One of the first posts I ever wrote on this site was Political Deification, in which I began to lay out the thesis that there exists a deep seated psychological need to believe in a G-d. I suggested that those who do not believe in G-d simply replace their belief in a deity with a belief in various ideas that take its place and serve the same purpose. This was aptly summarized by G. K. Chesterton's famous comment:
''The trouble, when people cease to believe in God, will not be that they will believe in nothing but that they will believe in anything.''
Our minds form from a kernel that is irrational. Our rationality is a very late (ie, recent) development. The beginnings of a belief in the uniqueness of the individual can be traced back to Paleolithic burial ceremonies, inferred from ancient interments. For 95% of the time homo sapiens has existed our mental life was dominated by the irrational. While many atheists disdain religion and belief in G-d as irrational, noting religion's roots in the need to find a way to codify and bind up our often irrational mystification and fear at the workings of the universe, this disdain assumes that rational thinking has now triumphed over the irrational within us and we no longer need to worry about its leakage or control distorting our functioning. While it is possible to question many of Sigmund Freud's basic tenets, the existence and operational reality of a dynamic unconscious receives research confirmation almost every day, not just in Psychoanalyst's offices but in Neuropsychology laboratories.
When people do not recognize their own biases and, even more significantly, when they do not even understand that they have (unconscious, irrational) biases, the results can be unfortunate. When such people gain positions of power and influence, the unfortunate results can be dangerous. Many of our "best and brightest", to use a terminology that resonates with those who remember their history, assume they understand their own motivations and how the world works because they have a highly developed ability to think rationally.
[In Paranoia: Rationality in the service of the Irrational, I pointed out how easily rationality can be subverted by the irrational. Man has not been referred to as the Rationalizing Animal for nothing.]
Today more than ever, the Jew and the Jewish state, are the canaries in the coal mine of Western Civilization. On Tuesday, Spengler posted a rather troubling article describing his concern for the Jewish people. His article starts with a critique of Natan Sharansky's recent book, Defending Identity: Its Indispensable Role in Protecting Democracy:
Sharansky wants to say that the particularism of Jewish national identity offers universal benefits for humankind. But he does not want to say so in religious terms, and cannot find a clear way to say so in secular terms.
Jews often are loath to make theological claims for their own importance, which sound megalomaniac to secular ears. But the Jews might as well resign themselves to being hanged for a sheep as well as a lamb. Except for its religious implications, the world has little use for Jewish nationhood, and considers the presence of a few million Jews in the Middle East an inconvenience at best, and a danger at worst. That is why the only true friends of the Jewish state are American and some other evangelicals, and a few leaders of the Catholic Church.
Franz Rosenzweig, the great German-Jewish theologian, asserted that the history of Israel was the history of the world. Expansive as this claim may appear, it is well grounded in Rosenzweig's sociology of religion. What Rosenzweig meant is that Israel's existence forever transformed human identity. From Israel, Western Asia and Europe first heard the promise of eternal life, and afterwards looked at themselves differently. The pagans of the ancient world knew their days on Earth were numbered, and that their time would come to die out and be forgotten. But the promise of eternal life that the nations heard from the Jews undermined their ancient fatalism.Reasonably, or not, we want to live forever. The first people to believe that God promised that it would endure forever became the standard against which all nations must measure their condition. From Ireland to Afghanistan, the identities of all tribes and nations became a response to Israel: Christianity offers a New Israel, Islam a competitor to Israel, neo-paganism a Satanic parody of Israel. The trouble is that Jewish national identity is not one national identity among many national identities. There is only Jewish identity, and a set of responses to Jewish identity. Jewish national identity has a radically different character than all other national identities, for the Jews uniquely believe that their nation was summoned into being to serve the sole creator God of the Universe.
The idea of the Jews as the chosen people has been a difficult concept through the ages. It has led to accusations of arrogance and alienness for the Jews. It has led to untold grief for Jews in which "in every generation they rise up to destroy us." Much anti-Semitism is based on a misunderstanding of the concept of chosenness. The Jews were chosen to have a covenant with G-d, a holy contract. The Jews would be held to a higher standard than others and in return would receive his Laws to follow. This is enacted on a daily basis and Israel, albeit imperectly, has tried to uphold its end of the bargain. No other people in the history of the world have been as tolerant of their enemies (and their enemies are particularly loathsome, people who proclaim their goal to be to finish the genocide of the Jewish people begun by Hitler) as the present day state of Israel. When the Muslim Brotherhood threatened the rule of the minority Alawites in Syria, 20,000 men, women, and children were murdered in Hama. When Russia felt threatened by Chechnyan rebels, they leveled the city of Grozny and murdered untold thousands. In earlier days, counter-revolutionaries who were taken to be a threat, were murdered in the millions by Stalin, Mao, and their ilk. Hutus murdered Tutsis wholesale; the list goes on. As Spengler notes, prior to the birth of ethics, genocide was the order of the day:
It is wrong to blame religion for war. Exterminating one's neighbors was the norm for human behavior from the dawn of man until early in the first millennium BCE, when the prophets of ancient Israel first spoke of universal peace under the reign of a single God.
Of note, our most recent 20th century genocides have been perpetrated in the name of man, not G-d. Only the Muslims have the faith required to justify genocide today and our secular elites tend to simply ignore this unpleasant challenge to their world view, perhaps thinking that such a genocide will be impossible or will stop with the Jews.
Spengler connects the loss of faith in G-d, replaced as it has been for our sophisticated elites by a faith in themselves and their ideas, with the loss of faith in the future that has become a hallmark of the West:
European national identity is dead and gone for tragic reasons, which is to say very good ones, and the thin broth of European cosmopolitanism that bubbles in its place is not a substitute so much as tasteless residue. When the dogs no longer want to live forever, they don't trouble to have puppies, and in a few generations the problem resolves itself through depopulation and ruin.
It was the genius of John Paul II, the last great hero of Christian Europe, the pope who brought down communism, to understand that the true Europe needed Israel. Not the Europe of the peoples, but the Europe of the universal Church, required the living presence of Israel as the exemplar of a People of God, and John Paul II declared God's Covenant with the Jewish people to be eternally valid, and instituted diplomatic relations with the Jewish state.
The Jews invented the future and gave us ethics, based on the belief that there is something greater than the merely human. This belief was taken up by Christian Europe, wrung through the cauldron of blood and grief for a thousand years, and bequeathed to us the enlightenment, the idea that G-d has created a universe that could be predicted and understood, albeit imperfectly, by the merely human. By explicitly banishing G-d from our discourse, sophisticated modern secular man has turned this idea on its head. No longer is there a G-d given reality for us to understand and explain, but through the cauldron of blood and grief of the 20th century we have now arrived back to a world which is only predictable and understandable through the power of those who define reality. This is the post-modern world in which subjectivity is victorious over objectivity at every turn.
In Israel, this takes the form of an increasingly secular state marginalizing the religious Jews and substituting their own narcissistically derived, insisted upon, constructed, reality for that of a G-d derived metaphysics.
[Please be clear that I am not arguing for the existence of G-d per se but for the utility of G-d. Living as if there is a G-d is not only a rational response to Pascal's wager but has real world implications we ignore at our peril.]
Tomorrow, I will consider the results of such arrogance.
Recent Comments