god

New Book Extracts II

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

War against Humanity

Our present discontents

One problem is that people in government and business who should be looking after us prefer to look after themselves. Our community is being trumped by their egos.

When the babyboomers like me were born at the end of World War II, Australia was heading for a period of sunny growth, peace and prosperity. The organs of government and business that we had inherited from England were working well enough. Our prosperity was underwritten by what we found under the ground and what we could grow above it. We were about to be enlivened by migrants first from Europe and then from Asia and Africa – to our never-ending betterment.

Our condition was famously defined by the remark of Donald Horne that ‘Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck’. That is still the case, in spades, but no sane Australian then or now would ever dream of living elsewhere.

Government was then as now both timid and mediocre, but the party that might now be labelled ‘progressive’ had just shot itself in the head – again – leaving us with a generation of one-party rule.

Business was staid and protected. Our parents had survived the Depression and the war. They would never be as free of care as us, but they mowed the lawns listening to the footy or cricket in their suburban refuge, while waiting for us to be their triumph and bring home the bacon on the ‘broad, sunlit uplands’ envisioned by Winston Churchill. We were truly blessed to have been born there and then. (Provided, as a male mate mordantly remarked, you were a boy.)

In those days, most of the girls waited to be married. The boys, if they were not stupid, were assured of a free university education. (And we beneficiaries of that system are horrified that others now deny it to our children and grandchildren.) For the boys who were not so fortunate, or not disposed to engage in what technical education there was, there were at least two courses open to them that may have seemed dull to some, but which were both respectable and provided an assured future – the civil service and working for a bank.

All that has gone – in the space of one lifetime. Our whole understanding of communal life – life in our community – has shifted. And that shift has been inward toward the ego rather than outward toward the community.

All too often now when we deal with government or business, we are invited, if not made, to do so on the phone or online, or both. This of itself is threatening for those of my generation who now feel our age. We are not then dealing with a human being, but a robot in the form of a computer that feeds into our laptop or mobile phone.

And we have meekly surrendered.

For the most part, we are not dealing with a man or woman in government or business who can take responsibility for a decision and the action of the department or company that they represent. And who can therefore discuss with us the reasons for the decision and how it might be best implemented – or perhaps altered or withdrawn.

The decision will usually mean far more to you than to them, and in most cases, they will have much more power and resources than you. And the capacity to live with a bad decision or failure of process. Robots do not lose sleep, hit the bottle, have trouble with the tax man or a cranky bank manager, or get divorced. Or get insulted by an ATM that refuses to issue money, or get a threatening notice for being late with some response.

The Adversarial Trial

1

Conflict

A court of law – the place that Sir Owen Dixon called ‘the judgment hall’ – is a combat zone.  People go there to fight.  It may not look that way to you, but it certainly does to most of the punters.  A court room is a scene of conflict.  For ‘conflict’, the Oxford English Dictionary gives us ‘an encounter with arms; a fight; especially a prolonged struggle’.  That is very apt for this note. 

The court sees two types of conflict.  What are they?

People generally go to law because they have been hurt and they think that the law might be able to give them some form of redress – in the writ that starts their legal action, their lawyer often asks for ‘relief.’  That is a good word for what they want.  They believe that someone has done them some harm by breaking their word or their trust, or by some careless act, or by some other harmful conduct that some precedent or statute enables the court to do something for them in return.  The conflict starts with a perceived wrong, and the victim believes, usually with legal advice, that if they go to court, the process of the law will help them to deal with that wrong.  They hope to come out better off than they were before suing.

If a stranger runs into the back of your car, or bad mouths you in the press, you are put into a position of conflict.  By and large, only deranged people enjoy conflict or seek to create it.  Most of us try to avoid it, or we at least try to reduce the risk or extent of it. 

But some conflict is worse than others, and this is why although it is hard to think of any good litigation, some litigation is worse than others.  The conflict is usually worse if there has been a breakdown in a previous relationship, especially one of trust, say between business partners or husband and wife, or where the parties have to live together, and the conflict is eating into their lives, as in a fencing or nuisance dispute between neighbours.  The resulting litigation is likely to be a lot more wounding and stressful – and the wounds incurred are likely to take much longer to heal, and to be even more beyond the kind of relief that a court can direct than wounds suffered in conflict between strangers.  Purely commercial brawls might involve money and face, but they are a lot less wearing than cases where real people have real lives on the line.

So, the first form of conflict arises from the conduct that leads to the legal action.  Then, if the person wronged does go to court, there is another form of conflict.  The initial conflict is resolved by a process that in itself entails conflict.

Under our process, which goes back for many hundreds of years, the judges do not sit under a palm-tree, make such inquiries as they think fit, and then pronounce some decree that they think is right to resolve the conflict.  That system has not appealed to us – as someone said, he who sits under a palm-tree knows not where the nut may fall. 

Under our system, each side presents their side of the case according to the rules laid down for this kind of contest, and the judges award the decision to the party found to have the stronger case under those rules.  We do not hold an inquiry into some kind of abstract truth.  That kind of thing is far too grand or, too ambitious, for our taste.  We leave that kind of inquisition to foreigners and royal commissions.

The great legal historian F W Maitland compared our judges to cricket umpires – people who stand there silently and respond to the question: ‘How’s that?’  Sir Daryl Dawson put it this way (in a criminal case, where onus plays a bigger role):

A trial does not involve the pursuit of truth by any means.  The adversary system is the means adopted, and the judge’s role in that system is to hold the balance between the contending parties without himself taking part in their disputations.  It is not an inquisitorial role in which he seeks to remedy the deficiencies in the case on either side.  When a party’s case is deficient, the ordinary consequence is that it does not succeed.

Put differently, the party with the stronger case wins and the one with the weaker case loses. 

It would be silly to suggest that mistakes are not made or that innocent people do not get hurt under our model.  What we have is a kind of judicial duel where the prize goes to the side that is found to have the stronger case – and in the process, both sides, including the eventual winner, can get badly hurt.

People thinking of going to court to resolve some conflict need to understand these things.  In an attempt to resolve their conflict, they are taking it to another level, and to a process that involves its own kind of conflict, often in a very public way.  There must be the risk that in escalating the conflict, they are making it worse.  They are certainly raising the stakes.

One of the first things that the lawyer has to tell someone complaining of the hurt flowing from some felt wrong is that it is highly unlikely that as a result of legal process they will be put in a position as if that wrong had never happened.  They are now worse off than they were before the wrong was done, and the probabilities are that they will stay that way, even if they ‘win’ in the court battle. 

This is important.  To go back a bit, they may or may not come out of court better off than they were before suing, but they are quite unlikely to end up as if nothing bad had ever happened at all.  You might compare the process to that of a surgeon asked to operate to deal with an injury or illness.

Paraplegics who get millions would hand them all back, even with a few more zeroes, if they could be put back to the way they were before the accident.  Money is very imperfect in measuring pain and suffering.  If someone instructs you to insert a clause in a contract requiring one party to ‘make the other whole’ after a breach, you should tell them that this may or may not be possible in dollars, but it will very likely be impossible for other purposes. 

It is fundamental in considering any legal action, and whether to settle it once it has started, that the party claiming to be wronged is quite unlikely ever to return to their position before they suffered the wrong.  They’ve taken a hit, and we can’t just wipe out the effects of that hit.  The law cannot rewrite history.

And this goes for the other side as well.  No sane person wants to be sued.  Some know that it is coming, because they know they have done something to upset the person suing, but often the writ will come as just as nasty a surprise to the person sued as would a slap in the face. 

But once the party is effectively sued, they too are likely to have suffered a form of harm – the anxiety, cost, and risk flowing from being sued – that they will never entirely get over – even if they ‘win’ the case.

The point is that in both these kinds of conflict, neither side is ever likely to feel quite as well as if the relevant events – the initial hurt or the resulting legal action – had never happened.  They are both behind scratch – and, sadly, often one side or the other has a lot of trouble getting over that simple fact of life.

The Pursuit of Happiness

What I believe

I

Well, then, I am not a dog or a cat.  The Wolf and I were close – but not that bloody close.  I was born a human being.  This means a lot to me.  I can think and talk in a way that cats or dogs can’t.  If I was a baboon, we would not be having this conversation – even if you were all baboons. 

Our humanity is a comfort to us since we live on a planet that revolves around one of the countless millions or billions of stars in creation.  For me, the whole notion of humanity is basic.  Too many of us take it for granted.

I believe that human beings evolved from animals on earth.  I am told, and I believe, that this process of evolution was completed round about 200,000 years or so ago, in that part of Africa that is now thought by some to be one of the most backward parts on earth.  (Being first is not therefore everything.) 

I believe that humans started moving out of Africa about 70,000 years ago.  I forget when they first arrived down here in Australia, but I believe that two things that distinguish us from the gorillas are cutlery and courtesy.  Those figures for time are very rough, but that hardly matters – we can hardly grasp the extent of those times as they are.

My part in time is therefore minute – much less than a drop in the Pacific Ocean or a grain of sand in the Sahara Desert.  If you reflect on the inconceivable vastness of the universe, my part in space is even smaller. 

If there is a God, He or She must have a very big filing cabinet.  I do not believe in God as most people understand that word.  The idea of God does not answer any questions for me.  But if I could, I would pray that there is no God with the personality that many religions seem keen to describe.  The Bible and the Koran both speak of atrocities by or in the name of God.  And history suggests that too many of the worst wars and atrocities were suffered because of strife with or within the faithful – the latter being the more savage.

When I say that I don’t believe in God, I mean just that.  I am not saying that there is no God.  It is, if you like, a matter of personal choice.  Whether you follow Arsenal or the Storm is a matter of choice, and people usually arrive at a choice of God in a similar way to choosing their footy team – by inheritance or by chance.  The most devout Muslim may have been an equally devout Hindu had she been born next door or over the road. 

Others have a different view about God.  That is their perfect right, and good luck to them – as long as they don’t try to inflict their views on me.  I, for my part, find it handy to use the term God when I am talking, even though I personally do not believe in one.  I am, if you like, a God-fearing doubter.

Some believe in a God.  Some don’t.  But no God has a majority, and most people accept that all Gods have no foundation – except theirs.  Their faith is that they have drawn the best ticket in the lottery.  The only difference between me, a doubter, and others, believers, is that I cannot find it within myself to allow an exception.

 I am therefore like the great legal historian F W Maitland who said he dissented from all churches – although on another occasion, he described himself as a ‘very Protestant agnostic’ – a label I could live with.

About twenty years ago, I did an online philosophy course at Oxford: ‘Does God exist?’  (Philosophy was my major in my Arts Degree, and I have topped it up at summer schools at Cambridge and Oxford.  I will come back to this.)  I was mortified to learn, as were other members of the class, that the tutor had written a book endorsing Pascal’s wager.  Pascal said that God may or may not exist, but if He did, it was worth your time to offer some form of allegiance.  That looks like an each-way bet – not something a decent God would smile upon.  (And here I refer to Groucho Marx.  He said he would not want to join a club that would take him as a member.)

But there is an underlying truth.  Many versions of God are offered to us.  People who commit to one are in a lifelong gamble that theirs is the contender best placed to suit them.  But the arithmetic is inexorable – most must be on a loser because they do not, like the Greeks or Romans, countenance multiple gods. 

Very few believers face that quandary squarely.  Gibbon said:

The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful. And thus, toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious concord.

The superstition of the people was not imbittered by any mixture of theological rancour; nor was it confined by the chains of any speculative system. The devout polytheist, though fondly attached to his national rites, admitted with implicit faith the different religions of the earth. …. The Greek, the Roman, and the Barbarian, as they met before their respective altars, easily persuaded themselves, that under various names, and with various ceremonies, they adored the same deities.  

Since in my view nothing can come from nothing – that’s one thing King Lear got right – there can be no answer to the mystery of creation. 

There is a fire station on the peak of Mount Victory in what white people call the Grampians in Victoria.  I like to visit it at least once a year.  If you look down and out over a valley between various mountain ranges, you will see our bush as God made it, or as the blackfellas first saw it.  And at dawn or dusk, you will see our bush move through the kinds of colour changes that bedazzled Monet.  We can document moments in the development of time and space – but not how it all began.

And just as I cannot conceive of nothing, I cannot conceive of infinity or eternity.  Or God.

I certainly do not believe in any afterlife.  The idea now sounds fanciful to me.  I have no wish to keep going when I die.  I agree with Einstein – once is enough for me, too.  Or, as someone said in War and Peace, when you die, you either get the answers to all your questions, or you stop asking them.  I fancy the latter.

Indeed, the idea of an afterlife may be fine.  Like the idea of God.  But which manufacturer, and which model?  And how much do you want to pay?  And do you really want to live forever – and never die?

Then there is the problem with religious texts – scripture.  Two of what for me are the more obnoxious notions to enter the West from the East are these.  There is only one God, and he can and does prefer one people or tribe over others.  And humanity was infected by an original sin that called for divine intervention, and that sin was committed by a woman.  Is it possible to imagine two better ways to sow the seed division on earth?  The priests promptly put a woman in the Godhead and insulted and degraded her sisters on earth.  The first of the two notions has sentenced the Middle East to eternal war.

And that is before you get to jihadis or caste, or the Latterday Saints, Scientology, Voodoo, Southern Evangelicals, the Orthodox Church in Russia, Islam in Iran, Buddhism in Burma, the Settlers and Exclusionists in Israel, or the Australian Christian Lobby. 

The priestly caste tends to look after itself rather than the flock, and to align with the earthly establishment.  They resent the notion of liberty.  A left leaning cleric is close to being a contradiction in terms.  And they have no compunction in building an establishment on the teaching of one sent to tear down the establishment.

I was therefore liberated by the observation made by Wittgenstein (and a Greek or two before him) that you do not live to see your own death.  This suggestion may look self-evident, but not many people accept what follows from it.  After you’ve gone, you have nothing to worry about – you are not here, or anywhere else.  Turgenev wrote a fragment reflecting on death.  Its title is ‘Enough’.  Its last words are those of Hamlet: ‘The rest is silence.’ 

What more can we say?

Why do so many wish for life after death – to be immortal?  Who wants to live forever?  After three hundred years or so, the heroine of The Makropoulos Case has had enough.  She felt that infinite life had no meaning – it only has meaning when it is finite.  There is something permanent about death – but infinity has no end by definition.  I would not like to explore the difference.

It is certain that each of us must die.  But it is a miracle of chance that any of us was ever born.  And it is an even greater miracle that I was ever born.  That could only have happened after millions of years of pure chance in the development of life and then human life.  I – and Mac and Norma before me – am just one product of this flirtation with immeasurable chance.  How and why Norma and Mac met and conceived me was beyond them and me.  Granted the accidental nature of my whole universe, I can hardly complain that my time must end.

………We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

Buruma on Spinoza

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Following my success with this writer on Berlin during the war, I tried my luck with his book on Spinoza, Freedom’s Messiah.  (I have ordered one on Japan during the war.)  It is certainly up to scratch.  This man knows how to put such a book together, on a subject that can be both tricky and touchy. 

Spinoza was a most extraordinary man – who managed to wind up all sorts of people – to the extent that he got expelled from his own community in a country that was pleased with its own level of toleration.  As it happens, I idolize Spinoza – for the reasons given in the note on his most read work that is set out below.

I commend this book by Ian Buruma.  I think he has handled a difficult subject extremely well.  He is like a good lawyer sifting the material and getting to the point in a coherent and persuasive manner.  It is a most useful gift.

I will not review the book, but focus on one point that bears on the current discussion about what some call hate speech. 

We have long had laws that enable police to intervene when someone is offending others in public in a way that may lead to a fight.  The primary driver of the growth of the common law was the felt need to maintain the king’s peace and end the vendetta. 

But once you seek to go beyond that and control what people may lawfully say about religious, political or tribal issues, you get into trouble with that very sensitive notion called freedom of speech.  (I see it is about to be tested in the U S in the case of a man indicted for sending a photo of sea shells – a case brought by dull bigots with a straight face and no sense of shame – all desiderata in the current federal government.)

In the note below I referred to ‘doctrinal dynamite’.  The dynamite went much further than doctrine – in a community where the author had been kicked out of a community by a community that had been kicked out of another country.

Mr Buruma gives one example.  In the Treatise referred to, Spinoza said the Hebrew nation was not chosen by God because of intellect or peace of mind, but because of its social order and the fortune by which it came to have a state.  Mr Buruma says the ‘idea of the Jews as chosen people was nonsense.’

That they had survived for so long was no surprise, since they had ‘separated themselves so from all nations that they have drawn the hatred of all men against themselves, not only by having external customs contrary to the customs of the other nations, but also by the sign of circumcision, which they maintain most scrupulously.’

That makes dynamite look like mother’s milk.  Mr Buruma says:

It is hard to think of anything that would cause greater offense to Jews, and particularly to Jews of his own family, who had suffered persecution, forced conversion, and were trying so hard in Mokum, the Safe Place, to become practising Jews again…. his suggestion that Jews had brought the hatred of others upon themselves by refusing to give up their own traditions was especially hurtful…. Spinoza’s argument for assimilation is naïve, and if it had been made by a gentile, it could easily be construed as a form of anti-Semitism.

Well, as someone said, there is nothing new under the sun.  But if we have learned anything in three thousand years of Western philosophy, it is that there is no such thing as the answer. 

And from where I sit, those who think they may get lasting relief on issues like these from a group of civil servants sitting as a royal commission may feel let down.  The Holy Grail may be a phantom outside of Wagner, and whatever else you may say of him, he was not a model politician.

There are limits to the extent to which we should either expect or wish the State to control how we think or talk about others.  The law can only deal with what it can – the rest belongs to the grind or mire of politics.  And the law is not good at politics.

I commend the book.  It is well presented by Yale University Press in the series Jewish Lives, and it comes with luscious rough-cut pages and a French style dust jacket with a portrait – which shows a much softer version of the subject than the one looking down on me in my study.

As for Spinoza, if you wish to join issue with him on any issue of religion or philosophy, gird yourself well, because he has more intellectual firepower in one toe than the rest of us in our whole frame.

BOOK EXTRACT

TRACTATUS THEOLOGICO-POLITICUS

Benedict de Spinoza (1670)

Translated R H M Elwes Second Edition, Revised; George Bell and Sons, Covent Garden, 1889; republished in facsimile by Kessenger Publishing, U S; rebound in half yellow leather and yellow cloth with black label embossed in gold.

Superstition, then, is engendered, preserved and fostered by fear.

The main text that the Inquisition invoked against Galileo was the miracle of the sun standing still for a day to enable Joshua and the Israelites to kill a lot more of the indigenous people whose land God had promised to his chosen people.  This is one of those parts of Scripture that makes a lot of people very nervous about miracles and an all too human God – nor did it do much for Galileo.  Do we really want a God who intervenes in Middle Eastern wars by suspending his own laws to help one tribe kill more of others because he has chosen them as his favourite?  Do we want a God who is so exclusive and so lethal?  If you do not, you may wish turn to Spinoza and Kant.

For some, the only black mark against Spinoza is that Bertrand Russell said that he was ‘lovable.’  This is what Russell said.  ‘Spinoza (1632-77) is the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers.  Intellectually, some others have surpassed him, but ethically he is supreme.  As a natural consequence, he was considered, during his lifetime and for a century after his death, a man of appalling wickedness.  He was born a Jew, but the Jews excommunicated him.  Christians abhorred him equally; although his whole philosophy is dominated by the idea of God, the orthodox accused him of atheism.  Leibniz, who owed much to him, concealed his debt, and carefullyabstained from saying a word in his praise; he even went so far as to lie about the extent of his personal acquaintance with the heretic Jew.’

Spinoza’s parents were Portuguese Jews forced to ‘confess’ Christianity by the Inquisition.  They migrated to Amsterdam where Baruch (or Benedict) was born.  He was very bright as a child and so intellectually precocious that his own community eventually excommunicated him.  The terms of the cherem chill the blood.  He was described when young as having a beautiful face with a well-formed body and ‘slight long black hair.’  He polished lenses by day and wrote philosophy at night.  He died young of a lung condition that was not helped by his work. 

The Tractatus was published anonymously and was immediately condemned on all sides.  His master-work, Ethics, was not published until after his death.  He lived alone, and frugally – although he enjoyed a pipe and a glass of wine, he could go for days on milk soup made with butter and some ale. 

Spinoza says that his chief aim in the Tractatus is to separate faith from philosophy.  He says that Moses did not seek to convince the Jews by reason, but bound by them a covenant, by oaths, and by conferring benefits.  This was not to teach knowledge, but to inspire obedience.  He then says, ‘Faith consists in a knowledge of God, without which obedience to Him would be impossible, and which the mere fact of obedience to Him implies’. 

As doctrinal dynamite goes, there is enough in his exposition for believers and unbelievers of all kinds to inflict a lot of damage on each other.  And Spinoza gives intellectuals another slap in the face: ‘The best faith is not necessarily possessed by him who discloses the best reasons, but by him who displays the best fruits of justice and charity’.  You might think that a lot, or even most, believers of good will would go along with that proposition, but Plato and Aristotle would have been very, very unhappy, and deeply shocked.

Reason, Spinoza said, was ‘the true handwriting of God.’  His belief is evidenced by the following extracts from the Tractatus.

I have often wondered that persons who make a boast of professing the Christian religion … should quarrel with such rancorous animosity, and display daily towards one another such bitter hatred, that this, rather than the virtues they claim, is the readiest criterion of their faith.

Spinoza corresponded widely on a very high plane, but some letters show homely insights from the least sect-bound of men.  Christ gave ‘by his life and death a matchless example of holiness’; if the Turks or other non-Christians ‘worship God by the practice of justice and charity toward their neighbour, I believe that they have the spirit of Christ, and are in a state of salvation’; the ‘authority of Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates does not carry much weight with me’; and ‘Scripture should only be expounded through Scripture.’  He also asked question similar to one asked by Darwin: whether ‘we human pygmies possess sufficient knowledge of nature to be able to lay down the limits of its force and power, or to say that a given thing surpasses that power?’

The little Dutch Jewish outcast also said:

Every man’s true happiness and blessedness consist solely in the enjoyment of what is good, not in the pride that he alone is enjoying it, to the exclusion of others

Many of those words will ring true for those who have become estranged from religion, and just as many who are struggling to stay with it.  The last citation alone would justify the whole life and work of this very great and holy man.  That sentiment should be put up in neon lights outside every exclusive institution in the land.

Spinoza was a very holy man who crossed on to the turf of less holy men.  Turf wars are the scourge of religion.  The great gift of Spinoza and Kant to mankind was to stand up and stare down those clever and subtle men – alas, they were all men – who claimed to have exclusive rights to the box of tricks without which the rest of us could not get near God or enjoy the grace of true religion. 

They both should be remembered as two of our greatest liberators.  Their legacy is worth so much more than the brackish howls of those bothered God-deniers whose very loudness bespeaks the bankruptcy of philosophy.  Just what does philosophy have to show for itself?  And, just before dawn, did Bertrand Russell see himself as one of those who were intellectually superior to Spinoza?

Buruma on Spinoza

Following my success with this writer on Berlin during the war, I tried my luck with his book on Spinoza, Freedom’s Messiah.  (I have ordered one on Japan during the war.)  It is certainly up to scratch.  This man knows how to put such a book together, on a subject that can be both tricky and touchy. 

Spinoza was a most extraordinary man – who managed to wind up all sorts of people – to the extent that he got expelled from his own community in a country that was pleased with its own level of toleration.  As it happens, I idolize Spinoza – for the reasons given in the note on his most read work that is set out below.

I commend this book by Ian Buruma.  I think he has handled a difficult subject extremely well.  He is like a good lawyer sifting the material and getting to the point in a coherent and persuasive manner.  It is a most useful gift.

I will not review the book, but focus on one point that bears on the current discussion about what some call hate speech. 

We have long had laws that enable police to intervene when someone is offending others in public in a way that may lead to a fight.  The primary driver of the growth of the common law was the felt need to maintain the king’s peace and end the vendetta. 

But once you seek to go beyond that and control what people may lawfully say about religious, political or tribal issues, you get into trouble with that very sensitive notion called freedom of speech.  (I see it is about to be tested in the U S in the case of a man indicted for sending a photo of sea shells – a case brought by dull bigots with a straight face and no sense of shame – all desiderata in the current federal government.)

In the note below I referred to ‘doctrinal dynamite’.  The dynamite went much further than doctrine – in a community where the author had been kicked out of a community by a community that had been kicked out of another country.

Mr Buruma gives one example.  In the Treatise referred to, Spinoza said the Hebrew nation was not chosen by God because of intellect or peace of mind, but because of its social order and the fortune by which it came to have a state.  Mr Buruma says the ‘idea of the Jews as chosen people was nonsense.’

That they had survived for so long was no surprise, since they had ‘separated themselves so from all nations that they have drawn the hatred of all men against themselves, not only by having external customs contrary to the customs of the other nations, but also by the sign of circumcision, which they maintain most scrupulously.’

That makes dynamite look like mother’s milk.  Mr Buruma says:

It is hard to think of anything that would cause greater offense to Jews, and particularly to Jews of his own family, who had suffered persecution, forced conversion, and were trying so hard in Mokum, the Safe Place, to become practising Jews again…. his suggestion that Jews had brought the hatred of others upon themselves by refusing to give up their own traditions was especially hurtful…. Spinoza’s argument for assimilation is naïve, and if it had been made by a gentile, it could easily be construed as a form of anti-Semitism.

Well, as someone said, there is nothing new under the sun.  But if we have learned anything in three thousand years of Western philosophy, it is that there is no such thing as the answer. 

And from where I sit, those who think they may get lasting relief on issues like these from a group of civil servants sitting as a royal commission may feel let down.  The Holy Grail may be a phantom outside of Wagner, and whatever else you may say of him, he was not a model politician.

There are limits to the extent to which we should either expect or wish the State to control how we think or talk about others.  The law can only deal with what it can – the rest belongs to the grind or mire of politics.  And the law is not good at politics.

I commend the book.  It is well presented by Yale University Press in the series Jewish Lives, and it comes with luscious rough-cut pages and a French style dust jacket with a portrait – which shows a much softer version of the subject than the one looking down on me in my study.

As for Spinoza, if you wish to join issue with him on any issue of religion or philosophy, gird yourself well, because he has more intellectual firepower in one toe than the rest of us in our whole frame.

BOOK EXTRACT

TRACTATUS THEOLOGICO-POLITICUS

Benedict de Spinoza (1670)

Translated R H M Elwes Second Edition, Revised; George Bell and Sons, Covent Garden, 1889; republished in facsimile by Kessenger Publishing, U S; rebound in half yellow leather and yellow cloth with black label embossed in gold.

Superstition, then, is engendered, preserved and fostered by fear.

The main text that the Inquisition invoked against Galileo was the miracle of the sun standing still for a day to enable Joshua and the Israelites to kill a lot more of the indigenous people whose land God had promised to his chosen people.  This is one of those parts of Scripture that makes a lot of people very nervous about miracles and an all too human God – nor did it do much for Galileo.  Do we really want a God who intervenes in Middle Eastern wars by suspending his own laws to help one tribe kill more of others because he has chosen them as his favourite?  Do we want a God who is so exclusive and so lethal?  If you do not, you may wish turn to Spinoza and Kant.

For some, the only black mark against Spinoza is that Bertrand Russell said that he was ‘lovable.’  This is what Russell said.  ‘Spinoza (1632-77) is the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers.  Intellectually, some others have surpassed him, but ethically he is supreme.  As a natural consequence, he was considered, during his lifetime and for a century after his death, a man of appalling wickedness.  He was born a Jew, but the Jews excommunicated him.  Christians abhorred him equally; although his whole philosophy is dominated by the idea of God, the orthodox accused him of atheism.  Leibniz, who owed much to him, concealed his debt, and carefullyabstained from saying a word in his praise; he even went so far as to lie about the extent of his personal acquaintance with the heretic Jew.’

Spinoza’s parents were Portuguese Jews forced to ‘confess’ Christianity by the Inquisition.  They migrated to Amsterdam where Baruch (or Benedict) was born.  He was very bright as a child and so intellectually precocious that his own community eventually excommunicated him.  The terms of the cherem chill the blood.  He was described when young as having a beautiful face with a well-formed body and ‘slight long black hair.’  He polished lenses by day and wrote philosophy at night.  He died young of a lung condition that was not helped by his work. 

The Tractatus was published anonymously and was immediately condemned on all sides.  His master-work, Ethics, was not published until after his death.  He lived alone, and frugally – although he enjoyed a pipe and a glass of wine, he could go for days on milk soup made with butter and some ale. 

Spinoza says that his chief aim in the Tractatus is to separate faith from philosophy.  He says that Moses did not seek to convince the Jews by reason, but bound by them a covenant, by oaths, and by conferring benefits.  This was not to teach knowledge, but to inspire obedience.  He then says, ‘Faith consists in a knowledge of God, without which obedience to Him would be impossible, and which the mere fact of obedience to Him implies’. 

As doctrinal dynamite goes, there is enough in his exposition for believers and unbelievers of all kinds to inflict a lot of damage on each other.  And Spinoza gives intellectuals another slap in the face: ‘The best faith is not necessarily possessed by him who discloses the best reasons, but by him who displays the best fruits of justice and charity’.  You might think that a lot, or even most, believers of good will would go along with that proposition, but Plato and Aristotle would have been very, very unhappy, and deeply shocked.

Reason, Spinoza said, was ‘the true handwriting of God.’  His belief is evidenced by the following extracts from the Tractatus.

I have often wondered that persons who make a boast of professing the Christian religion … should quarrel with such rancorous animosity, and display daily towards one another such bitter hatred, that this, rather than the virtues they claim, is the readiest criterion of their faith.

Spinoza corresponded widely on a very high plane, but some letters show homely insights from the least sect-bound of men.  Christ gave ‘by his life and death a matchless example of holiness’; if the Turks or other non-Christians ‘worship God by the practice of justice and charity toward their neighbour, I believe that they have the spirit of Christ, and are in a state of salvation’; the ‘authority of Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates does not carry much weight with me’; and ‘Scripture should only be expounded through Scripture.’  He also asked question similar to one asked by Darwin: whether ‘we human pygmies possess sufficient knowledge of nature to be able to lay down the limits of its force and power, or to say that a given thing surpasses that power?’

The little Dutch Jewish outcast also said:

Every man’s true happiness and blessedness consist solely in the enjoyment of what is good, not in the pride that he alone is enjoying it, to the exclusion of others

Many of those words will ring true for those who have become estranged from religion, and just as many who are struggling to stay with it.  The last citation alone would justify the whole life and work of this very great and holy man.  That sentiment should be put up in neon lights outside every exclusive institution in the land.

Spinoza was a very holy man who crossed on to the turf of less holy men.  Turf wars are the scourge of religion.  The great gift of Spinoza and Kant to mankind was to stand up and stare down those clever and subtle men – alas, they were all men – who claimed to have exclusive rights to the box of tricks without which the rest of us could not get near God or enjoy the grace of true religion. 

They both should be remembered as two of our greatest liberators.  Their legacy is worth so much more than the brackish howls of those bothered God-deniers whose very loudness bespeaks the bankruptcy of philosophy.  Just what does philosophy have to show for itself?  And, just before dawn, did Bertrand Russell see himself as one of those who were intellectually superior to Spinoza?

Superstition, Religion, and Myths

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Superstition is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘an irrational belief in supernatural events’.  Since ‘supernatural’ refers to events that cannot be explained by science, the term ‘irrational’ may not add much.

And the comparison with religion comes to mind – ‘the belief in and worship of a God or gods’ or ‘a particular system of faith and worship’. 

Very few people now believe that the existence of God, or other subjects of religious belief, can be demonstrated logically by science – it must rest ultimately on faith, outside of or beyond logic.  The relation between religion and superstition is therefore apparent – although the latter is not generally so well regarded as the former.

Most philosophers now accept that faith is beyond logic, and that the two are distinct.  Spinoza was very firm on this.  He said that the chief aim of his Tractatus, which was only published after his death, was to ‘separate faith from philosophy’. 

Philosophy has nothing in view save truth: faith…. looks for nothing but obedience and piety.

He began his Preface as follows:

Men would never be superstitious, if they could govern all their circumstances by set rules, or if they were always favoured by fortune; but being frequently driven into straits where rules are useless, and being often kept afloat pitiably between hope and fear by the uncertainty of fortune’s greedily coveted favours, they are consequently, for the most part, very prone to credulity.

He went on –

…. most people when in prosperity are so over-brimming with wisdom (however inexperienced they may be), that they take every offer of advice as a personal insult, whereas in adversity, they do not know where to turn, but beg and pray for counsel from every passerby.  No plan is then too futile, too absurd, or too fatuous for their adoption; the most frivolous causes will raise them to hope, or plunge them to despair….

We see all that in every revolution.  He went on –

…. superstition’s chief victims are those persons who greedily covet temporal advantages…

Superstition then is engendered preserved and fostered by fear…  ‘The mob has no ruler more potent than superstition….’

Just reflect back on Covid and vaccination, and the climate and the Stock Exchange.

Immense pains have therefore been taken to counteract this evil by investing religion…with much pomp and ceremony, that it may rise superior to every shock, and be always observed with studious reverence by the whole people…

…To the rest of mankind, I care not to commend my treatise, for I cannot expect that it contains anything to please them: I know how deeply rooted are the prejudices embraced under the name of religion.

What gets to me as I relay the thoughts of as capacious a mind as I have known, is not just their relevance to the mythology surrounding the Greek and Roman gods, but to the alarmingly crass mythology now being generated under that ghastly term populism. 

And that observation may be a grave disservice to religious faith and the death of the Greek and Roman gods.  In saying that, I do not reflect on the far more tolerant attitude of the ancients to that of the followers of one God.

(And for the removal of doubt, I do not here comment on getting a workable legal definition of ‘religion’.  That is very tricky – our High Court shocked a lot of people here when it admitted Scientology to the Club.)

Well, as Spinoza saw, when we are confronted with a question which we don’t like the answer to, we answer a different question.  We make it up.  Politicians and people in business are trained in this evasion.  Their servants are ingrained to follow their lead.  And this is in a world shattered by the internet and exposed to artificial (made up) intelligence.  Truth then goes clean out the window.

We like to think of humanity as moving forward – the word ‘progress’ is fraught.  We lost our fear of animals and, at least in the West, famine.  We have got rid of kings and aristocrats (as rulers), slavery, and other forms of caste.  We have moved from status to contract. 

But the allure of the bogus priest, the soothsayer, and the mountebank, and their myths lingers on.  These snake oil dealers live with a largely imaginary past and a wholly imaginary future and appear to have something in common with Homer – they do not see themselves as accountable.  The trouble is that the celebration of fantasy can lead to the death of truth, which in turn is practised adversely on the rest of us.

The truth is that we believe what we want to believe.  That is what David Hume meant when he said reason is the ‘slave of the passions’.  He also echoed Spinoza:

The greater part of mankind are naturally apt to be affirmative and dogmatical in their opinions….  To hesitate or balance perplexes their understanding and suspends their action.  They are therefore impatient till they escape from a state which to them is so uneasy: and they think they could never remove themselves far enough from it by the violence of their affirmations and the obstinacy of their belief.

Doubt unsettles most of us and makes most of us nervous.  We want assurance – even from a suspect source, and humanity is now engulfed by false priests in ways that Homer could never have dreamed of.

To put it at its lowest, we mere humans are at risk of going backwards – to the tune of ‘Quick, send in the Clowns – Don’t bother, they’re here.’

More on Minorities

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Lectures on Foreign History by J M Thompson is one of my favourite books.  I keep going back to it.  As a tutor at Cambridge remarked, the Reverend historian wrote at a time when good writing was a prized attribute of the historian – one which we hardly see now.

Here is part of the author’s lecture on the reaction of the Church to the Reformation.

First came the Jesuits – then called ‘the Company of Jesus’.  The Company was, he says, a military body living under military discipline.  All religious orders had a vow of obedience, but that of the Jesuits was ‘specially strict’.  The members were to be directed and ruled ‘as though they were a dead body.’ 

As for liberty of thought, there is no more room for patriotic agnosticism in West Point than for Jesuit agnosticism in a Jesuit College.

Well, all that has a very different ambience here and now.

Then came the Inquisition.

After this auspicious beginning, the Spanish Inquisition never looked back.  It became a weapon of the State as well as the Church.  It punished political liberalism as it punished unorthodoxy in religion – they were regraded as two sides of the same coin.  It was turned less against Protestants than against Jews, Moors, and renegade Jewish Christians.  It chose its victims from the classes best worth plundering.  If they could not be burnt, at least their goods might be confiscated, or they might be frightened into purchasing their freedom cash down.

The Reverend was a man of the cloth – and surely also a man of the world. 

Elsewhere, we read of the Duke of Orleans in what was called ‘the barbarous age’.  ‘His Godhead was the Trinity of wealth, of women, and of wine’. 

But it was said that at birth the fairies had given him every gift, but the last fairy said: ‘He will possess all the talents, except the talent for making use of them.’

I know just what the fairies meant – the risk manager’s nightmare.