I suppose you know that your ideas, the ones that run in background that you so take for granted you barely need to think of them, were all invented by someone and that you just act on them.
John Maynard Keynes, whose theories on the usefulness of deficit spending by government so influenced Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt who used them during the Depression to fund projects such as the Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps to put jobless men back to work to eliminate despair and restore hope by putting food on the family table, noted this phenomenon in the world of economics when he said what has been smoothed down to this:
Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.
Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.
If you say you believe in America, or democracy, or God, you are saying that you put your faith in ideas invented by someone, some human being you may be aware of, forgot, or never knew. When you say you believe in God, you are probably talking about the god invented in the Middle East some millenia ago, unless, if you descend from the Inca, you are talking about a different one invented in South America. See A History of God, The 4,000 Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, by Karen Armstrong (Random House, 1993).
American democracy is fairly traceable back to our Revolution of 1776 and the Constitutional Conventions that followed. Our founding fathers, the framers of the Constitution, such as Madison and Jefferson, drew their ideas on religious toleration from John Locke. Locke had taken refuge in in Holland because he got in trouble with the king over the long religious (Protestant v. Catholic) civil war that had been raging in England since Henry VIII broke with Rome, expropriated the monasteries, and established the Church of England, the Anglican or as it is known here Episcopalian Church.
Locke is believed to have become familiar with the ideas of his contemporary in the Netherlands, Baruch Spinoza, the former member of a congregation of Portuguese Jews forced
to flee Portugal even though some of them had been converted to Christianity several generations earlier in Spain. The Spanish were not going to let the Jews off that easily, however, especially when the forced converts, called New Christians or swine ("Marranos") began out-competing Old Christians for jobs in government and the Catholic Church hierarchy, now that they had removed the taint of Judaism, supposedly.
The Spanish Inquisition was established to ferret out secret Judaizers who kept the ancient rites beginning at sundown on the Friday evening Sabbath, such as by putting fresh linen on the table and refusing to work on the holy evening or on Saturday. Cervantes has Sancho Panza describe himself as a 'cristiano viejo,' an Old Christian, thus a person beyond the taint of a doubt.
The Spanish came to believe in the notion of "Once a Jew, always a Jew," as though the blood itself were tainted thus, some argue, introducing the notion of tainted blood that Hitler used to eradicate millions of Jews. Don't laugh, we practiced the same belief here in regard to belief with the so-called 'one-drop' rule of determining 'who's a black.' If one of your ancestors was black, no matter how far back, if this fact were known, you were black. Hitler drew the line on one Jewish grandparent, which was enough to get you fired from your government or university job. "Jewish physics" is how Hitler & Co. regarded the works of Albert Einstein and other Jewish scientists.
They say the Dark Ages was a long time ago. Others say that no bad idea ever really goes away.
Spinoza got himself thrown out of his congregation for applying reason to religious beliefs, proving once again that reason and religion only go so far together, and not ever to questioning the roots of the latter.
Of course we like to do that anyway, some of us, and so we will, trusting that the Lord who gave us brains will forgive us for trying to use them to show that there's a lot of make-believe in religion. Any God worth his salt will allow this, of course, even if some of his followers will not, perhaps because they feel threatened with removal of power and influence if it turns out they're selling humbug, not that they would do that.
An Op-Ed in the New York Times today marks the 350th anniversary of the excommunication of Spinoza, teacher of Locke, Jefferson, and perhaps, you.
Op-Ed Contributor
Reasonable Doubt
Baruch Spinoza
Boston
THURSDAY marked the 350th anniversary of the excommunication of the philosopher Baruch Spinoza from the Portuguese Jewish community of Amsterdam in which he had been raised.
Given the events of the last week, particularly those emanating from the Middle East, the Spinoza anniversary didn’t get a lot of attention. But it’s one worth remembering — in large measure because Spinoza’s life and thought have the power to illuminate the kind of events that at the moment seem so intractable and overwhelming.
The exact reasons for the excommunication of the 23-year-old Spinoza remain murky, but the reasons he came to be vilified throughout all of Europe are not. Spinoza argued that no group or religion could rightly claim infallible knowledge of the Creator’s partiality to its beliefs and ways. After the excommunication, he spent the rest of his life — he died in 1677 at the age of 44 — studying the varieties of religious intolerance. The conclusions he drew are still of dismaying relevance.
The Jews who banished Spinoza had themselves been victims of intolerance, refugees from the Spanish-Portuguese Inquisition. The Jews on the Iberian Peninsula had been forced to convert to Christianity at the end of the 15th century. In the intervening century, they had been kept under the vigilant gaze of the Inquisitors, who suspected the “New Christians,” as they were called even after generations of Christian practice, of carrying the rejection of Christ in their very blood. It can be argued that the Iberian Inquisition was Europe’s first experiment in racialist ideology.
Spinoza’s reaction to the religious intolerance he saw around him was to try to think his way out of all sectarian thinking. He understood the powerful tendency in each of us toward developing a view of the truth that favors the circumstances into which we happened to have been born. Self-aggrandizement can be the invisible scaffolding of religion, politics or ideology.
Against this tendency we have no defense but the relentless application of reason. Reason must stand guard against the self-serving false entailments that creep into our thinking, inducing us to believe that we are more cosmically important than we truly are, that we have had bestowed upon us — whether Jew or Christian or Muslim — a privileged position in the narrative of the world’s unfolding.
Spinoza’s system is a long deductive argument for a conclusion as radical in our day as it was in his, namely that to the extent that we are rational, we each partake in exactly the same identity.
Spinoza’s faith in reason as our only hope and redemption is the core of his system, and its consequences reach out in many directions, including the political. Each of us has been endowed with reason, and it is our right, as well as our responsibility, to exercise it. Ceding this faculty to others, to the authorities of either the church or the state, is neither a rational nor an ethical option.
Which is why, for Spinoza, democracy was the most superior form of government — only democracy can preserve and augment the rights of individuals. The state, in helping each person to preserve his life and well-being, can legitimately demand sacrifices from us, but it can never relieve us of our responsibility to strive to justify our beliefs in the light of evidence.
It is for this reason that he argued that a government that impedes the development of the sciences subverts the very grounds for state legitimacy, which is to provide us physical safety so that we can realize our full potential. And this, too, is why he argued so adamantly against the influence of clerics in government. Statecraft infused with religion not only dissolves the justification for the state but is intrinsically unstable, since it must insist on its version of the truth against all others.
Spinoza’s attempt to deduce everything from first principles — that is, without reliance on empirical observation — can strike us today as quixotically impractical, and yet his project of radical rationality had concrete consequences. His writings, banned and condemned by greater Christian Europe, but continuously read and discussed, played a role in the audacious experiment in rational government that gave birth to this country.
The Declaration of Independence, that extraordinary document first drafted by Thomas Jefferson, softly echoes Spinoza. John Locke, Spinoza’s contemporary — both were born in 1632 — is a more obvious influence on Jefferson than Spinoza was. But Locke had himself been influenced by Spinoza’s ideas on tolerance, freedom and democracy. In fact, Locke spent five formative years in Amsterdam, in exile because of the political troubles of his patron, the Earl of Shaftesbury.
Though Spinoza was already dead, Locke met in Amsterdam men who almost certainly spoke of Spinoza. Locke’s library not only included all of Spinoza’s important works, but also works in which Spinoza had been discussed and condemned.
It’s worth noting that Locke emerged from his years in Amsterdam a far more egalitarian thinker, having decisively moved in the direction of Spinoza. He now accepted, as he had not before, the fundamental egalitarian claim that the legitimacy of the state’s power derives from the consent of the governed, a phrase that would prominently find its way into the Declaration.
Locke’s claims on behalf of reason did not go as far as Spinoza’s. He was firm in defending Christianity’s revelation as the one true religion against Spinoza’s universalism. In some of the fundamental ways in which Spinoza and Locke differed, Jefferson’s view was more allied with Spinoza. (Spinoza’s collected works were also in Jefferson’s library, so Spinoza’s impact may not just have been by way of Locke.)
If we can hear Locke’s influence in the phrase “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” (a variation on Adam Smith’s Locke-inspired “life, liberty and pursuit of property”), we can also catch the sound of Spinoza addressing us in Jefferson’s appeal to the “laws of nature and of nature’s God.” This is the language of Spinoza’s universalist religion, which makes no reference to revelation, but rather to ethical truths that can be discovered through human reason.
Spinoza had argued that our capacity for reason is what makes each of us a thing of inestimable worth, demonstrably deserving of dignity and compassion. That each individual is worthy of ethical consideration is itself a discoverable law of nature, obviating the appeal to divine revelation. An idea that had caused outrage when Spinoza first proposed it in the 17th century, adding fire to the denunciation of him as a godless immoralist, had found its way into the minds of men who set out to create a government the likes of which had never before been seen on this earth.
Spinoza’s dream of making us susceptible to the voice of reason might seem hopelessly quixotic at this moment, with religion-infested politics on the march. But imagine how much more impossible a dream it would have seemed on that day 350 years ago. And imagine, too, how much even sorrier our sorry world would have been without it.
Comments