brexit, which he opposed, and the other was Scottish independence, which he supported.

    After Jacques Delors’s term as president of the European Commission, The EU became more right-wing and reactionary. On this basis, Harvey would have supported Brexit. However, it turned out that the people behind the Brexit movement were reactionary right-wingers who were anti-immigrant and anti regulatory. So he didn’t support Brexit.

    By contrast, in the case of Scottish independence the people were working against neoliberal governance in London. This government was robbing Scotland of North Sea oil and other depredations. Scottish independence called for a progressive welfare state where Scotland could control its own resources. In addition, it included everyone who lived in Scotland, not only people with Scottish heritage. By comparison, Heidegger would have limited it to those who could prove Scottish heritage.

    Conclusion

    Probably Harvey’s most important clarification or addition in regard to John Mearsheimer’s debate points is his conclusion that you can’t immediately say whether national identity is good or bad. It depends on whether people use it for positive or negative reasons. The main difficulty for analysis is that there is no real foundation for a theory of place. That is, aside from a better understanding of how places form and what they are about. Therefore, Harvey concludes that a theory of place is crucial. And this theory can’t be divorced from its context in space-time and environmental conditions.

    There is a power in place-making

    So, we have begun to recognize a certain power in place-making, and how the way places are made has a big impact on how culture forms. We should tale note that the world is made up of places. However, when you are talking about space-time, you are talking about an abstraction. It makes more sense if you talk about space-time in particular. For example the space-time coordinates of places in the world. For example the coordinates which make Lisbon like Lisbon and Barcelona like Barcelona. This would include a consideration of how much the politics of those places really matters. In addition, cases like the Scottish referendum illustrate the use the notion of place as a political lever to engage in certain kinds of action. Harvey provides another example, the experience of the Paris Commune.

    The Paris Commune

    Surveys were done with the people who had been part of the Paris Commune. Many of them said they were there because they were loyal to Paris. When the painter Courbet was put on trial, he gave as his reason for being in the commune that he loved Paris. Paris was a significant feature of political organization.

    It is important to ask what is going on in terms of class struggle and what is going on in terms of national struggle. Can we distinguish between national interests and class interests? What’s the relations and between class and nation? In what sense are class interests and national interests related to each other? What is the national interest about and how does it work? These questions will be addressed in Professor Harvey’s next video.

  • This is a summary and critique of a debate hosted by the Institute of Art and Ideas. In the videos linked below, Steven Pinker and John Mearsheimer are debating The Enlightenment and its alternatives. The subtitle is, Which ideals are the best guide to human betterment? In my opinion, this debate is an important addition to questions I have raised about the Enlightenment, and so I’m providing a summary of it here. I apologize for the length, but I think it was necesssary for analysis. My comments are in parentheses, bold type, and italics. Please watch the debate at the IAI website or view it on YouTube in 2 parts. The debate was published December, 2023.

    Gresham College Director, Sophie Scott-Brown, was the artist, and she provided the following resolution.

    “The Enlightenment advocated reason, science, democracy and universal human rights as a grounding for human morality and social organization. In the quarter millennium since, to what extent have these ideals been realized? Has the Enlightenment in fact been successful in bringing about moral progress, or are there viable alternatives to the Enlightenment vision?”

    (Mearsheimer and Pinker address the question of whether society has improved since the Enlightenment. Pinker argues that it has, according to his material criteria. The opposing argument is Mearsheimer’s focus on the effectiveness of Enlightenment values in promoting political and moral progress. He said he chose this focus because Pinker had previously argued in the affirmative on this point.

    An additional ‘provocation’ as stated by Sophie Scott-Brown, seems to suggest a slightly different focus. It questions whether the values of universal liberty and justice are harmful or helpful in themselves. I think it can be argued that both Pinker and Mearsheimer would defend universal liberty and justice, but this question was not taken up.)

    We associate values such as universal liberty and justice with the Enlightenment. Do they harm or hinder the world or do they help the world?

    Sophie Scott-Brown

    Steven Pinker’s Constructive Speech for Enlightenment Values

    Steven Pinker constructs his affirmative position for Enlightenment ideals by arguing that we should use reason to improve human flourishing. He explains that the fruits of reason can be seen in certain institutions, such as liberal democracy, regulated markets and international institutions. By reason, he means we should use open deliberation, science, and history in the evaluation of ideas.

    Pinker’s definition of human flourishing is: access to the things that each of us wants for ourselves, and by extension, can’t deny to others. These include life, health, sustenance, prosperity, freedom, safety, knowledge, leisure, and happiness. But they are not to be confused with the notion that we should venerate great men of the 18th century. It’s the ideas that count. Nor should we venerate the West. According to Pinker, the West has always been ‘ambivalent’ to Enlightenment ideals, and many counter-enlightenment themes have had great influence in the West.

    (The caution against venerating the West seems to be a deliberate narrowing of the terms of the debate. For one thing, it heads off any inclination to analyze the real effects of the Enlightenment on the American system, which was directly influenced by it. In addition, the caution against venerating ‘great men of the 18th century’ eliminates the possibility of analyzing the motives and biases of the philosophes, not to mention their historical context. Pinker wants to limit the debate to data points for material progress.)

    Has the Enlightenment Worked? The Affirmative Position

    For Pinker, material progress is evidence that the Enlightenment has worked. According to the statistics provided in the video, there has been impressive improvement. The following data provide a snapshot of what has happened in the last 250 years as it applies to the various dimensions of human flourishing.

    Decrease in Poverty, Famine and War; Increase in Life Expectancy, Literacy and Democracy
    • First, Pinker cites a drastic increase for life expectancy and large decreases in child mortality. In addition, extreme poverty has gone from about 90 percent globally to less than 9 percent. Famine, which used to occur regularly, is only known in war zones and some autocracies. There has also been a large increase in the literacy rate and the percentage of the global population receiving a basic education.
    • War has decreased since the Enlightenment. Pinker limits this criterion to what he calls ‘great power war’, or war between ‘800-pound gorillas’. His argument is that this type of war was constant several hundred years ago, but it no longer happens since the Korean War.
    • Thanks to the Enlightenment there has been an increase in democratic countries. Pinker believes this has led to fewer incidences of ‘judicial torture’, slavery, and homicide. By judicial torture he means crucifixion, breaking on the wheel, and disembowelment. During the Enlightenment period there has been ‘a wave’ of abolishment of this type of judicial torture.
    • Finally, Pinker argues that countries with Enlightenment ideals, by which he means liberal democracies, are the healthiest, cleanest, safest, happiest, and the most popular destination of immigrants.

    As to the question of alternatives to the Enlightenment Pinker lists religion, romantic nationalism and authoritarianism, zero-sum struggle (in which a country or group tries to end the control of an oppressor), and reactionary ideologies.

    John Mearsheimer’s Constructs his Argument Against the Effectiveness of Enlightenment Values in Fostering Political and Moral Progress

    Mearsheimer begins by explaining that he is not arguing there has been no progress since 1680. Nor is he denying that the Enlightenment contributed to some of it. His question is whether the Enlightenment has led to moral and political progress. As mentioned above, he bases this focus on the argument made by Steven Pinker in the affirmative. In Mearsheimer’s view, moral and political progress have to do with first principles or the ability to reach consensus on the good life. Has the Enlightenment created a situation where wide scale consensus can be reached on first principles, or the good life? If so, this would be evidence of moral progress. His argument has three parts:

    The Probems: Unfettered Reason, Radical Individualism, and Security Competition
    • The core argument is based on the question of whether unfettered reason will lead individuals to come to an agreement on first principles or truth. Again, this is in contrast to Steven Pinker, who has argued in his book that it will lead to agreement. On the contrary, Mearsheimer believes agreement can’t be achieved by using unfettered reason. When unfettered reason involves many individuals, there will be significant disagreement, and it can actually lead to homicide. This is due to the fact that people cannot agree on first principles, political goods, or justice. For this reason, politics are important. By contrast, Pinker argues that politics are not important. He believes agreement will come in the end.
    • People who focus on the Enlightenment focus on radical individualism. However, Mearsheimer argues that people are social animals first, and they carve out room for their individualism. Because they are social animals, they belong to tribes. Today, we call tribes ‘nations’. Because human beings are tribal, their identity is bound up with the tribe or nation. This affects their interests, ways of looking at the world, views of justice, etc. Since individuals are parts of nations, and nations disagree on first principles, it is harder to reach agreement.
    • In international relations, people who focus on the Enlightenment believe, like Kant, that by using reason people can create perpetual peace. However, Mearsheimer doesn’t think Enlightenment ideals lead to consensus, or some sort of truth about political factors. He thinks reason leads to competition. This is a problem because the international system is anarchic. In other words, it has no higher authority. Therefore, each state uses reason to think about how to survive. And survival has to be its principle goal. This means that all states will engage in security competition. So, in an anarchical system you have a situation where reason leads not to peace but competition, and sometimes to deadly conflict.

    Theme One: Can We Agree on What Progress Looks Like or will we never be able to agree on first principles?

    Sophie Scott-Brown asks Steven Pinker if politics is missing from his account. It seemed rather rosy at first, but maybe some political context is missing. She gives the example of how some countries might seem attractive because they are colonial powers. The countries that are not so attractive are not colonial powers and have been put into very difficult economic situations by successful and quite aggressive states which are now liberal democracies. Is there any scope for agreed frameworks and shared decision making that could lead to the kind of collective progress that Enlightenment seems to feel is necessary?

    Steven Pinker’s Response to Sophie Scott-Brown and Rebuttal of John Mearsheimer

    Absolutely. It’s called democracy. The Enlightenment thinkers were obsessed with how you can have a political organization that is not vested in an absolute monarch with divinely granted powers. And the ideals of free speech and democracy were absolutely predicated on the fact that people do disagree. There is absolutely no presumption that everyone has the same values and the same beliefs. That’s why you need democracy. Given that people are not going to agree, how are we going to govern ourselves? On the other hand, Pinker thinks it’s important not to exaggerate how much disagreement there is compared to say, 250 or 500 years ago, specifically compared to the wars of religion.

    The Declaration of Human Rights

    The world’s nations did sign the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. You have many countries signing on to it, sometimes in the breach and sometimes hypocritically. But these ideals command wide assent. Not universal assent. There are still religious fanatics and authoritarian despots. And there are still glory-mad expansionist leaders. The ideals of the Enlightenment are not a guarantee that everyone will come around, but they are arguments about which way we ought to be heading.

    (The underlying assumption is that the world should be heading to more liberalism. The alternatives are described as religious fanatics, authoritarians, and glory-mad expansionist leaders–in other words, as inferior.)

    Individuals are Free to Belong to a Group, and to Leave the Group

    Next, Pinker addresses individualism, another point that Mearsheimer mentioned. Among the individual needs are belonging to a group, belonging to family, having friends, belonging to institutions, belonging to organizations. There’s nothing about recognizing the right of individuals that contradicts the idea the we like to belong to groups, as long as they don’t coerce us or as long as we can leave those groups. And that includes nations.

    Not everyone agrees with everyone else in a nation. That’s why we have parties and contested elections and people who come and go and disagree with their leaders, unless they are threatened with jail for doing so. It is exactly a precept of the Enlightenment in its commitment to democracy that people within a nation actually disagree with each other. And the fact that a nation has an ideology doesn’t mean that is it right for every last individual to be forced into conforming to it. We know historically and from current events, people don’t.

    (Pinker seems to deny that there is any difference between Mearsheimer’s claim that humans are social animals and his own claim that humans are first and foremost individuals. But this is a fundamental difference between the two participants.)

    The Rate of War Has Decreased

    On Mearsheimer’s claim that competition for security means that we will perpetually be at war, Pinker argues that if that were true, the rate of war should be at a constant level throughout history. And it’s not. It’s gone way down, especially since the end of the second world war. Competition for security does not mean we will be perpetually at war. The rate of war goes up and down depending on nations’ commitment to Enlightenment ideals, or whether its goal is glory or grandeur or preeminence. Countries who have been at each other’s throats for centuries have decided that it’s better to get along. The nature of the international system does not pin us to a constant level of war in every period in history.

    (Pinker says the rate of war has decreased since World War II. But is this due to the Enlightenment? To answer that, we will have to examine the structural changes in governance and finance that took place during and after that war, and as a direct result of that war. His claim is that the rate of war goes up and down depending on nations’ commitment to Enlightenment ideals. He seems to imply that a lack of Enlightenment ideals results in a country having a goal of glory, grandeur, or preeminence. Are wars initiated by countries with those goals? Or are wars initiated against countries with those goals?)

    John Mearsheimer’s Rebuttal to Steven Pinker

    Mearsheimer says that with a careful reading of Pinker’s book, it is clear that he talks about truth, and about allowing truth to prevail. (Pinker adds that he means approaching truth, that we don’t know what truth is.) But Mearsheimer is interested in how you get moral and political progress if you don’t get truth? For example, in the United States we have the red versus blue divide. How do you make progress in that situation? ‘It just seems to me that progress is bound up with the concept of truth’.

    He is also aware that Pinker considers progress to be the coming of liberalism. When he says we’re getting smarter, he means we’re becoming more liberal. Mearsheimer concludes that, for Pinker, the truth is synonymous with becoming liberal.

    Mearsheimer is not criticizing liberalism per se, but he says there are a lot of people on the planet who don’t like it. Furthermore, liberal democracies have been decreasing since 2006. He asks whether we really want to identify progress as liberalism, and anyone who opposes it as wrong.

    Steven Pinker’s Rebuttal to John Mearsheimer

    Pinker argues that he wants to identify progress with human flourishing. He says some values of human flourishing, like freedom, do overlap with liberalism, but he could argue that other values like health, longevity, sustenance, and equality of women (he redefines this as a liberal value in the next sentence), infants not dying, women not dying in childbirth, people not getting stabbed to death in muggings, or getting thrown in jail because they disagree with the king, are universal. Values like equality of women are liberal values, but many of the values listed above are universally agreed upon. There are ‘holdouts’, but there is a significant trend in values such as equality of women.

    The Historical Trend is Liberalism

    The countries that deny women the vote have been dwindling. According to Pinker, the only one left is the Vatican But the direction is that laws discriminating against women are falling off the books. Also, countries that have laws criminalizing homosexuality are liberalizing that. Overall, he thinks there is a historical trend toward liberal values. And liberal values are the most defensible. Therefore, when people come together, they tend to agree on these values more easily. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is an example.

    Liberalism as a Universal Value–as Opposed to the Vatican for Example

    However, he argues that if the first universal value is that we accept Jesus Christ as our savior, a lot of people will fall by the wayside. Education and freedom of speech are harder to argue against.

    (The mention of ‘holdouts’ is interesting. He specifically mentions the Vatican as a holdout. He points out that a religious belief, like the acceptance of Jesus Christ as our savior, can’t lead to consensus or agreement. He’s probably right, and Mearsheimer doesn’t disagree with him on this. Pinker may be more extreme, because he sees liberalism and Enlightenment as superior to Christianity, and not only as a first principle. In his view, Christianity is destined to diminish over time.)

    John Mearsheimer’s Rebuttal

    Mearsheimer’s concern about consensus remains, and he wants to go a step further. He says Pinker believes that in the academy there are huge numbers of people who do not agree with his world view. He says these are people who are not using reason for good ends. It’s not only that Pinker thinks a large number of great thinkers, people who enjoy great esteem in the academy, people like Foucault and Nietzsche, are hindering progress or getting in the way. He argues that anybody who believes in these isms, these ideologies, are asking for trouble. So the question is, how can Pinker argue we are moving in a positive direction?

    Mearsheimer does not disagree that these ‘great thinkers’ hinder progress. He believes ideologies are a hindrance to progress on the moral and political front. That is the point he’s been trying to make. Given this panoply of forces that are acting in ways that are contrary to Pinker’s preferences, how can he argue that we’re making progress?

    Steven Pinker’s Rebuttal

    There are a number of pathologies in our institutions. The belief that there is progress is not a belief that everything gets better for everyone all the time. Progress is incremental and has setbacks. It has to, because it’s not a force of the universe.

    Mearsheimer is right that there was a perception of progress as some mystical force that carries us ever upward. That’s not what Pinker is advocating. Quite the contrary. Pinker says most of the forces of the universe will try to grind us down, but we fight back with reason, with deliberation, with argument, and there’s no guarantee of success. Sometimes brute force wins. Sometimes people are under a spell of delusions or believe in ideologies. But the standard argument of what we ought to do and the descriptive argument of where we are, are separate. Things can go wrong, and things have gone wrong. On average, we’re better off than 100 or 200 years ago, to say nothing of 2,000 years ago.

    (Apparently, progress is not something that can be defined in the moment. You can only see it in retrospect. Until then, we struggle against the forces of the universe. It is only on the basis of observable historical change that Pinker can say the world is better off than 100, 200, or 2,000 years ago. His evidence is in the statistics that measure human flourishing. However, in the present, the ‘normative (or standard) argument’ of what we ought to do is all we can depend on. Fortunately, Pinker believes he knows what we ought to do.

    Cross Examination

    On cross examination, Sophie Scott-Brown asks John Mearsheimer if maybe it’s not always about getting it right and building up a history of that rightness. Maybe it’s understanding more about how you go about getting it right. She asks John, if that is a convincing argument for him.

    John Mearsheimer’s Response to Sophie Scott-Brown

    He clarifies his point by saying that deliberation and reason in different individuals leads to different conclusions about political or moral goods. In universities, for example, there are huge numbers of smart people who can’t agree on much of anything.

    Steven Pinker’s Rebuttal of John Mearsheimer

    Pinker thinks it’s a bit of an exaggeration that they can’t agree on much of anything. [But] there is plenty of disagreement. He says we want to distinguish between the institution of academia and the republic of letters, which includes think tanks, newspapers, bloggers and so on. [But] even within Academia there are not a lot of people who agree with traditional gender roles or think that homosexuality should be criminalized, or that war is heroic and humanity will become decrepit if we ever have peace. Many arguments are obsolete–like the idea that we should have racial segregation, or that we should look to the Bible as a source of history. There is intellectual progress; there are also crazy superstitions and monstrous beliefs.

    Cross Examination

    John Mearsheimer, are you confident we won’t slip back again or do you see new myths rising to replace the old ones?

    Sophie Scott-Brown

    John Mearsheimer’s response to Sophie Scott-Brown

    It’s not so much myths. Reason can lead individuals to come up with smart views that the world works in one way, and lead other individuals to think it works in other ways. In international relations, the world I operate in, I have a theory of realism. I argue that realism best explains how the world works. Steve is a very smart guy and he has a different view of international politics, a liberal view. That is my basic point. Smart individuals can use their critical faculties to come up with different world views. When you have different views, how do you have progress? The fact that Steve and I have different views of international relations makes me doubt we can have progress in understanding how the world works.

    Steven Pinker’s Rebuttal

    If we take the history of science as our guide, we find that at any given time there are controversies. But sometimes enough time passes, enough empirical tests are done, and we find out one of them was right and one of them was wrong. Turn back the clock 80 years and scientists were arguing whether inheritance was carried in protein or DNA. The DNA guys won and the protein guys lost. It may be that in the realm of international relations, let’s say we have a competition and we try to make predictions about what will happen in the next year, 5 years or 10 years. Time passes and we may discover that one of us was wrong and one was right. We use the history of science as our guide…

    John Mearsheimer’s Rebuttal

    When talking in the moral and political realm, and not the medical realm, it is almost impossible to reach consensus on a widespread scale. There’s always going to be disagreement. Mearsheimer says this is his basic point.

    Steven Pinker Introduces a Hypothetical Question

    How about the desirability of a Marxist-Leninist command control economy and political system? I think reasonable people would say, yeah we tried that experiment and it didn’t work.

    John Mearsheimer’s Rebuttal of Pinker’s Premise

    I think there’s no question that ideas come and go. I think the example of what’s happened with Marxism is basically correct. It had its heyday and it’s no longer a very influential ideology. But the point is, it’s not the new ideologies that have appeared and the old ideologies that have hung on, and we have fought with each other and had some sort of dialectical process that has led to a consensus. My argument is that you need a consensus to get progress. What we’re talking about, the dependent variable, is moral and political progress. (In other words, you need consensus at the beginning of the process in order to go in the right direction. The alternative is to wait for 50 years or a century to see who was right.)

    Theme Two: How Do We Define Individualism, and Has it Made the World a Better Place?

    Let’s pick back up with the idea of the individual. John, Steve says the individual is not this isolated entity, they are multi-social beings. They don’t abandon their social belonging, they are members of different social groups. It’s that no one predominates. There are also distinctions within nations. Nations are not unified concepts. What do you think about that?

    Sophie Scott-Brown

    John Mearsheimer’s Rebuttal

    When you think about human nature you have to ask yourself certain questions. Do you think we are first and foremost individuals who form social contracts? This is what liberalism is all about. Or do you think that we are first and foremost social individuals who carve out room for our individualism? Almost all Enlightenment thinkers start with the individual. He thinks this is true of Steven Pinker. For Pinker, the focus is on the individual and it is individual reason that really matters. Mearsheimer’s view is that we are first and foremost social animals. We are born and socialized into social tribes, which we now call nations. He says, ‘for folks like Steve, tribes get in the way of rational thinking…Political tribalism is the most insidious form of irrationality today.’ And political tribalism is equated with the nation.

    Mearsheimer Does Not Disagree With Pinker on the Problems of Tribalism and Nationalism

    However, it’s important to be clear what their differences actually are. Mearsheimer is not disagreeing with Pinker on this point. He acknowledges there are problems with tribalism. Nationalism, identity with a nation, the fact that we live in a world with nation states, makes it difficult to reach progress. But if you do believe that we are social animals, that causes all sorts of problems for Pinker’s argument.

    Steve Pinker’s Rebuttal

    One of the challenges of the Enlightenment is, how do you have large-scale groupings without the coercion of forcing people to sacrifice their interests for a majority or even for the most powerful? That’s why we have liberal democracy and freedom of speech. It explains why nations have decreasingly identified themselves with some single religion or ethnic group. They have become defined, retrospectively, through something like a social contract.

    The Problem with Defining a Nation in Terms of Race or Religion

    It’s not historically true that people sat down together and hatched out the details for a country. But in terms of rationalizing what are the defensible arrangements for a country, Pinker thinks it’s really good that the United States is not a Christian nation. It doesn’t define itself as a white nation, or even an Anglo nation. In addition, the other nations that people want to live in are nations that are multicultural, accept difference, and recognize rights of individuals.

    Among the rights of individuals are the right to affiliate voluntarily with groups like religions or clubs or whatever they want. But to have the violence that is carried out by a state identified with a particular ethnic group is a terrible idea. Because you’re never going to have the members of one kindred, of one ethnic group, of one religion sharing a territory. Every territory has people from many backgrounds. It’s a bad idea if the wielder of force serves one blood line. He believes in human nature, but he thinks there are some features of human nature that we ought to develop means to control.

    (Pinker’s argument depends on individualism. However, he does not admit that this is a fundamental difference with Mearsheimer’s contention that humans are social animals first. Also, in the United States, the wielder of force often favors one bloodline. Is that the result of liberalism, or is it an example of the West’s ambivalence to Enlightenment liberalism?)

    The Problem of Tribalism in the United States

    Pinker explains why he thinks tribalism leads to irrationality. He gives the example of a healthcare proposal that was first developed by the Republicans. When the Democrats tried to pass it, the Republican opposed it. That’s irrational. Another example is a math problem. If the answer favors a liberal policy proposal, the liberals will overlook mathematical errors and vice versa. Say you give people a logical deduction from certain premises, and it’s consistent with a leftist agenda. The leftists will think it’s highly proper and the right will reject it. Tribalism is an incoherent system for a modern nation state because nation states are heterogenous.

    (It seems Pinker has made Mearsheimer’s point. Reason does not lead to consensus. This is important because Pinker previously defended political parties as a liberal remedy for the inability to come to consensus.)

    John Mearsheimer’s Rebuttal

    Mearsheimer says he is happy he lives in a country that is not a Christian country, or of one ethnicity. But there are a lot of his fellow Americans who disagree with him. And if you go outside the boundaries of the United States there are lots of countries who don’t want a multiethnic state. He says this is what underpins his argument that we have not made a lot of progress over time.

    Steven Pinker’s Rebuttal

    Pinker says part of the argument he is making is normative. It is true that there are a lot of societies that try to limit the population to one race or ethnicity. Many argue that is not viable, that they will be torn by strife. These societies will have significant minorities, and it’s bad to suppress them, ignore them or deny them rights. That’s the standard argument. And then there’s the argument of those who ask, are we winning? It’s not true that we have convinced the entire world.

    Then there’s the separate question of what has been the trend? Do you have more societies that recognize minority rights? That give the franchise to minorities? Or do you have more societies that criminalize a religion? It’s not unanimous. It hasn’t swept all over the globe. But that has been the trend. He cites his book Better Angels. The empirical study of how many people are convinced that this is how a society ought to be run is different than how ought a society to be run.

    Cross Examination

    Can we talk about liberalism as the system that’s best at handling the differences we are talking about? And actually that’s why it’s so successful? John?

    Sophie Scott-Brown

    John Mearsheimer’s Affirmative Speech for Liberalism

    I agree one hundred percent. Liberalism is predicated on the assumption that individuals can’t agree about first principles. They cannot agree on questions about the good life. And sometimes those disagreements are so intense that people kill each other. So, liberalism deals with that fundamental set of problems by creating civil society, and by giving people room to live life the way they see fit.

    Liberalism also privileges individual rights. It says we each have the right to live the way we see fit. Furthermore, liberalism preaches tolerance because, again, individuals can’t agree on first principles. And finally, liberalism enables the creation of a state to make sure no single person is in a position to kill another person. That’s what liberalism is all about. It’s all about dealing with the fact that there is no consensus on political and moral questions of the first order.

    So is progress, Steve, just acknowledging that no consensus is possible and we just have to learn to live and manage these differences as best we can? Is that actually an alternative account of progress?

    Sophie Scott-Brown

    (John Mearsheimer interjects that that is not Steve’s definition of progress.)

    Steven Pinker’s Rebuttal

    It’s a component, but it’s not the definition of progress. Pinker would define progress as improvements in human flourishing. But yes, the fact of disagreement stemming from the fact that humans are different individually and culturally, and have to come to some working agreement despite that disagreement. But it’s an exaggeration to say we can’t agree on first principles.

    The fact is that despite disagreement, some factual opinions are better than others, we don’t know them a priori because the truth has not been given to us by some deity. Instead, we’ve got to blunder along and discover what the truth is. Likewise, we’ve got to experiment and blunder to find the best arrangements for living together. Some of them work better than others in terms of the criteria of enhancing human flourishing.

    Pinker’s Redefinition of First Principles

    If you look at the UN’s sustainable development goals, every country agreed on which way the world ought to go. Poverty should be reduced, safety should be increased, access to clean water should be increased, etc. There’s an awful lot of agreement. And then we can reframe other arguments in terms of what will get us to the state that many of us can agree on? Again not everyone will agree.

    There’s some people who have messianic visions that the world is not going to be a great place until everyone obey’s all of God’s commandments. And if kids die it doesn’t matter. But to the extent that people do agree that kids dying is bad, that changes the argument from disagreements over first principles to disagreements over means to the end.

    (Pinker can’t explain why people with different visions still exist, so he discounts them as irrational. In his view, the focus on the importance of keeping kids alive is a remedy for human disagreement because it is something most people can agree on. This agreement then changes the focus of the argument from first principles to means-to-an-end.)

    John Mearsheimer’s Refutation

    I just don’t think, Steve, there’s any disagreement on issues of safety, health and sustenance. That’s not the issue. We’re talking about moral and political principles here. We’re talking about first principles, what comprises the good life. That’s where the real disagreements are.

    Steven Pinker’s Response

    He asks if fewer children dying isn’t a moral principle? (This is somewhat dishonest. As I understand him, child and infant mortality was part of his measure of human flourishing, which is part of the means-to-an-end argument rather than a first principles argument.)

    John Mearsheimer’s Rebuttal

    That is so obvious it’s not interesting. You didn’t need the Enlightenment for that. From time immemorial people have understood that children dying is a bad thing and we should try to keep them alive as long as possible.

    Steven Pinker’s Rebuttal

    But Pinker says those are first principles everyone agrees on. He then counters that the end of slavery, human sacrifice and genocide are also moral. Likewise, agricultural improvements are a better a way to avert famine than prayer. Agricultural improvements were a moral development in his view.

    Finally, he argues that the idea of universal human flourishing is not so obvious. If you go back to ancient codes the idea that every last homo sapien ought to flourish isn’t there. This supports his contention that the concern for human flourishing is due to the Enlightenment.

    (I think we need statistics on Pinker’s claim–the belief that every last homo sapien ought to flourish, didn’t exist in ancient codes. As for the morality of agricultural improvements instead of prayer, the ancients knew about crop rotation.)

    Theme Three: Are there any really viable alternatives or are we stuck trying to make Enlightenment values work?

    John Mearsheimer’s Points of Agreement with Pinker: The First Enlightenment Principle is Unfettered Reason

    The first Enlightenment value is unfettered reason. Reason is put up on a pedestal, however, this is another premise Mearsheimer agrees with. And he assumes all three of the participants, as academics, would agree with it too. He argues that the dispute has to do with what unfettered reason leads to in moral and political questions.

    The Second Enlightenment Principle is Individualism

    The second principle value of the Enlightenment is the focus on the individual. Nor is Mearsheimer against individualism. For academics, individualism really matters. But his basic point is we are all social animals and we have to carve out space for our individuality.

    Where we live makes a difference in how we see the world and that makes it more difficult to reach a consensus or truth on social and political values. Therefore, Mearsheimer has a mixed mind about individualism. He does like individualism, but also believes we are social animals first. With regard to international relations. He reiterates that we live in a fundamentally competitive world. States compete with each other often in nasty ways and this has not changed since the beginning of time. And this is not going to change in the future. We haven’t made any progress there.

    Steven Pinker’s Rebuttal: What are the Alternatives to Enlightenment Principles?

    Well, the more you try to formulate alternatives to Enlightenment ideals, the better they look. Because what are the alternatives? If you decide to argue against reason, why should we take that seriously? Either it’s reasonable, in which case you signed on to it, or it’s not reasonable, in which case there’s no reason to go along with it.

    If you’re against individualism, are you okay with your parents arranging a marriage for you? Are you okay with your parents forcing you to go to church every Sunday? Are you okay being forced to do anything? For the coherence of the group, not expressing your opinion is the rule, because that would introduce dissent, and that would be uncomfortable.

    It’s very hard to argue for an alternative for individualism as long as it includes people’s preference to belong to social collectives. Again Pinker would distinguish the normative position of what ought we to persuade others or to argue for from the triumphalist argument that we’ve won and everyone agrees with us. Everyone doesn’t agree with us. We might think they ought to, but he wouldn’t want the dictatorial force to make them agree. Those are two separate arguments. But he thinks the trend has been in the direction of consensus. He would argue that Enlightenment ideals are what we ought to strive for and that that’s the direction we are moving.

    John Mearsheimer’s Rebuttal

    Mearsheimer thinks there is a large element of triumphalism in Pinker’s book. He said it made him think of ‘Frank’ Fukuyama’s article, The End of History, which was published in 1989. ‘Frank’s’ argument is that we’re making progress. We defeated fascism in the first half of the twentieth century, and Communism in the second half. The future is liberalism. We will have more and more democracy over time. And once you have more democracy, you won’t have fundamental disagreement over political and moral issues. Therefore, since most of the countries of the world will be democracies, there won’t be much political disagreement out there.

    ‘Frank’s’ argument at the end of his article was that the biggest problem we will face is boredom because there will be no more politics and no more fights. Mearsheimer’s argument is that because of the limits of unfettered reason, what you get are really big fights where people are willing to kill each other. And that’s what makes politics a contact sport. Once politics, which is a contact sport, is at play, you’re not going to make a lot of progress. In fact, you’re going to need a state to keep everybody under control.

    Steven Pinker’s Rebuttal

    Pinker argues that the end of history was deliberately ambiguous in the two ways he has mentioned in this debate. You could read it either as a goal that political systems are aiming at or ought to aim at, or you could read it as the factual claim that we’ve got there. He says that he read Fukuyama as arguing more for the former than the later. Fukuyama’s book was written before the end of the Cold War and at that time, he was right. Liberal democracies were steadily growing. In the last ten years, there has been a recession of democracy, but Pinker predicts democracy will increase in the future.

  • I want to quickly share a few videos and sermons that have come to my attention since I wrote the last article. It is my opinion that theologians would best address questions that were raised in that article about the nature of God. Some of the following links address this question. I’ve also included related videos. There is one criticizing Zionism and the latest pro-Palestinian protest. Also included is a Christian service from St. Peter’s Basilica and a video of Royal Hours for the Nativity of Our Lord from the Holy Resurrection Orthodox Church in North Dakota. Happy Christmas 2023.

    Bishop Robert Barron – He will rule forever.

    Double Down News – “Jesus Would Be Killed in Gaza”

    Seyyed Hossein Nasr – Does God Make Sense?

    Lauren Booth – Rabbis Expose Zionist Genocide

    Reuters – Palestinian Christians replace Christmas festivities with a sombre vigil in Bethlehem

    Not the Andrew Marr Show – Christmas protests for Gaza!

    Holy Resurrection Orthodox Church – Royal Hours for the Nativity of Our Lord

    I would also like to share a Bible verse from Bishop Barron that is an important addition to the article Political Zionism is an Anachronism. That article related that Hebrew nationalism was made extinct after a Babylonian monarch, Nebuchadnezzar, destroyed the Jewish state. As a result, the Hebrew religion changed. It came to worship a God who was no longer tribal and confined to a specific territory. Now God was universal and concerned for all mankind. The experience of exile and the new understanding of God that accompanied the exiles cut the bond between religion and nationality.

    The verse from Bishop Barron is Hebrews 13:14. I’ll share verses 9 through 14.

    Be not carried about with divers and strange doctrines. For it is a good thing that the heart be established with grace; not with meats; which have not profited them that have been occupied therein.

    We have an altar, whereof they have no right to eat which serve the tabernacle.

    For the bodies of those beasts, whose blood is brought into the sanctuary by the high priest for sin, are burned without the camp.

    Wherefore Jesus also, that he might sanctify the people with his own blood, suffered without the gate.

    Let us go forth therefore unto him without the camp, bearing his reproach.

    For here have we no continuing city, but we seek one to come.

    Hebrews 13: 9-14
  • No Christmas for Bethlehem
    Learning How to Keep Christmas

    Now that Gaza as been destroyed and her people are starving and dying of infection and disease, our conversation can’t help but change. We no longer feel we are talking to fellow beings when we address our elected officials. And anyway, there is nothing left of the world we hoped to save. Both physical infrastructure and human life have been destroyed. For survivors in Gaza and their sympathizers, the mental and spiritual wounds will never go away. And now we are hearing that there will be no Christmas for Bethlehem. After everything that has happened, Christmas has been shrouded by the misery of Gaza. My prayer is that this realization will shake our world view. Maybe it will even teach us what it really means to keep Christmas.

    I wrote previously that the time has come to prepare for the next life. I said Gaza reminds us that Death comes for everyone. Today, Americans see this possibility more clearly when our own government ignores our cries for mercy. We feel we are kin to the Palestinians more than to the political establishment. But I’ve discovered that we need to clear a theological path so that they can walk beside us.

    I became aware of this need by watching this video by Dr. Ali Ataie on religious Zionism. I explained in a previous article that Morris Jastrow was sympathetic to a certain kind of religious Zionism. But there is another version that Jastrow would have considered heretical. In his video, Dr. Ataie explains this second type of religious Zionism. However, the part of the video I want to talk about is near the end. It has to do with his concern about the nature of the Judeo-Christian God. This concern is especially relevant today because of Netanyahu’s use of Old Testament passages to justify the destruction of Gaza.

    If I understand him correctly I think he is presenting questions that he can’t avoid asking. He is trying to understand a concept that is necessary to his own faith.

    How do Muslims understand the Jewish and Christian God?

    The Christians say they believe in the God of Abraham, but then they say that the genocidal God of Deuteronomy 20 is not Christian. He is the Jewish God. This is not satisfactory.

    Dr. Ataie mentions the word Perichoresis. According to Cambridge Core,

    ‘Perichoresis (perichoresis, circumincessio) is a theological term which describes the ‘necessary being-in-one-another or circumincession of the three divine Persons of the Trinity because of the single divine essence, the eternal procession of the Son from the Father and of the Spirit from the Father and (through) the Son, and the fact that the three Persons are distinguished solely by the relations of opposition between them.’ 

    Cambridge Core

    I think the Cambridge article attempts to explain away any confusion, but I’m not sure it was successful. According to Dr. Ataie Muslims have a difference of opinion with the anti-Zionist Jews who describe the problem as a mistaken definition. The anti-Zionist Jews claim that the Zionist Jews got the meaning wrong. I think it is understandable if this doesn’t provide much comfort when bombs are falling.

    Genesis 1:28 has similar genocidal language. Some try to explain this away by saying that it only applies to the generation of Moses. Others claim it never actually happened. But Ataie argues that current beliefs matter. And they really do matter in Palestine today. All things considered, it’s hard to argue with him.

    Concerning the Christian concept of God, Ataie is also aware that the Logos became Jesus of Nazareth. Or is is it more correct to say the Logos is Jesus of Nazareth? I haven’t studied this concept, and I’m not sure it would help if I had.

    Logos theology is a theology of presence without division. It is a way of unification, of which the incarnation is the greatest visible example.

    1517.org

    What does Morris Jastrow say?

    If someone had asked me these questions a week ago, I would have cited Jastrow. He said the Prophets ushered in a new conception of religion that cut the bond between religion and nationality. As a result, religion became the concern of the individual and not the group. As for the nature of God, the Prophets announced that pleasing Yahweh would now depend on each individual’s obedience to certain principles, as opposed to the group’s obedience. In this way, the national Yahweh was transformed into a universal Jehovah.

    Jastrow calls this new religious concept the religion of the Prophets and explains that this process happened in phases. Judaism emerged out of Hebrew nationalism only after the destruction of the Jewish state.

    Does this answer Dr. Ataie’s questions? Because now I have some questions of my own.

    Where was God in all of this? Or who was God? Unless I’ve missed something, it’s not clear if God himself changed or the Hebrews merely changed their view of God.

    These questions don’t shake my sense of the God I pray to, but I’m not being bombed by a crazed tribal deity. And I’m not Arab or Muslim. Does this description of God make more sense to a Western reader than it would to an Arab reader?

    Hopefully, theologians can help us deal with these questions. It’s important because unless we can establish a common base of understanding and trust, nothing we say will be helpful.

  • Political Zionism is an Anachronism
    Political Zionism

    Morris Jastrow1 wrote in 1919 that Israel is a ‘glorified ghetto’. When you think about it, the conditions of Jewish life before the Enlightenment have been perfectly reproduced in Palestine. It’s no wonder the Israelis and their allies are cracking up. Political Zionism is an anachronism.

    Many Israeli leaders have claimed religious sanction for their treatment of the Palestinians. At the center of the current bombardment of Gaza is Benjamin Netanyahu, who claims to be following the admonition of Moses (Deut. 25:12–19) that “The Eternal will be at war against Amalek throughout the ages.” 

    This implies that Israel is commanded to wage a holy war of extermination against Amalek (Deut. 25:12–19), for in the early days “the wars of Israel” and the “wars of the Lord” were synonymous expressions (cf., e.g., Judg. 5:23).

    But, unfortunately for Netanyahu, even his supporters did not buy his analogy. His supporters don’t necessarily object to the carnage, just the rhetoric. They worry that announcing a holy war is not a good look for him. But his use of a story from ancient Israel to justify his war reveals the central mistake of the Zionists.

    Zionism does not understand the Hebrew Prophets or Jesus

    The use of the Old Testament in this way reveals that Zionism is a movement out of place and time. According to Morris Jastrow, this movement ignores what was accomplished by the Hebrew Prophets and Jesus. Jastrow calls Jesus the successor of the Prophets.

    Political Zionism is an anachronism

    Jastrow had sympathy for religious and economic Zionism. But as a political measure, Zionism was an anachronism. However, the political aspect has dominated since 1897. (p. 31) The only way the Zionists could have pulled this off is by ignoring or denying the religious aspect.

    The Prophets: From Ancient Israel to Judaism

    If Christians and Jews understood how the Old and New Testament fit together they would reject Zionism immediately. But instead, they are led by dramatic verses taken out of context, such as the story of Amalek. In fact, the Zionist movement itself is out of context.

    The Zionists seem unaware that the Prophets made major changes in the religion of ancient Israel. These changes are recorded in the Old Testament. The central concept that resulted from their teachings had to do with nationality and citizenship.

    Antiquity interpreted religion in terms of nationality. The basis of nationality and citizenship was a nation’s language and gods. This influenced the organization of religion, including the ancient Hebrew religion.

    The Hebrews had a national deity, whom they called Yahweh. He was their protector within the boundaries of their own territory. Within those borders, they were the chosen people of Yahweh. The groups around them were no different. They had been chosen by some other god.

    What was the message of the Prophets?

    However, for the Hebrews the ancient concept of religion changed with the rise of the Prophets. The Prophets taught that Yahweh is unlike other gods. His concern is conditioned on the obedience of his followers to certain principles. These principles involved ethical distinctions between right and wrong.

    But, this was not a theoretical lesson on ethics. The Prophets announced that Yahweh had rejected his people because of the oppression of the poor by the rich, the injustice in the courts of justice, and rampant crime. They said Yahweh would punish the people for their sins unless they would mend their ways.

    The Prophet Amos was the first to preach this message. He was followed by Hosea, who made the same prophecy. Then came Isaiah. Isaiah emphasized that sacrifices and tribute are an abomination to Yahweh, and that he does not want his worshippers to defile his holy place by coming there with unclean hands.

    These teachings represented a new (religious) language. Their significance lay in the emphasis on the conduct of the individual as the test of religion. From this point onward, the group was considered to represent an entity composed of individuals.

    In this process, the national Yahweh was transformed into a universal Jehovah. In other words, Judaism made its first appearance at that time. Judaism is a religion based on a monotheistic conception of divine government, which makes the conduct of the individual the test of religious life. But this transformation would soon be tested.

    The effect of the Babylonian exile

    Hebrew nationalism was made extinct after a Babylonian monarch, Nebuchadnezzar, destroyed the Jewish state. As a result, the Hebrew religion changed. It came to worship a God who was no longer tribal and confined to a specific territory. It worshipped a God who was universal, a God who was concerned for all mankind. The experience of exile and the new understanding of God that accompanied the exiles cut the bond between religion and nationality. The transformation into Judaism was complete.

    It is a fact of the utmost significance that the great contribution of the Jews to the world’s spiritual treasure was made not while the national life was flourishing, but as it was ebbing away. The Prophets with their revolutionary doctrines made their appearance when the northern Kingdom was beginning to show symptoms of decline, and the movement reached its height after this kingdom had disappeared and the national existence of the southern Kingdom was threatened. The religion of the Prophets is the swan song of ancient Hebraism, and the example of a people flourishing without a national background had to be furnished to the world in order to bring the new conception of religion to fruition, which divorced religion from nationality and made it solely the expression of the individual’s aspiration for the higher life and for communion with the source of all being. The ancient Hebrews disappeared. It was the Jews, as we should call the people after the Babylonian Exile, who survived, and they survived despite the fact that they never recovered their national independence in the full sense of the word.

    Jastrow, p. 38

    The theocratic state

    Judaism changed the people from a political to a religious unit. However, this process proved to be too much for the masses and they yearned to go back to their nationalistic ways. Jastrow defines what they were going through as the ‘wrenching of the political from the religious life’. He thought the strange phenomenon of a Prophet who is also a Priest was a response to this difficulty. But it was a step backward.

    The Prophet-Priest Ezra created a new code. Ezra’s code was combined with the two earlier codes in Exodus and the Book of Deuteronomy. This framework of early traditions and tribal experiences became the Pentateuch. The Pentateuch served as the basis of religious life. It also recognized the solidarity of the Jews as a political unit. The result was that Israel was so dominated by the priestly ideal that a theocratic state came to be.

    The ministry of Jesus

    Second Isaiah and the other ‘writing’ Prophets after the Babylonian exile opposed this development because the theocratic state led the Jews to focus on national aspirations.

    Beginning with Amos, the Prophets before the exile had envisioned a time when the Jewish people would set an example for the world to worship the ‘supreme Author of all being‘. But the theocratic state reattached the religion to what remained of the national life. This was the situation Jesus confronted in his lifetime.

    The universal Jehovah had not entirely put aside the rule of the tribal Yahweh. Yahweh was still viewed as the special protector of His chosen people by the side of His traits as the God of universal scope. The crisis came in the days of Jesus, who, as the successor of the Hebrew Prophets, drew the logical conclusion from their premises and substituted for the national ideal that of the ‘Kingdom of God…Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s’. By such a single saying Jesus broke definitely with all nationalistic aims, which even during the period of Roman control, strict and complete as it was, the Jews did not entirely abandon.

    Jastrow, pp. 41-42

    According to Jastrow, it is an error to suppose that the Jews rejected the religious teachings of Jesus. They could not have rejected his teachings. Jesus taught in the same spirit as their own Prophets. What they rejected was Jesus’s uncompromising insistence that religion was a matter between the individual and his conscience. They were prevented from accepting this idea both by their own traditions and attitudes and by the religious concepts that surrounded them.

    When St. Paul came to give the doctrinal setting to the teachings of Jesus, and to interpret the meaning of his life with its tragic end, he laid the chief emphasis on the salvation of the individual through the acceptance of the belief in Jesus. The sins of the world were washed away through the blood of Jesus as a vicarious offering for mankind. Every individual was offered the opportunity of securing salvation for his soul by accepting Jesus as his saviour…

    Jastrow p. 45
    Did something similar happen to Christianity?

    However, Jastrow also identifies a continuing tendency to connect religion and nationality among Christians. He blames this on the Church’s ‘Zionistic temptation’ to become allied with Rome. I hesitate to bring this up because of the fear that some denominations will feel justified in their criticism of Catholicism. But it’s important to remember that many Protestant denominations built forts around their own theology. If I’m not misunderstanding Jastrow, I think this Zionistic tendency can be interpreted differently.

    It could be argued that it was the Roman emperors who first legalized Christianity and then made it the official religion of the Roman Empire. If the Church fathers agreed to this, perhaps they mistook it as a universalistic alliance. Jastrow does say (p. 45) that this alliance appeared in a form that at first appeared international.

    Conclusion

    This article demonstrates that political Zionism is anachronistic. Christian and Jewish Zionists are trying to carry out a scenario that no longer exists, and can’t be defended in the scriptures. In fact, they are going in the opposite direction to what their own Prophets intended. If we look again at Netanyahu’s use of the story of Amalek as justification for bombing Gaza, it becomes clear that a tribal Israel ruled by a nationalistic God is a thing of the past. The wars of Israel and the wars of the Lord are no longer synonymous. Israel’s God became a universal God when the Israelite nation was destroyed and the people were carried away to Babylon. Then Jesus, as the successor to the Prophets, reinforced the Prophetic teachings.

    Christianity, as we have seen, broke at its foundation with Jewish nationalism. It definitely cut the thread that bound religion to the limitations inherent in associating religion with the group.

    Jastrow p. 44

    Next it will be necessary to understand the difference between the religious practice of Christian Zionists, orthodox Christians and Jews.

    1. Morris Jastrow Jr. Ph.D, LL.D, Zionism and the future of Palestine: the Fallacies and Dangers of Political Zionism, The Macmillan Company, NY, 1999 ↩︎

  • I recently wrote about Morris Jastrow‘s 1919 book about Zionism. In the last century, events have transpired with no relation to the understanding he tried to convey. The result is that in spite of his efforts, Zionism has prospered. But, as I read his words, I am certain that his voice still matters. Jastrow’s book is an important source for defeating Zionism.

    Relgious belief or geopolitical maneuvering?

    Readers may think Jastrow’s approach is too simple, that it merely deals with mistaken notions which led Jews to accept Zionism. Some prefer to focus on manipulation by Western imperialists. In my opinion, geopolitical maneuvering is important, but it should not be the first priority. I suspect changes in Jewish religious beliefs are central to the success of Zionism.

    I’m not implying that we should be led by Jastrow alone. But his experience and education provide important information about the changes that took place in European and American Judaism in the late nineteenth and early 20th century. This is important because we may be seeing the effects of these changes today.

    However, an important misunderstanding about his religious views might distract from his usefulness. Therefore, before I talk about Jastrow’s book I will share my understanding of where he stood in relation to changes taking place in Judaism in his lifetime. I’m not an expert on this period of Jewish history, so I’m using an article that explains this relationship. I encourage the reader to check the article for accuracy.

    Did Jastrow repudiate traditional Judaism?

    A key aspect of Jastrow’s development, his relationship to Judaism, was misunderstood in his lifetime. According to Wikipedia, Jastrow repudiated traditional Judaism in 1886. But the The New York Times article cited by Wikipedia might be misleading, especially for gentile readers.

    The two most important factors in Morris’s experience were rising anti-Semitism in Russia, the U.S., and Germany, and the situation of liberal Judaism in America. Jastrow took issue with the influences on his religion during this period. Both Morris Jastrow, Jr. and his father, Marcus Jastrow, held similar opinions on this. Marcus, who had a PhD from Halle and was the rabbi of Philadelphia’s Rodef Shalom congregation, defended Judaism from both uncritical adherence to tradition, and extreme radicalism. Therefore, the NYT article is misleading when it says Morris Jastrow Jr. repudiated traditional Judaism.

    Morris Jastrow’s education and professional background

    In 1881, Jastrow earned a baccalaureate from the University of Pennsylvania. Then he sailed for Breslau to attend its Jewish theological seminary. His plan was to return to the United States after completing his education. Then he would prepare to take the place of his father.

    When Morris returned to Philadelphia, he began a rabbinical apprenticeship, but it only lasted for a year. One Sabbath, he gave the final sermon to his congregation. This is the speech mentioned by the NYT. According to this account, it was a long and pessimistic speech.

    He did not say in the speech what he would do next. But it turned out he had already accepted a professorship in Semitics at the University of Pennsylvania.

    This would not have been a surprise to his father. His reasons had to do with the forces he had encountered in Europe and America, and the role of Jews and Jewish learning in the late 19th century university.

    Jastrow’s response to secularization

    The process of secularization influenced several Jewish scholars in Jastrow’s generation. Some moved away from liberal Judaism, but for Jastrow, religious considerations were central in his choices. Leaving the rabbinate did not mean he would disengage with religion.

    Careful parental nurturing, a combination of an American and a European education, an apprenticeship under their father’s supervision, all helped cultivate a generation which would complete the evolution of an alternative to Orthodoxy and indifference.

    Wechsler, Harold S. “Pulpit or Professoriate: The Case of Morris Jastrow.” American Jewish History, vol. 74, no. 4, 1985, pp. 338–55. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23882681. Accessed 3 Dec. 2023.
    Jewish life in the late 19th century

    During the late 19th century, Western institutions of education did not admit Jews. Applicants were required to be members of a denomination. In addition, religious instruction was limited to dogma. But in Jastrow’s lifetime, these institutions were undergoing a process of liberalization. Many Jews were being offered academic positions in this period.

    This was a critical time in world Jewry. But there were differences between American and European liberalization. In America, Jewish life was congregational. In Europe it was communal. This meant that America was more open to liberal Judaism than Europe.

    The political situation

    The political situation also influenced Judaism. Increasing nationalism was one of Jastrow’s concerns. On the one hand, he couldn’t understand how people could give up their right to popular government or recognize anyone as superior due to birth position. He could not identify at all with the German brand of nationalism. At the same time, he thought nationalism was a healthy corrective for German materialism.

    Jastrow also had a conflicting interpretation of Treitschke’s claim that the ‘Jews are our misfortune’. Jastrow himself blamed the German Jews for a type of materialism that he observed during his stay in Europe. Therefore, he attributed Treitschke’s criticism to a lack of patriotism and idealism among German Jews. However, he also disagreed with the German idealists who identified German Jewry with Judaism. In his opinion, there was a drastic contrast between the Jewish Religion and the Jews in Germany.

    Jastrow also disapproved of the Jewish pursuit of the professions for the purpose of material gains, honor, influence and power. His own conception of idealism was that the only legitimate rewards for the professional are the benefits to mankind.

    Due to his experiences and observations in Europe, Jastrow concluded ‘that Germany will not be the land whence Jewish thought and Jewish enthusiasm for and attachment to the Jewish religion will spring‘. For a while, he was more optimistic about America. It all depended on the quality of Jewish leadership.

    But during his years in Europe this outlook changed. He was especially concerned about the rise in America of Isaac Mayer Wise. When Wise finally ‘cast his lot’ with the organized Reform movement and assumed its leadership, Reform’s universalism became the outlook of one faction, and American Jewry was permanently divided. Unity became impossible.

    The competing influence of Isaac Mayer Wise

    Before Jastrow left for Europe, Isaac Mayer Wise organized a domestic seminary for the education of American rabbis. Jastrow’s father had criticized Wise’s extreme liberalism and considered his personality inappropriate for leading America’s only seminary. It was partly due to Wise’s influence in America that Jastrow’s father sent him abroad for his education.

    When Jastrow Jr. returned home, he volunteered his services as a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania. This gave him a year to think about his future. By the end of the year, he had decided to leave the rabbinate. In the speech reported by the NYT, he shared with his congregation his observations about the rising generation of American Jews.

  • Laudato Si' and Progressivism
    Our Season of Creation

    Our environmental problems are the result of 200 years of industrialization. The philosophical and technological developments that enabled the Industrial Revolution were made possible by the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was not only independent of the Catholic Church, it opposed the authority of the Church.  Therefore, the Church is in a unique position to  publish a document like Laudato Si’. Environmental areas of concern form a natural connection between Laudato Si’ and Progressivism.  We should build on this connection.

    Who are progressives?

    But who are progressives?  The 21st century progressive movement is being shaped by environmental concerns, especially concerns about Agricultural Policy and Food Security. Social justice is also a concern of progressives. But it is impossible to separate social justice from environmental concerns. Progressives also oppose war. This opposition is due to the unjust character of war and its destruction of the environment.

    The Enlightenment: Science and progress versus the environment

    Supporters of Enlightenment ideals believed that progress and improvement of the human condition were more important than traditional institutions, and that these institutions could be discarded if necessary.  The French Revolution was one result of this belief, while the Industrial Revolution was the result of the Enlightenment’s scientific advances. The belief in progress has been discredited many times in the last 200 years. Climate change is the final nail in the coffin of this ideology.

    Political Classes and the Environment

    The liberal middle class benefited from the Industrial Revolution. The political left survived it.  Farmland was ‘enclosed’, and the former owners of that land were relocated to factory towns. They became workers. Workers became the political left in the process of surviving the Industrial Revolution. The environmental question never came up.

    What about the other political faction? Conservatives, have changed their character so many times they are no longer recognizable. However, they have never focused on the environment. Conservatives have a history of forming coalitions with the Catholic Church. The Church is a political entity as well as a religion. 

    However, liberals and the business class are also political entities. And they are determined to stay in control. This determination requires them to ignore or downplay the environmental crisis.

    With the publication of Laudato Si’, the Church demonstrates that it has an identity separate from political conservatism. Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si’ and his concern for the environment are not unexpected or surprising. What would be surprising is if an American liberal or conservative had written Laudato Si’.

    The following is from pages 6 and 7 of Laudato Si’.

    In 1963, Pope John XXIII addressed the nuclear threat in Pacem in Terris;

    Eight years later, in 1971, Pope Paul VI wrote about his ecological concerns and “the urgent need for a radical change in the conduct of humanity;”

    In 2001, John Paul II called for a “global ecological conversion;”

    In 2009, Pope Benedict XVI proposed “eliminating the structural causes of the dysfunctions of the world economy, and correcting models of growth which have proved incapable of ensuring respect for the environment.”

    …’the book of nature is one and indivisible,’ and includes the environment, life, sexuality, the family, social relations, and so forth.  It follows that ‘the deterioration of nature is closely connected to the culture which shaped human coexistence.’ ((On Care for Our common Home – Laudato Si’, Pope Francis, pp. 6-7))

    For a leftist take on environmentalism see Alyssa Battistoni’s Review of Naomi Klein’s Book

  • Plato's Influence on Our World
    Rethinking Plato’s Influence on the Modern World

    Plato has ruled the world for 2500 years through his lasting influence on philosophy, politics, and religion. It’s time we paid attention to Plato’s influence on our world. He is considered an authority on politics, even though in his lifetime, his writings were not compatible with the politics of his home country, Athens. Some of the worst attitudes of the modern world can be traced to him. He proposed a so-called link between societal ‘decay’ and race. He was also a misogynist. And yet he can’t be easily discarded. He is too much a part of us. Instead, I believe Plato’s influence has to be explored, discussed, and evaluated for its usefulness to contemporary society.

    I am going to try to follow Karl Popper’s moderate approach to Plato. Popper admits there is some good in Plato’s works, but objects to specific ideas which have caused lasting damage. On page 517, for example, he talks about the mischief–a term used by Samuel Butler–done to mankind by our secondary schools and universities. These were virtually invented by Plato. In this article, I would like to discuss Plato’s emphasis on perfectionism.

    Plato’s Influence and Motives

    Plato took his cue from Hesiod and other early Greek philosophers, but especially Heraclitus. Heraclitus ‘discovered’, during a period of political turmoil, that every sensible thing changes constantly. He eventually became disillusioned about the changes he observed and argued against the belief that the existing social order would remain forever. But Heraclitus was not giving up on the existing social order. This fact becomes clear in another element of his philosophy with the potential for a new kind of turmoil. According to Popper, 1 the emphasis on change in Heraclitus’s philosophy was combined with a belief in an immutable law of destiny.

    After Heraclitus, philosophers including Parmenides, Democritus, Plato and Aristotle dedicated themselves to solving the problem of a changing world. Both Parmenides and Plato relegated this world to a phantom-like existence. They theorized ‘that the changing world in which we live is an illusion and that there exists a more real world which does not change‘. (p. 127) In other words, the world we live in is just a copy of that perfect world. The world we can’t see is more real than the world we live in.

    The Capture of Western Thought

    One wonders how, in 2500 years, this has not been identified as blatant trickery. How odd that we never get around to questioning the relevance or theoretical usefulness of perfection itself. How strange that no one objects to their world being superseded by an ideal world in Plato’s head.

    It is true that Plato didn’t invent the idea of perfection. Previous to the ancient Greeks, Hinduism saw perfection as its primary spiritual goal. But in the Western world it was Plato’s realm of perfect things that influenced Christianity.

    Plato wrote that one had to transcend the imperfection of reality; Aristotle defined perfection as potential being fully realized and expressed; St. Thomas Aquinas concluded from Aristotle that perfection should be one of Christianity’s highest goals.

    Plato’s ideas have also mingled with Jewish and ancient Greek mystical cults to create the tradition of Western mysticism, including Hermeticism and Gnosticism, Theosophy, Freemasonry, and some forms of modern Paganism. In addition, Theosophy influenced the early Western perception of Tibetan Buddhism.

    Plato’s Influence on Education and Career Choices

    Fortunately, context is becoming more clear regarding the effect on individuals of perfectionist beliefs. In an article entitled The Illusion of Perfection, Robert Fritz acknowledges that perfectionism carries built-in assumptions that remain unquestioned. For example, he questions Richard Bach who said, “There is such a thing as perfection… and our purposes for living is to find that perfection and show it forth…”

    One common result of this belief is the responsibility it puts on people to strive for unreachable or undesirable goals. “It reminds me of what Lucy said to Charlie Brown when he told her that we are here to help others. ‘What are the others here for?’ She asked.” (as cited by Fritz)

    Fritz’s article follows perfectionist thinking to its cultural conclusion. “Schools give their students aptitude tests designed to measure their abilities. Then, guidance counselors sit down with these students, and give them advice. Their advice usually suggests pursuing a career based on their aptitude. If the student is good at math, become an engineer; if you are organized, become a manager...”

    In this way many end up in careers they never cared about because they thought they were obligated to develop their talents and abilities without regard to other possibilities.

    Another result of this approach is that many people believe they can’t learn and develop unless they already have gifts to develop. And if they do have gifts, their identity becomes tied to this purpose. They think they are defined by how well they develop their gifts. Since there is no way to reach the ideal of perfection, there is no way to win.

    Democratic Utopias

    If may be that the idea of perfection can be discarded without any great loss of culture or history, but we don’t know that yet. We haven’t explored it thoroughly enough. Democratic versions of utopianism also exist. For example, Sir Thomas More’s book, Utopia. In addition, American colonists created several utopian communities. They all emphasized spiritual perfection, although they differed in their beliefs. From the American example, we can see that the meaning of perfection differs from one group or individual to another, and also from one era to another.

    Today, it is assumed that ‘the American Dream’ is economic. However, that is not how it started out. “The concept of the ‘American Dream’ was created by Puritans in the early 18th Century American colonies. It was also based on the idea of perfectionism. Puritans viewed this New World as a fresh start from the old World of Great Britain and strived to create a society of elite people held under the highest standard of God.”

    The Link Between Puritanism and Transcendentalism

    It is time we paid attention to Plato’s influence on our world.

    1. The Open Society and its Enemies, Routledge, London and New York, 1994 ↩︎

  • Harold Kaplan said ‘humanist aspirations’ are the dominant American intellectual tradition. 1 But an abstract notion of democratic humanism is only part of the story. Kaplan explains democratic humanism in the context of writers of the American classics: Emerson, Thoreau, Cooper, Poe, D. H. Lawrence, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Twain, and Henry James. They composed the American classics and the poetry of democracy, and in their works we see hints of the strange continent that confronted them. Kaplan deciphers their experience through the historical context, their own letters and the works of European sympathizers. Their response to this unique time and place was to create a body of literature recognized today as the American Classics.

    Humanism and America’s Citizen Poets

    “How does one define humanism then? In the American context the necessary assumptions were that man was both the first cause and the final end of his experiences and that he has in some unmentioned respect a dominance over his history, his present state, and his future.” (p. 3)

    Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman were citizen poets. But this is also true of Melville and Hawthorne, who had opposing temperaments. They were all critics of their civilization, but beneath the criticism was a deep allegiance. ‘If we have a moral tradition that supports democracy, it is largely their creation’. (p. ix)

    The Metaphor of the Frontier

    The ancestors of these authors had arrived on the American continent with their heads full of the old world. By the 18th century, they were finally ready to formulate a debate with that world and distinguish themselves from it. This might account for the way American culture developed on a parallel track with native culture. They wrote about the native inhabitants, but they were obsessed with the burden of creating a new, non-European culture.

    Kaplan says that in some respects, modernity came to America at the beginning of its history. ‘The frontier supplied the best historical metaphor for both crisis and inspiration in a world without sovereign moral authorities’. These American authors ‘faced the deep insecurity of a quarrel between man and his civilization’. They took the cultural initiative of defining the terms of their own freedom, and for that reason, they seem like an avant garde for the modern consciousness.

    The Poetry of Democracy in Debate With the Old World

    Democracy was part of the debate with the old world. And freedom. And morality. And it wasn’t confined to American writers. That’s also true today. Hannah Arendt, for example, interpreted Hermann Melville’s Billy Budd as a rebuke against the French Revolution. That may be what Melville intended. However it seems to me that when conservatives disapprove of the French Revolution, they are trying to erase it from history, and that is more troubling than the Revolution itself. And Arendt was a conservative.

    An important contributor to our conversation is Chris Hedges, who often quotes Hannah Arendt. Hedges often quotes Melville’s Moby Dick as well. This is fitting because Hedges is a Calvinist, as was Melville’s mentor, Nathaniel Hawthorne. In our conversation, we are fortunate to have Hedges’s view of the American Classics in addition to that of Harold Kaplan and others. We need all of these voices and literary sources together to orient ourselves and our democracy in this time and place.

    Billy Budd

    The following is Harold Kaplan’s commentary on Billy Budd. This is a spoiler alert. If you haven’t read Billy Budd, you might want to read it before continuing.

    “In fact the ability to appreciate him (the ‘Handsome Sailor’) is what marks the line between good and evil, faith and despair… It is clear, from such expressions, as well as the longer development in Billy Budd, that the ‘Handsome Sailor’ was a man who reflected for other men their best sense of themselves...

    “The effect is to say that the ‘Handsome Sailor’ is universal in his humanity, and superior at the same time. He is, significantly, a democratic hero in another sense. In his various embodiments he is associated with revolutionary action, with mutiny, and the over-throw of authorities… The tension between resistance and conformity dominates the long development of the theme, a point which fulfills expectations for a democratic hero. In the last complete incarnation, Billy Budd cheers for the ‘Rights of Man,’ but also dies affirming Captain Vere.” (p. 189)

    It may seem surprising that Hermann Melville is a model for our contemporary neoconservatives. They appreciate what they see as Melville’s superior resistance to authoritarianism. I hope we can look at these authors through our own eyes and decide for ourselves what they were trying to tell us about our world. Maybe we can also expand on their vision.

    Chris Hedges: The Miracle of Kindness

    1. Democratic Humanism and American Literature, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1972 ↩︎

  • Was the Enlightenment democratic? According to Harold Kaplan, Americans accept without question the effects on the United States of the Reformation and the Enlightenment. He wrote:

    “We do not question that the twin roots of American national history were the religious revolution, which broke the Catholic hegemony, and the secular Enlightenment, which finally broke the traditional political structures, monarchical and hierarchical, of Europe…” (p. 14)

    ((Harold Kaplan, Democratic Humanism and American Literature, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1972, p. 14)) (T

    When I first started thinking about the social effects of America’s mythology, I questioned the religious basis of the Enlightenment. Now I’m questioning its democratic basis.There is no question that the Enlightenment made the United States possible. But there have always been concerns about its effects. Are we capable of talking about these concerns in the Enlightened United States?

    The short answer is, not necessarily. One faction of our enlightened forefathers, the federalists, wanted a continuation of Britain’s monarchy with a king-like president. Others wanted to create a new kind of government unlike Britain’s. Unfortunately, the new-government faction lost the debate. The best they could do was add the Bill of Rights to curb federal power.

    Although we might wish the anti-federalists had been successful, they were part of the same class as the federalists. One result of their class outlook was that they did not see a problem with inequality. They accepted slavery in particular.

    American Politics versus Enlightenment Governance

    Was the Enlightenment Democratic?

    As stated above, America’s government is an Enlightenment creation. In this light, it was interesting to discover that during the 2016 presidential election that we are not allowed to elect our chosen presidential candidate. After loudly objecting to our defeat, most of us accepted our limitations, unlike the Trump faction. That’s who we are.

    Trump

    Trump’s base apparently missed that demonstration of how democracy works. He used our act of good will to promote himself. Now we are observing billionaires and Freemasons trying to claw back democracy, and Trump’s supporters don’t bat an eye.

    You could say the aftermath of the 2020 election has been a Free-masonic temper tantrum. And it’s not going away. Freemasonry is part of our political history. The important lesson here is that our system offered no protections against a candidate like Donald Trump.

    Biden

    On a positive note, the Biden Administration has responded to many of our demands. It’s not what we envisioned in 2016. We thought a complete change of direction was needed to address climate change and the shortage of resources. But the truth is, no politician, including Bernie Sanders, can run a campaign on a platform of lower living standards and personal sacrifice. And this is what we need. If some mythical self-sacrificing candidate were to win anyway, the markets would remove him in short order.

    However, Biden’s political situation has been complicated by events in Palestine. As a recipient of AIPAC money, he supports Israel’s attack on Gaza. In addition, AIPAC is threatening to primary any political candidate who criticizes Israel’s bombing campaign. And our government does not object. Perhaps the most worrying part of this is that it is taking place over the objections of people all over the world. This is another lesson about American politics.

    Class Structure Was Here From the Beginning

    America has always had distinct social classes but no one bothers to explain how this came about. Immigration, of course. Groups immigrating to the colonies included Puritans (religious fundamentalists), Quakers (religious liberals), and Borderers. This last group wanted personal liberty without interference from society or government. But the largest group of English immigrants to the United States arrived between the years 1642 to 1675. They consisted of 45,000 Cavaliers of King Charles I, and their indentured servants. They had lost their former status in England because they were on the losing side in the English Civil War. However, they remained royalist, Anglican and Aristocratic.

    Some say they wanted to re-create in Virginia the hierarchal, farming society they had left behind. When their servants began to die, the Cavaliers’ descendants imported African slaves. Cavalier immigrants included ancestors of George Washington, James Madison, James Monroe, John Marshall, and other first families of Virginia.

    The descendants of the Cavaliers only stopped supporting the Stuart kings during the reign of Charles II. They turned against Charles because he appointed his own people to offices in Virginia and gave cultivated land to his favorites, among other injustices.

    Summary

    Was the Enlightenment a democratic movement? Not as much as it could have been. It seems Ben Franklin was not quite honest when he said democracy is ours if we can keep it. It is reasonable to question our form of government and the Enlightenment ideals that made it possible.

error: Content is protected !!