Can democrats criticize the Enlightenment? In Harold Kaplan’s analysis of modern literature, he doesn’t criticize the Enlightenment (late 17th to early 19th century), but he mentions it as a timeframe for a modern state of mind which has been detrimental to western thought.1 He doesn’t criticize the Enlightenment in Democratic Humanism and American Literature either.2 He mentions it rarely, for example when he mentions that Melville’s ‘insights deserted the confident ideas of the Enlightenment’. Kaplan is a democrat. His analysis of Democratic humanism analyzes how well the writers of American classics defended democracy.
(more…)Category: Foundations
Unspoken questions wind their way through the national conversation. Where are we going? What can we expect in the future? Will we survive? How can we prepare? Anxiety is increased by omens in the sky and the weather. In myth and religion we hope to find promises and instructions. We hope to rediscover our foundations. But we also find lamentations. We are not children who deny the possibility of destruction and death. Not now. The worst is already upon us. We’ve seen families swept away in the flood and burned in the fire. Let’s face the future like wise men and women. Let’s sit down together like elders of the tribe. Let’s mourn what is lost and love what remains.
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Can Democrats Criticize the Enlightenment?
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Religion Must Guide the Political Moment
Reading Time: 7 minutesThe religions that are most liable for the current political crisis are Judaism and Christianity. Some may find fault with this statement. They will say religions are irrelevant; today politics are part of a secular world. This is in spite of the fact that the religions of Judaism and Christianity prop up the far Right’s nationalist aspirations. Alternatively, the religious will say that their particular religion is on the side of righteousness. In this view, everyone who disagrees with them, meaning the secular world, is evil.
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Modern Israel is Anti-West
Reading Time: 5 minutesIn this article, I hope to correct the way progressives think about modern Israel. I think much of our secular sympathy for Jewish people comes from the fact that the Nazi regime hated them and persecuted them. In retrospect, we had that in common with the Jews: the Nazis hated the West as well. But Israel has more in common with war-time Germany than it does with the West. Modern Israel is anti-West. In short, progressives seem stuck on the political contradictions of Israel. Christians give the Jews an additional benefit of the doubt because Christianity and Judaism are kin, religiously speaking.
The West is Israel’s Biggest Victim
Sometimes this preference for modern Israel takes the form of a belief. We believe that the Israeli government’s atrocities are aberrations from Israel’s ideal nature. I will argue on the contrary that Israel’s behavior is the result of her true nature. To put it plainly, modern Israel does not now and never has possessed an ideal nature separate from its atrocities. Worse, Western countries are not simple bystanders to Israel’s actions. The West may be powerful enablers of Israel’s drama, but The West is also Israel’s biggest victim.
Israel and the West Against Hamas Where Does the Far Right End and Israel Begin?
Where doest the Far Right End and Israel Begin? To the United States, the German far right’s critique of the West, seems completely unique to World War II. But Israel hijacked our thinking. According to Rabbi Simon Jacobson of Chabad, Israel opposes the West as much as Germany ever did. For that matter, Israel opposes the entire world. Why? Modern Israel has a race theory that rivals that of the Nazis. Richard Rothschild calls Chabad’s race theory Modern, ‘Moral,’ Reactionary Jewish Racism. This racism does not admit political causes of the strife in Palestine.
Similar to the Netanyahu government’s dependence on the Old Testament story of Amalek, Rabbi Jacobson argues that the conflict in the Middle East started not with rivalry over the land, but with Jacob and Esau. Israel and Palestine are at war because they are descended from two archetypes. It’s a clash of civilizations.
A Clash of Archetypes/Civilizations
Rebecca, the mother of Jacob and Esau, was told she had two nations within her. Jacob was the father of the jewish people and Esau represented Western Roman Christianity. They remain at odds. Their immediate ancestors, Ishmael and Isaac, were not at peace either. Therefore, it’s not a surprise at all in Jacobson’s telling that their children and grandchildren are still enemies.
Strangely, after explaining how the line of Jacob is superior to the line of Esau, Jacobson then claims to promote peace. For example, he says Christianity’s war against Judaism proves that peace is possible, because Christianity was ‘tamed’. Translation: peace means the acknowledgement of Jewish supremacy.
Self-Serving Interpretations of Scripture
Based on a mix of sources, including the Zohar, Jacobson says ‘one regrets Hagar had Ishmael‘ (Ishmael was Abraham’s son through Hagar, Sarah’s handmaid). He points out that Ishmael was not circumcised until 13 years of age. As a result, God gave Ishmael’s posterity a portion for a period of time in Israel, and decreed that the children of Ishmael will rule the land for that time. But like their circumcision, which was not complete, it will be temporary. And it will be over a period of time when the land will be desolate. Then these people will prevent the children of Israel from returning to their place until the time has come to return the land to the Jewish people.
As a citation for this astonishing conclusion, Jacobson gives the page number: 32-A in the Zohar. I didn’t find his citations helpful, but I include them on the chance that someone else can use them. Then he continues: The children of Ishmael, the Arab nations and the Muslim nations, will cause great wars in the world, and the Children of Esau will gather against them. It’s a war between the West the the Muslim Arab world.
The Defeat of the Christian West
The war will go back and forth where the children of Esau, the Christians, and Romans and so on, will rule over the Ishmaelites. But the Children of Esau will not inhabit the land. The Holy Land will not be given over to them. At that time a nation from the ends of the earth will be aroused against evil Rome, and wage war against it for three months. Nations will gather there and Rome, referring to the Western World, will fall into their hands until all the children of Esau will gather against the nation, against that nation, from all the corners of the world. Then God will be roused against them. (And this is the meaning of the verse, for God is a sacrifice in Butra?). (That’s in Isaiah 3:46?) and afterwards it is written that it may take hold of the ends of the earth in (Job 38:31?) and he will defeat the descendants of Esau from the land and break all the powers of the nations, the nations’ guardian angels.
There will not remain any power of any people on earth except the power of Israel on earth (and this is the meaning God is your shade upon your right hand in the book of Psalms 12:15?), and then he concludes with verses talking about how ultimately we will come to the end of days, where on that day, God shall be one and his name one, and all the people of the nations of the world will recognize the name, and the truth of this one God each in their own way, (and that’s from the Book of Safia 3:9?) and then Blessed is God forever, amen and amen, and that’s how the Zohar ends.
False Humility
From here, he spends some time giving advice on humility and on how God wants harmony. But before peace can happen, there will be the period of these confrontations. What does that mean and translate in our lives he asks? That we all have within ourselves conflicts between our faith and the values that we believe in, and sometimes how do you implement that for example that has not compromised some of your ideals, due to so-called the realities on the ground. The challenge is how do you integrate the two.
Indeed!
Rothschild criticizes this belief system in more detail. For example, it is extremely disturbing that Chabad teaches similar divisions between peoples as the European far right. In this view, peoples of different nationalities belong to different species, with nothing in common. There is no universal man.
Modern Israel considers the West her enemy. And after squandering the West’s support, the Israeli’s believe that they will rule over the West with the approval of a Jewish God. Modern Israel is anti-West.
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Divisions in the Postwar Fascist International
Reading Time: 19 minutesOswald Spengler was inside the Munich Beer Hall on November 8, 1923, when Hitler launched his putsch. Such encounters convinced him that the Nazis were the worst sort of proletarized street rabble. But although he cultivated an aura of political detachment, he was highly political. He wrote Prussianism and Socialism in 1919, in which he took part in the struggle against Russian-style Marxism, German social democracy, and Weimar liberalism. He once transferred funds from a right-wing German politician and former Krupp director named Alfred Hugenberg to one of the Bavarian paramilitary leagues known as the kampfbunde (Coogan pp. 58-59). This was the beginning of divisions in the postwar Fascist International.
The Right-wing versus the Nazis
Spengler was right-wing, but he was not a Nazi. As a political monarchist, he thought real government must be aristocratic, since every nation in history was led by an aristocratic minority. He voted for Hitler in the 1932 elections as part of a broad conservative bloc, but he believed that movements like Nazism were symptoms of Europe’s decline. Hitler’s populist rhetoric, as well as the Nazis’ hooliganism and pandering to the masses, reflected Germany’s problem rather than its solution.
In The Hour of Decision, Spengler attacked the political left for its noisy agitation as a foundation for individual power. But Ernst Roehm’s Stormtroopers were just as bad. Spengler also criticized Italian Fascism.
For Fascism is also a transition. It had its origin in the city mobs and began as a mass party with noise and disturbance and mass oratory; Labor-Socialist tendencies are not unknown to it. But so long as a dictatorship has ‘social service’ ambitions, asserts that it is there for the ‘worker’s’ sake, courts favor in the streets, and is ‘popular,’ so long it remains an interim form. The Caesarism of the future fights solely for power, for empire, and against every description of party (Coogan p. 59).1
Spengler Falls Out With the Nazis
The year Spengler’s book was published, 1933, was also the year the Nazis took power. The Nazis courted him at first, but when his book became an instant bestseller they tried to halt sales. They attacked Spengler’s ‘ice-cold contempt for the people,’ his worship of aristocratic and monarchist society, his pessimism, and his denial of race. (To be clear, Spengler, Francis Parker Yockey and others who argued against the racial basis for anti-Semitism, had no more love for the Jews than the Nazis did. They believed in Jew hatred, but in a more spiritual form.)
It didn’t take long for Hitler’s archivists to discover that Spengler’s great grandfather, Frederick Wilhelm Grantzow, was partly Jewish. In addition, Spengler was too close to Germany’s old ruling classes for comfort. His allies included wealthy business magnates and right-wing nobles like former German chancellor Franz von Papen. Last but not least, Spengler was not an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist.
Educated Germany’s Contempt for Judaism, Islam and Christianity
Spengler shared the view of many educated Germans that Judaism was an exhausted belief system that had played out its historic vitality many centuries ago and only survived in Europe’s ghettos like a fossil preserved in amber. And these educated Germans were not any more friendly to Islam and Christianity. Spengler and his ilk even included the Nazi Volk in this group. He believed all of these belief systems were world-denying, escapist, and anti-historical. In his view, Western antipathy was not due to racism at all. It was cultural.
The Fascists Cherry-Pick Spengler’s Ideas
Francis Parker Yockey was completely on board with this view of race. However, unlike Spengler, he believed Hitler was ‘The Hero’, or the new Caesar, not because of but in spite of his ‘plebian racial musings’ (Coogan p 61).
Yockey Learns about Carl Schmitt at Georgetown
Carl Schmitt was Germany’s leading Catholic International and constitutional law theorist and an advisor to Franz von Papen during the Weimar period. He joined the NSDAP May 1933. Yockey became a devotee of Schmitt while studying at Georgetown University.
Yockey plagiarized Schmitt in Imperium. His defense of Machiavelli sounds eerily similar to that of Jacobin. Machiavelli’s book was defensive because Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards, and Turks had invaded Italy during his century.
When the French Revolutionary Armies occupied Prussia, and coupled humanitarian sentiments of the rights of Man with brutality and large-scale looting, Hegel and Fichte restored Machiavelli once again to respect as a thinker. He represented a means of defense against a foe armed with a humanitarian ideology. Machiavelli showed the actual role played by verbal sentiments in politics (Yockey, as quoted by Coogan, pp. 74-75)
Carl Schmitt, the Conservative Revolution, the State of Exception, and the Messiah
Spengler inspired a Weimar intellectual current known as the Conservative Revolution. Novelist Ernst Junger and Martin Heidegger were part of it. They believed liberalism, democracy, individualism, and Enlightenment rationalism were part of a superficial and materialistic capitalist society. When the liberal order collapses, a new virile man of adventure will arise–a kind of Western ronin willing to risk all and with a mystical belief in the state.
Schmitt particularly despised Weimar parliamentary democracy. His theory for overcoming constitutional rule was the ‘state of exception, or ‘legal positivism’. This meant suspending the constitution during a crisis. He believed ending the constitutional order opened a path for a new heroic ‘politics of authenticity’.
Like Spengler, Schmitt saw the state as supreme. He believed government proceeded in three dialectic states: from the absolute state of the 17th and 18th centuries; through the neutral state of the liberal 19th century; to the totalitarian state in which state and society are identical.
Father Walsh observed that the final stage of Schmitt’s idea ‘was the monopoly of all power, all authority, all will in the Führer, conceived and accepted as Messiah endowed with unlimited legal prerogatives in a state under perpetual martial law.’
Schmitt Endorsed Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives
Schmitt endorsed Hitler’s bloodletting on The Night of the Long Knives, but the killing cut both ways. Hitler also used the purge to intimidate his potential rivals in the old military and political establishment who had given him political respectability. He even murdered one of Franz von Papen’s closest aides. The following quote is the Nazi challenge to the old guard.
“If we had relied upon those suave cavaliers (the reactionaries), Germany would have been lost. These circles sitting in armchairs in their exclusive clubs, smoking big cigars and discussing how to solve unemployment, are laughable dwarfs, always talking and never acting. If we stamp our feet, they will scurry to their holes like mice. We have the power and we will keep it” (Joseph Goebbels, June 1934, as quoted by Coogan, p. 77).
The Nazi’s Turn Against Schmitt
In 1936, the Nazis turned on Schmitt and began investigating his ‘non-Aryan’ wife. The SS organ Das Schwarze Korps regularly threatened him. According to Coogan, this was simply a power-play by Himmler to seize total police and judicial power.
Schmitt Retreats to Geopolitics with His Grossraum Theory
In response, Schmitt turned to international law. In 1939, he gave a speech to the Institute of Politics and International Law at the University of Kiel about the legitimacy of an extraterritorial order, a ‘great space order.’ His rationale: the nation-state system had broken down. Now the world had the British, Soviet and American empires, as well as Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. These dwarfed older concepts of ‘nation.’ Enormous shifts in state power demanded corresponding shifts in international law. Grossraum was the proper way forward. Grossraum referred to an area dominated by a power. This would not be the result of organic geopolitical expansion but of a ‘political idea’. Schmitt had in mind a German-dominated Central Europe. This was a political idea distinct from its two universalist opponents–the laissez-faire ideology of Anglo-Saxon capital and the equally universalist Communist ideology. It was a German version of the American Monroe Doctrine.
This impressed Hitler. It also influenced Chamberlain’s agreement with Hitler over Eastern Europe’s 1939 Munich Agreement.
Yockey Objects to Schmitt’s Materialism; Haushofer Praises Schmitt; the Nazis Defend the Third Reich’s Racial Justification
Yockey’s criticism of Schmitt focused on Schmitt’s materialism. He said the traditional geopolitics of Schmitt was based on physical facts or geography. Instead, the soul is primary. But at the same time, he believed Schmitt’s researches had permanent value and that large-space thinking was essential.
Yockey praised Haushofer; Haushofer supported Schmitt; and the Nazis disagreed with Haushoffer and Schmitt. Haushofer thought Europe needed a concept like pan-Slavism or pan-Asianism–ideas seeking to manifest themselves in space. Nazi racialists argued that pan-Slavism or pan-Asianism would remove the racist justification from the concept of the German Reich.
Yockey and Newton Jenkins
While Yockey was attending Northwestern’s law school in Chicago, he served as a ‘kind of aide-de-camp’ to a lawyer and important right-wing activist named Newton Jenkins. Jenkins had found his way to fascism from the progressive movement.
Jenkins went to school at Ohio State and Columbia University’s Law School. After serving in World War I, he returned to the Midwest and became legal counsel for many farm groups and agricultural cooperatives. He also began working closely with the Progressive Party and used his radio program to support FDR for President. However, in 1932 he ran for senate in the Republican Party’s primary and was able to win 400,000 votes.
The Yockey-Jenkins connection came to the FBI’s attention through an informant. This informant had seen a March 31,1954 column by Drew Pearson, which attacked Soviet ties to the far right. In his column, Pearson revealed that the FBI was interested in Varange (Yockey’s pen name in Imperium), and he identified Varange as Francis Parker Yockey. As a result, a former acquaintance of Yockey’s from the late 1930s contacted the FBI. According to FBI files, this informant met Yockey in 1938 at the Chicago office of Newton Jenkins. An excerpt from the report follows.
_______recalls that Yockey was an intense, secretive, bitter individual who did not tolerate anyone who would not wholeheartedly agree with his solution to world problems…_______stated that…Yockey was ‘power hungry’ and gave the impression that he would not stop until he became the most powerful individual in the world. _______believes that Yockey will not succeed in this because he creates too may enemies. ________feels that Yockey will go along with any program whether it stemmed from Moscow, Buenos Aires, Yorkville, Tokyo or Washington, D.C., as long as he can be the leader. ________stated that Yockey believed that the world capitalist structure was about to crumble and that fascism was the only solution, but he insisted that it be the Yockey form of fascism and none other…
Coogan pp. 85-86
Jenkins Progressivism
Jenkins was active in promoting the America First Committee the Keep America Out of War Committee, and similar organizations working for the defeat of Russia and Communism. He also maintained ties to the German American Bund. According to George Britt’s 1940 book, The Fifth Column is Here, Jenkins has an extensive record of pro-Hitler comments. Also, Jenkins attempted to unite fascist and Nazi groups into a third political party. This led the Bund to christen him The Leader of the Third Party (cited by Coogan).
Jenkins Makes a Right Turn
Jenkins began his right turn in 1934 when he formed The Third Party under the slogan ‘U.S. Unite?’ Party headquarters was 39 South La Salle Street, the same office where the FBI informant had met Yockey. In his pamphlet, The Third Party, Jenkins portrayed himself as a progressive opposed to big business. He explained that he was founding his new organization because Franklin Roosevelt had backed down on implementing the more radical aspects of the New Deal. He also warned that the British Empire had too much influence over American foreign policy.
Jenkins favored active government intervention in the economy and thought Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany were models for America. To support his efforts, Jenkins began contacting Hitler’s supporters in the ‘Friends of the New Germany‘, which soon became the German-American Bund.
The German-American Bund, the Union Party, and Jenkins’s Ambition to Unite 125 Rightist Groups
In 1936, Jenkins became campaign manager for the Union Party, which turned out to be the most significant third-party challenge to FDR. After the Party’s defeat, Jenkins maintained relations with the Bund. He spoke at the Bund’s 1937 National Convention at Camp Siegrried in New York. He then launched his own paper, American Nationalism, which served as the propaganda arm of yet another Jenkins organization, the American Nationalist Political Action Clubs (ANPAC). This organization aimed to unite over 125 rightist groups into a coordinated movement (Coogan, pp. 87-88).
Yockey Was a Weimar ‘New Right’ Anti-American
Yockey’s attraction to both Spengler and Conservative Revolution theorists like Carl Schmitt made him virtually unique in the American far right. American supporters of Nazi Germany were usually German Americans, crude anti-Semitic nativists, or staunch conservatives who viewed Hitler as a heaven-sent bulwark against Bolshevism. By contrast, Yockey represented a Nazified version of the Weimar “New right” Conservative Revolutionary current.
Yockey devoted over a hundred pages of Imperium to describing an America incapable of ‘destiny thinking’. In this he was heavily dependent on Oswald Spengler, who had the following to say about ‘hundred percent Americanism‘:
A mass existence standardized to a low average level, a primitive pose, or a promise for the future?…America with its ‘intellectually primitive upper class, obsessed as it is by the thought of money, lacked that element of historic tragedy, of great destiny, that has widened and chastened the soul of Western peoples through the centuries. America was little more than a boundless field and a population of trappers, drifting from town to town in the dollar-hunt, unscrupulous and dissolute, for the law is only for those who are not cunning or powerful enough to ignore it (Spengler paraphrased by Coogan p. 132).
Spengler goes on to liken the United States to the Russian form of State socialism or State capitalism. It doesn’t grow organically. It grows through soulless mechanization. (You will recall that the idea of an ‘organic’ state was the first heresy of German geopolitics according to Father Walsh. Here Spengler faults the United States for growing mechanically, rather than organically.)
Yockey was every bit as insulting as Spengler. Coogan sums Yockey’s arguments up this way: ‘A Nation, in short, is a people containing a Cultural Idea. Because America lacks a Cultural Idea, America, by definition, is not a nation.’
Yockey also faults what he called the ‘Rationalist Religion’ of America’s Founding Fathers. He argued that this ‘Religion’ came from England through France. But rationalism did not dominate Europe until the 19th century, thanks to Europe’s tradition. America never had this tradition. Furthermore, America’s rationalist and materialist ideology made her vulnerable to domination by the Jewish ‘culture-distorter’.
Yockey’s racism was intense and visceral (Coogans words). It also had ideological roots. Coogan supports this argument with quotes from Hegel’s The Philosophy of History. Yockey was dealing with his own racism, Hegel’s influence, and Spengler’s description of great cultures (Coogan p. 135). For more of Yockey’s criticism of America see Coogan’s Chapter 14, Empire of the Senseless.
Imperium: a New Kind of Fascism
Coogan says the enthusiasm of rightist leaders for Yockey’s book, Imperium, reflected a need for a new kind of fascism. He cites the call for a united Europe by Sir Oswald Mosley. Mosley envisioned ‘a great unity imbued with a sense of high mission, not a market state of jealous battling interests.’
The Right’s Doubts About Yockey
But Mosley turned against Yockey. Mosley not only declined to publish Imperium, he blocked a promised review in the Union Movement paper. This brought much criticism from prominent members of Mosley’s group who wanted more dynamic leadership. Mosley’s biographer Robert Skidelsky explained Mosley’s rationale.
It was part of a process of Mosley’s extrication from the dead hand of pre-war fascism and a rededication to a new, and more moderate crusade. This meant coming to terms with American hegemony over Western Europe. It was this approach that Yockey opposed.
While still in Mosley’s group, Yockey had had discussions about the American question with A. Raven Thomson, one of Mosley’s closest aides. Thomson later wrote in a letter to H. Keith Thompson that Mosley had refused to finance Yockey’s book because it was full of Spenglerian pessimism and unnecessarily offensive to America. After Yockey broke with Mosley’s group, they found him to be ‘so conceited and unstable in personal relations that it is almost impossible to work with him‘ (Coogan, p. 171).
Coogan adds a historical explanation for the break: The political climate in Europe in 1948 had become dangerous, with the Berlin Crisis raising the possibility of war. Suddenly the fascist ‘third way’ was called into question.
Yockey Turns to the East
Eventually, Yockey’s book was financed by Baroness Alice von Pilugl. It was during his association with Pilugl that Yockey began advocating far-right cooperation with the Russian conquest of Europe (Coogan p. 172). And this was not the only attempt to ally the radical right with the USSR.
An anti-Yockey British-German group called NATINFORM (the Nationalist Information Bureau) observed Yockey’s meetings. By 1950, it was clear that Yockey et al were promoting a definite line of policy and seeking collaborators. The main trend of this policy was based on Imperium and Yockey’s concepts. In July of 1950, Guy Chesham, who was acting as a representative of Yockey, outlined a policy of infiltrating into all Nationalist groups with a view to seizing control from within or organizing sabotage.
The political direction of this activity was to be violently anti-American, avoiding all anti-Bolshevist conceptions. No anti-Jewish propaganda was to be permitted [at] first (Coogan pp. 173-174).
Yockey Has Company
Yockey was not acting alone in this effort. The right-radical Socialist Reich Party (SRP) was founded in Germany aroung the time of Imperium’s publication. It called for a pro-Eastern neutralist Germany, which was almost identical to Yockey’s position. Yockey’s organization, The European Liberation Front (ELF) was in some respect the SRP’s British cousin.
Two Russias
In the Russia chapter of Imperium, Yockey argues there are really two Russias: The first Russia, symbolized by Peter the Great, wanted to imitate the high culture of the West. But neither Peter nor his successors could implant ‘Western ideas below the surface of the Russian soul’.
…the true spiritual Russia is primitive and religious. It detests Western Culture, Civilization, nations, arts, State-forms, Ideas, religions, cities, technology. This hatred is natural and organic, for this population lies outside the Western organism, and everything Western is therefore hostile and deadly to the Russian soul.
According to Yockey, the Russian Revolution was a revolt of both Russias, the Marxist Western-oriented intelligentsia, and the anti-Western underclass.
The European Liberation Front and Strasserism
Some denounced Yockey and his European Liberation Front (ELF) for being Strasserists. Arnold Leese of the British far right denounced them in the early 1950s. The American Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell would label ‘Yockeyism’ a Strasserist perversion of true National Socialism.
Coogan defines Strasserism historically as the anti-big business northern wing of the Nazi Party. It was led in the mid-1920s by the brothers Gregor an Otto Strasser. They mainly recruited factory workers in the industrial north. The Strassers insisted that the Nazis were socialists who would break up the domination of big capital and the vast landed estates and called for an alliance with Russia and the ‘East’ against England and France. (England and France represented the hated enforcers of the Versailles Treaty.) Hitler was angry about their propaganda and their independent power base. He drew his strength from the more conservative Bavaria.
Otto Strasser created the Black Front after he quit the NSDAP to protest Hitler’s alliance with big business and aristocratic elites like the Krupps and the Papens. The Black Front was ‘Strasserist’. Hitler murdered Gregor in 1934 during the Night of the Long Knives.
Historically Yockey was not a Strasserist, but he was a small-s-strasserist in some ways. He had a national Bolshevist foreign policy, rejected biological determinism and hated capitalism. He also maintained ties with Alfred Franke-Gricksch, a key leader of the postwar German far right and a former member of Otto Strasser’s Black Front.
Yockey, Franke-Gricksch, and the Bruderschaft
Both Yockey and Alfred Franke-Gricksch advocated close cooperation between the far right and the East Bloc. The ELF, was also linked to Franke-Gricksch, who was the leading German advisor to the Union Movement at that time. Through Franke-Gricksch, Yockey established relations with an organization referred to as the Bruderschaft (Brotherhood) in Germany.
The Brotherhood was one of the most important groups in Germany’s postwar fascist elite. They used intelligence and organizational contacts with fascist movements around the world to play a role in the Nazi underground railroad that smuggled war criminals to South America and the Middle East. Franke-Gricksch had joined Major Helmut Beck-Broichsitter soon after he founded the Bruderschaft in a British POW camp in 1945-46. In addition, Franke-Gricksch brought with him a plan to recapture power by slow methodical insinuation into government and party positions.
Franke-Gricksch joined the Strassers’ northern wing of the NSDAP. He also became a founding member of the Black Front. Franke-Gricksch went into exile with Otto Strasser after Hitler took power, but later he deserted the Strassers. He may have been responsible for the destruction of the Black Front after his defection. Shortly after he rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the SS, the Gestapo was able to penetrate and liquidate the underground apparatus of the Black Front.
Franke-Gricksch’s son, Ekkehard, explained his father’s pre-war activity in a letter to Willis Carto’s Institute for Historical Review. He said that Hitler had distanced himself from his original National Socialist goals. After Alfred Franke-Gricksch fled the country, he returned and came to an agreement on this point with Himmler. He secretly joined the Waffen SS under the name Alfred Franke.
Alfred Franke-Gricksch’s and the German Freedom Movement
According to Coogan, Franke-Gricksch’s activity at the end of the war is more of a concern than his activities during the war. In April 1945, Franke-Gricksch was the head of the Personnel Section of Himmler’s RSHA (the Reich Security Main Office). This was Nazi Germany’s CIA. He spent the last days of the war preparing a blueprint for a postwar fascist Europe. This was The German Freedom Movement (Popular Movement). Among other demands…
it demanded a Nazi Party purge to free it ‘from a degenerate party bureaucracy and the…party bosses, from a ruling caste in State, Party, and Party organizations, which has deceived itself and others for years’ (p. 194).
The German Freedom Movement outlined a new pan-European foreign policy program. It included a 12-point ‘European peace settlement’ and a new ‘Sworn European Community’ of peoples. A ‘European arbitration system’ would secure some form of voluntary allegiance to a ‘Germanic Reich.’
One scholar described Franke-Gricksch’s plan as being based on the ‘call of the blood’ but tempered ‘by the introduction of a federal system and excluding any claim to sole leadership by Germany.’
This movement envisioned a post-Hitler Europe freed from the biological exaltation of the German race. SS technocrats had developed a similar concept. Their ranks included SS Brigadier General Franz Alfred Six.
Pan-European Fascism and the Rehabilitation of Carl Schmitt
SS Lieutenant General Werner Best was another advocate of pan-European fascism. He was a former Conservative Revolutionary, a fan of Ernst Jünger, and a counter-intelligence expert with a doctorate in law. He later became a director of Amt II, which supervised administrative, economic, and judicial matters for the RSHA. Franz Alfred Six was his first AMT II assistant.
From 1940 to 1942, Best was in charge of civil administration for all of occupied France. Then, in December 1942, he became Reich Plenipotentiary to Denmark. He used his power to rehabilitate Carl Schmitt inside the SS because he saw that Schmitt’s Grossraumordnung theory could be useful in the legal reconstruction of Europe. This allowed Schmitt to lecture to elite audiences throughout occupied Europe and Spain.
In Schmitt’s testimony at Nuremberg, he explained that Best’s circle wanted to become an intellectual elite and form a kind of German ‘brain trust’. But since a brain trust was a contradiction in Hitlerism, the concept of Grossraum became their touchstone.
The Reinvention of Fascism and Coogan’s Suspicions About Yockey
After Hitler’s suicide, technocrats like Best, Six, and Franke-Gricksch were free to reinvent fascism. This plan went forward in spite of the fact that until the autumn of 1948, Franke-Gricksch was in a POW camp in Colchester, England. He maintained his leadership position inside the Bruderschaft while in prison. After his return to Germany, he became the group’s ideological leader. Franke-Gricksch preached that the mission for the Bruderschaft was to midwife the creation of a new kind of elite rule now that ‘the era of the masses has passed.’
Coogan suspects that Yockey was acting in concert with the Bruderschaft while he was in Wiesbaden. Sometime in 1948, Yockey began publicly arguing in London that Russia was the lesser of two evils. Then, in 1949, after Franke-Gricksch had returned to Germany, Yockey, Guy Chesham, and John Gannon founded the ELF.
Divisions in Italian Fascism
There were also postwar divisions in Italian fascism. The divisions inside the MSI dated back to 1943, when the Fascist Grand Council deposed Mussolini. Italy’s Movimento Sociale Italiano (or MSI) was the largest and best-organized fascist movement in postwar Europe. After the Nazis freed Mussolini from an Italian jail, he established a new government known as the Salò Republic in the Nazi-held north of Italy. Subsequently, former fascist leaders and veterans of Salò’s National Republican Army founded MSI.
Because Mussolini believed his downfall was the fault of the old Italian elites, he returned to fascism’s radical roots and demanded the nationalization of Italian industry. After the war his Salò Republic supporters continued to represent a kind of northern Strasserist tendency inside Italian fascism. However, a more moderate wing of the party defeated the Salò radicals at the June 1950 convention. By the fall of 1951, the MSI had reversed its earlier opposition to Italian participation in NATO.
The Radical Wing of the MSI Accepts Yockey’s Imperium
Yockey’s Imperium especially appealed to the most radical wing of Italy’s MSI. MSI’s founder Giorgio Almirante praised Imperium after its publication. Almirante spoke for MSI hardliners opposed to turning the group into a purely parliamentary organization. Yockey was a member of this anti-MSI hard right.
Julius Evola
The journal, Imperium, published Evola’s first postwar political statement in 1950, in which Evola argued against all forms of ‘national fascism’ (including the Salò Republic). He demanded instead a new ‘Gemeinscaft Europas’ best symbolized by the Waffen SS. The arrest of Evola in June of 1951 was one example of the complex political situation in Italy in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Political Pragmatism and NATO in Italy
Italy’s Christian Democrat-led government, and its supporters inside both the Vatican and the CIA, needed the far right to help them oppose the Communists. Many MSI members, however, objected to any cooperation with the state. The MSI had only two options: It could continue to maintain a revolutionary ‘anti-bourgeois’ stand while having some parliamentary presence, or it could accept the status quo and become a full parliamentary organization. A second great choice involved foreign policy. Which superpower was Italy’s main enemy–Russia or America?
Advocates of the parliamentary road generally accepted the postwar order, which included Italian support for NATO. Rejectionists insisted on anti-American neutrality, with some even open to a tactical tilt East. The MSI’s founders, supporters of the Salò Republic, held radically anti-bourgeois ‘left’ corporatist fascist views. Almirante, for example, had earlier helped create the Fasci di Azione Rivoluzionaria (FAR) in 1946.
FAR member Mario Tedeschi said that real fascism had been subverted by conservative forces during the ventennio [twenty years] of power. He accused the monarchy and the plutocratic bourgeoisie of conspiring to bring down Mussolini in 1943. FAR violently opposed the Italian Communists, while at the same time hurling bombs at the U.S. embassy in Rome. FAR members claimed they were remaining true to the radical ideals of Salò.
Italy’s Communist Party (the PCI)
However, MSI’s fear of Italy’s Communist Party (the PCI) caused it to form anti-PCI electoral blocs with the Christian Democrats in Rome and other cities. MSI’s biggest electoral base was also in the conservative south, where a more pragmatic and traditional ‘southerner’ Augusto De Marsanich defeated Almirante in January 1950 for the position of MSI general secretary.
One key to Almirante’s downfall was that he had opposed NATO. In the spring of 1949, the MSI had voted against any Italian role in NATO. But after a bitter debate at the party’s congress in June, the group reversed itself and accepted NATO membership. Not long after that, De Marsanich took power. At this point, the Italian Communist Party began to court the MSI’s anti-NATO wing.
Young Radicals Try to Escape the Embrace of the Christian Democrats and the Communists
In the war between the ‘left’ and ‘right’ wings of Italian fascism, many young radicals tried to escape the embrace of either the Christian Democrats or the Communists. They considered these parties surrogates for the Americans or the Russians. In the early 1950s, veroniani like Pino Rauti, Clemente Graziani, and mario Gionfrida organized gang-like paramilitary groupings. Believing that democracy was a ‘disease of the soul’, they turned to Baron Evola for inspiration.
Evola Criticises Yockey and Fascist Youth
Evola and Yockey had much in common. They were both admirers of Spengler and held similar views on the question of race. And Evola thought Yockey’s book was important. However, he posed questions for Yockey and a whole generation of fascist youth.
Evola thought Varange (Yockey’s pen name in Imperium) had fundamentally misread Spengler by not taking seriously enough his emphasis on the difference between Kultur and Zivilization. Civilization could only be a time of decline. Yockey insisted on building the Imperium even though the formation of a super-rational and organic united Europe was inconceivable. Furthermore, Yockey had confused the age of Caesarism with the coming of Imperium. His belief that the breakup of the Third Reich made way for the emergence of a pan-European new fascist movement was romantic nonsense in Evola’s view. The NSDAP was a problematic formation in the first place and its breakup could not be transformed into a harbinger of a coming victory.
Dada: Evola’s Long Assault on the Bourgeois Order
Evola first began his assault on the bourgeois order as Italy’s leading exponent of Dada. He collaborated on the Dada journal Revue Blue, and often read his avant-garde poetry in the Cabaret Grotte Dell’Augusteo. He exhibited his Dada paintings in Rome, Milan, Lausanne, and Berlin. Inner Landscape 10:30 A.M. is still displayed at Rome’s Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna.
Evola discovered Dada in high occultism. There, he learned that it was a dissolution of outdated art forms. In the mid-1920s, he studied magic, alchemy, and Eastern religion as part of Arturo Reghini’s Gruppo di Ur. Reghini claimed to be a representative of the Scuola Italica, a secret order that had supposedly survived the downfall of the Roman Empire. He was a major figure in many Italian theosophical and anthroposophical sects and became a leader of the Italian Rite in Freemasonry. The Italian Rite, created in 1909, was allied with the anti-clerical Plazza del Gesu branch of Masons.
In 1927 Evola published Imperialism pagano, which denounced Catholicism’s influence on Italian culture starting with the alliance between the Church and State begun by the Roman Emperor Constantine. Evola’s denunciation led Father Giovanni Battista Montini, the future Pope Paul VI, to attack Imperialism pagano. In the Catholic magazine Studium, Montini used Evola’s writings to show what could happen to those who become too obsessed with a ‘metaphysics of obscurity, of cryptology of expression, of pseudo-mystical preciosity, of cabalistic fascinations magically evaporated by the refined drugs of Oriental erudition.’
Evola and René Guénon
Through Reghini, Evola learned of a French Orientalist named René Guénon. Guénon was an important figure in the European occult underground. Evola completely embraced Guénon’s argument that the modern age’s interest in democracy, mass culture, and materialism are all manifestations of the Kali-Yuga. Guénon taught that the Kali-Yuga had infected thinking to the point where Western philosophy has become ‘purely human in character and therefore pertaining merely to the rational order. This rational order replaced the genuine supra-rational and non-human traditional wisdom (Coogan p. 294).
Evola considered fascism another expression of the Kali-Yuga. In this way, he shared Spengler’s objections to Mussolini and Hitler’s pandering to the masses. However, Evola thought the dissolution that came with fascism would clear the way for a new Golden Age.
Even though Evola borrowed Guénon’s ideas, the two men became rivals in a way. Guénon eventually rejected contemporary spiritualistic and theosophic fads in favor of ancient spiritual traditions (Traditions). Evola, on the other hand, refused to separate man from the Gods.
- Kevin Coogan, Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International, Autonomedia, Brooklyn, New York, 1999. ↩︎
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Debating the Enlightenment and its Alternatives
Reading Time: 22 minutesThis 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-BrownSteven 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-BrownJohn 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-BrownJohn 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-BrownJohn 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.
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No Christmas for Bethlehem
Reading Time: 4 minutes
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 CoreI 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.orgWhat 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.
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Political Zionism is an Anachronism
Reading Time: 7 minutes
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. 38The 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. 41-42According 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. 45Did 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. 44Next it will be necessary to understand the difference between the religious practice of Christian Zionists, orthodox Christians and Jews.
- 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 ↩︎
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Defeating Zionism
Reading Time: 4 minutesI 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.
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Was the Enlightenment Democratic?
Reading Time: 3 minutesWas 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)) (TWhen 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
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.