tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-129124002024-03-12T19:12:23.517-07:00The Spirit RoomA personal archive of essays, <i>belle lettres</i>, speeches, poesy, and all kinds of desultory bits of inspiration, beauty, and sobriety ...Quixiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03126711689901268060noreply@blogger.comBlogger50125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12912400.post-36361037593286089782021-04-07T01:11:00.004-07:002021-04-07T08:37:03.940-07:00Towards an Understanding of Human Fanciness <p> </p><p><span face="ProximaNova, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #242f33; font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: 0.15px;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HRKSLI92OSA/YG1oCNGu4JI/AAAAAAAAJTE/DRDo8c1nd98jsALNE81YncNdkLZn2o0yACLcBGAsYHQ/s680/R-986747-1316371724.jpeg.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="680" data-original-width="599" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HRKSLI92OSA/YG1oCNGu4JI/AAAAAAAAJTE/DRDo8c1nd98jsALNE81YncNdkLZn2o0yACLcBGAsYHQ/s320/R-986747-1316371724.jpeg.jpg" /></a></div>
Of all the human drives which lie beyond the animal realm of preservation and propagation, perhaps the least understood or most overlooked is the infinite capacity for fanciness. The word fancy, originally a contraction of fantasy, has through time become so versatile as to be almost useless, which makes it all the more useful for our purpose. It is altogether fitting that fancy functions as a noun, verb or adjective and has meanings ranging from inclination and ornamental excellence to caprice and empty inflation of worth. In all its current uses there is a slight weakness, a mode of the emphatic that stops short of even being decisively sarcastic. In short, the word fancy is a fancy word. Let us turn to its creator. Any attempt to characterize with a single term such a long and multifarious experiment as the human race must necessarily fail unless that term is itself mired in endless diversity and elusive tone. Such a term is fancy.<br /><br />From pre-history it can be seen that what raises man above the animals (if indeed this can be claimed at all) is a special capacity that has long and mistakenly been identified as reason, but which we now venture to call fanciness. It is now generally accepted that reason cannot bear the weight that Western tradition has assigned to it as the definitive characteristic of the irrational animal. Reason implies necessity: a faculty for responding to given situations; a tool for synthetic problem solving and continued learning. This is, of course, not wrong, only partial. What reason overlooks is the insatiable drive towards problem-creating, making simple situations insolubly difficult, elaborating every aspect of life beyond function, beyond beauty, beyond usefulness, and finally beyond sustainability. This unreasonable, mindless complexity is the true hallmark of our species. It is our glory and undoing. Neither glittering towers nor mass graves are the work of a rational animal Culture and its annihilation are unnecessary, only the rewards of constant and unmotivated growth-for-its-own-sake.<br /><br />The illogic of fanciness would have man cut off his feet to wear them on his head, followed by the legs, torso, etc., until the head rests on the ground and the last fancy move would be to return the head to its original place atop the neck, where it could then devote itself to something more useful- an essay perhaps, or digging a hole in which to bury old hats. Here we arrive, naturally, at an abyss. If our fancy animal wanders far enough to the right or to the left, it will find in either direction the yawning chasm of the abyss (so the world is round after all). To the right is the path of self-extension, of leaving one's mark, of empire; to the left is the path of self-annihilation, of losing oneself in the world, of love. These are the twin ecstasies of fanciness, which are inseparable: to shine with an unbearable brightness, and in that brightness to disappear.<br /><br /><br />~(from Ashes: the surviving fragments of John Kane. Sleepytime Gorilla Press 1955)Quixiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03126711689901268060noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12912400.post-8801605432152419022016-07-21T14:56:00.002-07:002017-09-10T12:14:20.134-07:00Divine Evil <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<h2>
A Neglected Argument</h2>
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Standard versions of the argument from evil concern the evils God fails to prevent: the pain and suffering of human beings and non-human animals, and the sins people commit. The most ambitious versions of the argument claim that the existence of evil is logically incompatible with the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, and completely benevolent deity. More-cautious approaches maintain that the existence of pain and sin ought to make us skeptical about any such deity. Or that the extent of the suffering in the millions of years of sentient life on Earth gives us strong reason to think no such deity exists. Or that particular cases of extreme anguish and human cruelty make belief in this sort of deity irrational. And so on.
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In my view, even the most ambitious version succeeds conclusively. There is no evasion, unless the standards of success are set unreasonably high. Those who try to escape the conclusion have to insist that no use can be made of disputable premises, however antecedently credible those premises may be. But philosophers can and do dispute anything. Some, for example, are prepared to argue about the law of non-contradiction. The faithful who claim that the strong argument from evil leaves open a bare possibility--the sort of possibility only a philosopher could cherish--gain a victory in name only.
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What interests me here, however, is a simpler argument, one that has been strangely neglected. The standard versions, I said, focus on evil that God fails to prevent. But we might start instead from the evils God himself perpetrates. There are plenty of these, and, in duration and intensity, they dwarf the kinds of suffering and sin to which the standard versions allude.
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For God, if we are to believe an orthodox story, has prescribed eternal torment as a punishment for insubordination. There are, of course, disagreements about what it takes to be insubordinate. Some say that the mere fact of not believing in him is enough to mark you out. Others think that you must violate one of the divine commandments. However the test is set up, it is clear that there is some complex of psychological attitudes and actions that suffices for damnation.
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The orthodox story is explicit about the temporal scale of the punishment: it is to go on forever. Many of those who tell the orthodox story are also concerned to emphasize the quality of the punishment. The agonies to be endured by the damned intensify, in unimaginable ways, the sufferings we undergo in our earthly lives. So, along both dimensions, time and intensity, the torment is infinitely worse than all the suffering and sin that will have occurred during the history of life in the universe. What God does is thus infinitely worse than what the worst of tyrants did. However clever they were in prolonging the agonies of their victims, their tortures killed fairly quickly. God is supposed to torture the damned forever, and to do so by vastly surpassing all the modes of torment about which we know.
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Although those who elaborate the orthodox account are sometimes concerned with the fit between crime and punishment, there is no possibility of a genuine balance. For the punishment of the damned is infinitely disproportionate to their crimes. Even the worst of this-worldly offenders is only capable of inflicting a finite amount of suffering. However many times that offender endures the exact agony he caused, there will still be an infinite number of repetitions to come. Moreover, in each of these repetitions, the torment will be intensified and extended across all possible modes.
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This is to assume, of course, that the damned have committed some crime. If the orthodox story supposes only that they failed to believe in God, then the injustice is even more palpable. Alice the agnostic may live a life full of charity and good works, notable for its honesty, fairness, and loving care of those around her. If lack of faith suffices for damnation, then the divine reward will be an eternity of the most exquisite agony.
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<h2>
Varieties of Theism</h2>
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So I think the usual philosophical discussions of the problem of evil are a sideshow. We seem to strain at the gnat and swallow the camel. Why is this?
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Many will say that what I have called the “orthodox story” is a cartoon theism. Real, grownup theists believe something much more sophisticated. The standard versions of the argument from evil prove attractive to philosophical unbelievers because they are taken to deploy only uncontroversial premises, the sorts of premises grownup theists can be expected to have to grant.
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I reply that this overlooks two important points. First, the neglected argument does apply against mainstream versions of theism preached all around us. There is a strong case for claiming that the overwhelming majority of Christians and Muslims, both in North America and the rest of the world, are committed to the “orthodox story.” There are many passages in the New Testament (and in the Koran) that tell, or presuppose, that story, and they are read at face value.
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Second, the reply fails to appreciate how difficult it is to avoid the “orthodox story” while simultaneously retaining the distinctive doctrines of Christianity. To evade the neglected argument, you must contend that prominent passages of scripture should not be read literally. Perhaps there are alternative ways of reading the idea of God’s punishment or understanding torment. But we need to hear not just <i>that</i> there are such ways but <i>what</i> they are.
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I concede that the neglected argument doesn’t apply against deism. If you simply hold that there is an omniscient, omnipotent, completely benevolent deity but have no views about his plans for rewarding and punishing people in any hereafter, then you can save your energies to defend against the more familiar problems of evil. But, I shall suggest, you will have to acknowledge that your doctrine isn’t Christianity.
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There are several ways in which you might try to elaborate a more substantial theism. Perhaps you think that talk of judgment and punishment isn’t to be taken literally. Maybe what happens in this life is that people make choices. Some choose salvation, and others damnation. Those who are damned receive what they have chosen. But if damnation is torment, or if it is a state for which eternal torment is an apt metaphor, then trouble recurs. For if we suppose that the alleged choice is ill-informed and irrevocable, then God does evil. He places people in a situation in which they must make a judgment that binds them for eternity, and he knows that some will be so inadequately informed that they will opt for an eternity of torment (or for a state for which torment is an apt metaphor). It is hard to distinguish between God and the parent who equips the nursery with sharp objects galore and plenty of matches, fuses, and dynamite. Moreover, it is very difficult to see how our actual choices could be anything except ill-informed. For the world in which we live is one in which we have scanty evidence about any hereafter of potential torment, and one in which those who tell tales about God’s judgments and punishments offer incompatible suggestions about what should be done to avoid torment. On many versions of Christianity, of course, our lack of evidence is an integral part of the divine plan, for it is supposed that the greatness of faith consists in the ability to trust in the absence of--or even in the teeth of--the evidence.
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Things would be different if those were damned are stubborn, persisting in their choice even when fully informed. What would these people be like? They must prefer a state of torment (literal or metaphorical) to the alternative of salvation. Why do they see subordinating themselves to God as worse? Perhaps because they set supreme value on their own independence. But, if God is genuinely worthy of our worship, then to be fully informed is to recognize all the attributes that make this so. It is hard to recognize how resistance could survive an eternity of demonstrations of the divine magnificence.
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Even if we suspended doubts about the possibility of stubbornness in the face of full information, we can still ask why God fails to prevent damnation. This returns us to the familiar versions of the argument from evil. A standard explanation is on offer: incompatibilist freedom is of supreme value. It is alleged that even an omnipotent, omniscient, and completely benevolent deity who wished to create a world in which incompatibilist freedom was found might have to allow for the existence of stubborn beings who chose eternally to remain in torment.
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I reply in two parts. First, I question the supreme value of incompatibilist freedom. Imagine two worlds. In one of these, actions are produced by psychological states, themselves caused by prior psychological conditions and by the pressures of the environment, those conditions and environments in turn being caused by earlier circumstances, all in accordance with the conditions philosophers introduce to allow for compatibilist freedom. In the second world, just the same actions are performed, but in accordance with your favorite incompatibilist account. Why should we think of the second world as a great advance on the first? In what, precisely, does its superiority reside?
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If you are inclined to think, as I do, that there is no superiority to be found, you will not be satisfied with the thought that God may have to allow some people who eternally choose damnation. You will think that God could have settled for a world with compatibilist freedom and that he could have set things up so as to keep his creatures out of trouble. So, to escape the problem, theists will have to explain why the value of incompatibilist freedom is so great that it outweighs the extraordinary torment endured by those who continue forever to resist.
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Yet even if we allow that incompatibilist freedom is a great value, it’s still worth asking why God has arranged things in the way we find them. He could leave incompatibilist freedom intact while doing far more luring and urging that he does. Assuming we have to make a choice, why must it be made through a glass darkly? Once again, God seems negligent, at best.
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Instead of substituting our free choice for God’s judgment and punishment, theists may contend that we should reinterpret the notion of torment. Lurid anecdotes about unquenchable fire, sulfur, and brimstone are not to be taken literally. Damnation simply consists in the state of being insubordinate to God. This proposal depends on supposing that torment is an apt metaphor for insubordination.
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I deny that it is. Contented atheist that I am, my state of alienation from the deity is not one for which torment is an apt metaphor. Christians may respond that this judgment is shallow: from my mundane perspective, I may judge myself happy enough in my denial of God. Once I am fully informed, however, I will appreciate the grossness of my swinish satisfaction, and torment will be an apt description of my insubordinate condition.
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Now familiar troubles arise. Suppose, first, that my state of insubordination is unmodifiable: insubordinate on Earth, insubordinate eternally. Then indeed, I can envisage my eternal separation from God as being one of great anguish, as I come to appreciate the glorious bliss that is forever beyond my reach. But, as before, I have been placed in a dangerous situation, one in which my internal prospects were determined by a choice I was forced to make in ignorance. Once again, I have been treated unjustly.
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A second possibility is that I can make amends in the hereafter. When acquainted with the divine greatness in the divine plan, I accede and subordinate myself to God. Now, it seems, the metaphor dissolves. My state of insubordination is remedied, and I am no longer in torment. Perhaps the response will be that my torment endures because of the memory of my past insubordination. But why should the memory cause me more than a pang, if I rightly see myself as insubordinate because of ignorance and as remedying my insubordination in light of the facts? I might come to applaud those who made the correct choice from the earthly perspective, but it would be hard to justify chiding myself so severely that it would amount to anything like torment. Furthermore, if the memory does serve as a source of torment, then, once again, God has failed to prevent evil by permitting me to hazard my eternal felicity in a state of radically incomplete knowledge.
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The charge was that the neglected argument depended on a cartoon version of the hereafter. I reply that the strategy of reading the scriptures non-literally either fail to take torment as an apt metaphor for the state of damnation or else reinstates the problem. If the texts (and the doctrines drawn from them) are not radically misleading, then God remains as a source of divine evil.
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But the strategy has exposed another possibility: what if everyone repents and is saved?
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<h2>
Universal Salvation</h2>
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It is plainly possible for God to avoid perpetrating evil. He might not punish anyone. Or, perhaps, he might just administer ordinary finite punishments, designed, in some way, to change the psychological condition of those who had resisted him.
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I find the option of limited punishment mysterious. Presumably there is some great end that God has designed his creation to achieve, an end that is furthered by the repentance of those who had failed the earthly test. An obvious rejoinder, from those of us who find no great value in incompatibilist freedom, is that God could have saved himself the trouble of limited punishment by setting up the causal conditions so that the resisters didn’t go astray to begin with. Even if we acquiesce in the supreme value of incompatibilist freedom, however, inflicting torment seems quite unnecessary. An omnipotent God could be expected to convert resisters by other means--displays of magnificence, for example. If it is suggested that these are not guaranteed to do the trick, that the resistance may persist, then it should also be noted that, under the conditions of incompatibilist freedom, punishment also comes without any guarantee of repentance. Why should sticks work better than carrots?
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The idea of limited punishment supposes that God is disposed to punish his creatures so long as they remain insubordinate. If one of us resists eternally, then that person will suffer eternal torment. But perhaps this never happens. All of us may eventually knuckle under. We come to love Big Brother. We find the ministry of love irresistible. Yet this only diminishes the force of the neglected argument. God retains the disposition to punish those who resist, and to punish them eternally if they resist forever. In other words, even if he never inflicts the infinite torment, he is prepared to do so. He is ready to perpetrate evil far in excess of the sum total of pain, suffering, and cruelty manifested in the created universe. Divine evil continues to exist in the cast of the divine will.
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Some Christians are universalists. They maintain that God saves all of us. This happens not because everyone eventually falls into line, but because God isn’t disposed to punish any of his creatures. Now God is genuinely exempt from divine evil. He neither causes the infinite torment nor has any disposition to do so.
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Is universalism really a Christian option? Can Christians afford to deny divine evil? Christianity, properly so-called, requires a redemption. At its heart is the claim that Jesus was born to save us from something. The condition from which we have been redeemed must be truly horrible. What can be horrible enough except for eternal torment?
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Finite torment, perhaps. But for the sacrifice of Christ, God would have had to purify each of us individually, and that would have involved significant torment in the hereafter. God envisaged two possible scenarios. In the first, sinful humanity is unredeemed and all of us must be punished before achieving union with the deity. In the second, the crucifixion serves to cleanse us from our state of sin and no punishment after death is needed. Because God has no wish to punish any of us, he chose the second.
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But this apology fails. If each of us can be saved without punishment under the second scenario, then there is no differentiation between those with knowledge of the sacrifice of Christ and those who scoff, between the most devout saints and the greatest sinners. All of us can instantly be forgiven and brought into the bliss of salvation. If that were so, then there would be no need for punishment in the first scenario. The choice is between universal acceptance without the sacrifice of Christ and universal acceptance with that sacrifice. There is no redemption, no distinguishing the faithful from the insubordinate. Alternatively, if salvation is made possible for all by the death of Christ, but some who fail to appreciate this act of redemption need further cleansing in order to be saved, then we return to the idea of limited punishment. Universalism cannot be sustained.
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Orthodox Christians think that the suffering of Jesus gave us all a second chance but that some of us don’t avail ourselves of the opportunity. The redemption works for all of us by freeing us from the stain of sin (part of our human condition), but it doesn’t provide instant salvation for all. That’s why Christian theologians, and Christian preachers everywhere, emphasize the importance of faith, of following the precepts of Christ, and so on. If everyone wins without regard to performance, not only do all these doctrines drop away, but so too does the rationale of the earthly life. If even the most-wicked of people can be immediately forgiven without punishment, then there is no point to our life of trial in the vale of tears.
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So if there is a redemption, there’ll have to be a distinction between those who take advantage of it and those who don’t. What happens to those who don’t? According to universalism, they are not to be punished. God will place them in some condition without perpetrating divine evil.
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One possible condition would be nonexistence. Those who take advantage of the sacrifice of Christ, the faithful, are called to salvation. The rest of us simply die. You might worry, perhaps, that this is something of a waste. Couldn’t God have done better by increasing the fraction of those who would rise to the opportunity? Once again, the theist is likely to sing the praises of incompatibilist freedom. A world with fewer who were saved and more who depart into eternal sleep is better than one in which the ratio of sleepers to saved is decreased (even to zero), if the degree is purchased by exchanging incompatibilist freedom for its compatibilist counterpart. Even granting that, it seems appropriate to worry about the justice for individuals. Imagine a happy atheist, one for whom the earthly life goes well. From the standpoint of eternity, we might (and God presumably does) observe a life truncated. Our atheist didn’t turn to Christ, and so bodily death came as the end. Overall, however, we can see the life in positive terms because of the success of its mundane phase (its only phase as it turns out). The trouble is that other atheists (as well as agnostics and heathen worshipers) have earthly lives that are not so wonderful; some of them indeed endure sufferings that are, by our mundane standards, excruciating (although, of course, their pains are nothing in comparison with those inflicted in the orthodox story with which we started). From the eternal perspective, this life looks like an utter mistake, for its only phase is utterly dreadful. By bringing this person into being, God has brought about divine evil.
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The universalist Christian might reply that my assessment is wrong. God creates someone who turns out to suffer horribly. Bodily death comes as the end because, despite having the opportunity for faith, the atheist failed to turn to Christ; the resistance was free (in the incompatibilist sense). Arguments we have met before apply here too. Why is this type of freedom of such great value? Why not make the inducements to faith a bit stronger?
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I think universalists have a better reply. The afterlife is a more heterogenous affair than people have thought. The point of our earthly lives isn’t to divide us into two groups, one to live forever in unimaginable bliss, the other to suffer unimaginable torment. Instead of being tried, we simply discover who we are. Some, perhaps the most fortunate, find out that there are people for whom the adoration of the deity is the highest form of rapture; they appreciate Christ’s sacrifice and are summoned to the presence of God. Others resist the Christian message and develop different ideals for their lives. They are assigned to places in the afterlife that realize those ideals for them. Atheist philosophers, perhaps, discover themselves in an internal seminar of astonishing brilliance. Each of us finds an appropriate niche.
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This fantasy allows the sufferings of our mundane lives to be redeemed. Not all of us are destined for Christian salvation, for God’s eternal Sabbath, but everyone will receive a well-adapted reward. God does not treat all of us alike. But there is no divine evil.
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Redemption is taken to consist in making available to some, those who freely turn to Christ, the highest form of bliss. We are freed from sin, not so that we avoid the terrors of eternal damnation but so that we have the chance of gaining the most wonderful reward. We are as much freed for as freed from. But as I read the scriptures, the fantasy involves ignoring (or denying) crucial texts. It underplays the importance of sin. And, of course, it passes very lightly over the references to the torments of the damned.
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Most Christians follow a version of the religion that is committed to divine evil, evil perpetrated by God. Most, therefore, fall afoul of the neglected argument. Perhaps some do not. Perhaps some are inclined to accept the universalist fantasy I have just outlined. Can that count as a genuine style of Christianity? I shall leave that for the theologians to decide.
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<h2>
Can We Admire the Believers?</h2>
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Many Christians appear to be good people, people worthy of the admiration of those of us are non-Christians. From now on let us suppose, for simplicity’s sake, that these Christians accept a God who perpetrates divine evil, one who inflicts infinite torment on those who do not accept him. Appearances notwithstanding, are those who worship the perpetrator of divine evil themselves evil?
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Consider Fritz. Fritz is a neo-Nazi. He admires Hitler. Fritz’s admiration of an evil man suffices, we might think, to make Fritz evil.
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But perhaps this is too quick. Fritz’s evil character, we might say, arises not from his admiration for Hitler but from his willingness to behave in the same way. Simply admiring Hitler isn’t enough. One must also be disposed to emulate Hitler’s deeds; and if this disposition is present, one is evil, whether or not the admiration remains. Modest Fritz is not so disposed. He thinks himself unworthy. “Great deeds are reserved for great men,” he says. (Compare: “Vengeance is mine,” saith the Lord.) Fritz wouldn’t even beat up a defenseless weakling--not even with a dozen of his mates at his side. He might even go so far as to restrain them. “This is the Führer’s work, not ours,” he argues. Fritz knows very clearly what Hitler would want done. Even though he admires Hitler, he does not do it.
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Fritz is evil, it seems, simply because it is evil to admire someone who is evil. Or more exactly, it is evil to admire someone evil in full recognition of the characteristics and actions that express their evil. Evil is contagious, transmitted by clear-eyed admiration.
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Some worshipers of the perpetrator are obviously evil. They relish contemplating the appointment of the damned. Some of them even think that delight in the internal sufferings of worldly sinners will be a component of the bliss of the saved. Like Fritz, they may think that inflicting such suffering, or even any suffering at all, is beyond their humble station. They are glad that the perpetrator has instituted a division of labor. Their part is to forgive those who insult them, to turn the other cheek. They are happy in the thought that, by doing so, they will heap coals of fire on the heads of their enemies.
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Many other Christians are not like this at all. They are sincerely compassionate; they genuinely forgive their enemies. Yet they knowingly worship the perpetrator. Perhaps they do not like to think about it, but they firmly believe that, in the hereafter, their God will consign people they know, some of whom they love, to an eternity of unimaginable agony. Moved by this thought, they do whatever they can to urge others to join them in faith. Their deep sympathy with the unbelievers is expressed in efforts to persuade others to play by the rules the perpetrator has set. In worshiping the perpetrator, however, they acquiesce in those rules. They are well aware that many will not fall in line with the rules. They think that, if that happens, the perpetrator will be right to start the eternal torture. They endorse the divine evil. And that’s bad enough.
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Among those of us who do not worship the perpetrator, there are many who admire worshipers of the perpetrator. We admire some of our neighbors, recognizing their honesty, fairness, kindness, courage, and so forth. We admire religious people famed for their selflessness, their courage, or their scholarship--Mother Teresa, Father Murphy, Jean Buridan. Yet we know that they worship the perpetrator, endorsing his judgments about the propriety of eternal torment for some (including us), the perpetrator’s evil extends to them. They admire evil and are tainted by it. In admiring them, we too admire evil. Does the evil spread by contagion to us?
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What of those who admire those who admire those who worship the perpetrator? Are they too infected? If admiration transmits evil, then so do chains of admirers of arbitrary length. Eventually, almost every living person will be infected. It is almost impossible to avoid being hooked up to a chain that will terminate, possibly at a very long distance, in admiration of the perpetrator. Ecumenicism only makes matters worse. The more we are prepared to be tolerant in religious matters, the more we’ll be prepared to overlook the details of other’s theological views; the more we’ll focus on their exemplary behavior toward those around them: as more admire the perpetrator’s admirers, there will be more people for others to admire, and the contagion will spread.
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This will occur even if, someday, there are no more worshipers of the perpetrator, even if nobody remembers the perpetrator, even if nobody remembers anyone who worshiped the perpetrator, even if nobody remembers anyone who remembered worshipers of the perpetrator. The only ones to escape will be the committed misanthropes. Leaving aside those who find nothing admirable in humanity, everyone will be tainted with divine evil.
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The conclusion is absurd. It is also depressing. How can it be morally permissible to be tolerant of others and to appreciate their worth? What saves us from chains of contagion?
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Perhaps what saves us is that sometimes those who admire are not well enough informed. If Fritz did not know about Hitler’s evil deeds, thinking of the Führer only as a strong and patriotic leader who was restoring morale, then the misguided admiration would not mark Fritz as evil. Similarly, if I admire a worshiper of the perpetrator, recognizing that the worshiper appreciates the divine commitment to eternal torment, and if you admire me, not knowing of my admiration of the worshiper but recognizing my (occasional) good deeds, then the taint of divine evil does not spread from me to you. You are in the dark about the source of the evil in me. Like Fritz, you are an innocent. And, perhaps, your ignorance is far less culpable than his.
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Admiration, we might suppose, is a bit more selective than the examples suggest. We don’t just give it or withhold it. We admire people for particular qualities; sometimes we admire them despite perceived defects. I may admire the worshiper because she does so much for the poor and the sick. If I admire the worshiper despite his endorsement of the perpetrator, I place great weight on qualities that are genuinely good. You do not know of my knowledge of the worshiper’s acquiescence in the perpetrator’s rules, and my decision to give that relatively little weight in my overall assessment. If you did know that, you might have second thoughts about me; you might not admire me at all. So the chain of contagion would be broken.
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It is possible, then, to limit the spread of divine evil. Chains of contagion can be broken because admirers are often not fully informed about the attitudes of those they admire, because admiration can be a selective matter, a response to particular qualities. This is probably how things work in actuality. We are not all tainted with evil.
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A residual difficulty remains. What of the worshipers themselves? And what attitude should we non-believers have toward our Christian friends? Can they avoid contagion? Can we admire them and not be infected?
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If our friends believe the universalist fantasy, there’s no problem. They don’t worship the perpetrator, and we can freely admire them. But I suspect that the vast majority are more orthodox. They genuinely think that their God will commit those who do not accept him to eternal torment. They may prefer to not dwell on the point, but when they consider it, they accept his judgment. Of course, they do not see this as divine evil. Instead they talk of divine justice and the fitting damnation of sinners. If Fritz is clear about Hitler’s actual deeds, he will tend to use similar locutions. He won’t talk about evil and genocide but will praise the proper purification of the highest form of culture and the justified wiping out of a disease.
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Modest Fritz isn’t disposed to persecute the Jews in his neighborhood. Nor are our Christian friends inclined to rain suffering and humiliation upon us. Yet if Hitler, or one of his appropriate representatives were there, beside Fritz and his mates and the potential Jewish victim, Fritz would approve of the persecution’s being carried out by the proper authorities. So, too, with the worshipers. If the day of judgment were to arrive now, and they were to stand by and observe God’s decision to punish us--their unbelieving friends--they would endorse it. Perhaps they would grieve for the fact that the punishment was prescribed for us; they would be full of regrets that we had not listened to their warnings and urging; perhaps they would blame themselves for not having done more. But, in the end, they would worship the perpetrator; they would label divined evil as divine justice.
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Can we absolve them of evil for their collaboration? We might try to recall the many good things they do, the sufferings they alleviate, the comforts they bring. There is plenty to throw into the balance in their favor. We can admire their compassion, their perseverance, their selflessness. But can we admire them, despite their preparedness to worship the perpetrator?
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The balance seems to tilt in the negative direction. For, as the original neglected argument makes clear, the evil that God causes is infinitely greater than the entire sum of mundane suffering and sin. It is infinitely intense, and it lasts forever. However much pain our friends forestall or relieve, it is infinitesimal in comparison with the torments inflicted on a single individual who receives God’s damnation. Yet they are willing to testify to their perpetrator’s rightness in passing so severe a sentence. They are prepared to go on worshiping.
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Overall, it seems, our evaluation must be negative. They are like the tyrant whose many small contributions to his subjects’ welfare pale in contrast to the monstrous repression he will countenance. If we think of them as clear-headed, as fully aware of the character of their commitments in worshiping the perpetrator, we cannot excuse them.
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But most of us do, at least most of the time. Are we too conniving at the divine evil? Probably not, precisely because the neglected argument is neglected. The magnitude of the torment isn’t taken seriously. We dodge the consequence by keeping it all in soft focus, consoling ourselves with the thought that hellfire and brimstone are mere conceits, that grownup theists have gotten beyond the cartoon scenarios. That is probably the stance most favored by those who worship the perpetrator; starting from their trust in God, they suppose that there must be some nice version of the story, one that will not literally end with billions of damned souls writhing in eternal agony. Can they articulate a nice version that retains the distinctive ideas of Christianity?
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Non-believers have been able to excuse their religious friends on the grounds that they are probably not clear-headed about the commitments of their worship. We can think of them as good people who have not seen the perpetrator’s dark side. In bringing the problem of divine evil to their attention, I am presenting them with a choice they have previously avoided. Ironically, I may be making it impossible for myself to admire many whom I previously liked and respected.
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David Lewis</div>
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from <b><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Philosophers-without-Gods-Meditations-Atheism/dp/019974341X">Philosophers Without Gods</a></b><br />
2010
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<br />Quixiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03126711689901268060noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12912400.post-28336269195336279052016-02-08T05:39:00.000-08:002020-01-11T19:46:13.525-08:00Ayn Rand and the Music of Rush: Rhapsodic Reflections<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">and the mercury is rising </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">barometer starts to fall </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">you know It gets to us all </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">the pain that is learning </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">and the rain that is burning </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">feel red
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">still—go ahead </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">you see black and white—and I see red </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">(not blue)</span><br />
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—<span style="font-size: x-small;">Red Lenses </span><br />
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This essay could have been called “<b>Ayn Rand? Don’t get me started!</b>” But then I did get started and it seemed I would never stop.
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Rush is a group that justifiably has many loyal fans. The group deserves respect not only for their instrumental and compositional skills, but also because they have managed over more than three decades to play the music that they want to play, without concessions to either media-conglomerate pressures or passing musical fads. Indeed, Rush is practically a model of Howard Roark-like integrity!
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I have written about Rush before, in two books, one on the progressive rock trend of the late 1960s and 1970s, titled <b>Listening to the Future</b> (Martin 1998), and the other, titled <b>Avant Rock </b>(Martin 2002), on creative trends in rock music from the later Beatles to more recent groups such as Björk, Jim O’Rourke, Stereolab, Radiohead, etc. Before these two books, I also wrote a book devoted to the music of Yes (Martin 1996), which topic also bears, of course, on a discussion of Rush’s music and outlook. Both temporally and aesthetically, so to speak, I came to Rush through progressive rock. Perhaps as a result, and I realize that this is a generational thing, although I also count myself as an admirer of the group, I tend to consider Rush as “secondary.” The progressive rock era ran roughly from 1968–1978, from King Crimson’s <b>In the Court of the Crimson King</b> to Yes’s <b>Going for the One</b> (1977)—or, it might be said, to <b>Never Mind the Bollocks</b> (Sex Pistols, 1977). When I think of the most creative and virtuosic of the groups during that era, I am less likely to think of Rush. This is a very tendentious thing to say, but in some sense I have a similar view of Ayn Rand, that she is a secondary figure—not because I disagree with her arguments for the most part, which I do—but because I cannot think of her as a “major figure” in the philosophical canon.
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Before aficionados of either Rush or Rand (or both) get too riled, however, allow me to qualify this last statement somewhat. There are many artists and writers who may not be in the absolute forefront of creativity or significance and yet who have made important contributions and are worthy of attention. Furthermore, one quality that is shared by Rush and Rand is that each is <i>sui generis</i>, each created a field that is uniquely their own. Even though one can trace the elements that make up their respective approaches, still, there is no one else who is really like them. With Rand, there is the additional aspect of being a “phenomenon,” and therefore someone not to be ignored. Whenever I’ve done interviews about my work on progressive rock, or even just in casual conversation, it is almost inevitable that the question will arise, “What about Rush?” Similarly, it is still the case that undergraduates will ask about Ayn Rand. I hear this from my colleagues as well, and then they are surprised at the fact that I’ve spent some time trying to figure out Rand, her scene, and her appeal.
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One of my first experiences with Ayn Rand was when, as a teenager in the early 1970s, I woke up to “The Objectivism Hour” (I believe it was called) on the radio (which I had left on the night before). This was one of the FM “underground” stations: WBUS--the “magic bus”--in Miami, Florida. The station would often play Pink Floyd, Traffic, King Crimson, Caravan (for instance, I first heard “Nine Feet Underground,” from their superb album, <b>In the Land of Grey and Pink</b>, on WBUS), etc., along with “public service
announcements” from then--Yippie leaders Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin (who were based at that time in Coconut Grove). Such announcements provided helpful bits of advice such as “it’s not a good idea to go surfing in a hurricane” and “elections are a sham--don’t vote!” (Words to live by, and I still accept both to this day.) Rand’s hopeful message that day was that people who have decided to end their lives (commit suicide) should not be interfered with by the state. Not exactly what I needed to hear at that stage of my life, but still, my curiosity was piqued, as much by Rand’s stern and morally upright tone as by the content of the message.
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I had already developed an interest in philosophy, inspired, as I have been in most things in my life, by the intertwined influences of a Christian upbringing and the radical political and cultural currents of the late 1960s. My main experience of bookstores at that point was just the Waldenbooks at the mall, and of course the philosophy section there was not very extensive. Among the more attractive covers on display were those of Ayn Rand’s books, so I bought a couple. Strangely, I can remember being attracted to some of what Rand said, and, again, perhaps even more to her forthright tone, and yet I didn’t go very far with her. Most likely this had to do with certain commitments I still associated with Judaism and Christianity, even as I was breaking with certain metaphysical aspects of them (simply put, I increasingly found that I couldn’t accept the God of classical theology). These commitments were, again, increasingly combined with the radical currents that some have grouped together under the heading of “’68 Thought.”
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Later, Kant came to play a large role in my intellectual and political life, and of course Kant is the figure whom Rand vilifies most of all. Like Kant, but like Aristotle for that matter, I could not conceive of an individualism that is not co-implicated in mutuality and a fabric of basic social obligations. This is what might be called “strong autonomy” in Kant, something that exists at the intersection of ethical regard for the Other and the intersubjective basis of epistemology. By contrast, I would say that Rand’s notion of individualism is rather weak, because it is founded upon unsustainable notions such as not owing anyone else a single moment of “my” time. In <b>Listening to the Future</b>, I address this question, albeit briefly and schematically (and perhaps a bit flippantly— e.g., when I referred to Rand’s ferocious cigarette habit, specifically the way that Rand would respond to questions about the rationality of smoking by lighting up another one), in terms of the question of children. I think a good deal of social theory can be done around this question—were children come from, how they are made (and the gender relations in any given society), and what obligations people have to make the world hospitable for them and to create opportunities for them.
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In his exceedingly generous treatment of my brief look at Rand’s philosophy in relation to Rush, Chris Matthew Sciabarra cites the relevant passage from <b>Listening</b>, where I note that there is no room for children in her novels (at least the later, big ones), “there is no place for anyone who was not a fully formed adult ... People must come from nowhere, so that they will not in any way be in debt to other persons” (Martin 1998, 270-71; cited in Sciabarra 2002, 174). In Atlas Shrugged, then, we have the formation of an ideal society, the result of “the mind” having gone “on strike,” out of a relative handful of individuals, all adults. To my mind, what this primarily demonstrates is that the problems of the Robinson Crusoe scenario—much beloved in neoclassical economics and sufficiently demolished by Marx—are not overcome by having a gaggle of Crusoes. Were John Galt and Howard Roark not children at one time, in a society with gender relations, parent-child relations, a certain level of productive technique, class relations and divisions of labor, to say nothing of a standard of living that is based in part upon colonial and imperial domination of Third World countries? Did Galt and Roark just show up one day, fully formed, one a philosopher and the other an architect?
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The fact is, these fellows didn’t even show up fully formed from the head of Ayn Rand, even insomuch as they are characters in novels, and not, for instance, real, “sensuous” (to use a term of which Marx was especially fond of in his earlier writings) human beings who go to school to study architecture or philosophy with teachers, and for whom the matter of keeping the digits limber enough to perhaps someday design another building even while breaking rocks in a quarry (for how many hours a week?—is this just an “individual” question?) would not just be a question of keeping one’s head together.
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This goes to the <i>sui generis</i> issue as well—even to the extent that I can admire Rush and Rand (the latter a bit grudgingly, for sure) for having “their own thing” (and leaving aside for the moment the point that a great rock group is a matter of “their,” a certain collectivity where the whole is greater than the merely quantitative sum), and even insomuch as I might accept the notion of persons as “singularities” (as per Kierkegaard, Derrida, and others), I don’t think that the notion of “the” philosopher, composer, inventor, architect, or what-have-you, of the “epoch” is sustainable, at least not from a contemporary perspective. I’m not so skeptical of canon formation as to think it a mere accident that Plato or Augustine or Descartes or Kant were major figures of their respective periods. It is not only an historical accident that accounts for our greater appreciation of JS Bach than for Buxtehude (though Bach himself acknowledged Buxtehude as the greatest organist of their time), for Mozart than for Salieri, or for Beethoven than for Czerny—though Rand, as we know, from her great heights of musical knowledge, preferred her “tiddly-wink music” to Beethoven, and one can safely assume that Rush for her would go the way of all rock music. (Beethoven, the greatest of Romantics, denigrated by someone who presumed to write <b>The Romantic Manifesto</b>—that boggles my mind into a quagmire of flummoxation.<sup style="color: red;">1</sup>) The thing is, Buxtehude, Salieri,and Czerny were all very good composers, just as Rush is a very good band. In the pantheon of the great and the very good, I would put Yes and King Crimson, for example, in the former category, and Rush in the latter—but it is no simple or mean feat to join the ranks of the very good.
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However, there are indeed social and historical factors that make possible the centrality of these figures. There really is such a thing, as Einstein put it, as standing on the shoulders of giants, which is the sort of thing Ayn Rand seemed completely unable to acknowledge. Thus, Howard Roark makes such startling discoveries as “form follows function” (undoubtedly this had never occurred to any previous architect) or “there is no collective brain.” One has to wonder if Rand’s own inability to recognize great art is integral to her inability to recognize the sources of such art. The same might be said of philosophy—though the dominance of analytic and positivist model in the English-speaking countries has brought about a similar inability in many academic philosophers. What William O’Neill (1971) characterized as the “with charity toward none” point of view might instead be called the “ungenerous” cast of mind—again, not that Rand was some unique expression of this, either. It might be said that there is no “collective brain” just as there is no “collective liver.” (I’m reminded of Quine’s discussion of synonymy, where he takes up the point that “creature with a brain” and “creature with a kidney” are both descriptive of mammals [Quine, 1964].) For sure, there is a point to be made here about philosophical materialism, that “there never was an idea that a brain didn’t think” (this was said by a Marxist whose ungenerous cast of mind rivals Rand’s).
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Be that as it may, neither the production of ideas nor even the production of brains and livers is an “individual” thing—and, on the latter pair of organs, it might be pointed out once again that we humans (and other mammals) acquire our brains and kidneys in our mother’s wombs. If having charity toward none is meant as a critique of the politics of pity, which is bound up with the politics of resentment, then there is something that can be affirmed there, but one already gets this in a more systematic form from Nietzsche and, it might be argued, Rousseau.
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Speaking of whom: in the midst of gathering these scattered, decidedly unsystematic reflections, I happened to run into Deena Weinstein as I was coming out of a café near DePaul University, where we are both professors. Deena and I are the university’s “professors of rock music,” though I would dare say that she is the better-known, having been featured on MTV, for instance. Professor Weinstein wrote the book <b>Heavy Metal</b> (1991), and she is also known for her writing on Rush, including a study cited by Sciabarra. When I mention that I had been asked to discuss the Rush/Rand connection, she offered that “it’s really all Rousseau.” It was a bitterly cold Chicago winter evening, so we couldn’t continue this line of thought out there on the sidewalk, but it seems worthy of further exploration by Rushologists. Allow me to offer a comparison similar to the Rush/Rousseau one.
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Sometimes, when I have taught my department’s course on “Business, Ethics, and Society,” I’ve shown the film, <b>The Fountainhead</b>. The students, most of whom have not studied much (if any) philosophy up to that point, often find Howard Roark to be an admirable character. They are moved by him. Of course, this is also the case when young people read the novel (not only young people, certainly, but I’m driving at some questions somewhat specific to adolescents and people in the transition from adolescence to adulthood). There are some interesting particularities of the film, however. Rand was not responsible for the entire film, but she did write the screenplay, and she had a very large measure of “creative control” over the film. Indeed, one form in which this is manifest is Howard Roark’s famous closing speech to the jury. As I am sure every reader here knows, Roark is on trial for dynamiting a public housing project that he had designed, because the other planners of the project had made modifications to his design. If nothing else, this trajectory of events, culminating in the destruction of the buildings and Roark’s trial, demonstrate the centrality of aesthetic judgment in Rand’s philosophy—this is a point to which I shall return in a moment. What I wanted to mention here is that Roark's speech to the jury is the longest speech in any film up to that time, at least in the English language. King Vidor, the filmmaker, had wanted to cut the length somewhat, but Rand put her foot down. Again, there are some things here to discuss about the centrality of aesthetic judgment. But there are some other facets of the film, specifically, that I wanted to highlight, especially having to do with its style. In particular there is a starkness to the film that makes it, stylistically, something of a cross between <i>film noir</i> and Socialist Realism. (Indeed, the stark architecture of the city—though not necessarily Roark’s own buildings, also a topic to which I shall return—reminds me of visiting certain American bastions of Cold War anti-communism, such as Bob Jones University, which, in terms of their built space, would have fit in nicely with the drabbest images of the former East Germany.) The heroism of Roark stands out, and yet not exactly as a “contrast,” but instead because Roark’s demeanor and sensibility is even more dire—if I can get away with such an expression—than that of the other people, and even of the built environment, around him.
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This is a world of objects, perhaps captured best by an interesting duality that runs right through Rand’s work. on the other hand, Rand’s mature novels, <b>The Fountainhead</b> and <b>Atlas Shrugged</b>, are centrally constructed around speeches that the main characters make to each other, indeed, <i>at</i> each other. In other contexts as well, whether in her books of essays or in the aforementioned radio program, one feels “talked at.” perhaps this is to some extent unavoidable for a philosophical work that has some element of missionary zeal or at least some desire to convince, rather than mere musing about “the world as I found it.” One reviewer of Popper’s <b>The Open Society and Its Enemies</b> ([1962] 1971) averred that the book should have been called “<b>The Open Society <i>by</i> One of Its Enemies.</b>” Certainly, in the larger world of philosophy, one can feel “talked at” from many directions, from all over the political landscape, and Marxists are certainly no exception. And yet, I think the point I am driving at stands, even if it applies to others as well (though I would argue to a lesser degree, and more as a matter of being under sway of the bourgeois-propertarian worldview, which, being the ideology of the capitalist ruling class and therefore the dominant ideology, affects opponents of capitalism too). In Rand, the fact that the idea of “being with” would just be part of the repugnant conceptual machinery of supposedly owing someone else a moment of my time, means that hers is a world of objects. In such a world, a world of the sheer “thatness” of objects, is it any wonder that “private property” would be the central notion, indeed the <i>defining</i> feature of human life? An entire study, then, might be made of the idea that the unalienable right to destroy one’s personal property is some higher expression of human freedom. But if other people are just objects to me, along with other objects such as tables, chairs, or SUVs and cell phones (just to name two classes of objects that I would readily destroy if I could!), then on what basis should I respect their “rights” (or they mine)? In Rand’s claim about the right of ownership including the right to destroy what is “mine,” there is even the resonance of the Christianity that she despised, especially in its modern, Protestant form (as understood by Max Weber in <b>The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism</b> [1930]): there is hardly any point in my going to Heaven if I can’t also enjoy the fact that many others will go to Hell. This is especially problematic in the context of rock music, of course, since clearly Hell will have the better band!
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Just as <b>The Fountainhead</b>, the film, has much in common with <i>film noir</i> and Socialist Realism (and I should say, just for the record, that I like the film, I find it a fascinating work, and you can’t really argue with Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal), the novel has something in common with a literary style that arose in France in the 1950s and 60s: <i>chosisme</i>. Literally, this means something like “thing"-ism.) As applied by writers such as Alain Robbe-Grillet, the idea of <i>chosisme</i> is to portray a world were persons have no special status; they are simply objects along with all of the rest. Foucault turned his into a methodology when he proposed an “archaeological” approach to consciousness. Sartre once wrote that the writer André Gide had liberated his readers from “the tyranny of chosisme”—the point being that chosisme is a French translation of the Marxist concept of reification. Indeed, Sartre’s whole philosophy could be said to be set against the tyranny of the “thing,” and therefore against whatever reduces people to mere things. I have invoked this chain of references because, for all of the objectification that one encounters in Rand, there is also an existentialist feel to her writing, and especially to the characters who most seem to represent her own views: Howard Roark and John Galt.<sup style="color: red;">2</sup> This comes through not only in the heroic aspect of their respective characters, but also in the way that each seems to be fundamentally alone—something that seems true of not only Rand, but, it should be said, Sartre too. I would say that this quality carries over to some of Rush’s music as well, or at least to some of the stories they tell—especially when these are seen in contrast to the utopian communalism of the music of (especially a group such as) Yes. But this still is not the comparison that I am driving toward.
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Rand is right, I think, about her conception of ownership—but I would say that it not only includes destruction, it <i>entails</i> destruction, and, indeed, I would say that ownership in her conception <i>is</i> destruction. “Existence exists,” absolutely, and what is mine is mine, absolutely. Contrast this philosophy of property to that tradition that runs from Aristotle to Aquinas, Locke, and Jefferson. Jefferson said that “the earth belongs to the living,” in “usufruct,” this last meaning “stewardship.” There is no “absolute” right to ownership in this tradition. This comparison of theories of property deserves the kind of treatment that it would not even make sense to embark upon here, but my point is that an absolutist conception of property can not help but go hand-in-hand with a good deal of existential angst and even a dire, siege mentality. Are these conceptions and outlooks a natural outgrowth of deep insecurity—of a kind that is completely understandable—or is it the other way around? Probably some of both. What is fascinating is that all of this angst and insecurity could kill an ordinary person (in which case they should be free to end their life without outside interference!), but in Rand's heroic characters there is an indomitable optimism that cannot be extinguished. Recall the final scene in <b>The Fountainhead</b>, where Dominique Francon (that is, Patricia Neal) rides the construction elevator up the side of the world’s tallest building, looking up to the tall, handsome, smiling, and heroic Howard Roark (Gary Cooper), who stands firmly upright, hands on hips. The entire tableau is a monument to phallogocentrism, and Nietzsche’s mountain is replaced with the skyscraper. That Rand could not stand so tall is not the point, though I don’t think it is inappropriate to argue for some relationship between her ostensible outlook and the fact that she did not seem to be a happy person.
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Ayn Rand is not Howard Roark—so what? Could anyone be Howard Roark? If the answer is “no,” what follows?
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Returning to my students who have seen <b>The Fountainhead</b> in “Philosophy 228: Business, Ethics, and Society,” it does not seem to me that coming away from Rand with the ideal of striving to be a person of character is such a bad thing—not hardly! It is basically an Aristotelian lesson that, if people do not acquire strength of character until adolescence, thanks to the breakdown of child rearing in this society, then at least it is better then than not at all. Indeed, even to be a bit hard on Rand as someone who basically appeals to adolescents and people in transition from adolescence to adulthood (a transition that some people never really make—and indeed one might argue, in both a Kantian and a Freudian vein, and probably a Marxist vein as well, that Humanity-writ-large still has a good deal of growing up to do) is not exactly fair. One might instead recognize for a latter-day Aristotelian who at least implicitly grasps that the categories of “childhood,” “adolescence,” and “adulthood” were not at all the same things in Aristotle’s time and place (and the middle term is a very recent development in the grand scheme of things, and it still does not exist in some parts of the world) as they are in the modern, industrial world. Although I find Rand’s dismissal of rock music to have some overtones of racism and Eurocentrism (but, I hasten to add, the same attributes can be found in what Theodor Adorno said about rock and jazz, and simple lack of musical sophistication—not something Adorno could be accused of, I suppose!), I also wonder if she was bothered by what might be called rock music’s “normative adolescence.” After all, anyone who deals with progressive rock even if simply as a listener and fan, is confronted with legions of critics who claim that rock music must submit to a categorical imperative to remain musically unsophisticated and lyrically oriented toward adolescent themes. Any attempt from within rock music to approach creativity and craft in the same ways that people in the other, shall we say, “developed,” “adult” forms of music, whether they be Western classical music, jazz, Indian classical music, or what-have-you, is to be rejected tout court, as “inauthentic,” as not proper to rock music’s essence.<sup style="color: red;">3</sup> What is great about rock music isn’t its essential adolescent outlook, but rather its lack of an essence altogether. But I also wonder if the “adolescent normativity” of at least a great deal of rock music simply too close for comfort, given the orientation of much of Rand’s own work.
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Still, okay, it’s not such a bad thing to be inspired by Howard Roark. It is not so bad to be inspired by the idea of “objective truth,” if the alternative is a blithe, “it all comes down to what you think”—relativism. It is not so bad to be inspired by the idea of integrity. The strength of these inspirations can be affirmed without ignoring the limitations. But then, let us not forget that the objective truth, the “is” of the real world of capitalism, is that the owners of the means of production and their top administrators (CEOs and top corporate managers) are not heroic artists, indeed they are neither heroic nor artists. Let us not forget that, for Aristotle, there is no such thing as the “virtuous person” who exists in isolation from the quality of the social fabric and the possibilities for pathways to flourishing—in other words, for Aristotle, as we might have learned in Philosophy 101, the good person, the good life, and the good society are bound together inextricably. Meanwhile, for Rand, there is about as much to the concept of “society” as there is to the collective brain. My own view is that Kant has a good deal in common with Aristotle, but that Kant is writing in a time of the overwhelming pressure of social existence, where to talk in terms of parenting and character will not deal adequately with the social currents that whip people around and shape possible conceptions of the good in persons, life, or society. In brilliant essays such as “Perpetual Peace” and “Idea for Universal History, From a Cosmopolitan Point of View” and “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?,” Kant (1983) laid the foundations for a philosophy that takes global social relations into account. When this philosophy is joined with some serious political economy, the idea of “not owing anyone a moment of my time” seems silly and bizarre in the light of what is really involved in putting food on the table or a roof over our heads. Indeed, this notion of independence sounds like what it is: the rebellion of the sensitive adolescent with artistic or intellectual aspirations. Well, as they say on “Seinfeld”: “Not that there’s anything wrong with that”—as far as it goes. Which is also to say, as far as the model of Howard Roark goes.
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This role model, a character in a novel, served as a standard for lyricist Neal Peart during a period when Rush was developing rapidly as a creative force. Again, nothing wrong with that.
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I have been promising a certain comparison. As much as I don’t necessarily think that it is a bad thing to be inspired on some levels (obviously I’m hedging a good deal here) by Howard Roark, I am thinking of two role models that might have been better. For one thing, if you think Howard Roark is a romantic artist— a hero, check out Ludwig van Beethoven—he’s the one who said to one of his major patrons, a member of the ruling aristocracy of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, “What you have is through an accident of birth, what I have achieved is by my own effort; there are many princes, there is only one Beethoven.” I will return to Beethoven as a role model in a moment.
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The other person I am thinking of is the real-life Howard Roark: Frank Lloyd Wright. Now there was an innovator, a real artist, and it might be useful to compare him to Howard Roark on various points. For instance, Wright had a mentor, namely Louis Sullivan. Wright had his own artistic standards, among them the refusal to build any projects where occupancy by Black or Jewish people was restricted. As I recall, African-Americans and Jews hardly appear in Rand’s narratives—I suppose that would be an instance of “tribalism” to have marked these identities—the result being that the main characters are all quite, northern Europeans.<sup style="color: red;">4</sup> There is nothing unusual in this for the time, so it isn’t that Rand was any more a participant in furthering invisibility than were most white writers in the period, but my point is that Roark’s politics are largely “aesthetic,” that is, they have to do with the independence of the artist.
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Rand takes one side of Aristotle and one side of Wright, and a bit of Nietzsche, at the same time striving to be perspicaciously, if not studiously, against Kant. In taking an architect as the paradigm of the capitalist, or at least of someone with the proper, “radical capitalist” point of view, Rand has raised an interesting and problematic example. Before I go further into this as both a political and an aesthetic question, and that’s a question at the intersection of politics and aesthetics, there is a point to be made about Beethoven and Wright as regards the music of Rush.
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One thing that distinguishes Rush from the “first tier” of progressive rock groups is that the latter took up a good many influences from beyond rock into their music. Indeed, this is one of the reasons that progressive rock is often confronted with the dreaded charge of “pretentiousness,” because the best groups presume to stand on the shoulders of giants such as Sibelius, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Davis, Coltrane,
Taylor, Shankar, etc. (It can be added to this last, “just as the Beatles did before them.” More on this in a moment.) It is often said, and I’ve said it myself, that the formula for Rush is: one part Yes and one part Led Zeppelin. I think that formula is good enough. (I don’t know if readers of this journal will know, by the way, that there were plans at one point to form a band with two former members of each of those bands: Robert Plant and Jimmy Page from Zeppelin, and Chris Squire and Alan white from Yes. They were going to call it XYZ-- Ex-Yes/Zeppelin. However, the record companies and artistic management put the kibosh on this plan, though I’m sure their judgment was guided by the highest principles of aesthetic judgment and integrity, as is generally the case with our heroic capitalists!) I don’t want to say that the members of Rush do not have respect for the elements that went into first-tier progressive rock, namely what the Beatles have already taken up into their music and what groups such as Yes and King Crimson took even further. But there is something to the way that Rush takes off from elements more purely within rock, even if at the further reaches of it, that deserves discussion. The point is not that one cannot get to some good music this way. Instead the point is that Rush has had, in their music at any rate, about as much use for the larger history of music and art, as did Ayn Rand.
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The difference is that I am sure that the members of Rush would never tell anyone that theirs is the only music worth listening to (indeed, everything I’ve ever read about the band members leads me to believe that they are exceedingly generous toward other artists. Most recently, for instance, I read a tribute from Rush bassist and vocalist Geddy Lee to the late John Entwistle). Despite this, I find some of the fans of Rush to be pretty narrow. I mean, for instance, if the topic of discussion is progressive rock, and there are bands such as Yes and King Crimson to discuss, why is it that their main contribution is to ask, “What about Rush?” All right, fans of Rush tend to be more narrowly into rock than, say, fans of Yes and King Crimson.<sup style="color: red;">5</sup> They also tend to be into heavy metal. That’s fine, or at least I don’t think it’s not fine. But there is in that corner of rock music a tendency to enter cul-de-sacs, where rock music does not develop very much in terms of either creativity or craft.<sup style="color: red;">6</sup>
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While Geddy Lee, for instance, would of course never hesitate to acknowledge the influence and/or greatness of other bass guitarists, Ayn Rand is clearly convinced that she is the only philosopher who ever mattered, whether canonical or contemporary—and she did not hesitate to tell this to her readers. Even the great cult leaders of analytic and Continental philosophy, Wittgenstein and Heidegger, never thought or said this. Wittgenstein perhaps came close, but then he had the good grace to at least think that he wasn’t worth reading either. (Some years ago I heard Thomas Flynn, of Emory University, present a paper where he remarked that Sartre had said that he would rather read detective novels than Wittgenstein. I could not restrain myself from blurting out that Wittgenstein felt the same way.)
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But I still wonder what accounts for the narrowness of some Rush fans. I tend to think it is a generational thing, and by “generation” I don’t necessarily mean nineteen or twenty years, but more a certain relationship to the counterculture that inspired the later Beatles and the first generation of progressive rock groups. In <b>Rocking the Classics</b>, Macan (1997, 144–66) has an insightful discussion of the transition from a counterculture to what sociologists call a “taste public.” Although Macan and I disagree on the political interpretation of the counterculture (and therefore to some extent over the meaning of the transition away from it), it is still safe to say that this transition is one that is away from the politics of the rebellions that took place around the world and in the imperialist citadels in and around 1968. While I doubt that the members of Rush would have much in common with the point of view that Rand (1967, 236–69) expressed in “The Cashing In: The Student ‘Rebellion’” (or perhaps I should say that I just don’t know and maybe it would be better if I didn’t know), which is an attack on the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, neither the redemptive utopia of “Close to the Edge” (Yes) nor the technological dystopia of “21st-Century Schizoid Man” (King Crimson) seems to be motivating themes in the earlier music of Rush. this changes, arguably, by the time of <b>Grace under Pressure</b> (my personal favorite) and <b>Power Windows</b>, but, by then, if they are still taking something from Ayn Rand and Howard Roark, then it is a vision that has matured and broadened considerably.
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Returning to Beethoven and Wright: The “Beethoven” point has to do with listening to and learning from others, something Rand seem to have no interest in doing. The “Frank Lloyd Wright” point here is just that it would have been interesting if Rush had taken his work as inspiration rather than—or at least alongside—
Howard Roark’s fictional life. “Architectural metaphor” is a term used in music; I think we could use some music that is inspired by Wright’s architecture and other works from the Prairie School. I would also like to hear more music that is inspired by Art Deco, a movement with which Wright’s designs might be associated in important ways. Perhaps Rush could look into this?
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Wright loved the outdoors and breeding clean air, and Ayn Rand drove him crazy with her cigarette smoking when she visited Taliesin West (Wright’s school for architects, located In Arizona) to get a look at how “real architects” go about their work (Seacrest 1993, 497–98). Wright didn’t much like cities. That isn’t quite right—in fact, he hated them. Wright considered himself a socialist. Now, we can debate the extent of Wright’s influence on the creation of Howard Roark—given that, on at least some level, it does not especially matter, and, on another, Roark is decidedly not Wright, and vice versa.
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What I want to focus on instead is the point that the architect, especially one who is creative and innovative, is a peculiar kind of artist. One of Howard Roark’s most famous lines is: “I don’t intend to build in order to have clients. I intend to have clients in order to build” (Rand [1943] 1993, 26). Much can be said about this statement. On the “aesthetic” side, it is reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s claim that no great work of art was created with an audience in mind. I always thought that Jon Anderson of Yes had his priorities right when he said, “I just try to do the right thing, and then I hope somebody likes it” (Yesyears Retrospective, 1991). It isn’t that the audience doesn’t matter, but instead that, if one creates art on the basis of what one is first of all hoping an audience will like (which nowadays means a “demographic”), then one is not thinking first of all about what would be good art.
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Moving to the “political” side, however, the architect faces a problem that is perhaps unique among the arts, or close to it. A person can write a novel and hope that someday she will have readers for it—but, if the readers do not come, the novel still exists, it is no less a novel for the fact of not having attracted or reached readers. And, after all, at least one person read it, even if that person is also the author—and no author is a Robinson Crusoe, even if she has indeed washed up on the shore up some isolated island, clutching a manuscript for dear life. Philip K. Dick wrote a series of novels that came to be called <b>The Valis Trilogy</b>. Unknown for several years was the fact that a fourth book in the series existed in the form of a manuscript that was in the midst of a mess of papers of various kinds and purposes. Even if this manuscript had not been published and attracted readers, as <b>Radio Free Albumith</b>, it would still have been “built.” Something similar can be said for most of the other arts, I would think, though it is certainly the case that there are vexing ontological questions about the form of existence and the materiality of musical works and films, in particular. If I write music in a conventional, Western way, with marks on paper, then I would seem to be in the same position as the novelist, and not yet having attracted listeners does not keep me from “building” my music. But mark some paper do not by themselves seemed to be music, not yet. I may need people to interpret those marks. I may need some way to record the music, such that it can be reproduced as sound. And yet these are relatively minor problems, at least as practical matters (as philosophical issues they remain difficult), and in many ways they become “more minor” every day.
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With film there are similar ontological questions, but there is another problem that cannot be addressed by thought alone: money. If I want to write a novel, all I have to do is get some paper and a pen and start writing. Even a typewriter or personal computer is not so hard to acquire if that is my priority. Of course, I am assuming a social fabric in which things such as basic literacy and a ready supply of electricity are taken care of, and that is to assume a lot, in fact. It seems to me that there are all kinds of ways in which this social fabric remains unexamined by Rand, as it is, for that matter, by most people most of the time, especially in the “advanced capitalist” countries. Be that as it may, I don’t have to have great financial resources, relatively speaking, to embark upon writing a novel. But what about when it comes to making films or designing buildings, especially big buildings? Most anyone is free to put some marks on paper and thereby design a building, but if none of the buildings are actually built, what’s the point? A person may be a “failed” musician, in some sense, if they are not able to get anyone to play or listen to their music, but I would still say this person is a musician -- and perhaps, as has happened more than a few times, enthusiasts of the music come along later rather than sooner. If this happens after the musician has died, we don’t say this person was not a musician while they were alive, and has only become a musician posthumously (as appealing as this idea may be from a Nietzschean perspective). But what would we say about an “architect” whose designs were never built, not a single one of them?
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Now, Howard Roark did not look upon any job as “too small”—he designed a gas station, and he brought the same craft and effort to this task as he would to designing a skyscraper. Indeed, the film especially makes a point of this. But an “architect” who never had a building built would be like an airplane pilot who never actually flew an airplane. After a while, you wouldn’t allow that this person is an actual pilot, just that he or she had hoped to become one.
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Even on “aesthetic” grounds, then, Howard Roark’s statement has to confront the money issue. That is, even if, as an architect, I don’t build in order to have clients, but instead I have clients in order to build, still, I had better have some clients by and by, or else I won’t be doing any building, after a while I won’t be an architect. So, I may have as a principle that I’m going to design my buildings according to what I think of as my own visionary, innovative principles, but if I’m really going to be an architect, I’m going to have to deal with clients one way or another.. My decision to not build because there are no clients who will support my vision will become, over the course of years and decades, a decision about whether or not to be an architect at all. Again, I don’t know if there is any other art form that is in this situation, except perhaps film.
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How does Rand deal with his quandary? Basically with a happy ending -- Roark stands by his principles and ultimately goes from the rock quarry to building the world’s tallest skyscraper.
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Rand stuck by her principles in demanding that her version of Roark’s speech to the jury be presented in full in <b>The Fountainhead</b>. For her, there was a happy ending, too, at least on this point. Somehow, I’m sure Rand would attribute this to the great possibilities afforded to her by American capitalism. She’s probably right about that, but then, of course, she was using the speech to praise that system. Even so, a further “progress” in the colonization of every nook and cranny by the imperatives of capital since the making of <b>The Fountainhead</b> (1949) means that no Hollywood film made today would have such a speech. Think of the original <b>Thomas Crown Affair</b> (1968), with Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway, as compared to the more recent remake (1999), with Pierce Brosnan and René Russo. In many ways I prefer the remake, but there was one scene in the original that I cannot imagine being placed in a Hollywood film today, namely the famous and superb chess scene.<sup style="color: red;">7</sup> From the beginning of the scene, when Faye Dunaway says “let’s play,” to the end, when she says “check” (it’s typical of filmmakers that they don’t know the difference between “check” and “checkmate”), about four and a half minutes pass without a word. Can anyone imagine a scene of chess and flirtation of that length today, without a word being said, and without something (a bus or a 747) crashing or exploding? So of course the scene was not part of the remake. The irony is that the remake has Thomas Crown stealing a painting so that he can enjoy looking at it for an evening, whereas the original caper is a bank heist, and it is easier to imagine suave Pierce Brosnan actually playing chess, as opposed to brash, all-American Steve McQueen, whose other hobbies include tearing up the beach in his dune buggy.
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The larger point that I am driving toward is that an artist may be able to make the decision to place aesthetic principles and other values over the “A is A” of capitalism, or, to use Marx’s expression, what is “Moses and the prophets” to capitalism, to “accumulate, accumulate, accumulate”—but the capitalist qua capitalist could not care less about what he “builds” (and, in the age of what Frederic Jameson [1991] calls “money money”—as opposed to, say, “oil money,” “steel money,” etc.—the capitalist may build nothing at all), and, indeed, the capitalist qua capitalist absolutely can not make decisions in the pursuit of some value other than profit and simply let the chips fall where they may.
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We could go a good deal further with this point in terms of Rand's philosophy, because the fact is that Rand does recognize that there is a difference between the value of money and the value of artistic endeavor. She recognizes this issue in essays such as “What Is Capitalism?” (Rand 1967, 11–34), but the difference also runs through <b>The Fountainhead</b>—obviously, the value of what Roark is attempting in his designs does not depend on whether or not people with the kind of wealth required to execute them have any aesthetic sense at all. Rand addresses this issue by saying that, despite the difference between market value and aesthetic value, to have any other social mechanism than the invisible hand determine what is going to be produced will lead to an economy of coercion. When I see the pap and pabulum that the “culture”—if they can even be called that—of this postmodern capitalist society has devolved into, it is hard for me to think of Rand’s response to the value difference as amounting to much more than Homer Simpson saying, “yeah, but what are you gonna do?” Well, a real argument about this will have to wait for another day, but just to underline the main point, no real capitalist could say what Howard Roark said about building and clients.
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Obviously, Rush accept the difference between market value and aesthetic value too— for one thing, they are not deterred by Rand’s view of rock music; for another, they have pursued their own vision of good music apart from a central concern with some of the more lucrative commercial venues. But then, financially, their story has a happy ending too, and is a lot easier to validate the market from that standpoint. Maybe that is the difference between the struggling artist and a truly starving artist, or the person who can not be an artist because market discipline has determined that she and the others around her will starve.
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I’m sure this is the sort of thing that is discussed in this forum all of the time, but one problem that is often overlooked in discussions of capitalism is the use of the term “market.” The word has a relatively benign and even innocuous ring to it. Rand, like many ideologists of capitalism, tends to use the word in a folksy way, as if “the market” was just that area of the village where people brought the fruits of their labor and engaged in barter—and not what it really is in the epoch of capitalism and even more so in the epoch of imperialism and imperialist globalization, a mechanism that operates on a global scale and that depends on a basic division between the few who own the means of production and a great many who do not. An even more quaint term is “marketplace”—here one especially sees the unreality of the folksy outlook, because not only are global market mechanisms not tied to particular places (though, in my view, they are still tied in significant ways to nation-states and their ruling classes), they are progressively destroying places and any sense of place—through outright spoilage, homogenization (creation of the McWorld, absorption of people into electronic media and cyberspace, etc.).
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This rambling set of reflections opened with some lines from the song “Red Lenses,” from Rush’s 1984 album, <b>Grace Under Pressure</b>. There are many interesting lines from that album. However, I might add, before mentioning one of the lines, that the lyric writing is another area where I cannot think of Rush as being in the first rank of progressive rock groups. Indeed, to borrow another argument from Macan, Rush came into its own at a time when the more abstract and “poetic” lyrics that were coming from Yes (often people think of Jon Anderson as the primary lyricist for the group, but Steve Howe has written or co-written some of the best lyrics to, as have Chris Squire and even Alan White), King Crimson, Genesis, etc., were giving way to more “direct” and sometimes even clumsy forms of expression. Still, I think Rush’s potential for more visionary work really showed itself with <b>Grace Under Pressure</b> (even if, as Rushologists know better than I do, there was some dissension within the ranks, especially because of the heavy reliance on keyboards and a somewhat smaller role for electric guitar than on previous albums). One line in “Red Lenses” refers to “thinking about the overhead—the underfed.” This makes me think of the value difference as expressed by Roark—basically what clients are about and what the art of building is about.
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Long ago, Aristotle (1984, 44–50) set out the distinction between “maintaining a household,” on the one hand, and the “mere getting of money,” on the other. The first of these is the true stuff of economics, the Greek term for which (<i>oikonomia</i>) refers to the household, while the latter, merely seeking after money, if it becomes the dominant ethos in a society, will lead to disaffection and, ultimately, social ruin. This line of thought is taken up into the philosophies of Aquinas, Locke, Jefferson, Hegel, Marx, Sartre, and Derrida, among many others. Seemingly, Rand has some affinity for it too, but then it also seems, when “the big money” speaks, she is there to listen. (Two especially egregious examples of this are the essays on labor unions and the student movement in Rand 1967.)
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One reason the “architectural metaphor” is useful in music is that a piece of music can create a world, or at least a dwelling, that people can inhabit (for at least a little while). The metaphor would seem to situate the artist on the side of maintaining a household, rather than the mere seeking of clients. Why did Rand not confront this contradiction in anything like its full depth—the contradiction that Marx expressed as that between a system of production that is fully socialized and is fully dependent upon this socialization (and that <i>requires</i> immiseration, exploitation, alienation, and violent crises as part of its “normal” course of operation) and the system of accumulation that is oriented toward the relative handful who own the means of production. I’m sure there is a range of reasons, having to do with everything from class background and outlook to issues of individual psychology (Rand’s overwhelming need to feel self-made and independent), but intellectually and theoretically, I think the missing term is history. Rand has the category of ill-gotten gains, but she seems to associated it with simple theft rather than with anything that is systemic and has a trajectory. Thus, she is likely to speak of ownership or the law or even “rules” (as in the essay on the student movement) without any depth on the question of how some have come by ownership of the far greater part of social wealth and the means for creating it, and what mechanisms they use (especially of the state and its police powers and so-called “system of justice,” but also the generation of ideology, whether that is through education, the “free press,” the churches that sanctify private property and tell people to accept their lot, or the culture industry more generally). With <b>Grace under Pressure</b> and its closely-associated follow-up, <b>Power Windows</b>, Rush is starting to question these things.
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In the end, though, what does Ayn Rand’s (or anyone’s) philosophy have to do with musical form, and vice versa? I think it is good to have a little skepticism regarding the “aboutness” of music. I would at least hold to that skepticism to this extent: even if I don’t like some of the ideas that a band is taking up and trying to represent in their music, that isn’t the end of the story. And, as I’ve said before, the very fact that Rush is the sort of group that wants to dig into ideas and try to do something with them in their music already places them in a category separate from most of the musical “product” floating around out there. Lastly, I think the more recent Rush album as of this writing, <b>Vapor Trails</b>, is quite good, and I am even more impressed with Geddy Lee’s solo album, <b>my favorite headache</b>. It’s a very “Jewish” album, I think, and if one wants to find a historical sense in which to locate political concepts in the human striving—and if one wants to find this sends in a way that is itself historical—then I think Judaism and those old Israelites, especially the prophets, are the place to go. Otherwise, one is only “living in the present tense,” to borrow the title from an excellent song on the album.
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Of course, Alissa Rosenbaum had, at one time, a relationship to Judaism—but, like I said, don’t get me started ...
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Bill Martin</div>
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Symposium on "Rand, Rush, and Rock"</div>
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Replies to Christ Matthew Sciabarra's Fall of 2002 article
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Notes</h2>
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<span style="color: red;">1</span>. <span style="font-size: x-small;">Incidentally, I would be curious to know if anyone has ever addressed the “soundtrack question” for The Fountainhead. I do not recall Max Steiner’s film score music being especially “dire.” One contemporary master of dire music, to my mind, is Mark Snow, a composer who did the music for “The X- Files” television series in film. Clearly, Snow’s music is much influenced by that of Krzystof Penderecki, a composer whom Rand would probably dislike even more than Beethoven.
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<span style="color: red;">2</span>. <span style="font-size: x-small;">It is worth noting that Hazel E. Barnes devotes a section to Rand in the book, An Existentialist Ethics (1967).
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<span style="color: red;">3</span>. <span style="font-size: x-small;">Edward Macan (1997) has dealt effectively with the “authenticity” question in Rocking the Classics, and I have also dealt with the question, and with its connection to the typical charge of “that ain’t rock ‘n roll,” in my books on music. Given that Sartre did the most to place the question of “authenticity” on the philosophical map, it might be mentioned that, for him, authenticity had nothing to do with “essence”—or, I should say, authenticity as a purely negative relationship to “essence,” an appeal to an essentialism Afula person “is” is the most inauthentic gesture that one could make. I’m bothered by the “normative adolescence” too. I should add, too, that rock music can be about adolescence and yet not necessarily be adolescent in its approach, a prime example being while Quadrophenia by The Who.
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<span style="color: red;">4</span>. <span style="font-size: x-small;">The editors point out to me that there are examples of minor Jewish characters in Rand’s works—for example, Sol Salzer in the play “Ideal” (in Rand 1984, 185–256) and Mr. Slotnick in The Fountainhead in (Rand [1943] 1993).
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<span style="color: red;">5</span>. <span style="font-size: x-small;">A good example of this is the comments that some of the classical musicians made in 2001 one Yes toured with various orchestras. Many of them pointed out that not only had they been Yes fans for a long time, but that they were led to classical music by Yes. I might add that one violinist—whom a friend of mine talked with—said that the music she played on the “Yes Symphonic” tour with some of the hardest she had ever played.
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<span style="color: red;">6</span>. <span style="font-size: x-small;">For instance—and perhaps there are things that I am not hearing or that I haven’t devoted enough time to exploring—I find heavy metal bass playing pretty boring with just a few exceptions, primarily Geezer Butler of Black Sabbath. But I put Black Sabbath on a whole other plane than almost every other heavy metal band, and one of the key differences is that the bass player and drummer (Bill Ward) are not just banging out some noise cushion for the guitarist. Fans of Rush, of course, appreciate—how could they not? —that Geddy Lee and Neil Peart are superb practitioners of their respective instruments, but sometimes I wonder If they really get much more than the purely technical aspect (in a word, chops). If they did, then their sights would also be set on Chris Squire, John Entwistle, Jack Bruce, and Paul McCartney, and on Bill Bruford, Alan white, the extraordinary percussionists of King Crimson (a category that includes Bruford, of course), Keith Moon, Ginger Baker, and Ringo Starr. Indeed, I take it to be a kind of litmus test of rock musicians whether or not they appreciate the brilliance of Mr. Starkey. Not to be snotty, but is it hard to Imagine more than a few Rush fans dismissing Ringo on the basis of what really amounts to pyrotechnics? Let me add that I don’t think Peart, either, is a pyrotechnician where histrionic player for the most part, but I do think it is the purely “chops” -- side of things that some Rush fans appreciate, and, as I said, I think this leads into a musical cul-de-sac.
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<span style="color: red;">7</span>. <span style="font-size: x-small;">Rand didn’t care much for chess, either. See her “Open Letter to Boris Spassky” in Rand 1982, 63–69. Leonard Peikoff set of philosophy that “[i]t is not a chess game divorced from reality designed by British professors for otherwise unemployable colleagues” (“Introduction,” viii). Admittedly, that is funny!
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Quixiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03126711689901268060noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12912400.post-27203487037629567902015-10-17T03:13:00.000-07:002015-10-17T07:33:33.798-07:00Bioenergetic Fields<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Much of alternative medicine is grounded on vitalism, the notion that living
organisms possess some unique quality, an <i>élan vital</i>, that gives them that special quality we call life. Belief in the existence of a living force is ancient and remains widespread to this day. Called <i>prana</i> by the Hindus, <i>qi</i> or <i>chi</i> by the Chinese, <i>ki</i> by the Japanese, and 95 other names in 95 other cultures (Brennen 1988), this substance is said to constitute the source of life that is so often associated with soul, spirit, and mind. Wheeler (1939) reviewed the history of vitalism in the West and defined it as "all the various doctrines which, from the time of Aristotle, have described things as actuated by some power or principle additional to mechanics and chemistry." Modern theories of vitalism include those of Driesch (1914) and Bergson (1919).</div>
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In ancient times, the vital force was widely identified with breath, which the Hebrews called <i>ruach</i>, the Greeks <i>psyche</i> or <i>pneuma</i> (the breath of the gods), and the Romans <i>spiritus</i>. As breath was gradually acknowledged to be a material substance, words like "psychic" and "spirit" evolved to refer to the assumed nonmaterial and perhaps supernatural medium by which organisms gain the qualities of life and consciousness. The idea that matter alone can do the job has never proved popular.
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Chi or qi remains the primary concept in traditional Chinese medicine, still widely practiced in China and experiencing an upsurge of interest in the West. Chi is a living force that is said to flow rhythmically through so-called "meridians" in the body. The methods of acupuncture and acupressure are used to stimulate the flow at special acu- points along these meridians, although their location has never been consistently specified. The chi force is not limited to the body, but is believed to flow throughout the environment (Huston 1995). When building a house, many believers rely on a <i>feng
shui </i>master to decide on an orientation that is well-aligned with this flow.
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As modern science developed in the West and the nature of matter was gradually uncovered, a few scientists sought scientific evidence for the nature of the living force. After Newton had published his laws of mechanics, optics, and gravity, he spent many years looking for the source of life in alchemic experiments. His search was not irrational, given the knowledge of the day. Newtonian physics provided no basis for the complexity that is necessary for any purely material theory of life or mind. This would require
quantum physics. Furthermore, Newtonian gravity had an occult quality about it, with its invisible action at a distance. Gravity seemed to be transmitted across space with no intervening matter evident. Perhaps the forces of life and thought had similar immaterial properties. Still, Newton and others who followed the same trail never managed to uncover a signal for a special substance of spirit or life.
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In the eighteenth century, Anton Mesmer imagined that magnetism was the universal living force and treated patients for a wide variety of ills with magnets, a therapy still being promoted today. He believed that a force called "animal magnetism" resided in the human body and could be directed into other bodies. Indeed, patients would exhibit violent reactions when Mesmer directed his energy toward them by pointing his finger, until the flow of "nervous current" would re-balance the patient's energies (Ball 1998). Today, "mesmerism" has become associated with hypnosis and disconnected from animal magnetism or other notions of a living force, but Mesmer's ideas have survived in various modern "holistic" theories that contradict science.
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In the late nineteenth century, prominent scientists including William Crookes and Oliver Lodge sought scientific evidence for what they called the "psychic force" that they believed was responsible for the mysterious powers of the mind being exhibited by the mediums and spiritualist hucksters of the day. They thought it might be connected with the electromagnetic "aether waves" that had just been discovered and were being put to amazing use. If wireless telegraphy was possible, why not wireless telepathy? This was a reasonable question at the time. However, while wireless telegraphy thrived, wireless telepathy made no progress in the full century of uncorroborated experiments in "parapsychology" that followed (Stenger 1990).
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Conventional medicine follows conventional biology, conventional chemistry, and conventional physics in treating the material body - a complex, nonlinear system assembled from the same atoms and molecules that constitute (presumably) nonliving objects such as computers and automobiles. Medical doctors are in some sense glorified mechanics, who repair broken parts in the human machine. Indeed, any stay in the hospital reinforces this image, as you are hooked to devices that measure blood pressure, temperature, oxygen saturation, and many other physical parameters. You are almost always treated with drugs that are designed to alter your body's chemistry. You usually get better, every time but once, but, unless you are a physicist, you tend to view the whole experience rather negatively.
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No surprise, then, that alternative practitioners find many eager listeners when they announce that they go beyond materialism and mechanism, and treat the really important part of the human system - the vital substance of life itself. People's religious sensibilities and images of self-worth are greatly mollified when they are told that they are far more than an assemblage of atoms - that they possess a living field that is linked to both God and cosmos. Furthermore, the desperately ill will quite naturally seek out hope wherever they can find it. So a ready market exists for therapists who claim they can succeed where medical science fails.
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I must at least mention the highly celebrated recent publication in a major medical journal of the tests of Therapeutic Touch performed by the schoolgirl Emily Rosa (Rosa 1998). In this simple experiment, TT practitioners were unable to detect Emily's "energy field." It seems that not only is this field so transparent that no one can see it, the theory behind it is so transparent that even a child can see through it.
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Unified Biofield Theory</h2>
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The hypothetical vital force is often referred to these days as the bioenergetic field. Touch therapists, acupuncturists, chiropractors, and many other alternative practitioners tell us that they can affect cures for many ills by "manipulating" this field, thereby bringing the body's "live energies" into balance.
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The use of "bioenergetic" in this context is somewhat ambiguous. This term is applied in conventional biochemistry to refer to the readily measurable exchanges of energy within organisms, and between them and their environment, which occur by normal physical and chemical processes. This is not, however, what the new vitalists have in mind. They imagine the bioenergetic field as a holistic living force that goes beyond reductionist physics and chemistry.
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By "holistic" here, I am not referring to trivial homilies such as the need to treat the patient as a whole and recognize that many factors, such as the psychological, emotional, and social, contribute to well-being along with the physical body. While this is often the example used by those who claim to practice holistic medicine, they imply something much more is at work in their treatments. Treating the whole person does not contradict any reductionist principles. Neither does the fact that the parts of a physical system interact with one another. Reductionism is not about a universe of isolated objects. The holism that goes beyond reductionism implies a universe of objects that interact simultaneously, and so strongly that none can ever be treated separately. This concept enters into the discussion of bioenergetic fields, where that field is imagined as some cosmic aether that pervades the universe and acts instantaneously, faster than the speed of light, over all of space.
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Therapeutic Touch and other forms of "holistic healing" are now widely practiced within the nursing community (Rosa 1994, Schieber 1997, Ulett 1997, Rosa 1998, Pryjmachuk 1998). These seem to be based on a theoretical system called "The Science of Unitary Human Beings," proposed by Rogers (1970, 1986, 1989, 1990). According to Rogers, "energy fields are postulated to constitute the fundamental unit of the living and nonliving." The field is "a unifying concept and energy signifies the dynamic nature of the field. Energy fields are infinite and paradimensional; they are in continuous motion" (Rogers 1990, 30).
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The exact nature of the bioenergetic field is not specified, even as a speculative hypothesis, in Rogers or the other literature on holistic healing. On the one hand, the biofield seems to be identified with the classical electromagnetic field; on the other it is confused with quantum fields or wave functions. For example, Stefanatos (1997, 227) writes: "The principles of energy medicine originate in quantum physics. Bioenergetic medicine is the study of human and animal bodies as dynamic electromagnetic fields existing in an electromagnetic environment."
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Auras and Discharges</h2>
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Perhaps the most specific model for the bioenergetic field is some special form of electromagnetism. Advocates claim that measurable electromagnetic waves are emitted by humans."
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In the <i>Journal of Advanced Nursing</i>, Patterson relates "spiritual healing" to the belief that "we are all part of the natural harmonious energy of the universe." Within this universal energy field is a human energy field "that is intimately involved with human life, often called the 'aura'" (Patterson 1998, 291).
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Some self-described psychics claim that they can "see" a human aura. The claim has not been substantiated (Loftin 1990). Indeed, humans have auras that can be photographed with infrared-sensitive film. However, this can be trivially identified as "black body" electromagnetic radiation. Everyday objects that reflect very little light will appear black. These bodies emit invisible infrared light that is the statistical result of the random thermal movements of all the charged particles in the body. The wavelength spectrum has a characteristic smooth shape completely specified by the body's absolute temperature. As that temperature rises, the spectrum moves into the visible. The sun, for example, radiates largely as a "black body" of temperature 6,000 K, with a broad peak at the center of the visible spectrum in the yellow. At their much lower body temperatures, humans radiate mostly in the infrared region of the spectrum that is invisible to the naked eye but easily seen with infrared detection equipment.
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The inability of the wave theory of light to explain the black body spectrum led, in 1900, to Planck's conjecture that light comes in bundles of energy called "quanta," thus triggering the quantum revolution. These quanta are now recognized as material photons. It is somewhat ironic that holists find such comfort in quantum mechanics, which replaced etherial waves with material particles." Surely black body radiation is not a candidate for the bioenergetic field, for then even the cosmic microwave background, 2.7K radiation left over from the big bang, would be "alive." Black body radiation lacks any of the complexity we associate with life. It is as featureless as it can be and still be consistent with the laws of physics. Any fanciful shapes seen in photographed auras emanating from humans can be attributed to optical and photographic effects, uncorrelated with any property of the body that one might identify as "live" rather than "dead," and the tendency for people to see patterns where none exist.
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Stefanatos (1997, 228) tells us that the "electromagnetic fields (EMF) emanating from bacteria, viruses, and toxic substances affect the cells of the body and weaken its constitution." So the vital force is identified quite explicitly with electromagnetic fields and said to be the cause of disease. But somehow the life energies of the body are balanced by bioenergetic therapies. "No antibiotic or drug, no matter how powerful, will save an animal if the vital force of healing is suppressed or lacking" (Stefanatos 1997, 229). So health or sickness is determined by who wins the battle between good and bad electromagnetic waves in the body.
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Now it would seem that all these effects of electromagnetic fields in living things would be easily detectable, given the great precision with which electromagnetic phenomena can be measured in the laboratory. Physics can measure the magnetic dipole moment of the electron (a measure of the strength of the electron's magnetic field) to one part in ten billion, and calculate it with the same accuracy. They surely should be able to detect any electromagnetic effects in the body powerful enough to move atoms around or do whatever happens in causing or curing disease. But neither physics nor any other science has seen anything that demands we go beyond well established physical theories. No elementary particle or field has been found that is uniquely biological. None is even hinted at in our most powerful detectors.
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Besides the infrared black body radiation already mentioned, electromagnetic waves at other frequencies are detected from the brain and other organs. As mentioned, these are often claimed as "evidence" for the bioenergetic field. In conventional medicine, they provide powerful diagnostic information. But these electromagnetic waves show no special characteristics that differentiate them from the electromagnetic waves produced by moving charges in any electronic system. Indeed, they can be simulated with a computer. No marker has been found that uniquely labels the waves from organisms "live" rather than "dead."
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Kirlian Photography is often cited as evidence for the existence of fields unique to living things. For example, Patterson (1998) claims that the "seven or more layers within an aura, each with its own colour," have been recorded using Kirlian photography.
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Semyon Davidovich Kirlian was an Armenian electrician who discovered in 1937 that photographs of live objects placed in a pulsed high electromagnetic will show remarkable surrounding" aura." In the typical Kirlian experiment, a object, such as a freshly-cut leaf, is placed on a piece of photographic film that is electrically isolated from a flat aluminum electrode with a piece of dielectric material. A pulsed high voltage is then applied between another electrode placed in contact with the object and the aluminum electrode. The film is then developed.
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The resulting photographs indicate dynamic, changing patterns, with multicolored sparks, twinkles, and flares (Ostrander 1970, Moss 1974). Dead objects do not have such lively patterns! In the case of a leaf, the pattern is seen to gradually go away as the leaf dies, emitting cries of agony during its death throes. Ostrander and Schroeder described what Kirlian and his wife observed: "As they watched, the leaf seemed to be dying before their very eyes, and the death was reflected in the picture of the energy impulses." The Kirlians reported that "We appeared to be seeing the very life activity of the leaf itself" (Ostrander 1970, 200).
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As has been amply demonstrated, the Kirlian aura is nothing but corona discharge, reported as far back as 1777 and completely understood in terms of well-known physics. Controlled experiments have demonstrated that claimed effects, such as the cries of agony of a dying leaf, are sensitively dependent on the amount of moisture present. As the leaf dies, it dries out, lowering its electrical conductivity. The same effect can been seen with a long dead but initially wet piece of wood (Pehek 1976; Singer 1981; Watkins 1988, 1989).
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Once again, like the infrared aura, we have a well known electromagnetic phenomenon being paraded in front of innocent lay people, unfamiliar with basic physics, as "evidence" for a living force. It is nothing of the sort. Proponents of alternative medicine would have far fewer critics among conventional scientists if they did not resort to this kind of dishonesty and foolishness. (For more discussion of Kirlian photography, see Stenger 1990, 237-241).
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Quantum Healing</h2>
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"Quantum" is the magic incantation that appears in virtually everything written on alternative medicine. It seems to be uttered in order to make all the inconsistencies, incoherences, and incompatibilities of the proposed scheme disappear in a puff of smoke. Since quantum mechanics is weird, anything weird must be quantum mechanics.
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Quantum mechanics is claimed as support for mind-over-matter solutions to health problems. The way the observer is entangled with the object being observed in quantum mechanics is taken to infer that human consciousness actually controls reality. As a consequence, we can all think ourselves into health and, indeed, immortality - if we only buy this book (Chopra 1989. 1993). As I showed in a previous issue of this journal, "quantum healing" is based on a particularly misleading interpretation of quantum mechanics (Stenger 1997). Other interpretations exist that do not require any mystical ingredients (see also Stenger 1995).
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"Einstein" is a name found frequently in the literature on bioenergetic fields. Stephantos (1997, 228) says: "Based on Einstein's theories of quantum physics, these energetic concepts are being integrated into medicine for a comprehensive approach to disease diagnosis, prevention, and treatment."
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Einstein's theories of quantum physics? What theories are these? While Einstein contributed mightily to the development of quantum mechanics, especially with his photon theory, modern quantum mechanics is the progeny of a large group of early century physicists. Planck, Bohr, de Broglie, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Pauli, Born, Jordan, and Dirac each made contributions to quantum mechanics at least as important as Einstein's. Einstein's immortality rests securely enough on his two theories of relativity.
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Referring to well known authorities such as Fritjof Capra and Ken Wilber, Stefanatos (1997, 227) tells how "Einstein's quantum model replaced the Newtonian mechanistic model of humankind and the universe." Thus holistic healing is associated with the rejection of classical, Newtonian physics. Yet, holistic healing retains many ideas from eighteenth and nineteenth century physics. Its proponents are blissfully unaware that these ideas, especially superluminal holism, have been rejected by modern physics as well.
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Never mind that Einstein was not the inventor of quantum mechanics and objected strongly to its anti-Newtonian character, saying famously, "God does not play dice." Never mind that electromagnetic fields were around well before quantum physics and it was Einstein himself who proposed that they are composed of reductionist particles. And never mind that Einstein did away with the aether, the medium that nineteenth century physicists thought was doing the waving in an electromagnetic wave, and a few others thought might also be doing the waving for "psychic waves." The bioenergetic field described in holistic literature seems to be confused with the aether. Or, perhaps no confusion is implied. They each share at least one common feature - nonexistence.
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As the nineteenth century drew to a close, experiments by Michelson and Morley had failed to find evidence for the aether. This laid the foundation for Einstein's theory of relativity and his photon theory of light, both published in 1905. Electromagnetic radiation is now understood to be a fully material phenomenon. Photons have both inertial and gravitational mass (even though they have zero rest mass) and exhibit all the characteristics of material bodies. Electromagnetism is as material as breath, and an equally incredible candidate for the vital field.
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Much as we might wish otherwise, the fact remains that no unique living force has ever been conclusively demonstrated to exist in scientific experiments. Of course, evidence for a life force might someday be found, but this is not what is claimed in the literature that promotes much of alternative medicine. There you will see the strong assertion that current scientific evidence exists for some entity beyond conventional matter, and that this claim is supported by modern physical theory - especially quantum mechanics. Furthermore, the evidence is not to be found in the data from our most powerful telescopes or particle accelerators, probing beyond existing frontiers. Rather, it resides in vague, imprecise, anecdotal claims of the alleged curative powers of traditional folk remedies and other nostrums. These claims simply do not follow from any reasonable application of scientific criteria.
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The bioenergetic field plays no role in the theory or practice of biology or scientific medicine. Vitalism and bioenergetic fields remain hypotheses not required by the data, to be rejected by Occam's razor until the data demand otherwise.
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The Significance Level of Medical Studies</h2>
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In my field of particle physics, reputable journals such as Physical Review Letters will not publish any claim of a new phenomenon, such as evidence for the top quark or the mass of the neutrino, unless the data have a "significance level" of 10-4 or less. This means that if the same experiment were repeated 10,000 times, the reported effect would have been produced artifactually, as a statistical fluctuation or systematic error, no more than once on average.
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In medicine, and related fields such as psychology and pharmacology, and in the social sciences as well, the significance level for publication in the best journals is typically five percent. That is, the experiment need only be repeated twenty times, on average, to have the reported effect not be real but to result from an artifact of the experiment. This means that every twentieth paper you read could be a fluke, although many, of course, exceed the significance threshold and so the fraction of reliable results is probably, thankfully, much greater.
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This very loose criterion in the human sciences is justified by the very reasonable argument that any new result should be put to use as soon as possible in case it may save lives. Indeed, medical researchers are placed under pressures, unheard of in the rest of science, to make their results available well before they can be confirmed by criteria and procedures that are quite conventional in other disciplines. Also, in many cases this is perhaps the best that can be done, given the greater complexity of the human body or human social systems compared to the typical systems studied in physics. Still, it might do well for the human disciplines to tighten up a bit. They will avoid much confusion, and very likely make better progress, as fewer researchers waste time and money following blind alleys that are suggested by research already "published in peer-reviewed journals."
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We might ask: What criterion should be applied to those studies that claim to show some therapy works, when that therapy violates well established scientific principles, such as the conventional laws of physics? For example, should we publish an experiment that indicates Therapeutic Touch works where the significance level is five percent? I argue that we should not. Given the difficulty of accurately estimating errors in any human experiment, any such claims are far more likely to be wrong than one in twenty. One in one are more likely to be wrong.
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I am not advocating censorship - just tighter standards to apply for any extraordinary claim, in physics and medicine. When the significance level for bioenergetic fields
reaches 0.01 percent, that is, one in ten thousand chances for an artifact, then publish away and watch physicists scramble for an alternative to their conventional theories of matter.
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<div style="text-indent: .25in;">
If bioenergetic fields exist, then some two hundred years of physics, chemistry, and biology has to be re-evaluated. I would insist that any experiment claiming their existence be forced to obey the same criteria that particle physicists and other forefront researchers must obey, a significance level of one part in ten thousand rather than one part in twenty. It is one thing to publish a low significance result that does not violate known principles; it is another to publish one that forces science to undergo a paradigm-shift and redirect the limited resources of research to areas that are extremely unlikely to produce any pay- off.
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Much of alternative medicine is based on claims that violate well established scientific principles. Those that require the existence of a bioenergetic field, whether therapeutic touch or acupuncture, should be asked to meet the same criteria as anyone else who claims a phenomenon whose existence goes beyond established science. They have an enormous burden of proof, and it is time that society laid it on their thin shoulders.
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<h2>
Acknowledgments: </h2>
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<div style="text-indent: .25in;">
The author is grateful for very helpful comments from Benedict Adamson, Dr. Stephen Barrett, Paul Bernhardt, Keith Douglas, Robert G. Grimes, Jim Humphreys, Peter Huston, and Dr. David Ramey.
</div>
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<h2>
References: </h2>
<br />
<div>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Ball, Thomas S. and Dean D. Alexander 1998. "Catching Up with Eighteenth Century Science in the Evaluation of Therapeutic Touch." Skeptical Inquirer 22(4), 31-34. <br /><br />Bergson, H. 1911. <i>Creative Evolution</i>. New York: Macmillan. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Brennen, B. A. 1988. <i>Hands of Light</i>: <i>A Guide to Healing Through the Human Energy Field</i>. New York: Bantam New Age Books.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Driesch, H. 1914. <i>History and Theory of Vitalism</i>. New York. Macmillan. Huston, Peter 1995. <i>Skeptical Inquirer</i> 19(5), 38-42, 58. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Loftin, Robert W. 1990. "Auras: Searching for the Light." <i>Skeptical Inquirer</i> 14(4), 403- 409. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Moss, Thelma 1974. <i>The Probability of the Impossibl</i>e. Los Angeles: Tarcher. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Meehan, T. C. 1985. "The Effect of Therapeutic Touch on the Experiences of Acute Pain in Postoperative Patients." Unpublished doctoral dissertation, New York University. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Ostrander, S. and L. Schroeder 1970. <i>Psychic Discoveries Beyond the Iron Curtain</i>. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Patterson, Elissa 1998. "The Philosophy and Physics of Holistic Health Care: Spiritual Healing as a Workable Interpretation." <i>Journal of Advanced Nursing</i> 27, 287-293. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Pehek, John O., Hay J. Kyler, and David L. Faust 1976. "Image Modulation in Corona Discharge Photography." <i>Science</i> 194, 263-270. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Pryjmachuk, Steven, Dsnal P. O'Mathzna, Wayne Spencer. Michael Stanwick, Stephan Matthiesen 1998. "Therapeutic Touch: Misusing Science to Justify Non Science." </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Rogers, M. 1970. <i>The Theoretical Basis for Nursing</i>. Philadelphia: F.A. Davies. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Rogers, M. 1986. "Science of Unitary Human Beings." In V. M. Malinski (ed.) <i>Explorations of Martha Rogers' Science of Unitary Human Beings</i>. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Norwark: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Rogers, M. 1989. "Nursing: A Science of Unitary Human Beings." In J.P. Riehl-Sisca (ed.) <i>Conceptual Models for Nursing Practice</i>. 3rd edition. </span><span style="font-size: x-small;">Norwark: Appleton & Lange.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Rogers, M. 1990. "Nursing: Science of Unitary, Irreducible, Human Beings: Update 1990." In E.A.M Barrett (ed.) <i>Visions of Rogers' Science-Based Nursing</i>. New York: National League for Nursing. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Rogers, M. 1992. "Nursing Science and the Space Age." <i>Nursing Science Quarterly</i> 5(1), 27-34. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Rosa, Linda A. 1994. "Therapeutic Touch." <i>Skeptic </i>3(1),40-49. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Rosa, L., E. Rosa, L. Sarner, and S. Barrett 1998. "A Close Look at Therapeutic Touch." <i>Journal of the American Medical Association</i> 279, 1005-1010. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Schieber, Bela 1997. "Therapeutic Touch: Evaluating the 'Growing Body of Evidence' Claim." <i>The Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine</i> 1(1), 13-15. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Singer, Barry 1981. "Kirlian Photography." In George O. Abell and Barry Singer (eds.) <i>Science and the Paranormal</i>. New York: Scribners. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Stefanatos, Joanne 1997. "Introduction to Bioenergetic Medicine." Chapter 16 of Allen M. Schoen and Susan G. Wynn (eds.) <i>Complementary and Alternative Veterinary Medicine: Principles and Practice</i>. Mosby-Year Book. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Stenger, Victor J. 1990. <i>Physics and Psychics: The Search for a World Beyond the Senses</i>. Buffalo NY: Prometheus Books. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Stenger, Victor J. 1995. <i>The Unconscious Quantum: Metaphysics in Modern Physics and Cosmology</i>. Buffalo NY: Prometheus Books. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Stenger, Victor J. 1997a. "Quantum Quackery." <i>Skeptical Inquirer</i> 21(1),37-40. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Stenger, Victor 1997b. "Quantum Mysticism." <i>The Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine</i> 1(1), 26-30. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Ulett, George 1997. "Therapeutic Touch: Tracing Back to Mesmer." <i>The Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine</i> 1(1), 16-18. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Watkins, Arleen J. and William S. Bickel 1986. "A Study of the Kirlian Effect." Skeptical Inquirer 10(3),244-257; "The Kirlian Technique: Controlling the Wild Cards." <i>Skeptical Inquirer</i> 13(2), 172-184. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Wheeler, L. Richard 1930. <i>Vitalism: Its History and Validity</i>. London: Witherby.
</span></div>
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<div style="text-align: right;">
Victor J. Stenger</div>
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<i>The Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine</i>, <br />
Vol. 3, No. 1, Spring/Summer 1999.<br />
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Quixiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03126711689901268060noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12912400.post-25295794843422466092014-02-15T17:27:00.002-08:002015-10-17T03:16:37.482-07:00Revolution by Other Means: Jefferson, the Jefferson Bible, and Jesus<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-6pRNTOOmS_w/ViIf-9j6QUI/AAAAAAAABwc/RMTCQAXDmuo/s1600/Jefferson-Monticello-illustration-1-631.jpg__800x600_q85_crop.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="152" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-6pRNTOOmS_w/ViIf-9j6QUI/AAAAAAAABwc/RMTCQAXDmuo/s320/Jefferson-Monticello-illustration-1-631.jpg__800x600_q85_crop.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<div style="text-indent: .25in;">
It would be difficult to dispute that Thomas Jefferson was, at times, a ruthless, amoral, and unscrupulous politician. While Secretary of State, he secretly helped create a newspaper to attack his boss, President Washington, he supported the paper (and its editor) with funds drawn from State Department accounts; and he leaked secret information taken from State Department files so that the paper (the National Gazette) could publicize Jefferson’s views without Jefferson actually having to confront Washington (Burns; see, however, Malone, 423–427). Once he had assumed the presidency, himself, Jefferson pushed his followers to find ways to impeach politically inconvenient judges (Bernstein). Later, despite having won the presidency, in part, by charging President Adams and his followers with violating the press’s liberties, he urged his followers to use local and state laws to harass newspapers that opposed him with a few “wholesome punishments” (Levy; Jefferson, “Second Inaugural,” avalon.law.yale.edu).
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While acknowledging Jefferson’s duplicity and ruthlessness in politics, most historians have been willing to accept at face value his protestations regarding religion. He, after all, had placed on his tombstone “HERE WAS BURIED THOMAS JEFFERSON [—] AUTHOR OF THE DECLARATION OF AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE[;] OF THE STATUTE OF VIRGINIA FOR RELIGIOUS FREEDOM[;] AND FATHER OF THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA....” His tolerance, his deism, his belief in a rational approach to religion are writ large in accepted history—and this essay will not challenge the broad outline of this dogma. There are, however, devils in the details of Jefferson’s religious beliefs and the accepted texts of his beliefs must, in some instances, be tinted and footnoted.
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We need to turn first to the religious shades cast by many American leaders during the time of the American Revolution and the Early Republic. As Gordon Wood has noted, “most of the founding fathers had not put much emotional stock in religion.... As enlightened gentlemen, they abhorred the ‘great gloomy superstition disseminated by ignorant illiberal preachers’ and looked forward to the day when ‘the phantom of darkness will be dispelled by the rays of science, and the bright charms of rising civilization’” (Wood, 330).
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The leading founders embodied their views in their actions. On June 7, 1797, for instance, the Senate of the United States unanimously passed a “Treaty of Peace and Friendship” with the pasha of Tripoli, a so- called “Barbary pirate” who had been raiding American ships and holding American sailors hostage. The eleventh article of this treaty has, deservedly, attracted attention over the years. It reads:
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As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion,—as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen,—and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries [avalon.law.yale.edu].
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Article 11 did not, at the time, excite consternation. The treaty was widely available in newspapers and it had been read on the floor of the Senate. The vote, outside of its unanimity, was not exceptional in any way and the Senate moved onto other business. Retrospectively, its implications regarding the founding generation’s “original intent” are, here in the early twenty-first century, significant. Within less than a decade of the writing of the United States Constitution, the Senate, in very humdrum fashion, put the government on record as not being “in any sense” a Christian nation (Gould, stephenjaygould.org).
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Seven years earlier, George Washington had undertaken a tour of New England as a “goodwill tour” promoting the new government he now headed. The Touro congregation at the Sephardic synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, anticipating Washington’s arrival in their area, had expressed their pleasure at being included in “a Government, which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance—but generously affording to all Liberty of conscience, and immunities of Citizenship:—deeming every one, of whatever Nation, tongue, or language equal parts of the great governmental Machine” (avalon.law.yale.edu).
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Washington responded that year with what has become one of the most famous of his letters—now called the “Touro Synagogue Letter”:
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The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation.... It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving
it on all occasions their effectual support ... every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid [George Washington Papers, Library of Congress, Series 2 Letterbooks, Letterbook 39].
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In fact, the George Washington who has been pictured in innumerable (and romanticized) etchings, sketchings, posters, and tourist trinkets as kneeling in prayer at Valley Forge quite likely did not exist. On February 1, 1800 (or forty- nine days after Washington’s death), Jefferson recorded in his private notes:
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[Benjamin] Rush tells me that he had it from Asa Green that when the clergy addressed Genl. Washington on his departure from the govmt, it was observed in their consultation that he had never, on any occasion said a word to the public which showed a belief in the Xn religion and they thot they should so pen their address as to force him at length to declare publicly whether he was a Christian
or not. They did so. However he observed the old fox was too cunning for them.
He answered every article of their address particularly except that, which he passed over without notice. Rush observes he never did say a word on the subject in any of his public papers except in his valedictory letter to the Governors of the states when he resigned his commission in the army, wherein he speaks of the benign influence of the Christian religion. “I know that Gouverneur Morris, who pretended to be in his secrets & believed himself to be so, has often told me that Genl. Washington believed no more of that system [Christianity] than he himself did” [Jefferson in Bergh, ed., 433–434].</blockquote>
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The import of Jefferson’s notes is supported by a pastor of the Episcopal Church in Philadelphia which the Washingtons attended during Washington’s presidency:
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I can only state the following facts: that, as Pastor of the Episcopal Church, observing that, on Sacrament Sundays, George Washington, immediately after the desk and pulpit services, went out with the greater part of the congregation ... I considered it my duty, in a Sermon on Public Worship, to state the unhappy tendency of example, particularly of those in elevated stations, who uniformly turned their backs upon the celebration of the Lord’s Supper.... A few days after, in conversation ... with a Senator of the United States, he [the Senator] told me he had dined the day before with the President, who, in the course of conversation at the table, said that ... he had received a very just rebuke from the pulpit
for always leaving the church before the administration of the Sacrament; ... That he had never sufficiently considered the influence of his example, and that he would not again give cause for the repetition of the reproof; and that, as he had never been a communicant, were he to become one then, it would be imputed to
an ostentatious display of religious zeal, arising altogether from his elevated station. Accordingly, he never afterwards came on the morning of sacrament Sunday, .... [James Abercrombie, qtd. in Sprague, 394].
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Even the most religious and, by far, the most enthusiastically devout of the early presidents, Andrew Jackson, not only refused to support a movement to form a Christian (read Protestant) Party, he, perhaps more importantly, also refused to halt mail deliveries on Sunday. In response to a call by a supporter, the Evangelical minister Ezra Stiles Ely, to form a Christian (read Protestant) party, Jackson wrote to Ely: “Amongst the greatest blessings secured to us under our Constitution is the liberty of worshipping God as our conscience dictates” (Andrew Jackson to Ezra Stiles, qtd. in Haskell, 406; for Ely sermon see The Reformer, 7:135–137).
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Jackson’s point of view indicates that even the more religious of American political leaders were not so quick to call for religious obedience supra the Constitution or America’s libertarian past. Congress simply refused to listen to those Protestants who wanted a stricter observance of the Sabbath. After more than a decade of petitions from evangelicals on the subject and with almost two full decades in which the voters could have made their preferences known, the Senate’s “1829 Report on the Subject of Mails on the Sabbath” declared that the Senate was “a civil institution, wholly destitute of religious authority” and concluded that “the line cannot be too strongly drawn between church and state” (U.S. Senate Report, qtd. in Lambert, 2010; “Review of a report of the Committee, to whom was referred the several petitions on the subject of mails on the Sabbath; presented to the Senate of the United States, January 16, 1829, by the Hon. Mr. Johnson, of Kentucky, chairman of said committee”).
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There was, however, another side to American political life in the founding decades. While Minister Ely had little luck with his crusade against Sunday mail deliveries, the cultural magnet of religion grew ever more powerful. During the Constitutional era, several states decided to rewrite their constitutions. Generally, this has been seen as a conservative reaction against state constitutions which were either perceived as too radical, too threatening to coastal elites, or simply too unworkable (or some combination thereof ).
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The most important of the rewrites was almost certainly the one undertaken by Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania’s 1776 Constitution had been the most radical of the state Revolutionary era constitutions; in fact, it was known as the “Radical” Constitution. It had been put into place without ratification, without consultation with the populace, and without even much deliberation. When Pennsylvania wrote a new constitution in 1789–1790, its constitutional convention wrote the new constitution in a very deliberate fashion, debated it at considerable length, and enacted it only after a pause of a number of months in which delegates returned to their districts to sample their constituents’ opinions. Despite a period of furious debate over the provisions for the State Senate during December and early January, by late January the people of Pennsylvania seem to have found the process so unexceptional that they lost interest in it. Even the more radical newspapers in Pennsylvania stopped reporting on it by early February. The populace accepted its installation without murmur in September of 1790.</div>
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Yet, in the convention’s debates over religious qualifications for officeholding,
something odd had occurred—something which suggests that the skepticism and deistic coloration of America’s leaders did not quite match what was occurring at lower political levels. A committee of distinguished state leaders had created the first draft of the new state constitution in December of 1789 and reported a bill of rights that had as its fourth section: “That no person who acknowledges the being of a God, and a future state of rewards and punishments shall, on account of his religious sentiments, be disqualified to hold any office of trust or profit under this commonwealth” (Pennsylvania State Constitutional Convention, 1789–1790).
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By European standards, this was remarkably liberal; it opened the door to political office not only to Christians, but to Jews and Moslems. Some delegates, nevertheless, felt that it was not sufficiently liberal. On February 3, one Philadelphia County delegate, William Robinson, Jr., moved to strike “and a future state of rewards” from the draft. Apparently before a vote on that motion could be held (parliamentary procedure being somewhat looser in the eighteenth century), he made a second motion to also strike “who acknowledges the being of a God, and a future state of rewards and punishments.” Robinson’s motion was defeated 13–47. Most of the votes in favor of Robinson’s motion came from (supposedly conservative) Federalists, while those who were later to be identified with “liberal” Jeffersonian agrarianism, and certainly with Jefferson, himself generally voted to keep the restrictions (Minutes of the Grand Committee, 84).
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There was something of the future in this vote. Gordon Wood, in his
Radicalism of the American Revolution, notes that by the 1820s even such a
profoundly anti– Christian jurist as the New York chancellor, James Kent,
found it necessary to recognize Christianity as being at the core of the body
politic (Wood, 331). In the case of New York v. Ruggles (8 Johns. R. 290 N.Y.
1811), Kent found that Ruggles, in saying that “Jesus Christ was a bastard,
and his mother must be a whore,” had threatened the basic tenets of ordered
civilization:
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We stand equally in need, now as formerly, of all the moral discipline, and of those principles of virtue, which help to bind society together. The people of this state, in common with the people of this country, profess the general doctrines of christianity, as the rule of their faith and practice; and to scandalize the author of these doctrines is not only, in a religious point of view, extremely impious, but, even in respect to the obligations due to society, is a gross violation of decency and good order.
</blockquote>
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Christianity had, by the mid–1800s, not become the religion of society;
it had become society itself. Admittedly it was, by and large, a very accepting
Christianity, one capable of tolerating wide variation. The general society
neither disdained nor hindered skeptics such as the young Abraham Lincoln.
Religious orthodoxy, admittedly a wide orthodoxy, had found a respect, if
not a foothold, among the most religiously liberal. Even those who were not
religious, could not ignore the ordering and stabilizing effects of Christianity.
The country may have treasured orthodoxy but it still tolerated attacks
on that orthodoxy (assuming a certain level of civility). Jews might not be
Christians, but Judaism was tolerated so long as it did not stand in active
opposition to the Christian orthodoxy. Skeptics could and did profess their
disbelief, but they were generally left unchecked so as long as they did not
attempt to savage the broad religious consensus. If one can have a profound
but vaporous orthodoxy, then such can be said of the United States. In such
a society, it is all but unremarkable, so far as a national history goes, that Jefferson
created his own Bible (or, to be more correct, “Bibles”)—with a cutting
tool and with paste. The Bible appears, at the least, to be the third president’s
own existential testimony to freedom of conscience. Historians have tended
to treat the Jefferson Bible as no more than an intellectual exercise, a quaint
tinkering, as it were, with Christianity by slicing out all the mysticism found
in it. In a land, however, that held what may seem religiously oxymoronic—
a land that possessed a profoundly vaporous orthodoxy—we should be alert
that not all may be quite as it seems.</div>
<div style="text-indent: .25in;">
First, Jefferson composed not one but two “Jefferson Bibles.” In both
instances, Jefferson simply took several bibles, cut from them various verses,
and then pasted these verses onto pages that he later bound into what were
essentially devotionals. Jefferson, probably a little disingenuously, stated that
he compiled the first Bible during a few nights in the late winter of 1804.
Using two bibles (which are still preserved) from which he cut the wanted
verses, Jefferson pasted them onto 46 octavo sheets. It is at this point that we
step into the long strange journey that we name the “Jefferson Bible.” What
happened to this first “Jefferson Bible” is unknown (D. Adams, ed., 45 –53).
Jefferson mentioned this first effort in several letters that are still extant. The
key one, at least for our understanding, is a letter of April 25, 1816, to Francis
Adrian Van der Kemp—a Dutch political radical and minister who had fled
from Europe to escape imprisonment by the Prussians and an intellectual
considered to be one of the most learned men in the United States (D. Adams,
ed., 368–370; Schama). It is in this letter that Jefferson states that the first
Jefferson Bible was “hastily done, however, being the work of one or two
evenings only....”</div>
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While we know that Jefferson created his first Bible quickly, the reality
is that it could not have been the work of only one or two evenings. The reader
is invited to do the following: first, become very learned in Christian scripture,
then create some type of index to guide your selection of verses (making
certain that you literally have several hundred verses in your index—enough,
in fact, to make a Gospel), now make selections so that you can form reasonable
sentences and shape those sentences into reasonable paragraphs, all the
while keeping in mind that your paragraphs must finally be formed into reasonable
Biblical chapters. You must do all this before you begin your cutting.
(In some instances, by the way, you will probably need to split verses in two
to create better sentences.) You must, also, locate the verses you want using
two different Bibles—you must use two different Bibles since cuts on one
side of a page may accidentally delete verses on the other side of the page.
Having performed this rather lengthy undertaking, cut your chosen verses
out of the Bible, and paste them onto octavo sheets. You must use a glue pot
or other gluing items available in 1804 (hence no glue sticks or whatever the
present most modern gluing instrument is) and you must use the scissors or
shears available in 1804. You will quickly find that even the indexing is not
the work of one or two nights. While we do not have anything which tells us
how long Jefferson spent on this first effort, it was clearly something on which
he expended a great deal of energy. We know that he did it quickly, receiving
the Bibles he used on or immediately after February 4, 1804 (although the
mere ordering of the Bibles, and the fact that he had thought through the
necessity to use two [!] Bibles suggests that Jefferson may have already had a
draft index in hand), and having the resultant tome bound no later than
March 10, 1804 (D. Adams, ed., 27, please note, in particular, footnote 83).
This suggests a considerable amount of energy and concentration expended
in a short period. This energy and concentration, in turn, suggests quite significant
amounts of intentionality.
</div>
<div style="text-indent: .25in;">
Jefferson’s second effort, in 1820, has been preserved and, as of this writing (January 2012), is in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. The 1820 effort, if we are to judge by the excisions found in the two earlier Bibles and compare them to the 1820 “Jefferson Bible,” must have been very similar to the 1804 effort. This 1820 “Jefferson Bible” demonstrates that Jefferson exercised considerable meticulousness in delineating exactly what he believed to be believable. Moreover, Jefferson clearly tried to create a pleasing harmony among sentences. There are a number of places where Jefferson clipped out part of a verse and then joined it to another verse when no verse, in its entirety, quite fit what he wanted to say. For instance, on page 15 of the 1820 manuscript, Jefferson began with Matthew 7:26 –29 and 8:1, followed by Mark 6:6, of which he used only the second half of the verse. The Mark snippet formed the bridge to verses pulled from Matthew (11:28–30) and then Luke (7:36–38). The analysis performed by Dickinson Adams of that manuscript indicates that Jefferson snipped individual verses into parts 46 times (D. Adams, ed., 51; see also Charles T. Cullen’s “Foreword” to D. Adams). The ability to use so many different verses to construct one column on one page makes it clear that Jefferson was in total control of his material–the King James Bible—and that he took considerable effort in the selection and joining of his verses. Jefferson, however, did not simply cut apart two or more King James Bibles. He also sliced into pieces Greek Bibles, French Bibles, and Latin Bibles; the 1820 Jefferson Bible is a columnar Bible with Greek, French, and Latin columns corresponding to the English versions (photographic reproduction, D. Adams, ed., 127–297). Anyone who has ever tried to align Greek translations precisely with English translations will realize what a strenuous intellectual undertaking such an effort would be. To do it not just for Greek verses but also for Latin and French verses and to have all them align would be an undertaking of staggering dimensions. It is, therefore, clear that the 1820 Jefferson Bible holds only what Jefferson, after much intellectual endeavor, intended it to hold.
</div>
<div style="text-indent: .25in;">
The reality that Jefferson was in total control of his material allows us to examine, in detail, Jefferson’s intentions and, if we may dare to use the word “faith,” faith. Since Jefferson would have excised anything that he did not believe to have a strong potentiality of being true, we can determine, precisely, specific elements of Jefferson’s beliefs. An author will not include demons after such an earnest and demanding exercise unless he or she believes that the universe is likely arranged in such a way as to include demons. In short, while many have plumbed Jefferson’s letters to determine his belief system, the actual physical cuts—into a number of Bibles—more surely delineate what Jefferson believed than those letters written to audiences besides himself.
</div>
<div style="text-indent: .25in;">
First and foremost, the Jefferson Bibles certainly indicate that he believed that there was a God. There is nothing odd about this observation—Deists, by definition, believe in a God. But Jefferson quite apparently meant to refer to a “Christian God”—in distinct contradiction to a “Jewish God.” From Jefferson’s point of view, the Jews had somehow come to believe, correctly, Jefferson believed, that the arrangement of the universe included one and only one God. His letters, however, indicate that Jefferson believed that Jewish theology was simply incorrect—their one God was not the one that existed. In an 1819 letter to the evangelist Ezra Stiles, Jefferson wrote:
</div>
<blockquote style="margin-right: 1in;">
I am not a Jew; and therefore do not adopt their theology, which supposes that the god of infinite justice to punish the sins of the fathers upon their children, unto the 3d. and 4th. Generation; and the benevolent and sublime reformer of that religion [Jesus] has told us only that God is good and perfect, but has not defined Him. I am, therefore, of His theology ... [Thomas Jefferson to Ezra Stiles, June 25, 1819 in Henry Augustine Washington, ed., 125].
</blockquote>
<div style="text-indent: .25in;">
Although not quite adopting a Marcionite<sup style="color: darkblue;">1</sup> position, Jefferson drew a sharp contrast between the Jewish conception of God and the Christian conception of God and believed that Jesus had come to teach the Jews that they had erred in their understanding of God. In a letter written in 1820, Jefferson was even blunter regarding the theology of the Jews: “The whole religion of the Jews, inculcated on him [sic] from his infancy, was founded on the belief of divine inspiration. The fumes of the most disordered imaginations were recorded in their religious code, as communications of the deity.... (Thomas Jefferson to William Short, August 4, 1820, in Washington, ed., 167).<sup style="color: darkblue;">2</sup>
</div>
<div style="text-indent: .25in;">
References to Jefferson’s God lead to Jefferson’s views on heaven. The 1820 manuscript is replete with both references to heaven and, what is more important, given the term’s connection with Jesus, the “kingdom of heaven.”<sup style="color: darkblue;">3</sup> The exact phrase “kingdom of heaven” occurs 20 times in the manuscript. “Heaven” is referred to 49 times. There are numerous instances where the word “kingdom” is used alone—but clearly referring to the “kingdom of heaven.” Jefferson, moreover, includes three instances of Jesus referring to “my kingdom” while angels are explicitly referenced nine times. Jefferson, incidentally, included references to the “devil” three times and to “Hell” nine times. Strikingly, Jefferson included (from Matthew 13): He that soweth the good seed is Son of man; The field is the world; the good seed are the children of the kingdom; but the tares are the children of the wicked one; The enemy that sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the world; and the reapers are the angels. As therefore the tares are gathered and burned in the fire; so shall it be in the end of this world. The Son of man shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity; And shall set them into a furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.... So shall it be at the end of the world: the angels shall come forth, and sever the wicked from the just, And shall cast them into the furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth [37–42, 49 –50]. The “wicked one,” “the devil,” the apocalypse, angels, the sinners tossed into the “furnace of fire” and the angels “sever[ing] the wicked from the just”—the reality is that Jefferson placed these mystical elements into his own personal devotional; the Jefferson Bible was, after all, not the “Jefferson Bible” to him, but his own personal guide to his own personal religion—and one he kept to himself until his death.
</div>
<div style="text-indent: .25in;">
The “textbook Jefferson,” the one who is credited with being a prime example of a Deist, is, to most who believe themselves aware of Jefferson’s beliefs, a person whose religious views were based on extremely rational approaches to religion—a sort of religion with all the energy of the mystical and the unknown drained away and only philosophy and reason left. Yet the above examples illustrate that, by the time he had advanced in years, Jefferson had become anything but a person whose religious model was based on a rational examination of the world and whose relationship with Christianity enclosed only its moral precepts. If we accept the idea that actions speak louder than words, Jefferson’s Bible states that Jefferson believed in—or at least accepted the strong possibility of—a wide range of items that twenty-first century members of Western culture would term either spiritual or superstitious.
</div>
<div style="text-indent: .25in;">
If the Jefferson Bible is not a demystified and desiccated collection of biblical verses, then what was it? More than anything else, it is a variation (albeit with a considerable twist) of a Gospel harmony; that is, an attempt to create a text that takes the four gospels, removes (in Jefferson’s case quite literally) contradictions and obscurities to create a harmonious single gospel.
</div>
<div style="text-indent: .25in;">
The idea dates back at least to Justin Martyr (103–165 C.E.) who created (or,
maybe, had access to) a harmony or harmonies of the Mark, Matthew, and Luke traditions.4 Justin’s harmony has been lost, if it ever existed in one singlewritten form, but Justin’s follower, Tatian (died c. 190), created a written gospel harmony using all four Gospel traditions. Copies, although at least somewhat incomplete, of Tatian’s harmony, the Diatessaron, have been preserved in a number of manuscripts and, although we cannot know, at the most granular level, Tatian’s precise ordering of passages from the different gospel traditions, the different manuscripts indicate that Jefferson and Tatian followed very much the same method of composition.<sup style="color: darkblue;">5</sup> Tatian and Jefferson both linked passages from different gospels by using short passages from other gospels. Several centuries after Tatian, the idea of creating a harmony among the different gospels probably reached its peak in an exhaustive, and even daunting, treatise by St. Augustine who wrote to repel attacks by non-Christians on the texts of the Christian scriptures. Augustine wrote his harmony in response to non– Christians who used the many differences between the Gospels as demonstrating that not even Christians knew the truth about their narrative.<sup style="color: darkblue;">6</sup> In short, the idea of a harmony, which is what Jefferson’s Bible is, lies well within the Christian tradition.
</div>
<div style="text-indent: .25in;">
While some ancient writers continued the tradition of Justin Martyr and Tatian, there were few, if any, attempts to write harmonies during the Western Middle Ages. At the beginning of the modern era, the tradition revived. Charles Cullen came to the conclusion that Jefferson followed, in rough fashion, a harmony in Greek of the Gospels, prepared by William Newcome, who was probably bishop of Dromore (Ireland) when he compiled his particular harmony. Certainly Bishop Newcome’s book was in Jefferson’s library when Jefferson died and it seems reasonable to suppose that Newcome’s version had at least some influence on Jefferson’s arrangement of data (D. Adams, ed., 37).
</div>
<div style="text-indent: .25in;">
Nevertheless, Jefferson’s harmony was not the harmony of Tatian or St. Augustine or Bishop Newcome or anyone else. They wrote their harmonies from the point of view that “received” Christianity, the “old- time religion,” as it were, was correct and that harmonies were needed mostly for reasons of simplification or, in Augustine’s case, defense of what had become “mainstream Christianity”—their attempt was to include, not exclude. Jefferson, on the other hand, built his harmony on his belief that the Gospels had to be harmonized through paring the text(s)—through exclusion rather than inclusion.
</div>
<div style="text-indent: .25in;">
Having determined for himself that the Gospels were corrupt, he sought to remove their impurities through an exclusive harmony. Jefferson, moreover, clearly believed that he was the one that had the intellectual ability to remove such corruptions, creating a new harmony. Certainly Jefferson was not shy about his abilities to discern the sayings of the “true Jesus”: “[Jesus’s words are] as distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill” and “It is as easy to separate [out the words of Jesus] as to pick out diamonds from dunghills” (Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, October 12, 1813; Jefferson to Adams, January 24, 1814; D. Adams, ed., 352; Broden, ed.). Anything which implied that Jesus was, in some mystic way, united with God, had been, Jefferson reasoned, entered in error and therefore had to be excluded. Certainly such a mix of the rational and the mystical was revolutionary; no one had ever thought to “demythologize” Jesus while keeping the rest of the Christian framework of myth<sup style="color: darkblue;">7</sup> and spirituality. Despite his acceptance of a Christian God and almost all the Christian framework of the spiritual world, the political revolutionary had become a religious revolutionary.
</div>
<div style="text-indent: .25in;">
The Jefferson Bible and Jefferson’s letters indicate that Jefferson believed that Jesus had set out to create a religious- cultural revolution. Jefferson saw Jesus as reacting (rebelling against, if you will) the base, corrupt, amoral, and intolerant rigidities that Jefferson believed had become part of Jewish society—much as Jefferson had when he listed, in the Declaration of Independence, the base, corrupt, amoral and intolerant rigidities that the British government had fallen into. Moreover, he believed Jesus had a vision of society that was far superior to those of his fellow Jews and much more closely aligned with, the thoughts of the original creator of the world—again much as Jefferson saw the American Revolution as aligning America with the ideals of that original creator (“that all men are created equal ... that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights...”). Jefferson’s Bible and his letters express his belief that he, Thomas Jefferson, could rescue Jesus from still another set of base, corrupt, amoral, and intolerant authorities who had seized Jesus’s message (in essence his constitution) and used it to further their own ignorant or selfish ends.
</div>
<div style="text-indent: .25in;">
In Jefferson’s mind, Jesus and Jefferson and his Bible expressed a resistance
against three tyrannies. First, Jefferson believed that the Jewish culture
of the Second Temple period and more recent Jewish cultures were corrupt
and horribly misshapen.</div>
<blockquote style="margin-right: 1in;">
The reformation of ... [Jewish] blasphemous attributes, and substitution of those more worthy, pure and sublime, seems to have been the chief object of Jesus in his discources [sic] to the Jews ... [Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, April 11, 1823, in Washington, ed., 283].
The deism and ethics of the [Second Temple] Jews ... shew in what a degraded state they were and the necessity they presented of a reformation [which would be provided by Jesus] [Thomas Jefferson to Joseph Priestley, April 9, 1803, in D. Adams, ed., 327–329].
But the greatest of all the Reformers of the depraved religion of his own country, was Jesus of Nazareth [Thomas Jefferson to William Short, October 31, 1819, in Washington, ed., 139].
Jews:
1. Their system was Deism; that is, the belief of one only god. But their ideas
of him and of his attributes were degrading and injurious.
2. Their Ethics were not only imperfect, but often irreconcileable with the
sound doctrines of reason and morality, as they respect intercourse with those
around us; and repulsive and anti- social, as respecting other nations. They
needed reformation, therefore, in an eminent degree [Thomas Jefferson, syllabus
sent to Benjamin Rush, April 21, 1803, in D. Adams, ed., 331–334].
[Quoting William Enfield’s History of Philosophy] “Ethics were so little studied among the Jews, that, in their whole compilation called the Talmud, there is only one treatise concerning moral subjects. [A long list of objections to Jewish maxims then follows.] What a wretched depravity of sentiment and manners must have prevailed before such corrupt maxims could have obtained credit [i.e., in pre-Talmudic Judaism, including Second Temple Judaism]! It is impossible to collect from these writings a consistent series of moral Doctrine.” It was the reformation of this “wretched depravity” of morals which Jesus undertook [Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, October 12, 1813, in Baden, ed.; Enfield, p. 409, 1792].
</blockquote>
<div style="text-indent: .25in;">
This list of quotes could be multiplied. Jefferson clearly saw Jews as being ethically flawed in the most desperate of manners and Jesus as being the person who attempted to rescue his people from their degradation. Jefferson, with his massive erudition, apparently took common points of view, loosely held by most of those who lived in Western civilization, and burnished them to sharp tines on which to impale Judaism and Jews.
</div>
<div style="text-indent: .25in;">
Second, Jefferson saw Christianity, as it had come to exist in its organized persona, as being great, but evil, and oppressive.</div>
<blockquote style="margin-right: 1in;">
The Christian priesthood, finding the doctrines of Christ levelled to every understanding, and too plain to need explanation, saw in the mysticisms of Plato, materials with which they might build up an artificial system which might ... admit everlasting controversy, give employment for their order, and introduce it to profit, power, and pre- eminence [Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, July 5, 1814, in Baden, ed.].
[Speaking of a bill before the English Parliament to allow anti– Trinitarians religious freedom and the opposition of the English church leaders to the bill]
This constitutes the craft, the power and the profit of the priests. Sweep away their gossamer fabrics of fictitious religion, and they would catch no more flies [Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, August 22, 1813, in Baden, ed.).
</blockquote>
<div style="text-indent: .25in;">
On theological subjects, as mangled by our Pseudo- Christians.... It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus [Thomas Jefferson to Francis Adrian Van der Kemp, July 30, 1816, in D. Adams, ed., 374–375].
</div>
<blockquote style="margin-right: 1in;">
[Toleration] does not satisfy the priesthood. They must have a ... declared assent to all their ... absurdities.... The artificial structures they have built on the purest of all moral systems [i.e., that of Jesus], for the purpose of deriving from it pence and power...” [Thomas Jefferson to Margaret Bayard Smith or B. Harrison Smith, August 16, 1816, in Washington, ed., 28].
</blockquote>
<div style="text-indent: .25in;">
Third, Jefferson simply dismissed, more or less as knaves and fools, the writers of the Gospels and other early Christian writers.
</div>
<blockquote style="margin-right: 1in;">
To do [Jesus] justice it would be necessary to remark the disadvantages his doctrines have to encounter, not having committed [his doctrines] to writing himself, but [having his writings committed to print] by the most unlettered of men, by memory, long after they heard them from him; when much was forgotten, must misunderstood, and presented in very paradoxical shapes [Thomas Jefferson to Joseph Priestley, April 9, 1803, in D. Adams, ed., 327–329].
[Referring to the Bible] I separate ... the gold from the dross; restore to [Jesus] the former, and leave to the stupidity of some, and roguery of others of his disciples. Of this band of dupes and imposters, Paul was the great Coryphaeus [leader of the chorus], and first corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus [Thomas Jefferson to William Short, April 13, 1820, in Washington, ed., 156].
We must reduce our volume to the simple evangelists, select, even from them, the very words only of Jesus, paring off the Amphibologisms [in this instance, probably meaning dogmatic, if unfounded and ill- conceived, statements] into which they have been led by forgetting often, or not understanding what had fallen from [Jesus], by giving their misconceptions as his dicta, and expressing unintelligibly for others what they did not understand themselves [Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, October 12, 1813, in Baden, ed.].
No historical fact is better established than that of the doctrine of one god, pure and uncompounded, was that of the early ages of Christianity; and was among the most efficacious doctrines which gave it triumph over the polytheism of the antients.... Nor was the unity of the supreme being ousted from the Christian creed by the force of reason, but by the sword of civil government wielded at the will of the fanatic Athanasius<sup style="color: darkblue;">8</sup> [Thomas Jefferson to James Smith, December 8, 1822, in Washington, ed., 269].</blockquote>
<div style="text-indent: .25in;">
The Jefferson Bible, thus, was not the simple product of a deist eliminating whatever seemed mystical, but the outpouring of something far stronger—An almost fanatical dedication to the “pure doctrines” of Jesus of Nazareth; a repudiation and distaste for all things Judaic; a hatred of the clergy that carried back over 1700 years; and a belief that Jesus’s near followers had either not understood what Jesus said or that they had forgotten or that they corrupted Jesus’s sayings for their own vain and selfish ends.
</div>
<div style="text-indent: .25in;">
We need here to take a step back. Jefferson had been the leader of the anti- authoritarian faction in the American Revolution. Whatever his relationship with his slaves, he believed in, if not constant revolution, at least punctuated revolution. He was, after all, the American leader who said that the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants” (Thomas Jefferson to Colonel [William S.] Smith, November 13, 1787 in Randolph, ed., 268); that “no society can make a perpetual constitution.... The earth belongs always to the living generation” (Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, September 6, 1789 in Smith, ed., 30); that “the spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always [emphasis mine] kept alive” (Thomas Jefferson to Abigail Adams, February 22, 1787, in Golden and Golden, 60).
</div>
<div style="text-indent: .25in;">
Revolutionary leaders, of course, have never been noted for their restraint and moderation. In 1921, Trotsky told the All- Russian Congress of Peasant Deputies, in defense of acts of terrorism and repression, that “we shall not enter the kingdom of socialism in white gloves on a polished floor” (Johnson, 77). As Maximilian Robespierre said to the French Convention in 1794: “Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible justice; it is therefore an emanation of virtue. It is not so much a special principle than a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country’s most urgent needs” (Halsall). Or, as Oliver Cromwell is believed to have noted upon the execution of Charles I: “cruel necessity” (Morrill and Baker, 36).
</div>
<div style="text-indent: .25in;">
Faced with his countrymen “descending” into ecstatic and emotional and “simplistic” religion Jefferson did what was unthinkable in his day and age. To rescue Jesus, to defy the Jews (at least of the Talmudic era and before), to defy the clergy, and even to defy Jesus’s early followers, he took a sharp object and physically cut several Bibles into pieces—and he did so not once, but twice. Compared to ordering massacres and terror and executions, this might seem child’s play—but those reading this should think how comfortable even secular academics would feel if someone were to hand them scissors and paste and tell them to begin cutting into their own heritage’s sacred texts.
</div>
<div style="text-indent: .25in;">
Even someone without religion, here at the beginning of the 21st century, might feel a hitch, a pause, a moment of hesitation before cutting into a Bible, into the Torah, into the Qur’an. Had the general populace—and all but a few of his revolutionary colleagues—known that he was doing so, it can be surmised that his activities would have taken them aback. With 1804 being an election year, one can imagine that common knowledge of his first attempt would have revived the Federalist Party.
</div>
<div style="text-indent: .25in;">
And yet he did undertake the revolutionary effort of taking the Christ out of Jesus and out of Christianity while leaving the other unseen or spiritual entities in. At least at this distance, the early twenty-first century, it appears that Jefferson believed that he had struck a blow for his fellow revolutionary, Jesus.
</div>
<div style="text-indent: .25in;">
Trotsky, of course, died with an ice pick in his head as delivered by one of Stalin’s henchmen. Robespierre made his own trip through the valley of the Terror and then to the scaffolding of the guillotine. Cromwell died in 1658 in his own bed. Within less than three years, though, his remains were dug up by a restored royalty, his body beheaded with the head stuck on a pike outside Westminster Hall (where it rotted beneath the sky and the birds until 1685), and his headless body hung in chains in London. (His head, in fact, was not taken to its final resting place at Cambridge until 1960.) Jefferson died in bed, surrounded by his family, and beloved by his country which, seventeen years before Cromwell’s head finally found a home (in a manner of speaking), opened a beautiful monument to him, surrounded by blossoming trees and near a quietly flowing river, in its capital city. As indicated above, Jefferson was a man who, by United States standards, was a Nixonian politician—stealing, libeling, and harassing in his pursuit of political power. But Jefferson attacked Bibles in what most Americans would have contended then and would contend now as supremely sacrilegious actions.
</div>
<div style="text-indent: .25in;">
While Watergate was sufficiently harmful to Nixon’s image and reputation in and of itself, the reader is left to imagine what would have been made of the 37th president—the charges of megalomania—if Nixon had been discovered hacking apart Bibles and rearranging the verses to fit his fantasies late at night in the secrecy of the family quarters. Yet Jefferson, to the end, conducted revolution by other means and his reputation has lived to tell the tale.
</div>
<div style="text-indent: .25in;">
On reflection, Jefferson did not live in a land where cold- blooded executions such as accompanied the French and Russian revolutions and the English civil war were likely to occur. While spies and, occasionally, collaborators, were executed during the American Revolution, and summary justice often meted out to pro– British guerillas, the massacres of groups according to status or association did not occur and, so far as we know, the thought of which did not occur. With the Jefferson Bible, Jefferson emerges as both the
most radical of the American revolutionaries and the most violent; but that the violence was done with paste and scissors suggests how far America had departed from the continent which produced Trotskies, Robespierres, and Cromwells.
</div>
<div style="text-indent: .25in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-indent: .25in;">
<span style="text-indent: 0px;">Tim H. Blessing </span><br />
<span style="text-indent: 0px;">(The opening chapter of <b>Godly Heretics</b>)</span></div>
<br />
<b>Notes
</b><br />
<br />
1. <span style="font-size: x-small;">Any number of authors may be consulted to explain the position of Marcion on the Jewish God. Marcion was an influential Christian (held as a heretic by those who formed what would eventually become the mainstream of Christianity) who believed that the vengeful and apparently blood-thirsty God of the Hebrew Scriptures could not possibly be the God to whom Jesus had directed his followers. I suggest Helmut Koester, Introduction to the New Testament: History and Literature of Early Christianity, vol. 2 (New York: Walter De Gruyter, 1982), 324–334.
</span><br />
<br />
2. <span style="font-size: x-small;">Was Jefferson an anti–Semite? There are 41 references to “Jews” in the correspondence between Jefferson and John Adams that began late in their lives. Although none of the references may be considered to be positive references to “Jews,” a goodly number are neutral, but the majority are negative, even sneering. None are racial in the sense of seeing Jews as physically inheriting a deficiency.
It might be more appropriate to say that Jefferson saw Jews as people who had been corrupted by Judaism. I performed this analysis through a word search for “Jew” and Judaism in the Kindle edition of “Ye will say I am no Christian”: The Thomas Jefferson/John Adams Correspondence on Religion, Morals, and Values, ed. Bruce Broden (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2006).
</span><br />
<br />
3. <span style="font-size: x-small;">The debate over the phrase “kingdom of heaven” or “kingdom of God” has been a long and
rich one. The phrase is certainly one of the key phrases Jesus used—some would contend that it is the key phrase in Jesus’s teachings.
</span><br />
<br />
4. <span style="font-size: x-small;">The question of the harmonies relating to Justin Martyr is another rich field for scholarly disagreement. I refer the reader to Kroeger, 342–343. However, see also Oskar Skarsaune, “Justin and His Bible,” Justin Martyr and His Worlds, ed. Sara Parvis and Paul Foster (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007).
</span><br />
<br />
5. <span style="font-size: x-small;">Our knowledge of the Diatessaron is imperfect since such evidence as we have on it is based on Syriac, Greek copies, and Arabic fragments which are manifestly flawed. Still, the reconstructions of Tatian’s work allows us to see a compositional consistency which suggests that Tatian’s manner of arranging his material must have been close to Jefferson’s manner—although with quite different results and without the glue and scissors. A good discussion of the difficulties in disentangling the threads of the Diatessaron is found in a reprint of a 1904 University of Chicago dissertation, A.A. Hobson, The Diatessaron of Tatian and the Synoptic Problem[:] Being an investigation of the Diatessaron for the Light which it throws upon the solution of the problems of the origin of the synoptic gospels (www.forgottenbooks.org).
</span><br />
<br />
6. <span style="font-size: x-small;">“Its great object is to vindicate the Gospel against the critical assaults of the heathen. Paganism, having tried persecution as its first weapon, and seen it fail, attempted next to discredit the new faith by slandering its doctrine, impeaching its history, and attacking with special persistency the veracity of the Gospel writers. In this it was aided by some of Augustin’s heretical antagonists, who endeavored at times to establish a conspicuous inconsistency between the Jewish Scriptures and the Christian, and at times to prove the several sections of the New Testament to be at variance with each other. Many alleged that the original Gospels had received considerable additions of a spurious character. And it was a favorite method of argumentation, adopted both by heathen and by Manichæan adversaries, to urge that the evangelical historians contradicted each other. Thus, in the present treatise (i. 7), Augustin speaks of this matter of the discrepancies between the Evangelists as the primary argument wielded by his opponents. Hence, as elsewhere he sought to demonstrate the congruity of the Old Testament with the New, he set himself here to exonerate Christianity from the charge of any defect of harmony, whether in the facts recorded or in the order of their narration, between its four fundamental historical documents” (Augustine of Hippo, in Schaff, ed.).
</span><br />
<br />
7. <span style="font-size: x-small;">By using “myth” I do not mean to imply “falsehood” or “fantasy.” I here am using “myth” in all its mystical, cosmological, sociological and pedagogical senses. See Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth (New York: Doubleday, 1988).
</span><br />
<br />
8. <span style="font-size: x-small;">Athanasius (c. 296–378 C.E.), Bishop of Alexandria, was the great proponent of Trinitarianism during the time when Christianity was becoming the recognized religion of the Roman Empire. Although it is very unlikely that Athanasius was the writer of the Athanasian Creed used by most Christian churches, the Creed’s content strongly reflects Athanasius’s unrelenting Trinitarianism.
</span><br />
<br />
--------------------------------------------------------------------------<br />
<br />
<b>Works Cited:</b><br />
Abercrombie, James. Letter to a friend dated 1831 quoted in Annals of the American Pulpit:<br />
Episcopalianism. Ed. William Bell Sprague. Washington, D.C.: Robert Carter and Brothers,<br />
1858. Vol. 5 of 9. This volume’s date is often incorrectly cited as 1859.<br />
Adams, Dickinson, ed. Jefferson’s Extracts from the Gospels: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson,<br />
Second Series. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.<br />
Augustine of Hippo. St. Augustine: Sermon on the Mount; Harmony of the Gospels; Homilies<br />
on the Gospels, First Series, Vol. 6 of 14. Ed. Philip Schaff. Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1887.<br />
_____. A Select Library of the Nicene and Post- Nicene Fathers of the Church. New York: The<br />
Christian Literature Co., 1886.<br />
Bernstein, Richard B. Thomas Jefferson, Kindle ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.<br />
Burns, Eric. Infamous Scribblers: The Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American<br />
Journalism, Kindle ed. New York: Public Affairs, 2007.<br />
Campbell, Joseph. The Power of Myth. New York: Doubleday, 1988.<br />
Cullen, Charles T. Foreword. Jefferson’s Extracts from the Gospels: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson,<br />
Second Series. Ed. Dickenson Adams. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.<br />
Dumas, Malone. Jefferson and the Rights of Man, vol. 2 of 6 of Jefferson and His Times, 1948–<br />
1981. Boston: Little, Brown, 1951.<br />
Enfield, William. The History of Philosophy, from the Earliest Periods: Drawn Up from [Johann<br />
Jakob] Brucker’s [“]Historia critica Philosophiae[”]. 1791. London: Thomas Tegg and Son,<br />
1837.<br />
Ely, Ezra. “The Duty of Christian Freeman to Elect Christian Rulers.” The Reformer: A Religious<br />
Work, vol. 7 of 8 (1820–1826). Philadelphia: Printed by J. Rakestraw, 1826.<br />
Golden, James L., and Alan L. Golden. Thomas Jefferson and the Rhetoric of Virtue. New York:<br />
Rowman & Littlefield, 2002.<br />
Gould, Stephen Jay. http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/buckner_tripoli.html. Accessed<br />
December 27, 2011.<br />
Halsall, Paul, ed. Modern History Sourcebook. “Maximilien Robespierre: Justification of the<br />
Use of Terror.” http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod /robespierre- terror.asp. Accessed<br />
March 18, 2012.<br />
Haskell, S.C. Andrew Jackson and Early Tennessee History. Nashville: Ambrose, 1920. Print.<br />
Hobson, A.A. The Diatessaron of Tatian and the Synoptic Problem[:] Being an investigation of<br />
the Diatessaron for the Light which it throws upon the solution of the problems of the origin<br />
of the synoptic gospels. www.forgottenbooks.org.<br />
Jefferson, Thomas. Memoir, Correspondence, and Miscellanies from the Papers of Thomas Jefferson,<br />
vol. 2 of 4. Ed. Thomas Jefferson Randolph. Charlottesville: F. Carr, 1829.<br />
_____. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 11 of 36 to date (1950–2012). Ed. Julian Boyd.<br />
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955.<br />
_____. “Second Inaugural.” 1805. http://www.bartleby.com/ 124/pres17.html. Accessed February<br />
19, 2012.<br />
_____. The Works of Thomas Jefferson, Federal ed., vols. 1 and 4 of 12. Ed. Paul Leicester Ford.<br />
New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904–1905.<br />
_____. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Monticello ed., vol. 1 of 2. Ed. Albert Ellergy Bergh.<br />
Washington, D.C.: Issued under the ouspices of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association<br />
of the United States, 1903–1904.<br />
_____. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson: Being his Autobiography, Correspondence, Reports,<br />
Messages, Addresses, and Other Writings, Official and Private, vol. 7 of 9. Ed. Henry Augustine<br />
Washington. New York: Darby & Jackson, 1859.<br />
_____, and John Adams. “Ye will say I am no Christian”: The Thomas Jefferson/John Adams<br />
Correspondence on Religion, Morals, and Values, Kindle ed. Ed. Bruce Broden. Amherst,<br />
NY: Prometheus, 2006.<br />
Johnson, Paul. Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties, rev. ed. New York:<br />
HarperCollins, 1991.<br />
Koester, Helmut. Introduction to the New Testament: History and Literature of Early Christianity,<br />
vol. 2 of 2. New York: Walter De Gruyter, 1982.<br />
Lambert, Frank. Religion in American Politics: A Short History. Princeton: Princeton University<br />
Press, 2010.<br />
Levy, Leonard. Jefferson and Civil Liberties. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1989.<br />
Morrill, John, and Phillip Baker. “Oliver Cromwell, the Regicide, and the Sons of Zeruiah.”<br />
Cromwell and the Interregnum: The Essential Readings. Ed. David Smith. Malden, MA:<br />
Blackwell, 2003.<br />
New York v. Ruggles. 8 Johns. R. 290 N.Y. 1811.<br />
Pennsylvania State Constitutional Convention, 1789–1790. “Minutes of the Grand committee<br />
of the whole Convention of the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, which commenced at<br />
Philadelphia, on Tuesday, the twenty- fourth day of November, in the year ... one thousand<br />
seven hundred and eighty- nine, for the purpose of reviewing, and, if they see occasion,<br />
altering and amending the constitution of this state.” Philadelphia: Printed by Zachariah<br />
Poulson, 1790.<br />
Schama, Simon. Patriots and Liberators. Revolution in the Netherlands, 1780–1813. New York:<br />
Knopf, 1977.<br />
Skarsaune, Oskar. “Justin and His Bible.” Justin Martyr and his Worlds, Kindle ed. Ed. Sara<br />
Parvis and Paul Foster. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007.<br />
Smith, James Morton. The Republic of Letters: The Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson<br />
and James Madison. New York: W.W. Norton, 1995.<br />
Treaty of Peace and Friendship, Signed at Tripoli November 4, 1796. http://avalon.law. yale.<br />
edu /18th_century/bar1796t.asp. Accessed December 27, 2011.<br />
United States Senate. “1829 Report on the Subject of Mails on the Sabbath.” Religion in American<br />
Politics: A Short History. Ed. Frank Lambert. Princeton: Princeton University Press,<br />
2010.<br />
Washington, George. George Washington Papers, Library of Congress, 1741–1799: Series 2<br />
Letterbooks, Letterbook 39. www.memory.loc.gov.<br />
Wood, Gordon. The Radicalism of the American Revolution. New York: Vintage, 1991.<br />
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Quixiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03126711689901268060noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12912400.post-23023676867399724612013-07-31T04:55:00.000-07:002015-04-07T22:02:41.411-07:00the sins of a gospel …<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="color: #351c75; font-size: x-small;">The following is an excerpt from <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Essayists-Prophets-Criticism-Anniversary-Collection/dp/0791085236">Essayists and Prophets (Bloom's Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection)</a>, a fantastic piece of literary criticism that I have been enjoying reading for a few days. One pleasant surprise for me was the opening essay, which it a literary critique of four books of the Bible (Job, Song of Songs, The Gospel of John, and Revelation). This excerpt focuses on the Gospel of John and is one of the most poignant and erudite rejections of Christianity I have come across in quite a while. I found it so moving that I decided to transcribe it and share it here.
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“Your father Abraham rejoiced that he had to see my day; he saw it and was glad.” The Jews then said to him, “You are not yet fifty years old, and have you seen Abraham?” Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.”
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This exchange from the Gospel according to St. John will be my text. In the Christian triumph over the Hebrew Bible, a triumph which produced that captive work, the Old Testament, there is no more heroic stroke than the transumptive trope of John’s Jesus: “Before Abraham was, I am.” Too much is carried by that figuration for any range of readings to convey, but one reading I shall give is the implied substitution: “Before Moses was, I am.” To my reading, the author of the Gospel of John was and is a more dangerous enemy of the Hebrew Bible than even Paul, his nearest rival. But I can hardly go on until I explain what I intend to mean by “an enemy of the Hebrew Bible.”
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It is now altogether too late in Western history for pious or humane self-deceptions on the matter of the Christian appropriation of the Hebrew Bible. It is certainly much too late in Jewish history to be other than totally clear about the nature and effect of that Christian act of total usurpation. The best preliminary description I have found is by Jaroslav Pelikan:</div>
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"What the Christian tradition had done was to take over the Jewish scriptures as its own, so that Justin could say to Trypho that the passages about Christ “are contained in your scriptures, or rather not yours, but ours.” As a matter of fact, some of the passages were contained only in “ours,” that is, in the Christian Old Testament. So assured were Christian theologians in their possession of the Scriptures that they could accuse the Jews not merely of misunderstanding and misrepresenting them, but even of falsifying scriptural texts. When they were aware of differences between the Hebrew text of the Old Testament and the Septuagint, they capitalized on these to prove their accusation…The growing ease with which appropriations and accusations alike could be made was in proportion to the completeness of the Christian victory over Jewish thought.
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Yet that victory was achieved largely by default. Not the superior force of Christian exegesis or learning or logic but the movement of Jewish history seems to have been largely responsible for it."</blockquote>
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Pelikan’s dispassionate judgment on this matter is beyond disputation. Though the Christians were to “save” the Old Testament from those like Marcion who would cast it out completely, that is precisely what they saved—<i>their </i>Old Testament. The New Testament is to a considerable extent a reading of that Old Testament, and I would judge it a very mixed reading indeed. Some of it is a strong misreading, and much of it is a weak misreading, but I will concern myself here entirely with strong misreadings, because only strong misreadings work so as to establish lasting enmities between texts. The author of the Gospel of John is an even stronger misreader than St. Paul, and I want to compare John’s and Paul’s strengths of what I call poetic misprision before I center upon John. But before commencing, I had better declare my own stance.
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“Who is the interpreter, and what power does he seek to gain over the text?” That Nietzschean question haunts me always. I am an enemy of the New Testament. My enmity is lifelong, and intensifies as I study its text more closely. But I have no right to assert that my own enmity carries the force of the normative Jewish tradition, because I am not a representative of that tradition. From a normative Jewish perspective, let us say from the stands of the great Akiba, I am one of the minim, the Jewish Gnostic heretics. My own reading of the Hebrew Bible, even if I develop it into a strong misreading, is as unacceptable in its way to the normative tradition as all Christian readings necessarily are. I state it is not the posture, but to make clear that I do not pretend to the authority of the normative tradition. In my view, the Judaism that moves in a continuous line from the Academy of Ezra through the Pharisees and on to the religion of my own parents is itself a very powerful misreading of the Hebrew Bible and so of the religion of the Yahwist, whatever we might take that religion to have been. But my subject here is not the text of the Yahwist.
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What kind of authority can a literary critic, whose subject is the secular literature of the English language, bring to a reading of the New Testament, particularly to a reading that sees the New Testament as a text in conflict and confrontation with the Hebrew Bible? I cannot speak for other literary critics, as here too I am a sect or party of one, and have no authority other than whatever my ideas and my writings can assert for me. But the central concern of my own literary theory and praxis, for some fifteen years now, has been the crisis of confrontation and conflict between what I have called strong poems, or strong texts. I cannot say that my formulations in this area have met with a very amiable reception, even in the most secular of contexts, and so I do not expect an amiable response as I cross the line into the conflict of scriptures. Still, I have learned a great deal from the response to my work, a response that necessarily has become part of my subject. One lesson has been that there are no purely secular texts, because canonization of poems by the secular academies is not merely a displaced version of Jewish or Christian or Muslim canonization. It is precisely the thing itself, the investment of a text with unity, presence, form, and meaning, followed by the insistence that the canonized text possesses these attributes immutably, quite apart from the interpretive activities of the academies.
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If so many partisans of Wordsworth or Whitman or Stevens find the offense of my work unbearable, then clearly I must expect a yet more pained response from the various custodians of the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament. I won’t take more space here for unhappy anticipation or personal defense, yet I do want to make the modest observation that several years spent intensely in reading as widely as I can in biblical scholarship have not left me with the impression that much authentic literary criticism of biblical texts has been written. To make a clean sweep of it, little seems to me to have been added to by recent overt intersections by literary critics, culminating in Northrop Frye’s <i>The Great Code</i>, a work in which the triumph of the New Testament over the Hebrew Bible is quite flatly complete. Frye’s code, like Erich Auerbach’s <i>figura</i>, which I have attacked elsewhere, is only another belated repetition of the Christian appropriation and usurpation of the Hebrew Bible.
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But these matters I will argue elsewhere. I come back again to the grand proclamation of John’s Jesus: “Before Abraham was, I am.” What can an antithetical literary criticism (as I call my work) do with the sublime force of that assertion? Or how should that force be described? It is not the New Testament’s antithetical reply to the Yahwist’s most sublime moment, when Moses agonizingly stammers: “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ What shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” This is the Revised Standard Version, and like every other version, it can not handle Yahweh’s awesome, untranslatable play upon his own name: <i>eyeh asher eyeh</i>. I expand upon a suggestion of Martin Buber’s when I render this as “I will be present wherever and whenever I will be present.” For that is the Yahwist’s vision of <i>olam </i>as “a time without boundaries,” end of the relation of Yahweh to a dynamics of time that transcends spatial limitations.
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The Yahwist’s vision of his God certainly would seem to center with a peculiar intensity upon the text of Exodus 3:13–14. But the entire history of ancient Jewish exegesis hardly would lead anyone to believe that this crucial passage was of the slightest interest or importance to any of the great rabbinical commentators. The <i>Exodus Rabbah</i> offers mostly midrashim connecting the name of God to his potencies which would deliver Israel from Egypt. But <i>eyeh asher eyeh</i> as a phrase evidently did not have peculiar force for the great Pharisees. Indeed, Jewish tradition does very little with the majestic proclamation until Maimonides gets to work upon it in <i>The Guide for the Perplexed</i>. One of my favorite books, Marmostein’s fascinating <i>The Old Rabbinic Doctrine of God</i>, has absolutely not a single reference to Exodus 3 in its exhaustive 150 page section on “The Names of God.” Either we must conclude that <i>eyeh asher eyeh</i> has very little significance for Akiba and his colleagues, which I think probably was the case, or we must resort to dubious theories of taboo, which have little to do with the strength of Akiba.
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This puzzle becomes greater when the early rabbinical indifference to the striking <i>eyeh asher eyeh</i> text is contrasted to the Christian obsession with Exodus 3, which begins in the New Testament and becomes overwhelming in the Church fathers, culminating in Augustine’s endless preoccupation with that passage, since for Augustine it was the deepest clue to the metaphysical essence of God. Brevard Childs, in his commentary on Exodus, has outlined the history of this long episode in Christian exegesis. Respectfully, I dissent from his judgment that the ontological aspects of Christian interpretation here really do have any continuity whatsoever either with the biblical text or with rabbinical traditions. These “ontological overtones,” as Childs himself has to note, stem rather from the Septuagint’s rendering of <i>eyeh asher eyeh</i> as the very different <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 23.390625px;">εγω ειμι ο ων</span> and from Philo’s very Platonized paraphrase in his <i>Life of Moses</i>: “Tell them that I am He who is, that they may learn the difference between what Is and what is not.” Though Childs insists that this cannot be dismissed as Greek thinking, it is nothing but that, and explains again why Philo was so crucial for Christian theology and so totally irrelevant to the continuity of normative Judaism.
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The continued puzzle, then, is the total lack of early rabbinical interest in the <i>eyeh asher eyeh</i> text. I labor this point because I read John’s greatest subversion of the Hebrew Bible as what I call this transumption of Yahweh’s words to Moses in that extraordinary outburst of John’s Jesus, “Before Abraham was, I am,” which most deeply proclaims: “Before Moses was, I am.” To me, this is the acutest manifestation of John’s palpable ambivalence toward Moses, an ambivalence whose most perceptive student has been Wayne Meeks. John plays on and against the Yahwist’s grand wordplay on Yahweh, and <i>eyeh</i>. However, when I assert even that, I go against the authority of the leading current scholarly commentary upon the Fourth Gospel, and so I must deal with this difficulty before I return to the Johannic ambivalence toward the Moses traditions. And only after examining John’s agon with Moses will I feel free to speculate upon the early rabbinic indifference to God’s substitution of <i>eyeh asher eyeh</i> for his proper name.
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Both B. Lindars and C. K. Barrett in their standard commentaries on John insist that “Before Abraham was, I am” makes no allusion whatsoever to “I am that I am.” A literary critic must begin by observing that New Testament scholarship manifests of every impoverished notion as to just what literary allusion is or can be. But then here is Barrett’s flat reading of this assertion of Jesus: “The meaning here is: Before Abraham came into being, I eternally was, as now I am, and ever continue to be.” Perhaps I should not chide devoted scholars like Lindars and Barrett for being inadequate interpreters of so extraordinary a trope, because the master modern interpreter of John, Rudolf Bultmann, seems to me even less capable of handling trope. Here is his reading of John 8:57–58:
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"The Jews remain caught in the trammels of their own thought. How can Jesus, who is not yet 50 years old, have seen Abraham! Yet the world’s conception of time and age is worthless, when it has to deal with God’s revelation, as is its conception of life and death. “Before Abraham was, I am.” The Revealer, unlike Abraham, does not belong to the ranks of historical personages. The <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 23.390625px;">εγω </span> which Jesus speaks as the Revealer of the “I” of the eternal Logos, which was in the beginning, the “I” of the eternal God himself. Yet the Jews cannot comprehend that the <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 23.390625px;">εγω </span>of eternity is to be heard in a historical person, who is not yet 50 years old, who was a man is one of their equals, whose mother and father they knew. They can not understand, because the notion of the Revealer’s “pre-existence” can only be understood in faith."</blockquote>
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In a note, Bultmann too denies any allusion to the “I am that I am” declaration of Yahweh. I find it ironical, nearly 2000 years after St. Paul accused the Jews of being literalizers, which of course the great rabbis never were. I cannot conceive of a weaker misreading of “Before Abraham was, I am” than Bultmann’s sneering retreat into “faith,” a “faith” in the “pre-existence” of Jesus. If that is all John meant, then John was a weak poet indeed. But John is at his best here, and at his best he is a strong misreader and thus a strong writer. As for Bultmann’s polemical point, I am content to repeat a few amiable remarks made by Rabbi David Kimhi almost 800 years ago:
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"Tell them that there can be no father and son in the Divinity, for the Divinity is indivisible and is one in every aspect of unity unlike matter which is divisible.
Tell them further that a father precedes a son in time and a son is born through the agency of a father. Now even though each of the terms “father” and “son” implies the other… he who was called the father must undoubtedly be prior in time. Therefore, with reference to this god whom you call Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, that part which you call father must be prior to that which you call Son, for if they were always coexistent, they would have to be called twin brothers."</blockquote>
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I have cited this partly because I enjoy it so much, but also because it raises the true issue between Moses and John, between Abraham and Jesus, which is the agonistic triple issue of priority, authority, and originality. As I read John’s trope, it asserts not only the priority of Jesus over Abraham (and so necessarily over Moses), but also the priority, authority, and originality of John over Moses, or as we would say, of John as writer over the Yahwist as writer. That is where I am heading in this account of the agon between the Yahwist and John, and so I turn now to some general observations upon the Fourth Gospel--observations by a literary critic, of course, and not by a qualified New Testament believer and/or scholar.
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John does seem to me the most anxious in tone of all the Gospels, and its anxiety is as much what I would call a literary anxiety as an existential or spiritual one. One sign of this anxiety is the palpable difference between the attitude of Jesus toward himself in the Fourth Gospel as compared to the other three. Scholarly consensus holds that John was written at the close of the first century, and so after the synoptic Gospels. A century is certainly enough time for apocalyptic hope to have ebbed away, and for an acute sense of belatedness to have developed in its place. John’s Jesus has a certain obsession with his own glory, and particularly with what that glory ought to be in a Jewish context. Rather like the Jesus of Gnosticism, John’s Jesus is much given to saying “I am,” and there are Gnostic touches throughout John, though their extent is disputable. Perhaps, as some scholars have surmised, there is an earlier, more Gnostic gospel buried in the Gospel of John. An interesting article by John Meager of Toronto, back in 1969, even suggested that the original reading of John 1:14 was “And the Word became <i>pneuma </i>and dwelt among us,” which is a Gnostic formulation, yet curiously more in the spirit and tone of much of the Fourth Gospel than is “And the Word became flesh.”
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The plain nastiness of the Gospel of John toward the Pharisees is in the end an anxiety as to the spiritual authority of the Pharisees, and it may be augmented by John’s Gnostic overtones. A Jewish reader with even the slightest sense of Jewish history, feels threatened when reading John 18:28–19:16. I do not think that this feeling has anything to do with the supposed pathos or problematic literary power of the text. There is a peculiar wrongness about John’s Jesus saying, “If my kingship were of this world, my servants would fight, that I might not be handed over to the Jews” (18:36); it implies that Jesus is no longer a Jew, but something else. This unhappy touch is another sign of the pervasive rhetoric of anxiety in the Fourth Gospel. John’s vision seen to be of a small group--his own, presumably--which finds its analog and asserted origin in the group around Jesus two generations before. In the general judgment of scholars, the original conclusion of the Gospel was the parable of doubting Thomas, a manifest trope for a sect or coven undergoing a crisis of faith.
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It is within that anxiety of frustrated expectations, perhaps even of recent expulsion from the Jewish world, that John’s agon with Moses finds its context. Wayne Meeks has written very sensitively of the Fourth Gospel’s ambivalence toward the Moses traditions, particularly those centered upon the image of Moses as prophet-king, a unique amalgam of the two roles that John seeks to extend and surpass in Jesus. My interest in John’s handling of Moses is necessarily different in emphasis, for I am going to read a number of John’s namings of Moses as being tropes more for the text than for the supposed substance of what the New Testament (following the Septuagint) insists upon calling the Law. I myself will call it not Torah but J or the Yahwist, because that is where I locate the agon. Not theology, not faith, not truth is the issue, but literary power, the scandalous power of J’s text, which by synecdoche stands for the Hebrew Bible as the strongest poem that I have ever read in any language I am able to read. John, and Paul before him, took on an impossible precursor and rival, and their apparent victory is merely an illusion. The aesthetic dignity of the Hebrew Bible, and of the Yahwist in particular as its uncanny original, is simply beyond the competitive range of the New Testament as a literary achievement, as it is beyond the range of the only surviving Gnostic texts that have any aesthetic value--a few fragments of Valentinus and the Gospel of Truth that Valentinus may have written. But I will return at the end of this discourse to the issue of rival aesthetic achievements. John’s struggle with Moses is at last my direct concern.
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There are so many contests with Moses throughout the New Testament that I cannot contrast John in this regard to all of the other texts, but I do want to compare him briefly with Paul, if only because I intend later to consider some aspects of Paul’s own struggle with the Hebrew Bible. I think there is still nothing so pungent in all commentary upon Paul as the remarks made by Nietzsche in 1888, in <i>The Antichrist</i>:
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"Paul is the incarnation of a type which is the reverse of that of the Savior; he is the genius in hatred, in the standpoint of hatred, and in the relentless logic of hatred… What he wanted was power; with St. Paul the priest again aspired to power,--he could make use only of concepts, doctrines, symbols with which masses may be tyrannized over, and with which herds are formed."</blockquote>
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Of course Nietzsche is extreme, but can he be refuted? Paul is so careless, hasty, and inattentive a reader of the Hebrew Bible that he very rarely gets any text right; and in so gifted a person this kind of weak misunderstanding can come only from the dialectics of the power drive, of the will to power over a text, even when the text is as formidable as Torah. There is little agonistic cunning in Paul’s misreadings of Torah; many indeed are plain howlers. The most celebrated is his weird exegesis of Exodus 30 4:29–35, where the text has Moses descending from Sinai, tablets in hand, his face shining with God’s glory--a glory so great that Moses must veil his countenance after speaking to the people, and then unveil only when he returns to speak to God. Normative Jewish interpretation, surely known to Paul, was that the shining was the Torah restoration of the <i>zelem</i>, the true image of God that Adam had lost, and that the shining prevailed until the death of Moses. but here is 2 Corinthians 3:12–13:
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"Since we have such a hope, we are very bold, not like Moses, who put a veil over his face so that the Israelites might not see the end of the fading splendor."</blockquote>
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There isn’t any way to save this, even by gently calling it a “parody” of the Hebrew text, as Wayne Meeks does. It isn’t a transumption or lie against time, which is the Johannine mode; it is just a plain lie against the text. Nor is it uncharacteristic of Paul. Meeks very movingly calls Paul “the Christian Proteus,” and Paul is certainly beyond my understanding. Proteus is an apt model for many other roles, but perhaps not for an interpreter of Mosaic text. Paul's reading of what he thought was the Law increasingly seems to me oddly Freudian, in that Paul identifies the Law with the human drive that Freud wanted to call Thanatos. Paul's peculiar confounding of the Law and death presumably keeps him from seeing Jesus as a transcending fulfillment of Moses. Instead, Paul contrasts himself to Moses, hardly to his own disadvantage. Thus, Romans 9:3:
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"For I could wish that I myself were accused and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen by race."</blockquote>
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It may seem at first an outburst of Jewish pride, of which I would grant the Protean Paul an authentic share, but the Mosaic allusion changes its nature. All exegetes point to Exodus 30 2:32 as the precursor text. Moses offers himself to Yahweh as atonement for the people after the orgy of the golden calf. “But now, if thou wilt forgive their sin—and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written.” How do the two offers of intercession compare? After all, the people <i>have </i>sinned, and Moses would choose oblivion to save them from the consequences of their disloyalty. The allusive force of Paul’s offer is turned against both his own Jewish contemporaries and even against Moses himself. Even the Pharisees (for whom Paul, unlike John, has a lingering regard) are worshipers of the golden calf of death, since the Law is death. And all Moses supposedly offered was the loss of his own prophetic greatness, his place in the salvation history. But Paul, out of supposed love for his fellow Jews, offers to lose more than Moses did, because he insists he has more to lose. To be cut off from Christ is to die eternally, a greater sacrifice than the Mosaic offer to be as one who had never lived. This is what I would call a daemonic counter-Sublime of hyperbole, and its repressive force is enormous and very revelatory.
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But I return again to John, whose revisionary warfare against Moses is subtler. Meeks has traced the general pattern, and so I follow him here, though of course he would dissent from the interpretation I’m going to offer of this pattern of allusion. The allusions begin with John the Baptist chanting a typical Johannine metalepsis, in which the latecomer truly has priority (“John bore witness to him, and cried, ‘This was he of whom I said: He who comes after me ranks before me, for he was before me’”), to which the author of the Fourth Gospel adds: “For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ” (John 1:15, 17). Later, the first chapter proclaims: “We have found him of whom Moses in the Law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth” (1:45). The third chapter daringly inverts a great mosaic trope in a way still unnerving for any Jewish reader: “No one has ascended into heaven but he who descended from heaven, the Son of man. And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the son of man be lifted up” (3:13-14). John’s undoubtedly revisionary genius is very impressive here merely from a technical or rhetorical point of view. No heavenly revelations ever were made to Moses, whose function is reduced to a synecdoche, and indeed to its lesser half. To use one of my revisionary ratios, Jesus on the cross will be the tessera or antithetical completion of the mosaic raising of the brazen serpent in the wilderness. Moses was only a part, but Jesus is the fulfilling whole. My avoidance of the language of typology, here and elsewhere, is quite deliberate, and will be defended in my conclusion, where I will say a few unkind words about the Christian and now Auerbachian trope of <i>figura</i>.
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The same ratio of antithetical completion is invoked when Jesus announces himself as the fulfiller of the sign of manna, as would be expected of the Messiah. But here the gratuitous ambivalence toward Moses is sharper: “Truly, truly, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven; my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven, and gives life to the world” (6:32-33). As the trope is developed, it becomes deliberately so shocking in a Jewish context that even the disciples are shocked; but I would point to one moment in the development as marking John’s increasing violence against Moses and all the Jews: “Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died… I am the living bread… if anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh” (6:49, 51). It is, after all, gratuitous to say that our fathers ate the manna and died; it is even misleading, since had they not eaten the manna, they would not have lived as long as they did. But John has modulated to a daemonic counter-Sublime, and his hyperbole helps to establish a new, Christian sublimity, in which Jews die and Christians live eternally.
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Rather than multiply instances of John’s revisionism, I want to conclude my specific remarks on the Fourth Gospel by examining in its full context the passage with which I began: “Before Abraham was, I am.” I am more than a little unhappy with the sequence I will expound, because I find in it John at nearly his most unpleasant and indeed anti-Jewish, but the remarkable rhetorical strength of “Before Abraham was, I am” largely depends upon its contextualization, as John undoes the Jewish pride in being descended from Abraham. The sequence, extending through most of the eighth chapter, begins with Jesus sitting in the temple, surrounded both by Pharisees and by Jews were in the process of becoming his believers. To those he has begun to persuade, Jesus now says what is certain to turn them away:
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“If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” They answered him, “We are descendants of Abraham, and have never been in bondage to anyone. How is it that you say, ‘You will be made free’?” (8:31-32)
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It seems rather rhetorically weak that Jesus should then become aggressive, with a leap into murderous insinuations:
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“I know that you are descendants of Abraham; yet you seek to kill me, because my word finds no place in you. I speak of what I have seen with my Father, and you do what you of heard from your father.”
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As John’s Jesus graciously is about to tell them, the Jews’ father is the devil. They scarcely can be blamed for answering, “Abraham is our father,” or for assuming that their accuser has a demon. I look at the foot of the page of the text I am using, <i>The New Oxford Annotated Bible, Revised Standard Version </i>(1977), and next to verse 48, on having a demon, the editors helpfully tell me, “<i>The Jews</i> turned to insult and calumny.” I reflect upon how wonderful a discipline such scholarship is, and I mildly rejoin that by any dispassionate reading John’s Jesus has made the initial “turn to insult and calumny.” What matter, since the Jews are falling neatly into John’s rhetorical trap? Jesus has promised that his believers “will never see death” and the astonished children of Abraham (or is it children of the devil?) protest:
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“Abraham died, as did the prophets; and you say, ‘If anyone keeps my word, he will never taste death.’ Are you greater than our father Abraham, who died?” (8:52-53)
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Jesus responds by calling them liars, again surely rather gratuitously, and then by ensnaring them in John’s subtlest tropological entrapment, which will bring me full circle to where I began:
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“Your father Abraham rejoiced that he was to see my day; he saw it and was glad.” The Jews then said to him, “You are not yet fifty years old, and have you seen Abraham?” Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.”
(John 8:56–58)
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It is certainly the most remarkable transumption in the New Testament, though I had better explained what I mean by transumption, which is a little exhausting for me, since I have been explaining the term endlessly in eight books published over the last nine years. Very briefly, transumption or metalepsis is the traditional term in rhetoric for the trope that works to make the late seem early, and the early seem late. It lies against time, so as to accomplish what Nietzsche called the will’s revenge against time, and against time’s assertion, “It was.” Uniquely among figures of speech, transumption works to undo or reverse anterior tropes. It is therefore the particular figure that governs what we might call “interpretive allusion.” Ultimately, it seeks to end-stop allusiveness by presenting its own formulation as the last word, which insists upon an ellipsis rather than a proliferation of further allusion.
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When John’s Jesus says, “Before Abraham was, I am,” the ultimate allusion is not to Abraham but to Moses, and to Yahweh’s declaration made to Moses, “I am that I am.” The transumption leaps over Abraham by saying also, “Before Moses was, I am,” and by hinting ultimately: “I am that I am”--because I am one with my father Yahweh. The ambivalence and agonistic intensity of the Fourth Gospel achieves an apotheosis with this sublime introjection of Yahweh, which simultaneously also is a projection or repudiation of Abraham and Moses. I am aware that I seem to be making John into a Gnostic Christian, but that is the transumptive force of his rhetoric, as opposed perhaps to his more overt dialectic. His gospel, as it develops, does seem to me to become as Gnostic as it is Christian, and this is the kind of Gnosticism that indeed was a kind of intellectual or spiritual anti-Semitism. Obviously, I believe that there are Gnosticisms and Gnosticisms, and some might find considerably more attractive than others. Just as obviously, the Gnostic elements in John, and even in St. Paul, seemed to me very shadowed indeed.
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Earlier in this discourse, I confessed my surprise at the normative rabbinical indifference, in ancient days, to Yahweh’s sublime declaration, <i>eyeh asher eyeh</i>. If the great Rabbi Akiba ever speculated about that enigmatic phrase, he kept it to himself. I doubt that he made any such speculations, because I do not think that fearless sage was in the habit of hoarding them, and I am not enough of a Kabbalist to think that Akiba harbored forbidden or esoteric knowledge. To the normative mind of the Judaism roughly contemporary with Jesus, there was evidently nothing remarkable in Yahweh’s declining to give his name, and instead almost playfully asserting: “Tell them that I who will be when and where I will be am the one who has sent you.” That is how Yahweh talked, and how he was. But to the belated author of the Fourth Gospel, as to all our belated selves, “I am that I am” was and is a kind of <i>mysterium tremendum</i>, to use Rudolf Otto’s language. That mystery John sought to transcend and transume with the formulation “Before Abraham was, I am.” Prior to the text of Exodus was the text that John was writing, in which the Jews were to be swept away into the universe of death, while Jesus led John on to the universe of life.
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This transformation is an instance of just how the New Testament reduced the Hebrew Bible to that captive work, the Old Testament. Though the reduction is necessarily of great theological influence, it of course does not touch the Hebrew Bible. I have read the Hebrew Bible since I was a child, and the New Testament since I first took a course in New Testament Greek as an undergraduate. Clearly, I am not a dispassionate reader of the New Testament, though I do not read the Hebrew Bible as the normative Jewish tradition had read it, either. I come back to the issue of the interpreter’s authority. When I read, I read as a literary critic, but my concerns have little in common with those of any contemporary critic. Idealizations of any text, however canonical, or of the reading process itself are not much to my taste. Emerson said he read for the lustres. I follow him, but I emphasize even more that the lustres arise out of strife, competition, defense, anxiety, and the author’s constant need for survival <i>as an author</i>. I don’t see how any authentic literary critic could judge John as anything better than a very flawed revisionist of the Yahwist, and Paul as something less than that, despite the peculiar pathos of his protean personality. In the aesthetic warfare between the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, there is just no contest, and if you think otherwise, then bless you.
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But surely the issue is not aesthetic, I will be reminded. Well, we are all trapped in history, and the historical triumph of Christianity is brute fact. I am not moved to say anything about it. But I am moved to reject the idealized modes of interpretation it has stimulated, from early typology on to the revival of <i>figura </i>by Erich Auerbach and the Blakean Great Code of Northrop Frye. No text, secular or religious, fulfills another text and all who insist otherwise merely homogenize literature. As for the relevance of the aesthetic to the issue of the conflict between sacred texts, I doubt finally that much else is relevant to a strong reader who is not dominated by extraliterary persuasions or convictions. Reading <i>The Book of Mormon</i>, for instance, is a difficult aesthetic experience, and I would grant that not much in the New Testament subjects me to rigors of quite that range. But then John and Paul do not ask to be read against <i>The Book of Mormon</i>.
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Can the New Testament be read as less polemically and destructively revisionary of the Hebrew Bible than it actually is? Not by me, anyway. But don’t be too quick to shrug off a reading informed by an awareness of the ways of the antithetical, of the revisionary strategies devised by those latecomers who seek strength, and you will sacrifice truth to get strength even as they proclaim the incarnation of the truth beyond death. Nietzsche is hardly the favorite sage of contemporary New Testament scholars, but perhaps he still has something vital to teach them. What do Jews and Christians gain by refusing to see that the revisionary desperation of the New Testament has made it permanently impossible to identify the Hebrew Bible with the Christian Old Testament? Doubtless there are social and political benefits in idealizations of “dialogue,” but there is nothing more. It is not a contribution to the life of the spirit or the intellect to tell lies to one another or to oneself in order to bring about more affection or cooperation between Christians and Jews. Paul is hopelessly equivocal on nearly every subject, but to my reading he is clearly not a Jewish anti-Semite, yet his misrepresentation of Torah was absolute. John is evidently a Jewish anti-Semite, and the Fourth Gospel is pragmatically murderous as an anti-Jewish text. Yet it is theologically and emotionally central to Christianity. I give the last word to the sage called Radak in Jewish tradition, that David Kimhi whom I cited earlier. He quotes as proof text Ezekiel 16:53: “I will turn their captivity, the captivity of Sodom and her daughters.” And then Radak comments, rightly dismissing from his perspective all Christians as mere heretics from Judaism: “This verse is a reply to the Christian heretics who say that the future consolations have already been fulfilled. <i>Sodom is still overturned as it was and is still unsettled</i>.”
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Harold Bloom </div>
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from Essayists and Prophets (2005) - pp. 8–22</div>
Quixiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03126711689901268060noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12912400.post-12075822689342739482013-05-09T18:03:00.001-07:002019-02-20T11:13:36.256-08:00From God or the Devil: The Debate over Music …<div style="text-indent: .2in;">
The lawfulness of music has been the subject of an ongoing debate from the time of the advent of Islam. Opponents and proponents alike have accepted the basic concept that music works on the emotions; the question has been whether or not music seemed to contradict religious faith, as its opponents have argued in numerous writings.
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There are many differing views within Islamic culture about the proper role for music: what it is, what it does, and what its importance is in people’s lives. There is a sharp contradiction between supporters who show a predilection for music and others who express a marked mistrust, which in the most extreme cases becomes hostile denunciation and a call for complete banishment of the art. As a result, we are confronted with a gamut of conflicting opinions.
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The central concept shared by all parties is that music produces emotions. Its innate message is thus realized through its influence upon the soul. Since music is essentially a language of the heart, the musician’s art should emphasize emotion, relying to a great extent on instinctive control and inner wisdom. Although the musician is an indispensable part of the trinity--music, musician, and listener--the relevant literature on Arab music is more concerned with the nature of the effect on the listener and his physical or spiritual response to music.
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The philosophers of the first centuries of Islam considered the variety of effects aroused by particular melodies; it was considered that these melodies in turn inherently possessed the character that they imprinted on the listener. In contrast to this sophisticated theory, however, most authors prefer to refer vaguely to the power of music, without troubling themselves to consider the question of whether a specific type of music caused a specific effect. They assumed that human beings are necessarily responsive to the charm of music and are incapable of resisting its power, whatever its character may be. This “truth” is reflected in a statement made by a mystical author, al-Hudjwiri, who lived during the 10th century in Ghazna, Iran: “Anyone who says that he finds no pleasure in sounds and melodies, is either a liar or hypocrite, or he is not in his right senses and is outside the category of men and animals.”
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A central concept thus emerges within Islam ascribing to music an overwhelmingly influential power whose effect may take different forms: religious ecstasy and mystical union, ethical equilibrium, sensual excitement resembling intoxication, and healing for physical and mental disturbances if administered to possessed, haunted, or anguished patients.
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The great importance attached to the actual effect on the listener, especially in a religious context, was expressed by the term <i>sama</i>. This word means “hearing” and, by extension, “the thing heard”--music. It contrasts with the term <i>ghina </i>(singing), which is used to designate secular urban learned music. Under the general title sama, one can, in most treatises on mysticism, find sections dealing with instruments, performing, practice, dance, and the perennial debate on the lawfulness or morality of music.
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While accepting the basic concept that music possesses an overwhelming power capable of exerting a strong effect on human beings, the leaders of the different mystical orders offered a wide variety of explanations. The first manifestations of mysticism as an organized movement go back to the middle of the eighth century. By the time the first organized ritual emerged, music and dance were already playing a prominent role in the spiritual exercises that sent the worshiper into ecstasy and mystical union. The problem of music was thus vital. In the numerous beautiful lyrical poems dedicated to music, there are statements crediting the sound of music with the power to awaken spirits immersed in the slumber of ignorance and to make them stand up and dance like the dead who will rise at the resurrection to the sound of the last Trumpet. (Dance helps people uproot their feet, which are stuck in the terrestrial mud, and transports them upward to the summit of the world.)
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Beyond such eloquent reflections and sayings, the mystic leaders also paid attention to allegations regarding the harmful effect of music. One of the early Sufi leaders, al-Darani, said, “Music does not produce in the heart what is not in it.” This aphorism was widely used in subsequent periods to argue that music is not directly responsible for the effects it produces; the effect depends exclusively on the virtues of the listener or the degree of mystical initiation. More explicit are the words of al-Hudjwiri: “Listening to sweet sounds produces an effervescence of the substance moulded in men; true if the substance be true, false, if the substance is false. When the stuff of man’s temperament is evil, that which he hears will be evil too.” Therefore, virtue, spiritual preparation, and premeditated attention are essential factors in receiving the true message through music. This high achievement was not and perhaps could not be attainable by everyone, even including adepts of the mystical brotherhoods, many of whom belonged to the lower social classes, as well as the marginal groups that turned to extravagances and practiced exorcism through frenetic trance and self-mutilation.
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Set more or less within the same traditional material and on the fringe of the mystical doctrines and philosophy is the 10th century treatise of the ikhwn al-Safa (Brethren of Purity). One of the most comprehensive and eloquent presentations of music theory and behavior in Arabic sources, the treatise was part of a comprehensive encyclopedia composed by a group of scholars who called themselves the Brethren of Purity.
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Different currents of thought are combined in his treatise, centering on the concept that music equals harmony in its broadest sense, that is to say, as a symbol at equilibrium and orderliness in the universe (the macrocosm) and in humanity (the microcosm). Human beings cannot know all that is in the universe by going about and studying it. Life is too short in the world too large; only by studying oneself can one attained knowledge of all things, which already exists within one. Music is said to act as a focus whose purpose is to explain and illuminate the wonders of creation, the phenomena of nature, and matters lying within the domain of human creation.
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The declared aim of the Brethren was to release the reader's soul from its bonds by awakening the knowledge of the exalted harmony and unity of all created things, and the knowledge of possible progression beyond material experience. Musical harmony in its most exalted and perfect form is embodied in the heavenly spheres and the music that they make. Earthly harmony, including that characterizing the music made by human beings, is only a pale reflection of that same lofty universal harmony. Whoever sets his mind to that task will necessarily acquire the knowledge that, in order to enjoy the pleasures of the most celestial and exalted music, one must free oneself from the defilement of matter and release oneself from the shackles of this world.
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The last part of the treatise includes sayings of philosophers and anecdotes that illustrate the blessed benefits of music and its determining power to affect the souls of its listeners, ideas illustrated In the following home, which extols the capacity of music to speak and teach the mysteries of the heart:
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Do not be astonished if the plant of the zir (the<br />
highest pitched string of the lute) draws the <br />
savage beasts of the desert.<br />
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Although not an arrow, from time to time, it <br />
pierces the heart, like an arrow.<br />
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Sometimes it weeps, sometimes it moans at the <br />
break of day and during the day until the dawn.<br />
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It speaks without tongue. Who can interpret the <br />
speech If not lovers? Sometimes it restores<br />
good sense to the mad, sometimes it <br />
enslaves the man of sense.</blockquote>
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The ideas sketched above formed part of the everlasting debate, which began soon after the advent of Islam, on the lawfulness of music. Since all the opponents accepted the basic concept of music as a producer of emotion, Islamic writers asked in what way music contradicted religious faith on the ideological or ethical grounds, or whether the opponents of music were reacting to the discrepancies between religious normative expectations and the actual behavior and experience characterized by the flourishing of learned music and its increasing importance in social life.
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— Amnon Shiloah
(from The World & I <br />
A Chronicle of Our Changing Era<br />
- Feb 1987)<br />
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(This was a secondary text inserted into the story from the preceding post, originally a magazine article … and it deserves to be printed along with it)<br />
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Quixiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03126711689901268060noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12912400.post-22084543029919827862013-05-09T11:55:00.001-07:002014-06-29T15:01:51.542-07:00Music in Arab Life …<br />
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The initial encounter of Easterners and Westerners with each other’s music did not, in most cases, result in love at first sight, or rather sound. Instead of poetical associations or feelings of delight, the other’s music often reminded the novice listener of a dog’s barking.
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In the mid-tenth century, an early Iraqi traveler to Europe, Ibrahim ibn Yaqub, reported, “I have never heard worse singing than that of the people of Schlesvig. It is a humming that comes out of their throats, like the barking of dogs, but more beastlike.” In August 1648, the French traveler M. de Moncoys attended a dervish ceremony in Cairo, which he described in macabre terms: “They all danced for more than an hour with horrible shoutings and screamings; they whirled with violence and a vertiginous speed to the extent that their dance went beyond what the wildest imagination can conceive of the witches’ Sabbath … They frequently alter their screaming to voices which sound now as enraged wolves and now as the barking of suffocated dogs.” More courteous in his observations was the Ottoman envoy to Spain, who wrote in 1780, “All the great men, by order of the king, invited us to meals, and we suffered the tedium of their kind of music.”
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Coming closer to our time, we find from the sardonic pen of the French composer Hector Berlioz such evaluations as, “The Chinese sing like dogs howling, like a cat screeching when it has swallowed a toad.” Or the following judgment on Oriental music, “They call music that what we designate by <i>charivari</i> … Their song consists of nasal, guttural, groaning and hideous notes similar to the sounds that dogs emit, when after a long sleep they stretch their limbs and yawn with a marked effort.”
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Music is not automatically a universal language. It is subject to misunderstanding as are other aspects of culture, but music, the language of feelings and symbolic values, reflects thoughts and beliefs, and is thus able to encounter other worlds.
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<span style="font-size: large;">The Development of Arab Music
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The general name Arab music covers a variety of musical genres with a long history of development, spreading over a huge geographical area stretching from central and west Asia to the Islamized lands of black Africa. It comprises the communal songs and dances of the desert Bedouin going back to the period before the advent of Islam, diverse rural styles found among the numerous ethnic groups that embraced Islam, the learned and sophisticated type of music which was elaborated in the context of the supranational Islamic civilization, and, last but not least, the sacred music of various forms and complex relationships of different religious denominations.
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The advent of Islam in A.D. 622, its rapid expansion over vast territories and its encounter with old and prosperous civilizations led to profound social transformations including changes in musical concepts and behavior.
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One of the most striking illustrations of transformation was that even in the first century of Islam, the two holiest cities, Mecca and Medina, became celebrated places of entertainment and diversion. Witnesses recount the magnificence of the daily gathering in the literary salons that attracted crowds of female and male musicians, poets, intellectuals, and notables of the ruling class. There were competitions and distribution of prizes, and well-known musicians demonstrated their talents to an enthusiastic audience.
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A contemporary musician's chronicle, in which a great deal of legend is found, describes the brilliance of these musical <i>fêtes</i>. One account tells that on the occasion of a concert the great crowd gathered to take delight in the singing of a famous musician, but their combined weight caused the collapse of the balcony on which they stood. Another account comments on the magnificence of the Medina songstress Djamilla’s <i>cortège</i> on her pilgrimage to Mecca. She was escorted by fifty singing slave girls who, lutes in hand, accompanied her singing. On her arrival in Mecca, she was welcomed by leading musicians and poets with great pomp and ceremony. In the same way, the charm exerted by the singing of the eminent Meccan musician ibn ‘Aicha occasioned a huge traffic jam on the way to the holy shrine of the Ka’aba.
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The Arab historian Ibn Khaldun (d. 1405) wrote in his <i>Prologmena to History</i> that Islam on its first appearance avoided music to some degree, because the art of music is naturally associated with luxury and easy living, usually originating in a society free from the necessities and urgent needs of survival. After the great conquest, he says, “Luxury and prosperity came to them, because they obtained the spoils of the nations. They came to lead splendid and refined lives and to appreciate leisure.” So, following the example of the Byzantines and Persians, they encouraged the elaboration of a new musical art to which numerous talented musicians contributed, both Arab and “alien” slaves and freemen from different parts of the Empire who brought their traditions and the fruits of their talent to it.
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No one can tell us now how this music sounded. It was transmitted orally. Information about it is confined to thousands of pages that describe and extol its characteristics and marvels, sometimes in anecdotal form and sometimes with a scholarly speculation. The character assigned to music in these writings is sometimes entertaining, sometimes sensual, and sometimes embodies the excitement associated with getting drunk. Only the philosophers continued to extol its moral virtues.
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<span style="font-size: large;">Emotion and Music
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<i>Tarab</i>, a common and recurring concept encountered in most Arab sources to define the effect of music, originally designated a strong feeling of joy or of sorrow stirred, for instance, by hearing beautiful verses. Later it was applied particularly to the emotion engendered by music. Some related forms were derived from the word. Thus, musical Instruments were called <i>alat al-tarab</i>, the musician <i>mutrib</i>, and the science of music <i>al-ilm al-matribi</i>. In its various occurrences in the literature the term covers the whole gamut of sensations engendered in the heart on hearing an expressive song, ranging from a sweet sensual feeling to intellectual delight and solace, and including exaltation and uncontrolled excitement.
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Since we are concerned in this context with learned music, assumed to conform to accepted rules and established norms and to arouse the response of well-informed listeners, it is interesting to look at the role played by the musician in tarab. Is the musician expected to experience the feeling supposedly being stirred in the listener’s heart?
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The evidence provided by the sources clearly indicates that the desired emotional ambience in a public performance was achieved by an interaction between those who produced the music and those who listened and responded to it. An account of the Meccan musician Ibn Jami‘, who lived in the eighth century, says that he could attain the height of his expressiveness only when he experienced sorrow. In order to test this quality, the caliph gave an order to forge a letter announcing the death of the artist’s cherished mother. The stratagem was successful. Indeed, under the shock, Ibn Jami’ intoned a song so moving that the whole audience began to weep.
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To render expression more effectively, the performer usually has recourse to facial and bodily postures as well as to special vocal productions. In turn, the response of the audience is manifested by concrete and frequent applause, which encourages the artist and stimulates his creative imagination. This indispensable give-and-take plays an important part in determining the quality of the performance as well as the content of the music.
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One of the important aspects of this type of music making is the relative freedom enjoyed by the artist in rendering the traditional material. This freedom is expressed by a great deal of improvisation, a technique that achieved great prestige and cultural centrality. Another significant factor of this music making is the affection manifested by Oriental artists for the details composing a work. It is as if they were less concerned with a preconceived plan than with allowing the structure to emerge from the details. However, something like a hidden mechanism of control acts toward preventing the work of art from becoming just a random association of ideas. This kind of creative representation, which in theory can be extended infinitely, is also found in other Muslim arts and sciences.
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Because the representation of living beings was prohibited, Muslim art developed an abstract art form known as arabesque, to which one geometric or plant-like shape grows out of the other, without beginning or end. This approach may give rise to almost innumerable variations that are only gradually detected by the eye. Similarly, the decoration of a carpet can be endlessly extended by the variations of its forms.
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The Arabic classical poem elaborated in the pre-Islamic period is based on strict formal rules and fixed meters, with the use of monorhyme at the end of the multiple verses, each of which should be independent and represent well-rounded ideas. Successful verses may migrate from one poem to another and be incorporated in their new context. Generally speaking, therefore, an Arabic poem is not judged as a unit but according to the perfection of the individual verses.
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<div style="text-indent: .2in;">
This carpet-like pattern also characterizes many historical works in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. Such writings, especially in classical times, contained valuable information that was put together without being shaped into a single cohesive work. Only rarely does the historian or philosopher reach a comprehensive, systematic view.
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In music, the lack of deliberate “architectural” constructions, which characterizes the modal concept and composition, embodies a general value of the culture involved. Like the artist, the poet, the storyteller, the litterateur, and the historian, the musician embroiders on a canvas, improvising within the framework of given melodic patterns attached to modal variations of the greatest subtlety. The mode chosen may also be imbued with an ethical virtue and attached to a particular emotional meaning. The performer has recourse to specific timbres, which constitute a vital element in characterizing a style. Indeed, the microscopic occurrences in this monophonic music have an important role to play in music making. Timbre is the most difficult parameter to define because it does not lend itself easily to measurement and comparison. Individual artists basically draw their material from the traditional repertory, which they enrich by their own contribution in accordance to their creative capacity. Some of these contributions may take the form of innovation.
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In many cases, musicians ascribed novelties to inspiration received from supernatural beings. Numerous accounts in the classical literature report that a <i>djinn</i> (genii) suddenly appeared from nowhere, usually at night, disguised as an old man come to teach the astonished musician a particular novelty or a new song. He disappears furtively leaving his host stunned. Eager not to let the new song be forgotten, the inspired musician urgently calls to his service a member of the family or a singing girl to have that person memorize it.
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With the emergence into the modern world, some of the above-mentioned characteristics underwent certain transformation or transvaluation. Indeed, foreign modes, instead of being integrated, were allowed to substitute for certain traditional forms and norms.
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Islam and Music
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After the advent of Islam, this sophisticated music became a “universal” element of the new supranational civilization. It was widely accepted, spreading over the vast territories under Moslem domination. Its great success came from the integration of disparate elements through a subtle process of Arabization of the diverse foreign borrowings. This process involved the predominance of the Arabic language, the adoption of Arabic poetry, prosody, imagery, vocal ideals, and intonations, together with the Bedouin’s aimless structure (which probably endowed musical creativity with its characteristic freedom). Thus, the manifestation of foreign borrowings in an Arabic context was experienced as genuinely Arabic.
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Considering this universal music in the broadest sense, we must ask, how, if at all, it fits into the religious message of the Arabic prophet Mohammed, from which Islamic civilization developed. Was music included in the authoritative framework of questions and answers concerning the universe and humanity’s behavior in it? In trying to discuss this fundamental question, we run up against the major difficulty: In the Quran, the holiest book containing the original core of the religious message, there is simply no reference either censuring or exalting music. The opinion that Mohammed rejected it is based on an interpretation of his denunciation of poets regarded as soothsayers and of poetry identified with a form of possession.
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If we examine the facts, it seems more likely that the whole issue of the lawfulness of music is a later question, generated by the transformations imposed by the expansion of Islam, including new standards of life and ideals, as well as the extension of intellectual horizons. In their attempt to give an authoritative answer to the problem of music’s lawfulness, the theologians and legists were most probably concerned with what they saw as the disruptive effect of the dark and sensual aspect of fashionable urban aristocratic music and the growing attention paid to it. However, the equivocal nature of the evidence to which the antagonists referred gave rise to the conflicting interpretations that fill numerous polemic and apologetic writings.
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The banishment of music does not usually involve the basic forms of folk musical traditions. Moreover, on a conceptual level, folk songs and dances are not considered as music, and the term music is not applied to them. Music is exclusively reserved for the learned urban art form. Therefore, folk music may be regarded as something that is not to be listened to for itself; it is subordinate to the predominating text, communal rather than personal. Its presence is useful because It is said to fulfill necessary functions in the life of the community.
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The same reasons are valid for the rudimentary forms of cantillation admitted in the framework of worship--the solemn reading of the Koran and the call to prayer with occasionally a few simple hymns, close to folk tunes, used to enhance religious feasts. Hence, we may say that with the exception of the ceremonial music of the mystical brotherhoods, officially, Islam does not possess specific mosque music after the manner of church and synagogal music.
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Among the arguments advanced by theologians and legists, the question of effect occurs frequently. In connection with the concept of tarab, we encounter in this context a corresponding term, <i>lahw</i>, which designates game, pastime, amusement. In the diatribe of the intransigents, the verb <i>laha</i>, from which lahw is derived, is usually defined as denoting an action aimed at amusing and at securing tarab. In the same way that tarab and its derivatives were extended to music, musicians and musical instruments, lahw, and the derived term <i>lalahi</i>, became synonymous with music, musical instruments, and even dance and dancer. We may assume that those associations had some bearing on theological attitudes toward music.
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<div style="text-indent: .2in;">
One of the earliest virulent attacks on music is contained in a treatise called <i>The Condemnation of Malahi</i>. The author, Ibn abi ‘Ioh-Dunya, a Baghdad theologian and jurist who died in A.D. 894, argues violently against music, which he regards as one of the chief catalysts of diversion from the life of devotion and piety. He links music with games and other types of pleasure. All dissipation, he claims, begins with music and ends with drunkenness. The oldest extant work of this kind, this treatise became a source of inspiration for later generations of theologians and jurists who were opposed to music.
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<div style="text-indent: .2in;">
Diversion is only one aspect of the argument. A recurrent denunciation concerned the intoxicating effect of music: In their highly emotional state, listeners lose control over their reason and act under the dominance of their passions. Hence the music, as an intoxicant provoking worldly passions in the soul and associated with sensual pleasures such as drinking and fornication, has a harmful effect on the behavior and judgment of people, who are driven to act like lunatics. This quasi-somnambulistic state was held by opponents to go against the exigencies of the rationalized religious precepts. On a more sophisticated level, the competitive influence of a humanly created world of sounds might have been regarded as a kind of polytheism.
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<div style="text-indent: .2in;">
Among the religious leaders who defended music, one finds criticism of inconsistencies in the opponents’ attitudes. Al-Nabulusi, a 17th century mystic leader and theologian born in Damascus, wrote in his treatise <i>The Clarification of Proofs Concerning Listening to Musical Instruments</i>: “It is astonishing to see that some of the legists attend mystical ceremonies in privacy and take pleasure in the music whether sung or played on instruments, yet when they are in the mosque they deliver sermons against it.”
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<div style="text-indent: .2in;">
Most of the antagonists found further support for their doctrines in the ultimate origin of music, ascribing to it devilish inspiration. Ibn al-Djawzi, a 12th-century jurist and preacher, delivered a violent attack in his book, <i>The Devil’s Delusion</i>, against the allegations of the mistakes concerning music, dance, and ecstasy. The author argues that music is basically a devil’s temptation or delusion. The devil dominates the soul and makes it the slave of its passions. The devil’s devices are illustrated in a conversation between a theologian and the devil: “‘What are these anklets on your foot?’ asked the theologist. ‘I shake them for man,’ replied the devil, ‘to make him sing or to make somebody else sing for him.’”
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<div style="text-indent: .2in;">
In support of his views, Ibn al-Djawzi cites the theory of the historian al-Tabari (d. 922) concerning the invention of musical instruments. The tradition reported by al-Tabari states that the first inventor of the instruments of music (malahi) is a descendent of Cain called Yubal. This refers to Genesis 4:21, “The father of them that play upon the harp and the organ.” Al-Tabari claims that Yubal invented the reed instruments, drums, short-necked and long-necked lutes, the zithers, and the lyres. The sons of Cain were plunged into amusements, and their behavior was reported to the inhabitants of the mountains--the descendants of Seth. Some of the latter went down to the plain, attempting to turn the sons of Cain from their depravity, but they themselves fell into the snares of beautiful women, music, and intoxicating liquors. All the elements of this tradition are found in Jewish <i>Midrashim</i>--the homiletical interpretative literature on the stories of creation, on which Arab authors most probably drew.
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<div style="text-indent: .2in;">
The better-known tradition than al-Tabari’s is that crediting Yubal’s father, Lamech, with the invention of the first <i>oud</i> (lute) and the first song. This tradition, which recur is in the literature in numerous variations, relates that Lamech in his old age lost his only male infant. He grieved sorely on the premature death of his beloved son and refused to be separated from the corpse. He hung it on a tree until the flesh fell from the bones. Then he modeled a lute from the skeleton and sang a lament to its accompaniment, the first of its kind in human annals. This myth of creation is also based on elements found in Jewish exegetic literature, which contains other interesting motives such as the relationship between music and the human body, the perpetuation of the body as a musical instrument, the symbolism of rebirth, and the like.
</div>
<div style="text-indent: .2in;">
The battle against music has not waned even in the present day, as recent events in the fundamentalist Islamic world testify--official banishment of musical manifestations and even public burning of musical Instruments.
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;">The Origin of Music
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-indent: .2in;">
At this point we reach a split in the ideas concerning the origin of music. The first, we have the opinion put forward in ibn al-Djawzi’s <i>Devil’s Delusion</i> crediting the devil with the invention of music in describing his permanently active role in music making. This point of view corresponds to the popular belief that the inspired poet, musician, and the crazy lover are mad nun (possessed by a spirit).
</div>
<div style="text-indent: .2in;">
In considering music as an irresistible sorcery inspired by the devil we have a denial of the basic concept of a transcendental divinity ruling absolutely over the world and all human deeds. Secondly, the attribution of the invention of music to a descendant of Cain the sinner and its assimilation with depravity implies that music is a human invention reflecting human weaknesses. As such it is full of vanity and the company’s activities incompatible with the basic requirements of religious ethics.
</div>
<div style="text-indent: .2in;">
In the opinions of attacking music, certain mystic doctrinaires considered music as God’s creation and divine effusion. They connected the music used in divine worship with the idea that everything that existed potentially before the creation of man became actual with his creation--including song. In this respect, the mystics also sought evidence in the antedeluvian legends in support of their arguments.
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<div style="text-indent: .2in;">
An Arab legend that refers to the origin of the flute illustrates this point of view and may conclude this <i>tour d’horizon</i>. This flute, held in great esteem by many mystics, expresses by its groaning, according to Djalal al-Din al-Rumi, the separation of man from God and invites him to unity. The legend tells the Adam was given at divine secret by the Archangel Gabriel. When he was expelled from Paradise, the secret troubled him and caused him great pain. He was advised by Gabriel to throw it into a well. Adam did so and was relieved. Around the well grew reeds, from which were fabricated special flutes for playing hymns of praise to God.
</div>
<br />
— Amnon Shiloah
(from The World & I <br />
A Chronicle of Our Changing Era<br />
- Feb 1987)<br />
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<blockquote>
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Quixiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03126711689901268060noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12912400.post-21826642536992941272012-07-29T07:20:00.001-07:002012-07-29T07:20:23.215-07:00on color<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I understand how scarlet can differ from crimson because I know that the smell of an orange is not the smell of a grapefruit. I can also conceive that colors have shades and guess what shades are. In smell and taste there are varieties not broad enough to be fundamental; so I call them shades. There are half a dozen roses near me. They all have the unmistakable rose scent; yet my nose tells me that they are not the same. The American Beauty is distinct from the Jacqueminot and La France. Odors in certain grasses fade as really to my senses as certain colors do to yours in the sun. … I make use of analogies like these to enlarge my conceptions of colors. … The force of association drives me to say that white is exalted and pure, green is exuberant, red suggests love or shame or strength. Without the color or its equivalent, life to me would be dark, barren, a vast blackness.
</blockquote>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Thus through an inner law of completeness my thoughts are not permitted to be colorless. It strains my mind to separate color and sound from objects. Since my education began I have always had things described to me with their colors and sounds by one with keen senses and a fine feeling for the significant. Therefore, I habitually think of things as colored and resonant. Habit accounts for part. The soul sense accounts for another part. The brain with its five-sensed construction asserts its right and accounts for the rest. Inclusive of all, the unity of the world demands that color be kept in it whether I have cognizance of it or not. Rather than be shut out, I take part in it by discussing it, happy in the happiness of those near me who gaze at the lovely hues of the sunset or the rainbow. </blockquote>
<br />
Hellen Keller<br />
<i>The World I Live In</i><br />
pp 105 ff.Quixiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03126711689901268060noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12912400.post-49858446633285965722011-02-14T23:08:00.001-08:002011-02-14T23:08:55.152-08:00<div style="text-indent: 0.2in;">THE WORLD IS COMING</div><div style="text-indent: 0.2in;"><br />
</div><div style="text-indent: 0.2in;">high and wide, in the vacant air . . .</div><div style="text-indent: 0.2in;"><br />
</div><div style="text-indent: 0.2in;">straight through the four white walls of the real</div><div style="text-indent: 0.2in;"><br />
</div><div style="text-indent: 0.2in;"><i>until it no longer appears</i></div><div style="text-indent: 0.2in;"><i></i><i></i></div><div style="text-indent: 0.2in;"><i>different</i></div><div style="text-indent: 0.2in;"><i></i><i></i></div><div style="text-indent: 0.2in;"><i>from what the eye sees.</i></div><div style="text-indent: 0.2in;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: center; text-indent: 0.2in;">(Ronald Johnson, "Poem," Poetry, 120 (1972), p 144)</div><div style="text-indent: 0.2in;"><br />
</div><div style="text-indent: 0.2in;"></div><div style="text-indent: 0.2in;"></div><div style="text-indent: 0.2in;"></div><div style="text-indent: 0.2in;"></div><blockquote></blockquote>Quixiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03126711689901268060noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12912400.post-71438062344501450152011-02-08T13:18:00.000-08:002011-02-08T13:18:54.620-08:00Unitarian EasterEntering here, I hope the confetti<br />
Can jazz up a burden<br />
<br />
The pastor, for instance, calling birds, head back,<br />
Or dancing an old French dance, hopping and kicking.<br />
<br />
And now the congregation winds around the chancel,<br />
Carrying damp, strapping forsythia sprigs, slanting them into a vase<br />
Beside the kotoist, her song plucked and bent, a few blossoms raining on the strings.<br />
<br />
God's weather today—sandals in puddles.<br />
The moment of silence—raindrops on the roof, no comment<br />
On the matter of God.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">Sandra McPherson </div>Quixiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03126711689901268060noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12912400.post-61403092854213022002011-01-01T05:57:00.000-08:002013-05-09T12:20:45.083-07:00Captain Beefheart's Ten Commandments of Guitar Playing<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;">1.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"><b> Listen to the birds.</b></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;">That's where all the music comes from. Birds know everything about how it should sound and where that sound should come from. And watch hummingbirds. They fly really fast, but a lot of times they aren't going anywhere.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;">2.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"><b>Your guitar is not really a guitar. </b></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;">Your guitar is a divining rod. Use it to find spirits in the other world and bring them over. A guitar is also a fishing rod. If you're good, you'll land a big one.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;">3.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"><b>Practice in front of a bush.</b></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;">Wait until the moon is out, then go outside, eat a multi-grained bread and play your guitar to a bush. If the bush doesn't shake, eat another piece of bread.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;">4.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"><b>Walk with the devil. </b></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;">Old Delta blues players referred to guitar amplifiers as the "devil box." And they were right. You have to be an equal opportunity employer in terms of who you're bringing over from the other side. Electricity attracts devils and demons. Other instruments attract other spirits. An acoustic guitar attracts Casper. A mandolin attracts Wendy. But an electric guitar attracts Beelzebub.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;">5.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"><b>If you're guilty of thinking, you're out.</b></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;">If your brain is part of the process, you're missing it. You should play like a drowning man, struggling to reach shore. If you can trap that feeling, then you have something that is fur bearing.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;">6.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"><b>Never point your guitar at anyone.</b></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;">Your instrument has more clout than lightning. Just hit a big chord then run outside to hear it. But make sure you are not standing in an open field.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;">7.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"><b>Always carry a church key.</b></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;">That's your key-man clause. Like One String Sam. He's one. He was a Detroit street musician who played in the fifties on a homemade instrument. His song "I Need a Hundred Dollars" is warm pie. Another key to the church is Hubert Sumlin, Howlin' Wolf's guitar player. He just stands there like the Statue of Liberty — making you want to look up her dress the whole time to see how he's doing it.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;">8.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"><b>Don't wipe the sweat off your instrument.</b></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;">You need that stink on there. Then you have to get that stink onto your music.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;">9.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"><b>Keep your guitar in a dark place. </b></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;">When you're not playing your guitar, cover it and keep it in a dark place. If you don't play your guitar for more than a day, be sure you put a saucer of water in with it.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;">10.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"><b>You gotta have a hood for your engine.</b></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;">Keep that hat on. A hat is a pressure cooker. If you have a roof on your house, the hot air can't escape. Even a lima bean has to have a piece of wet paper around it to make it grow.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #940f04; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"><br />
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</span>Quixiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03126711689901268060noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12912400.post-5141600055253697712010-10-18T19:26:00.000-07:002010-10-18T19:26:29.898-07:00How not to worship . . .You have felt, doubtless, at least those of you who have been brought up in any habit of reverence, that every time when I in this letter have used an American expression, or aught like one, there came upon you a sense of sudden wrong — the darting through you of acute cold. I mean you to feel that<b>:</b> for it is the essential function of America to make us all feel that. It is the new skill they have found there; — this skill of degradation; others they have, which other nations had before them, from whom they have learned all they know, and among whom they must travel, still, to see any human work worth seeing. But this is their specialty, this their one gift to their race, — to show men how <i><b>not </b></i>to worship, — how never to be ashamed in the presence of anything.<br />
<div style="text-align: right;">John Ruskin</div><div style="text-align: right;"><i>Fors Clavigera</i>, vol I, 1871, letter 12</div>Quixiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03126711689901268060noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12912400.post-50151398327795616252009-02-02T10:58:00.000-08:002009-02-02T11:13:38.952-08:00a parable ...<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">PART I</span></span><br /></div><span style="font-size:130%;"><br /><br />A PARABLE</span><br /><br />I am today twenty-five hundred years old. I have been dead for nearly as many years. My place of birth was Athens; my grave was not far from those of Xenophon and Plato, within view of the white glory of Athens and the shimmering waters of the Aegean sea.<br /><br />After sleeping in my grave for many centuries I awoke suddenly—I cannot tell how nor why—and was transported by a force beyond my control to this new day and this new city. I arrived here at daybreak, when the sky was still dull and drowsy. As I approached the city I heard bells ringing, and a little later I found the streets astir with throngs of well dressed people in family groups wending their way hither and thither. Evidently they were not going to work, for they were accompanied by their children in their best clothes, and a pleasant expression was upon their faces.<br /><br />"This must be a day of festival and worship, devoted to one of their gods," I murmured to myself. Looking about me I saw a gentleman in a neat black dress, smiling, and his hand extended to me with great cordiality. He must have realized I was a stranger and wished to tender his hospitality to me. I accepted it gratefully. I clasped his hand. He pressed mine. We gazed for a moment into each other's eyes. He understood my bewilderment amid my novel surroundings, and offered to enlighten me. He explained to me the ringing of the bells and meaning of the holiday crowds moving in the streets. It was Sunday—Sunday before Christmas, and the people were going to "the House of God."<br /><br />"Of course you are going there, too," I said to my friendly guide.<br /><br />"Yes," he answered, "I conduct the worship. I am a priest."<br /><br />"A priest of Apollo?" I interrogated.<br /><br />"No, no," he replied, raising his hand to command silence, "Apollo is not a god; he was only an idol."<br /><br />"An idol?" I whispered, taken by surprise.<br /><br />"I perceive you are a Greek," he said to me, "and the Greeks," he continued, "notwithstanding their distinguished accomplishments, were an idolatrous people. They worshipped gods that did not exist. They built temples to divinities which were merely empty names—empty names," he repeated. "Apollo and Athene—and the entire Olympian lot were no more than inventions of the fancy."<br /><br />"But the Greeks loved their gods," I protested, my heart clamoring in my breast.<br /><br />"They were not gods, they were idols, and the difference between a god and an idol is this: an idol is a thing; God is a living being. When you cannot prove the existence of your god, when you have never seen him, nor heard his voice, nor touched him -- when you have nothing provable about him, he is an idol. Have you seen Apollo? Have you heard him? Have you touched him?"<br /><br />"No," I said, in a low voice.<br /><br />"Do you know of any one who has?"<br /><br />I had to admit that I did not.<br /><br />"He was an idol, then, and not a god."<br /><br />"But many of us Greeks," I said, "have felt Apollo in our hearts and have been inspired by him."<br /><br />"You imagine you have," returned my guide. "If he were really divine be would be living to this day."<br /><br />Is he, then, dead?" I asked.<br /><br />"He never lived; and for the last two thousand years or more his temple has been a heap of ruins."<br /><br />I wept to hear that Apollo, the god of light and music, was no more—that his fair temple had fallen into ruins and the fire upon his altar had been extinguished; then, wiping a tear from my eyes, I said, "Oh, but our gods were fair and beautiful; our religion was rich and picturesque. It made the Greeks a nation of poets, orators, artists, warriors, thinkers. It made Athens a city of light; it created the beautiful, the true, the good—yes, our religion was divine."<br /><br />"It had only one fault"' interrupted my guide.<br /><br />"What was that?" I inquired, without knowing what his answer would be.<br /><br />"It was not true."<br /><br />"But I still believe in Apollo," I exclaimed; "he is not dead, I know he is alive."<br /><br />"Prove it," he said to me; then, pausing for a moment, "if you produce him," he said, "we shall all fall down and worship him. Produce Apollo and be shall be our god."<br /><br />"Produce him!" I whispered to myself. "What blasphemy!" Then, taking heart, I told my guide how more than once I had felt Apollo's radiant presence in my heart, and told him of the immortal lines of Homer concerning the divine Apollo.<br /><br />"Do you doubt Homer?" I said to him; "Homer, the inspired bard? Homer, whose ink-well was as big as the sea; whose imperishable page was Time? Homer, whose every word was a drop of light?" Then I proceeded to quote from Homer's Iliad, the Greek Bible, worshipped by all the Hellenes as the rarest Manuscript between heaven and earth. I quoted his description of Apollo, than whose lyre nothing is more musical, than whose speech even honey is not sweeter. I recited how his mother went from town to town to select a worthy place to give birth to the young god, son of Zeus, the Supreme Being, and how he was born and cradled amid the ministrations of all the goddesses, who bathed him in the running stream and fed him with nectar and ambrosia from Olympus. Then I recited the lines which picture Apollo bursting his bands, leaping forth from his cradle, and spreading his wings like a swan, soaring sun-ward, declaring that he had come to announce to mortals the will of God. "Is it possible," I asked, "that all this is pure fabrication, a fantasy of the brain, as unsubstantial as the air? No, no, Apollo is not an idol. He is a god, and the son of a god. The whole Greek world will bear me witness that I am telling the truth." Then I looked at my guide to see what impression this outburst of sincere enthusiasm had produced upon him, and I saw a cold smile upon his lips that cut me to the heart. It seemed as if he wished to say to me, "You poor deluded pagan! You are not intelligent enough to know that Homer was only a mortal after all, and that he was writing a play in which he manufactured the gods of whom he sang—that these gods existed only in his imagination, and that today they are as dead as is their inventer[sic]—the poet."<br /><br />By this time we stood at the entrance of a large edifice which my guide said was "the House of God." As we walked in I saw innumerable little lights blinking and winking all over the spacious interior. There were, besides, pictures, altars and images all around me. The air was heavy with incense; a number of men in gorgeous vestments were passing to and fro, bowing and kneeling before the various lights and images. The audience was upon its knees enveloped in silence —a silence so solemn that it awed me. Observing my anxiety to understand the meaning of all this, my guide took me aside and in a whisper told me that the people were celebrating the anniversary of the birthday of their beautiful Savior—Jesus, the Son of God.<br /><br />"So was Apollo the son of God," I replied, thinking perhaps that after all we might find ourselves in agreement with one another.<br /><br />"Forget Apollo," he said, with a suggestion of severity in his voice. "There is no such person. He was only an idol. If you were to search for Apollo in all the universe you would never find any one answering to his name or description. Jesus," he resumed, "is the Son of God. He came to our earth and was born of a virgin." Again I was tempted to tell my guide that that was how Apollo became incarnate; but I restrained myself.<br /><br />"Then Jesus grew up to be a man," continued my guide, "performing unheard-of wonders, such as treading the seas, giving sight, hearing and speech to the blind, the deaf and the dumb, converting water into wine, feeding the multitudes miraculously, predicting coming events and resurrecting the dead."<br /><br />"Of course, of your gods, too," he added, "it is claimed that they performed miracles, and of your oracles that they foretold the future, but there is this difference -- the things related of your gods are a fiction, the things told of Jesus are a fact, and the difference between Paganism and Christianity is the difference between fiction and fact."<br /><br />Just then I heard a wave of murmur, like the rustling of leaves in a forest, sweep over the bowed audience. I turned about and unconsciously, my Greek curiosity impelling me, I pushed forward toward where the greater candle lights were blazing. I felt that perhaps the commotion in the house was the announcement that the God Jesus was about to make his appearance, and I wanted to see him. I wanted to touch him, or, if the crowd were too large to allow me that privilege, I wanted, at least, to hear his voice. I, who had never seen a god, never touched one, never heard one speak, I who had believed in Apollo without ever having known anything provable about him, I wanted to see the real God, Jesus.<br /><br />But my guide placed his hand quickly upon my shoulder, and held me back.<br /><br />"I want to see Jesus," I hastened, turning toward him. I said this reverently and in good faith. "Will he not be here this morning? Will he not speak to his worshippers?" I asked again. "Will he not permit them to touch him, to caress his hand, to clasp his divine feet, to inhale the ambrosial fragrance of his breath, to bask in the golden light of his eyes, to hear the music of his immaculate accents? Let me, too, see Jesus," I pleaded.<br /><br />"You cannot see him," answered my guide, with a trace of embarrassment in his voice. "He does not show himself any more."<br /><br />I was too much surprised at this to make any immediate reply.<br /><br />"For the last two thousand years," my guide continued, "it has not pleased Jesus to show himself to any one; neither has he been heard from for the same number of years."<br /><br />"For two thousand years no one has either seen or heard Jesus?" I asked, my eyes filled with wonder and my voice quivering with excitement.<br /><br />"No," he answered.<br /><br />"Would not that, then," I ventured to ask, impatiently, "make Jesus as much of an idol as Apollo? And are not these people on their knees before a god of whose existence they are as much in the dark as were the Greeks of fair Apollo, and of whose past they have only rumors such as Homer reports of our Olympian gods—as idolatrous as the Athenians? What would you say," I asked my guide, "if I were to demand that you should produce Jesus and prove him to my eyes and ears as you have asked me to produce and prove Apollo? What is the difference between a ceremony performed in honor of Apollo and one performed in honor of Jesus, since it is as impossible to give oracular demonstration of the existence of the one as of the other? If Jesus is alive and a god, and Apollo is an idol and dead, what is the evidence, since the one is as invisible, as inaccessible, and as unproducible as the other? And, if faith that Jesus is a god proves him a god, why will not faith in Apollo make him a god? But if worshipping Jesus, whom for the best part of the last two thousand years no man has seen, heard or touched; if building temples to him, burning incense upon his altars, bowing at his shrine and calling him "God," is not idolatry, neither is it idolatry to kindle fire upon the luminous altars of the Greek Apollo,—God of the dawn, master of the enchanted lyre—he with the bow and arrow tipped with fire! I am not denying," I said, "that Jesus ever lived. He may have been alive two thousand years ago, but if he has not been heard from since, if the same thing that happened to the people living at the time he lived has happened to him, namely—if he is dead, then you are worshipping the dead, which fact stamps your religion as idolatrous." And, then, remembering what he had said to me about the Greek mythology being beautiful but not true, I said to him: "Your temples are indeed gorgeous and costly; your music is grand your altars are superb; your litany is exquisite; your chants are melting; your incense, and bells and flowers, your gold and silver vessels are all in rare taste, and I dare say your dogmas are subtle and your preachers eloquent, but your religion has one fault—it is not true."<br /><br /><br /><p style="text-align: right; margin-right: 60pt">M.M. Mangasairian<br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">The Truth About Jesus</span><br />(Introduction)<br />1909</p>Quixiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03126711689901268060noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12912400.post-73005247549721575932009-01-17T19:30:00.000-08:002011-02-17T15:56:07.016-08:00an Ambrose Bierce keeper . . .I keep an Ambrose Bierce quote widget over on my other blog. I wanted to keep this particular quote handy because I think it relates to some of the things I have been thinking and blogging about lately.<br /><blockquote><span style="font-size:180%;">"</span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:130%;">There is nothing new under the sun but there are lots of old things we don't know.</span><span style="font-size:180%;">"</span><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p></blockquote> (We just don't <span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">know</span> </span>that we don't know them).<p></p>Quixiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03126711689901268060noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12912400.post-43379548882430985582008-12-31T19:19:00.000-08:002009-01-02T12:18:23.048-08:002 bits - Ken Kesey on the function of the artist ...[...] from Shakespeare [...] get an audience [...] he went around in front of them and he'd grab them by the ears and he'd say, <blockquote><span style="font-size:130%;"><b>— you</b> listen to <b><i>me</i>!</b></span></blockquote>That's what the artists have to do. There in public. Otherwise you'll be watching MTV and reading Ditmer's guide and drinking CocaCola. As I've often told Ginsberg, you can't blame the president for the state of the country. It's always the poet's fault. You can't expect politicians to come up with a vision. They don't have it in them. The poets have to come up with a vision and they have to turn it on so that it sparks ... and catches on.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:180%;" ><br />- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -</span><br /><br />What's the job [...] of the writer in contemporary America?<br />Right now.<br />Hmm. I'm not sure.<br />But here I'll give you an example[...]<br /><br />You're gonna be walking along one day and suddenly there's gonna be a light. You're gonna look across the street, and on the corner over there, God is gonna be standing there.<br />And you're gonna know it's God because it's gonna have this beautiful curly hair that sticks up through his halo like Jesus. He's got little slitty eyes like Buddha. He's got a lot of swords in his belt like Mohammed.<br /><br />And he's saying:<br /><blockquote><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">— Come . . . . to me. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">— Come across the street to me. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">— O, come to me. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">— I will have the muses whisper in your ear. You will be the greatest writer. You will be better than Shakespeare.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">— They will have melon breasts and blackberry nipples.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">— Come to me.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">— All you have to do is say my praises. </span><br /></blockquote><br />The writers job is to say:<br /><blockquote style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">— Fuck you, God! Fuck you!<br />— Fuck you! Fuck you!</blockquote><br />'Cause <i style="font-weight: bold;">nobody</i> else is going to say it. Our politicians aren't going to say it. Nobody but the writer is going to say it. There's a time in history when it's time to praise God, but now is not the time. Now is the time to say:<br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;"></span><blockquote><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">— Fuck you! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">— I don't care </span><i style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">who</i><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;"> your daddy was! Fuck you.</span><br /></blockquote><br />... and get back our job of writing.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: right; margin-right: 100pt;">24th October 1989<br />at a Reality Club presentation<br />.<br /></div>Quixiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03126711689901268060noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12912400.post-50504351426840567412008-08-02T09:47:00.000-07:002008-08-02T09:52:16.203-07:00Philip Wylie on religions<p style="text-align: center;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:180%;">XII</span><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">It will be said that, for a man so intent on morals, I have been hard on the church.<span style=""> </span>I would be harder; I would do away with it.<span style=""> </span>This institution, this school for hypocrites and university of ignorance, has resisted attacks from myriad sane and decent quarters since the time it was divinely guided by a witchman with a drum and until the reign of the current Pope.<span style=""> </span>Men of enormous good will, and hope, too--even men within the church, like Emerson--have shaken every timber of its moribund architecture.<span style=""> </span>Yet it does not fall.<span style=""> </span>It has a sinister viability.<span style=""> </span>The church is like the Hydra that guards Hell’s Gate: whenever a successful cut is made at it, a head falls, whereupon two replace it. Let a dissenter penetrate some ignominious churchly superstition and so deprive the parent body of members and behold, one-two-ten denominations are founded on the objection.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Perhaps the old legend--the old archetype--is worth laboring a little farther.<span style=""> </span>Hercules found, when he finally slew the serpent, that if the wounds were cauterized, they seized to breed the devilish double-domes.<span style=""> </span>Some cautery is needed today, some fire of truth, some means of burning away the fission in the serpent's cells.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">The church (as I have indicated earlier in this essay), almost any church and nearly every church, is a foundation designed to maintain a particular body of legends.<span style=""> </span>According to the Jungian hypothesis, legends are the tangible forms which instinct takes in man, an inherent property of him and the inherent property of his subjectivity, generating themselves spontaneously in all places and at all times, peopled by resembling characters and telling parallel tales.<span style=""> </span>So this viability of churches is explained by any sect and every sect.<span style=""> </span>Instinctual man is under the necessity of giving some expressed form or other to the opposing forces from which consciousness has gradually emerged.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Out of their mysterious compulsions--will to live and wish to die, urge to procreate and dread of succession--even those island people I imagined as reared without benefit of man would slowly invent legends and archetypes.<span style=""> </span>And until more analytical men discovered what it was they all were doing--how they were merely articulating their animal natures in the very attempt to deny them (by claims of being heroes and owning gods and possessing immortal shades) --the transcendental effort would constantly obscure their true transcendental possibilities.<span style=""> </span>Their “shades” --their souls--would remain but shadows of egos which had taken on the garment of some godliness or other and thereby cast into darkness all view of the eternal time of instinct.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">The love and the fear of gods, the adoration and the dread, our fundamental qualities of the interior man--his “religious nature”--blind to itself until his insight becomes pure enough, or scientific enough--if you prefer--to scorch away his old ego and the public estimate of man's importances.<span style=""> </span>In the legendary, the religious patterns, forms themselves are all possessive.<span style=""> </span>Until a man sees that agony and glory, the reasons and the emotions of living, the panoply of his own evolution and of the blazing universe by truth discovered repose in his instinct, the instinct will possess the man and he will generally seek a repository for <i style="">it</i>.<span style=""> </span>Each church is such a repository; each religion therefore must contain the exalted and the cruel, the noble and the vicious, the pure ideal and the heathen applications.<span style=""> </span>And if a somewhat reasonable man be argued out of one church, he generally must needs join another.<span style=""> </span>He is but converted back and forth among archetypes. He eschews this sect because he has discovered it is too ritualistic, primitive, incredible or barbaric; he has debunked it; then he accepts a new faith which is more up-to-date but no less irrational in that it closes his mind some other way.<span style=""> </span>Or, he wearies of pure reason’s syllogisms, of being a modern man without a god, and the instinctual core of him responds to the drumming of organs and choirs and the holding up of symbols which are not anti-septic but venerable; he is “convinced” by the strength of very real instinctual impressions; and then your liberal atheist is suddenly become a Roman Catholic.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">The “need for God” is real to the vanity.<span style=""> </span>It is a need of gods.<span style=""> </span>Of names to put on instincts and on patterns--of a legendary to quiet the questions asked by the mind of the aspiring or the downcast nerves.<span style=""> </span>Why do I do this?<span style=""> </span>Why did I refuse?<span style=""> </span>Why do I feel angry when I should be at peace--happy, when I should be ashamed?<span style=""> </span>The “I” demands descriptions and definitions; these must be commensurate not only with the interior pressures but with whatever altitude of regard “I” has for itself.<span style=""> </span>That is why rich people own such enormous gods.<span style=""> </span>Who else needs or could temple them adequately or support delegated authority enough--the requisite priesthood?<span style=""> </span>The unlonely poor have still small voices.<span style=""> </span>And associations of people organize empires for their gods--states within states--supported by contribution everywhere in the earth-- and their gods can thunder loud enough to quake governments.<span style=""> </span>This gives them all, rich or poor, a collective arrogance in the ego that is great enough to hold instincts everywhere in check, or stasis, or seeming balance, sometimes for generation after generation.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">The godmen fear the atheist who, somehow peacefully and with a good demeanor, takes a small, solitary stand in the cosmos without assistance of one of their societies.<span style=""> </span>But most, they fear the individual whose private authenticity has found them out—whose up-winging wisdom commences to descry there fettered situation and to detect in the heavens the more-enveloping pattern and to live in liberty by itself.<span style=""> </span>The man of God and the soaring man are both ruled by instinct; one knows, the others do not.<span style=""> </span>So it becomes the necessary self protective instinct of the mass to try to shoot down this individual.<span style=""> </span>Wherever, in society, any process starts which might tend to undo the blunder of forebears who crept down from trees and slunk through the bushes with dangling arms--whenever there is a sign that the instinct of some man or men is about to investigate itself--the churches unite against the event, be it in pamphlet, a nudist colony, or science itself.<span style=""> </span>For the sake of the peace of mind of all who are compelled, that which compels them must somehow be kept in shadow, where they deem their shades to be--and rightly.<span style=""> </span>This is the explanation of persecution, office of churches, and the so-called will of God.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Since the churches the repository of instinct, it becomes administrator of it--and the archetypal theorem's established again by the shortest search for proof of this in any holy apparatus.<span style=""> </span>One finds among naked savages, and the nearly-as-naked savages on <st1:place>Park Avenue</st1:place> in <st1:city><st1:place>New York City</st1:place></st1:city>, that religion owns and controls all human biological procedure.<span style=""> </span>When a man is born, the church must baptize him.<span style=""> </span>When he is adolescent, the church must confirm the baptism.<span style=""> </span>When he mates, the church must marry him.<span style=""> </span>When he reproduces, the church must be handed the offspring, that the cycle start again.<span style=""> </span>If he would put his wife away from himself, the church must assent--or refuse to assent.<span style=""> </span>If he sins, the church must forgive him.<span style=""> </span>If he is sick, the church must take the advantages of comfort.<span style=""> </span>If he is dying, the church must supply prayers and unctions.<span style=""> </span>And when he dies, the church must bury him.<span style=""> </span>Each of these steps costs money.<span style=""> </span>A benediction will stoop to extort a farthing.<span style=""> </span>And after a man is dead, the church expects a portion of his estate.<span style=""> </span>Some churches put a posthumous levy on the entrance of Heaven.<span style=""> </span>The sumptuousness of these offices is scaled by price; there is every class of baptism, wedding and funeral--even two-pants suits for the dead, one to wear in the church and a more durable pair evidently needed for a head start on eternity, in the grave.<span style=""> </span>Though here, I do believe, it is the mortician who exploits the human vanity.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">This is a Christian nation, where Sabbath is holiday, the property of churches is not assessed, untaxed donations to God (up to ten percent of income) are permitted by the revenue collector, money bears the name of the Lord, the witness to crime is sworn on the Bible, most violations of the Ten Commandments are punishable by law, and statesmen say grace.<span style=""> </span>Yet there are enough different kinds of Christian churches here to convince any Buddhist or any worshiper of Baal or any Martian that the Christians themselves have no idea what Christianity means or what it intends that they should do.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">It is generally asserted that Christians are monotheists but it is hardly possible to find a sect, as I have said elsewhere, which has not split its God into parts and sexes; some, in the person of saints, have as many holy characters as all the other pagans, heathens and idolaters.<span style=""> </span>The clergy produces on-demand definitions of the gods to fit most purses and points of view.<span style=""> </span>In many Christian churches the gods and their symbols are intellectualizations nowadays; but in some, they are still plaster, like any Hindu frieze.<span style=""> </span>In all of them, a cruel creed of crucifixion (and a process of psychological resurrection which may lift the animal some few steps in instinctual awareness and is real to that extent) is offered in counterbalance to the American world and its main excesses.<span style=""> </span>A little psychic pain at Easter, if not every Sunday, compensates the conscience for another year of the hundred and fifty in which we have nervously enjoyed an American Spree.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Half of the nation has little or nothing to do with churches and assumes that “religious freedom” implies freedom of their irreligiousness.<span style=""> </span>It does not.<span style=""> </span><st1:country-region><st1:place>America</st1:place></st1:country-region> tolerates all churches.<span style=""> </span>But no church tolerates unchurchliness; because of that, the free mind of the nation is disenfranchised without knowing it.<span style=""> </span>We are enslaved by religions even when we will have none of them.<span style=""> </span>They are one when one of them is criticized.<span style=""> </span>Indeed, the pressure of sanity against them today is driving their sects toward physical reunion.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><st1:city><st1:place>Liberty</st1:place></st1:city>--the room for honesty--is everywhere a confining chamber, the theory but not much a practice, a condition believed to exist hugely until its measurements are examined.<span style=""> </span>The intolerant churches have compressed it.<span style=""> </span>Or they have kept it from expanding.<span style=""> </span>This is an incessant catastrophe; it has given the churches their power-- swelled up religious pride where freedom ought to grow--and slain conscience everywhere in the name of Christ.<span style=""> </span>Challenge of the fact is labeled hellish automatically (and, lately, ”communist”).<span style=""> </span>Millions of Christians do not just rage defensively at honest men, but weep in the pity of piety for them, which is the more appealing instinct and attracts new sentimentalists to the altar--for a blindfolding or, more generally, for having the last of their weak sight put out.<span style=""> </span>By now, every industry and profession and nearly every classroom in <st1:country-region><st1:place>America</st1:place></st1:country-region> has been corrupted to this purpose of the churches: to keep liberty from becoming extensive.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">It is possible, in the <st1:country-region><st1:place>United States of America</st1:place></st1:country-region>, to publish such an essay as this in a book.<span style=""> </span>And that is the outside dimension of the room here for freedom.<span style=""> </span>As a book, it will be stolen from libraries by persons who disagree with what it says--which is not a service to truth but the very exercise of fear and an act of panic.<span style=""> </span>Angered men, who do not like to have their natures or the etiology of their God disclosed, may attempt to confiscate this book by purchase from local stores or to have it banned from State courts.<span style=""> </span>They have done as much before.<span style=""> </span>People may throw copies of it on bonfires--as they have other books--and this, too, is a ritual of assuagement.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">But I could not express such thoughts as these on the American radio or by motion pictures or printed in the newspapers or get them published in the magazines.<span style=""> </span>No business has sponsored an atheist on the air--its gross would drop too suddenly and too much.<span style=""> </span>Theoretically, the atheist has as much “right” to argue as the Baptist.<span style=""> </span>Actually, he has no opportunity.<span style=""> </span>The “good” people in our society choke him.<span style=""> </span>For justice, they have absolute contempt.<span style=""> </span>They already “know” that they are “right” and will not hear anything further or permit the public to listen to a syllable of dissent!</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">In the dominions-- the immense realms--where the church administers instinct, this perfidious circumstance has driven what we know so far away from what we pretend that we are all disoriented, whether we profess God and sit in the Sunday bench, or mock even at morals, and tee off every Sunday morning with a ritualistic oath in warrant of an imperial irresponsibility for man.<span style=""> </span>We have gone insane.<span style=""> </span>We are all mad.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">The use of reason has provided us with a world which only reason can use.<span style=""> </span>But not priest or scientist or any layman betwixt them can expose our secrets, separate the collisions, and assembled the schisms, to see what the use ought to be, or to be becoming.<span style=""> </span>The instincts are confused on all sides.<span style=""> </span>The codes that were sufficient for <st1:city><st1:place>Jerusalem</st1:place></st1:city> and <st1:city><st1:place>Rome</st1:place></st1:city> and Venice-high in for all the artisans and handworkers of time--have become irrelevant or manifestly in error.<span style=""> </span>The new codes of communal association or corporate state breed frenzy.<span style=""> </span>The original incentive of easy riches expires with the gutting of our continent.<span style=""> </span>Nothing suffices.<span style=""> </span>But no one is allowed by the churches to consult with the people on any moral matter in other-than-churchly terms.<span style=""> </span>Examples are endless.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Birth control.<span style=""> </span>Here is a discovery of our biology as fundamental of the learning of the art of fire.<span style=""> </span>It means we must decide in our minds concerning what churches profess to own.<span style=""> </span>Do the radio networks explain it and discuss it, as it revolutionizes man?</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Evolution.<span style=""> </span>Is this great discovery of human origin--the only proper introduction to learning--the schoolboy's first course?</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Ethnology.<span style=""> </span>Here is the science of tolerance among men, for it proves they are one--not cousins--but the same blood.<span style=""> </span>Where <st1:country-region><st1:place>Phoenicia</st1:place></st1:country-region> mined tin, Semites bred with the natives.<span style=""> </span>Where the Iberians halted, they brought the Negro stream, through African Moors, and Spanish Moors, with whom they'd lived.<span style=""> </span>Each snobbish Anglo-Saxon may be part a Jew and part a colored man.<span style=""> </span>Has this inexorable circumstance been made clear to every moppet old enough to clutch the Star-Spangled Banner?<span style=""> </span>And does he also know what a torrent of <st1:place>Asia</st1:place> beats in his veins?</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">A book could be written of the mere lists of truths some men know that all should know, which it is forbidden to speak about in the presence of the general public.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Who forbids it?<span style=""> </span>The church.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">The gods and their arrogant servants, the men of God.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">It is a pea-soup world.<span style=""> </span>Truth hacks a hole, goes on, and the fog fingers of self-assessed virtue close up the place.<span style=""> </span>The minister intones.<span style=""> </span>The flabby lips of the priest moisten with a smile.<span style=""> </span>The density is restored.<span style=""> </span>The Republic's safe behind its clerical cloak, safe in the arms of Jesus-- that sad and terrible new erotic who have so little insight into himself, such giant ego, and yet such an intuition of the archetypes.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"></p><blockquote><p class="MsoNormal">Ye shall know the truth.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Love one another.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Suffer little children to come unto me . . . for of such is the kingdom of heaven.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">The <st1:place><st1:placetype>kingdom</st1:placetype> of <st1:placename>God</st1:placename></st1:place> is within you.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">For whoever hath, to him shall be given . . . but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the <st1:place><st1:placetype>kingdom</st1:placetype> of <st1:placename>God</st1:placename></st1:place>.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.</p></blockquote><p class="MsoNormal"></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Even the words of this man, spoken two ignorant thousand years ago, burn like the phrase at Belshazzar’s feast on the walls of every standing church today.<span style=""> </span>These Christians have had that long to add to wisdom and every century they have moved a little farther away from it.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">You cannot, today, even mention the sanctified repositories by name in the free press and the other free media of this great, free nation.<span style=""> </span>The right of simple criticism is stopped up.<span style=""> </span>The right to ridicule lies beyond editorial thought.<span style=""> </span>Whatever it is that half the citizens ponder with their free minds, it cannot be constellated or directed toward an inquiry on churches or the correction of a church.<span style=""> </span><st1:country-region><st1:place>England</st1:place></st1:country-region> is freer.<span style=""> </span>The English name names and assert critique, lambaste, enjoy the public literature of a liberty that has been murdered here.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">You will find--for example--that ninety-odd percent of your fellows in this republic hold the late Mary Baker Eddy to have been part abomination and part fool, a quack in the science of applied psychology, a fat Coué; and yet, were have you seen or heard of a man allowed to dissect the sophistries of Christian Scientists in the public prints?<span style=""> </span>It is tabu.<span style=""> </span>It is a fruitful forest our tribe is not allowed to enter.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">The objection to the Church of Rome is also mighty.<span style=""> </span>This House of God has existed for a thousand years on the bodies of exploited human beings.<span style=""> </span>In symbols and rituals it contains just enough awareness of instinct to bury deliberately continents and ages of the human mind.<span style=""> </span>Its mechanics give it an access to that kingdom of heaven which is the human child, and it understands archetypes enough so to indoctrinate him that even though he forgets the experience he will respond to it the rest of his days and beg extreme supreme unction to ready himself even for a gangster's funeral.<span style=""> </span>Freud explained it.<span style=""> </span>Freud's patients, like Catholics, had been bent to their shape in the years of infancy.<span style=""> </span>So with most crooked personalities.<span style=""> </span>Instinct-- instinct.<span style=""> </span>What ways it turns and how man holds the mold!</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Wherever in the nation the Roman Catholic Church is able to grasp the public instinct, freedom dies, a tyranny is set up over the citizens to conform with the spiritual and temporal tyranny of this church, and cathedrals flourish while the people grow poor.<span style=""> </span>A night of ignorance is walled around them like a sheepfold.<span style=""> </span>The clergy fleshes up.<span style=""> </span>Science is extinguished as a light among the laity and handed over to the Jesuits who have so employed it that their name of Jesus is a synonym for intrigue.<span style=""> </span>Wherever truth of science interferes with hierachy, it can be rationalized or set aside or put out again.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">That the church may seize the human conscience from the man, the Catholic confessional is held.<span style=""> </span>And that the drive of sex may be channeled for the uses of popes and cardinals and bishops, the fear-engendering, worship-provoking symbol of chastity is kept incarnate in living men and women--in priests and nuns--who walk among the contemporary people wearing the garments of their death, the evidence they have married God and Church.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">What other proof of instinct do you need?</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Only a little while ago, this organism proclaimed (in the <st1:country-region><st1:place>Vatican</st1:place></st1:country-region>'s own press) that a world horrified by the atomic bomb was a world which would at last understand why the Roman Catholic Church had fought science through the centuries.<span style=""> </span>These words of the church's own confession of its central crime.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">I know, good reader, my own hazard here, of being called anti-Catholic, or an anti-Christian Scientist, if there be such a term.<span style=""> </span>I know it will be said that I am inconsistent to attack intolerance and speak against sects in the same arguments.<span style=""> </span>I know that it will be said I have seemed to defend Jews while I assailed Protestants.<span style=""> </span>These are the tags of entrenched bigotry by which they dislodge the judgment even of those who strive to be fair-minded.<span style=""> </span>But remember how I began this chapter.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">I am against no man on earth, but in a passion for the gain of understanding in every man.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">I am against no special church, but all churches, because they employ the instinct of man above all else to maintain themselves, and because they do not preach or even pretend to own the morality of the Jesus they profess.<span style=""> </span>And they do not even vaguely comprehend the overwhelming meaning of his institutions.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">I am not an agnostic or an atheist--one who thinks the truth is unknowable or protests there is no God.<span style=""> </span>My sense of truth in the matter is different; I acknowledge there is validity--however savagely distorted--in all these gods.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">And I am against the distortion.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Let me be plainer.<span style=""> </span>To every man who believes he knows the True God: I am against his God.<span style=""> </span>For of each God, and then make the gods that render us mad to destroy us--the various Christ-Gods and all the antithetical gods that Christians fear and deplore (and court in secret) --Mammon, for example, and Venus.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Idols in the mind are identical with mud idols and merely look better to people were slightly aware they have minds.<span style=""> </span>But we have at long last learned enough to be done with this one more appalling institution in man's story-- the peonage of the conscience--the church.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Let us make a place in the news of our society, then, for the exposition--lest present scourges, and the eternal advocacy of the idolaters, demolish that small chamber from which our bravest forebears intended such mighty liberties to come for.<span style=""> </span>These Christians!<span style=""> </span>They are at the wheels of every war.<span style=""> </span>They are at the helm of monopoly.<span style=""> </span>They lie in labor's dirtiest ditches.<span style=""> </span>The American mom belongs to Jesus.<span style=""> </span>As statesmen, a trade away humanity through the centuries like strings of beads and barrels of vegetables.<span style=""> </span>These shining Christians! Their holy gleam, on close inspection, proves almost always to be the phosphore of putrescence.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Every man of honesty knows that we human beings are in the primary school of truth: we have barely learned how to learn.<span style=""> </span>What we can find out concerning the nature of Nature, of the universe and of ourselves will inevitably show how stupid and overweaning are the Beliefs of this day.<span style=""> </span>We should hold them ready, always, for surrender.<span style=""> </span>That is bravery.<span style=""> </span>That is greatness.<span style=""> </span>To be foresworn to a dogma is to be shackled and it is also to be made the own worst enemy of one's self, for the part of the mind able to learn more, whenever it stands in the presence of new truth, will hate the part that is pledged to learn no more--even though both parts maintain the bond of the obscene loyalty.<span style=""> </span>This is the thickness of thieves and the fierce, compulsory fealty of conspirators.<span style=""> </span>The man steals from an self and conspires against himself and hence from the whole world when he says, “I know it all”--especially concerning God.<span style=""> </span>If what men have claimed for God were the truth, the world would have been different long ago.<span style=""> </span>So I oppose the claim.<span style=""> </span>To the sincerely reverent, the somewhat honest, this opposition will seem painful.<span style=""> </span>I am sorry.<span style=""> </span>To the hypocrites-- the religionistic professionals--it will be infuriating.<span style=""> </span>I am unmoved.<span style=""> </span>My own pain to reach these conclusions was long and unexpressible; in the description of them my heart holds the steadiest good cheer and only the intellect is sometimes moved to anger as it speaks to the reader for liberty of the mind and equally against all anarchy and all tyranny.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">The churches have dug the public habits full of channels to divert all civilized contemplation of themselves.<span style=""> </span>When one churches taken to task, they say that all are being defiled and every Holy Name of God as well.<span style=""> </span>Religious criticism from outside the church, they hold an expression of ignorance and the shameful occupation.<span style=""> </span>It is a Sign of Communism, or anything else the majority despises: a sign of neurosis or sexual perversion.<span style=""> </span>It is, the churches add, a violation of the Constitution, which grants men the right to worship as they please--a vicious national act, un-American in fact and intent.<span style=""> </span>This habitual translation of the Constitution as a red-white-and-blue curtain over religious affairs is their favorite; it influences the most weak minds and has most deprived the nation of the fresh air of reality, fact, truth, and the equal rights of free speech that would oppose bigotry.<span style=""> </span>For the Constitution gives no minority the power to interfere with the individual or his honorable opinions or his press or his legislature.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">But the American churches do not hesitate--whenever other measures seem inadequate--to resort to blackmail, extortion, intimidation of free men, threat of assault in the pocketbook--all brands of Godly robbery.<span style=""> </span>And so dear has property become to Americans that those who do not kneel to a creed, do kneel to property--kneel--and crawl when it is invoked by sanctimonious dastards.<span style=""> </span>We will withdraw our advertising, the churches say to the editor.<span style=""> </span>We will refuse en masse to subscribe.<span style=""> </span>If you say anything about us that is not for us, we will boycott you.<span style=""> </span>Print this praise we have written of ourselves.<span style=""> </span>Cut out that speech.<span style=""> </span>It happens every day to the Free Press: the hinting minister--the smiling, apologetic priest--the little talk--and the crime against man's completed in the name of God.<span style=""> </span>I've seen it enough times in the managing editor's office and I have watched it originate in the churches to which I once belonged.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">What dirty citizens such people make!</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">What cowards they are--for their own sakes which they call the sake of Christ.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Because of them, the radio is neuter.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Because of them, the motion picture industries maintain an office headed by some man of prominence check each foot of film against the avalanche of each day's bigotries--how long a skirt may be, how deep a neck this year, how wide a dancer may swing her hips for the Mormons, what double meaning some obscure theology might find in the dialogue, the date when Methodists rescind a taboo on the word screwy, the forbidden chuckle about bishops and all moral significances--that virtue triumph, that never a man or woman lie together unmarried with pleasure and sans punishment, death preferred--and so on and on and on to the outermost reaches of every filthy, sick imagination that has exalted itself in vice for the glory of God.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">In sex, especially, and “sex morals”, the churches clench the dominion.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">When life and death are not problems of the immediate moment, the problem of man and woman is greatest--as Freud found, and as I have said here, and as every asylum keeper knows.<span style=""> </span>All that man does and is--his family, seen toward ancestors and progeny, the art of himself and his arts--has flowed from the duality of sex since the protoplasm remembereth not when.<span style=""> </span>Thus, if the church cannot order and command the archetypes that represent the myriad opposites in sexuality, the church cannot endure.<span style=""> </span>So its principal energy--its organizational libido--is directed to this end in ten thousand disguises and also by such psychological stratagems as I have already cited: the voluntary self-castration of a holy class of men and women for example--a violence upon life proportionate to the violence of sex instinct itself and cunningly intended to interfere with every private inkling of independence and of real purity, so that the individual will commit himself to the church, awed by this evidence of what seems inhuman might.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Ah!<span style=""> </span>The dreadful crosses Ego invents to spare itself from the sight of instinct!</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">The church has such a necessity of possessing the public attitudes towards sex that hardly any thought foreign to any religious system is allowed a good expression and in this sense we could call ourselves a Roman Catholic nation, or Methodist, since what offends these is carefully concealed from all.<span style=""> </span>Churchly control of the rules for sex behavior is of such ecclesiastical importance that its exercise has cost the general intelligence all common touch with morals. “Morals” mean sex morals to the masses, and not ethics.<span style=""> </span>That fact provides many incidental conveniences to the church, for it can set up exact rules of sex biology, administer them immaculately, and divided the rest of ethics to suit property--allowing the secret, cheatful doctrines of business holy ascent, and confining virtue to certain alms, the support of arrogant meddling by missionaries, tithes for a new edifice, endowment of parochial schools, and the like.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Morals confused--sometimes unconsciously, but more often deliberately, methodically!<span style=""> </span>Morals without reference to any knowledge that has appeared in the world since <st1:city><st1:place>Babylon</st1:place></st1:city>!</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">In the last half-century, the science of sexuality has been originated.<span style=""> </span>At the same time, our technical society has found various means to prevent conception and has learned ways both to inhibit and to cure venereal disease.<span style=""> </span>The sex instinct is now beginning to be understood.<span style=""> </span>The physical fears--exploited by churches since the Stone Age--are banished.<span style=""> </span>Everything that man knew about his sexual nature is changed and all he has done this subject to revision.<span style=""> </span>The crisis in morals is more desperate here than elsewhere for this is the center of ordinary rally.<span style=""> </span>Dilemma blazes in our promiscuous conduct; yet the brains and integrity of our society are not allowed to be brought to bear upon it--for impartial, public discussion is all but tabu.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Here, in all these churches, these religions, is the collective parallel for the process by which the individual falls blind prey to his own instinct.<span style=""> </span>He imports to his ego every advantage that can be seized or mirrored from objectivity, to be convinced that he is not an animal but more than an animal--and he exports, by the act, all awareness of archetypal opposition, all contact with time and truth.<span style=""> </span>The groups of the godly build their gods to shield the fact that they are animals.<span style=""> </span>They eschew the reason in their heads and the dignities in their hearts, as the price.<span style=""> </span>They will not treat with Nature evenly; Nature is too honest for them--as pure virtuousness and naught else--so they must forever lie.<span style=""> </span>But they cannot be forgiven any longer on the grounds that they know not what they do.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">It is possible, now, for them to know.</p><br /><p style="text-align: right;" class="MsoNormal">An Essay on Morals<br />1947<br /></p>Quixiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03126711689901268060noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12912400.post-42962808629244052422008-04-18T20:41:00.000-07:002008-04-18T20:49:35.577-07:00closing remarks . . .<span style="color:purple;">The following are the closing remarks of Jeffrey Shallit during a recent <a href="http://blip.tv/file/484924">debate</a> with Kirk Durston.</span><br /><br />Friends.<br /><br />We live in exciting and dangerous times. Exciting because today we understand so much more about the world than we ever have before. We live in an immense cosmos 13.7 billion years old — I feel like Carl Sagan—a cosmos that's made up of an enormous number of fundamental particles. The particles come together and form about a hundred chemical elements that make up everything in this room and everything in your bodies. We live in a solar system that came into being from the ashes of dead starts 4.5 billion years ago. Earth, our home, orbits a sun that warms us through the reactions of nuclear fusion. —he sun is a mass of incandescent gas— and will continue to do so for billions of years. All life is intimately related. Isn't that great?<br />Having descended from a single life form that rose about three billion years ago. We and the apes share a common ancestor that lived in Africa about 5 million years ago. All people are truly brothers and sisters, sharing the same genetic heritage.<br /><br />Now, we know these things.<br />How do we know them?<br />We know them not because of prayer, or religious revelation, or sacred texts, or meditation, or sacrificing of goats, or altered states of consciousness. We know these because generations of scientists weren't afraid to question the dogmas of their previous generations. Sometimes losing their lives or their liberties in the process. Our scientific picture of the universe is now far grander and subtler than that anything conceived by the authors of the Old Testament, the New Testament, or the Quran. And there's so much more waiting to be discovered.<br /><br />But, we live in dangerous times too. We're now confronted with threats more serious than ever before. The threat of global climate change, bringing significant disruption to our lives, hangs over us. The plague of AIDS, threatens to wipe out the entire continent of Africa. Nuclear proliferation brings the specter of mass destruction, or a dirty bomb that could render a major city unlivable for hundreds or thousands of years. Faced with these threats, what does fundamentalist religion really offer? My opponent offers us the absurd and grotesque image of a supposed-created of the universe, the inventor of everything that ever was or will be, unwilling to aid us with these threats, these significant threats to our survival, but ready to subdue aggressive bulls or bring rabbits back to life for the cost of a brief prayer.<br /><br />The fundamentalist God is one that is obsessively and intrusively concerned with our sex lives, but apparently unwilling to allow us to perform experiments on stem-cells to make life better for sufferers of disease.<br /><br />I am a provisional non-theist, someone who has not yet been convinced by the arguments for the existence of gods of Christians, Jews , or Muslims, but I'm not the enemy of theists. On the contrary, if yours is a theism that is willing to acknowledge that your conception of God might be wrong, that your belief in a supreme being doesn't create any obligation on the part of non-believers, that your holy books are human artifacts that may be read metaphorically or might contain errors, that we should behave charitably toward our fellow humans because it's the right thing to do and not because of threats of eternal torment, then you are my brothers and sisters. Let us go and solve our problems by reasoning together without relying on the dogmas of past ages. But if your sect is the enemy of rationalism, if it requires that evolution be false or homosexuals be stoned or shunned, forbidden to teach elementary school or adopt children, if you agree with Martin Luther that a lie that serves the church is ethically acceptable or, as my opponent admitted here at the University of Waterloo, just a few months ago, that genocide is perfectly okay, if God wills it, that it's perfectly okay to kill me and everyone in this room if God told him to do it—and he was sure.<br /><br />Then you're part of the problem, not part of the solution.<br /><br />So the question remains, will we remain as children, consoled by the false promises of fundamentalist religion, slavishly adhering to dogma blindly following the prejudices and bigotry of past ages, or will we go forward together as adults to stand on our own, ready to face the future with reason and courage?<br /><br />Let's all pray we make the right choice.<br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Thursday, October 25th, 2007</span></div>Quixiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03126711689901268060noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12912400.post-46211675689781655572007-12-10T17:39:00.000-08:002007-12-10T17:58:47.331-08:00religion as a biological organ . . .Man is always concerned about his destiny—that is to say, his position and rôle in the universe, and how he is to maintain that position and fulfill that rôle. All societies of man developed some sort of organs for coping with this problem—organs for orientating their ideas and emotions and for constructing attitudes of mind and patterns of belief and behavior in relation to their conception of their destiny. All of the social organs concerned with destiny can, I think, properly he included under the head of religions. Even if some of them are exceedingly primitive and consist of little but magic rituals, while others are highly developed and claimed to be entirely rational, they are all, from Haitian voodoo to Roman Catholicism, from neolithic fertility religions to Marxist Communism, concerned with the same general function. In the same sort of way, the tube-feet of a starfish, the legs of a horse, the pseudopods of an amoeba, and the wings of a bird, though profoundly different organs from each other, are all animal organs concerned with the same general function of locomotion.<br /><p style="text-align: right; margin-right: 70pt;">Julian Huxley<BR><u>Religion Without Revelation</u><BR>1957</p>Quixiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03126711689901268060noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12912400.post-16015879243223632352007-12-10T01:00:00.000-08:002007-12-10T01:14:29.703-08:00HerthaI that saw where ye trod<br /> The dim paths of the night,<br />Set the shadow called God<br /> In your sky to give light;<br />But the morning of manhood is risen, and the<br /> shadowless soul is in sight.<br /><br />The tree many-rooted<br /> That swells to the sky,<br />With frondage red-fruited<br /> The life-tree am I;<br />In the buds of your lives is the sap of my leaves; ye<br /> shall live and not die.<br /><br />But the Gods of your fashion<br /> That take and that give,<br />In their pity and passion<br /> That scourge and forgive,<br />They are worms that are bred in the bark that falls off;<br /> they shall die and not live.<br /><p style="text-align: right; margin-right: 100pt">—Algernon Charles Swinburne</p><BR> <BR>Quixiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03126711689901268060noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12912400.post-55127751779153290832007-11-07T20:19:00.000-08:002007-11-07T20:26:51.491-08:00on idolatrous foolishness ..." ... the inadequacy of the explanation does not invalidate the reality of the experience. Paul, like anyone who dares to speak of God, discovered that there is no such thing as a god language with which to process a God experience. The language we use is human, culturally conditioned, and incapable of doing more than pointing to that which it can never fully embrace. To attribute ultimate reality to the constructs of our language, to make religious claims for the human explanations for the God experience is to become idolatrous, and foolish. ...[...] ... The church must recognize that its first-century biblical explanations, its fourth and fifth-century creedal explanations and its later developing system of doctrines and dogmas are human creations, not divine revelations and none of them is either finally true or eternally valid ... [...] ... The ultimate heresy of Christianity lies not in its inability to explain adequately the Christ experience. It lies in the claim uttered through the ages that human words could not only define for all time something called orthodoxy, but that the ultimate and saving truth of the God experience could actually reside in the theological explanations."<br /><p style="text-align: right; margin-right: 25pt;">J.S. Spong<br />"A Christianity for Tomorrow"<br />The Once and Future Faith<br />2001</p>Quixiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03126711689901268060noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12912400.post-15273426280633810222007-11-02T23:56:00.000-07:002007-11-03T17:35:50.851-07:00watch that first step (it's a doozy)<h1 style="text-align: center;">I<br />The Meaning of "God"<br /></h1><p>Knowing what one is talking about is of inestimable value in any dialogue, so the theist, before he sets out to explain why we should believe in god, must first explain what he means by the word "god". What is the theist attempting to establish the existence of? What is the nature of god? How are we to identify him (or it)? At least some of the attributes of this supposed creature must be known before anything can be considered relevant to establishing his existence. As one theist puts it, "With no description or definition to work from, we will literally fail to know what we are talking about." For example, consider the following dialogue:<br /></p><blockquote><span style="font-weight: bold;">Mr Jones:</span> "A unie exists."<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Mr White:</span> "Prove it."<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Mr Jones:</span> "It has rained for three consecutive days—that is my proof."<br /></blockquote><p>If this exchange is less than satisfactory, much of the blame rests with Mr. White: his demand for proof is immature. Mr. Jones has not specified what an "unie" is; until and unless he does so, "unie" is nothing but a meaningless sound, and Mr. Jones is uttering nonsense. Without some description of an "unie," the alleged proof for its existence is incoherent.</p><p>When confronted with a claim that a god exists, the person who immediately demands proof commits the same error as does Mr. White. His first response should be, "What is it for which you are claiming existence?" The theist must present an intelligible description of god. Until he does so, "god" makes no more sense than "unie"; both are cognitively empty, and any attempt at proof is logically absurd. Nothing can qualify as evidence for the existence of a god unless we have some idea of what we are searching for. Even if it is demanded that the existence of god be accepted on faith, we still must know what it is that we are required to have faith in. As W.T. Blackstone puts it,<br /></p><blockquote>Until the content of a belief is made clear, the appeal to accept the belief is beside the point, for one would not know what one has accepted. The request for the meaning of a religious belief is logically prior to the question of accepting that belief on faith or to the question of whether that belief constitutes knowledge.<br /></blockquote><br /><p style="text-align: right; margin-right: 30pt;">from <b><u>Atheism</u>: The Case Against God<br />by George H. Smith<br />1979</b></p><b><br /><br /></b><p></p>Quixiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03126711689901268060noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12912400.post-81200969866192035732007-10-30T15:34:00.000-07:002007-11-03T12:02:43.673-07:00Einstein's world . . .<h2>The Meaning of Life</h2><p>What is the meaning of human life, or of organic life altogether? To answer this question at all implies a religion. Is there any sense then, you ask, in putting it? I answer, the man who regards his own life and that of his fellow creatures as meaningless is not merely unfortunate but almost disqualified for life.</p><h2>Of Wealth</h2><p>I am absolutely convinced that no wealth in the world can help humanity forward, even in the hands of the most devoted worker in this cause. The example of great and pure characters is the only thing that can produce fine ideas and noble deeds. Money only appeals to selfishness and always tempts its owners irresistibly to abuse it.</p><p>Can anyone imagine Moses, Jesus, or Ghandi armed with the money-bags of Carnagie?</p><h2>Christianity and Judaism</h2><p>If one purges the Judaism of the Prophets and Christianity as Jesus Christ taught it of all subsequent additions, especially those of the priests, one is left with a teaching that is capable of curing all the social ills of humanity.</p><p>It is the duty of every man of good will to strive steadfastly in his own little world to make this teaching of pure humanity a living force, so far as he can. If he makes an honest attempt in this direction without being crushed and trampled under foot by his contemporaries, he may consider himself and the community to which he belongs lucky.</p><h2>Education and Educators</h2>Dear Miss —<br /><p>I have read about sixteen pages of your manuscript and it made me—smile. It is clever, well observed, honest, it stands on its own feet up to a point, and yet it is so typically feminine, by which I mean derrivative and vitiated by personal rancour. I suffered exactly the same treatment at the hands of my teachers, who disliked me for my independence and passed me over when they wanted assistants (I must admit that I was somewhat less of a model student than you). But it would not have been worth my while to write anything about my school life, still less would I have liked to be responsible for anyone's printing or actually reading it. Besides, one always cuts a poor figure if one complains about others who are struggling for their place in the sun too after their own fashion.</p><p>Therefore, pocket your temperament and keep your manuscript for your sons and daughters, in order that they might derive consolation from it and—not give a damn for what their teachers tell them or think about them.</p><p>Incidentally I am only coming to Princeton to research, not to teach. There is too much education altogether, especially in American schools. The only rational way of educating is to be an example—of what to avoid, if one can't be the other sort.</p><br /><p style="text-align: right; margin-right: 60pt;">from <b>The World As I See It.<br /></b></p> <p style="margin-right: 60pt; text-align: left;"><b><br /></b></p>Quixiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03126711689901268060noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12912400.post-58121336466378743762007-09-20T02:25:00.000-07:002007-09-20T02:26:05.688-07:00This I Believe<p>In every one of the higher religions there is a strain of infinite optimism on the one hand, and on the other, of a profound pessimism. In the depths of our being, they all teach, there is an inner light, but an inner light which our egotism keeps for most of the time in a state of more or less complete eclipse. If, however, it so desires, the ego can get out of the way, so to speak, can dis-eclipse the light and become identified with its divine source, hence the traditional optimism of the traditional religions. Their pessimism springs from the observed fact that, though all are called, few are chosen for the sufficient reason that few choose to be chosen. To me this older conception of man's nature and destiny seems more realistic, more nearly in accord with the given facts than any form of modern utopianism. In the lord's prayer we are taught to ask for the blessing which consists in not being led into temptation. The reason is only too obvious. When temptations are very great or unduly prolonged, most persons succumb to them. To devise a perfect social order is probably beyond our powers, but I believe that it is perfectly possible for us to reduce the number of dangerous temptations to a level far below that which is tolerated at the present time. A society so arranged that there should be a minimum of dangerous temptations, this is the end towards which as a citizen I have to strive. In my efforts to achieve that end, I can make use of a great variety of means. Do good ends justify the use of intrinsically bad means? On the level of theory, the point can be argued indefinitely. In practice, meanwhile, I find that the means employed invariably determine the nature of the end achieved. Indeed, as Mahatma Ghandi was never tired of insisting, the means ARE the end in its preliminary stages. Men have put forth enormous efforts to make their world a better place to live in, but except in regard to gadgets, plumbing and hygiene, their success has been pathetically small. Hell, as the proverb has it, is paved with good intentions, and so long as we go on trying to realize our ideals by bad or merely inappropriate means, our good intentions will come to the same bad ends. In this consists the tragedy and irony of history. Can I as an individual do anything to make future history a little less tragic and less ironic than history past and present? I believe I can. As as citizen, I can use all my intelligence and all my good will to develop political means that shall be of the same kind and quality as the ideal aims which I am trying to achieve. And as a person, as a psycho-physical organism, I can learn how to get out of the way, so that the divine source of my life and consciousness can come out of eclipse and shine through me.</p><br /><br />Aldous Huxley <br />from original 1950s series, "This I Believe"Quixiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03126711689901268060noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12912400.post-36780725305852350472007-09-14T17:25:00.000-07:002007-10-30T16:41:30.733-07:00the unitary executive in the 1930s . . .<h1 align="center">Vive le Roi!</h1><br /><center><i style="color: red; font-size: 10pt;">this is deliciously tongue-in-cheek</i></center><br /><p>The abdication of Congress is certainly not as overt and abject as that of the German Reichstag or the Italian Parliamento; nevertheless, it has gone so far that the constitutional potency of the legislative arm is reduced to what the lawyers call a nuisance value. The two Houses can still make faces at Dr. Roosevelt, and when a strong body of public opinion happens to stand behind them they can even force him, in this detail or that, into a kind of accounting, but it must be manifest that if they tried to impose their will upon him in any major matter he could beat them easily. The only will left in the national government is his will. To all intents and purposes he is the state.</p><p>We have thus come to a sort of antithesis of the English system, under which Parliament is omnipotent and the King is only a falseface. It would be rather absurd to call the charge revolutionary, for it has been under way for more than a hundred years. Since Jackson's first election, in fact, Congress has always knuckled down to the President in times of national emergency. After 1863 Lincoln ruled like an Oriental despot, and after 1917, Wilson set himself up, not only as Emperor, but also as Pope. In 1864, as antiquaries familiar with <i>Ex parte</i> Merryman will recall, the Supreme Court undertook to bring old Abe to book, but as the same antiquaries know, it had to confess in the end that it could do nothing.</p><p>There is no likelihood that it will intervene in the present situation. For one thing, there seems to be no public demand that it do so. For another thing, judges as a class are naturally sympathetic toward arbitrary power, for their own authority rests upon it. Thus there seems to be every probability that Dr. Roosevelt will continue to operate as an absolute monarch, at least for some time to come. If the schemes of salvation concocted by his Brain Trust, <i>i.e.</i>, by the King In Council, appear to be working, then no one save a few touchy senators will want to depose him. And if we continue wandering in the wilderness, with our shirttails out and the hot sun scorching our necks, then most Americans will probably hold that it is better to go on following one leader, however bad, than to start scrambling after a couple of hundred of them, each with a different compass. </p><p>My gifts as a constructive critic are of low visibility, but the state of affairs thus confronting the country prompts me to make a simple suggestion. It is that a convention be called under Article V of the Constitution, and that it consider the desirability of making Dr. Roosevelt King in name as well as in fact. There is no Constitutional impediment to such a change, and it would thus not amount to a revolution. The people of the United States are quite as free, under Article V, to establish a monarchy as they were to give the vote to women. Even if they held, as some argue, that the Bill of Rights is inviolable and cannot be changed by constitutional amendment, it may be answered that there is nothing in the Bill of Rights requiring that the national government shall be republican in form. </p><p>The advantages that lie in making Dr. Roosevelt King must be plain to everyone. His great difficulty today is that he is a candidate for reëlection in 1936, and must shape all his acts with that embarrassing fact in mind. Even with a docile Congress awaiting his orders he cannot carry on with a really free hand, for there remains a moniroty in that Congress which may, son or late, by the arts of the demagogue, convince the public, or a large part of it, that wahat he is doing is dangerous, and so his reëlection may be imperiled. To meet and circumvent this peril he must play the demagogue himself, which is to say, he must only too often subordinate what he believes to be wise to what he believes to be popular.</p><p>It is a cruel burden to lay upon a man facing a multitude of appaling problems, some of them probably next door to insoluble. No other man of genuine responsibility under our system of government is called upon to bear it. It lies, to be sure, upon Congressmen, but Congressmen, after all, are minor functuaries, and no one has expected them, these hundred years past, to be wise. We try to lighten it for Senators, who are a cut higher, by giving them six-year terms and so postponing their ordeal by ballot, and we remove it altogether for Federal judges by letting them sit during good behavior. But the President has to go on the auction block every four years, and the fact fills his mind and limits his freedom of action from the moment he takes the oath of office.</p><p>I am not a Roosevelt fanatic, certainly, though I voted for the right hon. gentleman last November, and even printed a few discreet pieces arguing that he might be worse. But it must be manifest that, in any situation as full of dynamite as the present one, it is a great advantage to have a leader who can devote his whole time and thought to the problems before him, without any consideration of extraneous matters. Yet that is precisely what, under our present system, a president cannot do. He is forced, at every moment of his first term, to remember that he may be thrown out at the end of it, and it is thus no wonder that his concern often wobbles him, and makes him a too-easy mark for the political blackmailers who constantly threaten him</p><p>If his term were unlimited, or limited only by his good behavior—in brief, if he were in the position of an elected King—he would get rid of all this nuisance, and be free to apply himself to his business. I believe that any man, under such circumstances, would do immensely better than he could possibly do under the present system. And I believe that Dr. Roosevelt, in particular, would be worth at least ten times what he is worth now, for he is a good enough politician to know that his current high and feverish popularity cannot last, democracy being what it is, and that the only way he can save himself in 1936 is by forgetting the Depression once or twice a day, and applying himself to very practical politics.</p><p>What this division of aim and interest amounts to is shown brilliantly by some of his appointments. He has made a plain effort to surround himself with men in whose competence and good faith he can put his trust, but he has been forced by the exigencies of his uncomfortable situation to give a number of important posts to political plugs of the most depressing sort. These plugs were too powerful to be flouted, and now that they are in office they are even more powerful than before. If they remain, they will disgrace the administration soon or late, and if they are turned out, they will imperil it in 1936. An elected King could rid himself of them at once, and they could do him no damage, now or hereafter.</p><p>The objections to monarchy are mainly sentimental, and do not bear well under inspection. I shall rehearse some of them at length in a future article, and try to show how hollow they are. Suffice it for the moment to glance at a few of them. One is the objection that a King, once in office, can't be got rid of. The answer is that Kings are got rid of very often, and usually very easily, and that the same constitutional convention which provided one for the United States might also provide for his ready impeachment and removal, and even for his lawful and Christian execution.</p><p>Another objection is that the problem of the succession is hard to solve, and that any King that we set up would probably want his son to succeed him, and would root for that son exactly as President in his first term now roots for himself, and in his second term for some favorite in his entourage. Well, why not? I believe that a Crown Price, brought up in his father's office, is likely to make at least as good a King as any other fellow. Moreover, is it so soon forgotten that Dr. Roosevelt himself came in as a sort of Crown Prince?—though I should add that he was challenged by a Legitimist party led <i>de jure</i> by the Young Pretender, Prince Theodore Minor, and <i>de facto</i> by Princess Alice. If His Excellency's name were Kelly, or Kraus or Kaminsky would he be in the White House today? To ask the question is to answer it. Despite the theory that Americans fear and abhor the hereditary principle they have elected one President's son to the Presidency, one President's grandson and one President's cousin, and in at least two other instances they have made motions in the same direction. This is five times in thirty-one times at the bat, or nearly one in six.</p><p>But the succession is really a minor matter. I see no objection to letting the sitting King nominate three candidates, and then choosing between them, by plebiscite, at his death. His nominations, at worst, would be far better than any that professional politicians could or would make, and three nominees would give the voters sufficient choice. There remains the problem of starting the ball rolling. But that problem, as I have sought to show, is already solved. We have a King in the White House at this minute, and he is quite as much of the Blood Royal as George V. All that remains is to call a constitutional convention, and, as it were, make an honest woman of him.</p><br /><p style="text-align: right; margin-right: 100px;">H.L. Mencken<br />Baltimore Evening Sun<br />1 May 1933</p>Quixiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03126711689901268060noreply@blogger.com1