Tag Archives: Christianity

On Plato’s Republic and Just Societies

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I see Plato’s book, Republic, as logic-based epistemology applied to political philosophy. Anyway, that would be my claim in my undergraduate Philosophy 101 essay on Plato.

The conceptual range of “logic” and “epistemology” and “politics” in Plato’s Republic is that of a sophisticated and prosperous well-educated aristocrat of late 5th Century and early 4th Century BCE Athenian-Greek society. That conceptual range is free of prehistoric animism, and Asiatic and Celtic mysticism; it is solidly materialistic and absent any “depth psychology” of the type that would be popularized by Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung (the psychology of the “unconscious”). That conceptual range is also absent any qualms about hierarchical society structured on hereditarily-conferred class-based social status and functional roles, and which includes slavery.

So it is easy to see Plato’s Republic as the stone at the center of the plump fruit that is Western Philosophy with its inner flesh of Christian mythology and irrationality — which appropriated, subsumed, reformulated and blended prior pagan myths and mysticisms to serve the needs of temporal political hierarchy — its middle layer of Renaissance and Enlightenment rationalism, and with its outer flesh and skin covering as later envelopments by early 19th Century Romanticism — emotionalism — and late 19th Century Nietzschean anti-religious intellectualism, Freudian-Jungian depth psychology as a substitute for discredited and discarded Christian metaphysics, and the proletarian-socialist consciousness engendered by industrialization.

As 20th and 21st Century individuals, parts of each of us live in various prior periods of the development of Western Consciousness, depending on the particulars of the arcs of our personal psychological, family, ethnic, cultural, educational, economic and political situations.

The slow inter-bleeding of Eastern and Western Thought, at least since the 19th century, has somewhat diluted both, more fundamentally in the East that has become quite enthusiastically capitalist since the 20th Century, than in the West that has added a minor flavoring of Eastern philosophy into the self-absorbed and self-indulgent aspects of its materialistic consumerist obsessiveness.

In his book, Republic, Plato lays out his political philosophy for the establishment and maintenance of a stable, well-ordered and just society. In his time societies were city-states, like Athens in the time of Socrates, Plato and Diogenes. The essential element of Plato’s scheme is the “guidance” of the city — “governing” is too strongly “micro-management” of a word — by a class of “guardians” who were carefully selected and trained from youth for the task, and who were wholly devoted to it for their lifetimes: basically philosopher-guru-priests.

However, I note that the viability of Plato’s political formulation for the construction and operation of just societies rests primarily on the incorruptible moral character of its central and guiding personnel, the guardians, and secondarily on the reasonably stable decency of behavior of the citizens: that is to say, their morality.

Please note that by “moral” I do not at all mean “religious”; there is no functional correlation between the two (and in my view more likely an anti-correlation).

At least since the end of the Neolithic, the idea developed that a stable, well-ordered society (whether just or unjust, but always to the liking of its rulers) could be established solely by political means, such as in: monarchies, parliamentary democracies, socialist and communists states (most pointedly those sharply Marxist materialist), and dictatorships (whether purely materialistic or theocratic).

By political I mean social arrangements for societal management that are constructions external to the individual person. Note that such political structures can include elements of physical compulsion on individual behavior, and elements of thought-control by indoctrination and propaganda to capture, shape and distort individual thought, and that such political structures will still be external to the individual as a moral being.

So, I do not believe it is possible to ensure the stable continuation of any momentarily just society, whatever its political structure, solely on the basis of the forced maintenance of that political structure, nor solely on the basis of a change of political structure whether that change is reformist or revolutionary. Justice as societal stability requires a taproot into incorruptible moral character by a majority of the citizens. Justice is good politics and good political structure, and is a natural outgrowth of good and intelligent morality, which in turn is individually personified as character.

Given the above, I believe that any social movement aiming to “permanently” evolve, reform or revolutionize a society in need of anything from improvement to drastic change in order to make it universally just, has to base its efforts on developing the moral character of its movement adherents and the mass of citizens it wishes to convince, for lifetime incorruptibility. Here, we have faith that a society with a majority of its citizens being of incorruptible moral character will ensure the continuation of such in succeeding generations, by the operation of its educational systems.

Of course any serious movement for social change will act politically whenever it can to counter existing injustices and respond to humanitarian emergencies. But it must never lose sight of its chronic fundamental task — instilling ethics — regardless of the frequency and variety of crisis flare-ups it reacts to during the daily spectacle.

Yes, this prescription for engineering permanent social change for the better is an idealization that may seem impossible to implement, as witnessed by the history of human civilization, but I think it is nevertheless true and has been the most powerful force that has helped bring about whatever degree of decency any of our human societies possesses today.

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Christianity, from Socialist to Imperialist

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My son asked: “I don’t understand the term ‘conservative christian’ because Jesus was a socialist.” My reply follows.

Christianity (the religion of the 1st century reform Jews that myth and history have coalesced into the single character of “Jesus Christ”) was founded as an aspiration for personal salvation from earthly slavery, that is to say liberation from Roman Imperial rule and occupation: it is a slave’s religion. Since Rome was omnipotent on Earth, so far as the people of the Mediterranean were concerned at the time, the “liberation” and “salvation” from their earthly enslavement and oppression had to be visualized as on a metaphysical plane: heaven. Christianity borrowed its structure of a “sky god” religion from the Greeks (God the Father, from Zeus) and the Egyptians (Jesus Christ resurrected, from Osiris), its practical morality from Buddhism (“do unto others as you would have them do unto you”), and its Christian “charity” from Buddhist “compassion.”

The reason Christianity spread so quickly was because so many people were experiencing the same sorts of oppression and had the same sort of aspiration, and the organization of the Roman Empire allowed for the rapid (for the time) transmission of ideas over a vast geographical expanse. Just as today, “middle class” Romans, that is to say people who were not actual slaves and who might have occupations (jobs) within the Roman bureaucracy and economy, could feel insecure in their employment (like in our gig economy) and trapped economically (like our living paycheck-to-paycheck, and afraid to leave a dissatisfying job for fear of being unable to replace its income, hence trapped in specific kinds of work and particular locations). Also, most of Rome’s citizens and subjects had no control over how they would be taxed (and taxes kept increasing, and failure to pay could cause immediate confiscation of a family’s property and material goods, as well as males sold into labor slavery and daughters sold into sex slavery).

So, the aspiration for liberation from the existing system extended up from the chattel slaves through to the ranks of the proletariat (poor landless freemen), on into the plebeian class (commoners with some economic substance – which for some was extensive – but no aristocratic family roots, though some plebes did gain high position and honors, even to the point of becoming Caesars). It all depended on how insecure, oppressed and hopeless a person felt.

Those on top, the patricians (like America’s dismal aristocratic families: the Morgans, Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, Mellons, Harrimans, and maybe the Kennedys), and the highly successful plebes (like our even more dismal ‘self-made’ successes such as the Kennedys, Heinzs, Kochs, Trumps, Waltons, and on down from the Clintons), would all be most resistant to adopting the slave religion of Christianity (in Roman times, today it would be socialism and communism) in place of their fealty to the state religion they enjoyed being the supreme beneficiaries of (in Roman times the elevation of Caesar to a god, and in our time the Milton Friedman-neocon religion of “free market” corporate-over-people capitalism).

As the integrity of the Roman Empire decayed (more wars to fight off German invasions), and as a result its prosperity diminished and its oppression and taxation of the lower classes and foreign subjects deepened, there was a corresponding increase in the popularity of Christianity, the religion of personal salvation. By the time of the Caesar Constantine, so many of the Romans were Christians that even Constantine converted and the majority Christianized Romans replaced their Greek-derived religion (Jupiter being Zeus, etc.) with Christianity as the state religion, while keeping the hierarchical political and social structure of the empire, that is to say, they didn’t reform the state to be “socialist” and primarily democratic. Instead, Christianity was practiced as a hierarchical religion suitable to a hierarchical and imperialist state.

This Christian “divine right of kings” state religion is what swept through Europe from the Atlantic to the Ural Mountains from the 4th century into early medieval times and became the foundation of all European cultures up until at least the 19th century (the Communist Manifesto appeared in 1848). The religion of “Jesus Christ” may have been the religion of the slaves and “socialized” (as opposed to competitive) people of the underclasses of the 1st Century (AD or CE), but it became the state religion of the feudal and very hierarchical European Kingdoms that arose after the 4th Century.

Much of the disconnect between the original “Sermon on the Mount” aspect of Christian “charity,” “compassion” and even “socialism,” and its too often application (since the 4th Century) as exclusionary social, intolerance (even bigoted), and tax-avoidance clubs can be traced to this history. There is a fundamental conflict between a slave religion based on eliminating misery by equalizing wealth (i.e., a popular upwelling of “compassion,” “charity,” and “socialism”), and an imperial state religion based on a hierarchy of rights and privileges, which descend in diminishing proportions from an all-powerful sky-god.

“It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” It is impossible to remain a rich man (or woman) and practice 1st Century Christianity. It is so easy to practice imperial state Christianity and be rapaciously capitalist and militarist, and self-righteously claim to be a “good person” because of the original 1st Century “peace,” “love,” and “charity” form of Christianity.

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Palestine’s Gift of Christmas

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(22 December 2009, slightly edited here)

I am no longer religious, however, the season and the way the people I live among express it prompt these reflections.

A few days ago, I attended a Christmas music choral concert in which my young daughter performed. I think a sense of peace would easily be transmitted by the song “Silent Night” even if all intelligible words were stripped from it so it was a pure vocalise devoid of religious ideas. Music has that power, and that magic. Despite the many shortcomings of Christianity, to it’s credit it has spurred the writing of much good music. Listening to Mozart’s “Jubilate Deo,” I realized it might be better to hear all the familiar Christmas songs in Latin, because then our English (or French, German, or Spanish) language minds would, in most cases, be freed of textual and ideological distraction. For example

Personent Hodie – Andrea & Ella
25 December 2014
https://youtu.be/9QuX4GHgWdc

The concert (not the video above) was hosted by the Mormon Church at its large facility in Oakland, California. The extensive grounds have tall palm trees, an artificial river, and large buildings all festooned with colored lights in a flamboyant display of Christmas decoration that widens the eyes of 10-year-olds; it looks like Oz. My daughter’s group, the San Francisco Girl’s Chorus, had been invited to perform that night as part of a week-long series of free concerts intended to draw in prospective members, as well as to delight the current ones. A very enthusiastic church woman presented me with a brochure describing the concert series and crisply snapped it open while promoting the quality of the week’s line-up. Looking into the blue eyes shining from the weathered face of this energetic, lean and perfectly turned-out woman, I thought of the many Mormons I’d met during my career as a nuclear weapons physicist.

Since Mormons are unlikely to have rambunctious personal histories, are conscientious about pursuing prosperity, and often have good training in administrative and technical fields, they can frequently pass the filters to obtaining high-security US government jobs. I think theirs is the quintessential Yankee religion; a faith of imaginative child-like Wagnerian grandeur, with its creamy, velvety N. C. Wyeth style iconography of a golden-haired blue-eyed Jesus, to inspire its sober, industrious, well-scrubbed, pale-faced people, the inheritors of the Conquest in the North.

I always find it necessary to be patient with enthusiastic Christians, because I know how it is when one has awakened to greater insights and wishes to share, by “saving” others. Christmas tends to be a time of year when such patience needs to be exercised.

Here in the Yankee homeland, where God and the Almighty Dollar are so conflated, a religion is most precisely defined by the Tax Code. Each religion is some mix between feelings of spirituality and a tax-dodge scheme. It is this latter element that motivates churches to fish out new members from among the more “respectable” and “responsible” segments of the population, that is to say people with money. I find it tiresome to be hit-up by the always cheery, always smiling, always “sincere” people on missions, whether implicitly as at the choral concert, or explicitly under the fire of a Jehovah’s Witnesses direct-marketing assault: they knock on doors in targeted zip codes. Overall, I would prefer people to keep their religions private, “zipped up” like their pants as it were.

I realize some will take offense at my criticisms of their religions, but this is of no consequence since I do not advocate legislating discriminatory measures against groups targeted on the basis of personal attributes. I can think and say whatever I like about your religion, or lack of it, and you of mine, so long as we all adhere to the principle of equality under the law, which is enshrined in the Constitution. The purpose of my opinions on other people’s religions is entirely to guide my own life, not to provide excuses for persecuting others. Naturally, I grant everyone else the same privileges of thought, but I also see no allowance for the discrimination against one group because of the religious convictions of another.

This point was contested in California (and other states) this last year, where the more sexually repressed populations of numerous religions righteously exercised that delightful sensation of persecuting people feared as shadows, and seen as opposites and even “unclean,” by the populist political action of banning marriage between homosexuals. Marriage has nothing to do with religion, it is entirely a legal construct that defines the property relationships between the state and: two contracted individuals, their families, and between parents and their children. It happens that homosexual couples (male or female), are just as likely to wish to raise children, to ensure the inheritance and health benefit rights of their loved ones, and to take advantage of the tax deduction for “marriage,” that is to say of paying their income taxes jointly. Why should this matter to heterosexuals, except as a resentment (against “giving away” a financial benefit) brought on by prejudice, envy and greed?

2,500 years ago, Heraclitus wrote that “bigotry is the disease of the religious,” because he must have found enough examples of cruelty and prejudice being justified by religious convictions. It may be more true today. Any honest religious sense would express itself in a charitable and compassionate attitude toward other people, that is to say other “types” of people; and during the month of December in cultures infused with Christianity this is called “Christmas spirit.” Imagine if a real “Christmas spirit” was brought to popular consciousness in North America and Europe, and then focussed onto it’s land of origin, Palestine.

In his history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire (1776), Edward Gibbon wrote: “Phoenicia and Palestine will for ever live in the memory of mankind; since America, as well as Europe, has received letters from the one, and religion from the other.” Today, Palestine suffers under an Israeli assault that is in every way like the “Indian Wars” carried out across the United States in the 19th century, to “clear the land” for “progress.” Apologists for this land-theft and population displacement will issue very heated and very convoluted arguments to justify the continuing expansion of Israel, really the continuing invasion and colonization of Palestine by the Israeli Zionists. But we can dismiss all of that, the verbiage of decades, with the clear understanding that what is happening in Palestine is the simple and cruel consequence of an overwhelming force of arms. The Palestinians find themselves in the same situation as the Arawaks and Tainos of 500 years ago: a more powerful and technically advanced European-origined people covet their land. It is ironic that the Christian West that supports this “Indian War” against the Palestinians derives so much of its mythology from a religion born in Palestine.

The Palestinians are historically unlucky for four reasons: 1) theirs is a small, weak, poor and disorganized nation, 2) the Christian mythology of the powerful Western military powers works to obscure the reality of the Palestinian situation, and dull sympathy to it, in too many Western minds, 3) the history of crimes by fascists against European Jews in the 1930s and 1940s is skillfully exploited by Israeli public relations organizations, to badger Western public opinion and sow it with guilt, so as to extract money and acquiescence to Israeli aggression and land-theft, and finally 4) the natural disinclination of any individual or nation to sacrifice his and its comfort to protest, let alone fight against, the exploitation of a foreign people; the reality that most people not directly affected are willing to ignore the elimination of another “tribe.” They will say “how sad” or “how unfair” but they will allow the “Indians” to die out, without acting.

During the Christmas Season, we in the West tell many stories about Jesus Christ, and sing many songs about peace, salvation, giving, “a child is born” and “Christmas spirit,” to brighten the depth of winter and add some emotional warmth to a chilly world. But, this seems to have little practical effect when it comes to countering the Israeli aggression in Palestine. Here in the West, we have our Christmas parties, our Santa Claus for the delight of the children (and of course our commercial ambitions), a seasonal excuse to hear music or go to the ballet, our family get-togethers and dinner feasts, winter sports and church assemblies. Putting Christian charity into practice is an entirely different story, the whole point of our attitude is to give a seasonal nod of thanks for our blessings, and let somebody else get crucified for them. It’s easier if you don’t look and they’re “heathens.”

A few days ago, I finished reading W. Somerset Maugham’s novel “The Painted Veil,” about an unfaithful British colonial wife, a superficial young woman who unexpectedly finds herself in the midst of a cholera epidemic in southern China in the 1920s. Her husband, a bacteriologist and M.D., is leading the public health effort, and she is instructed and awakened by observing the responses of the different types of human character caught up in this awful reality with her, and by how the existing racist and class social constructs casts each of them. In going out for walks it becomes necessary to learn to ignore the cadavers of natives, which sometimes collect outside against the wall of the colonial residential compound. Doesn’t this sound like the attitude of many of us in the Imperial heartlands, when watching the TV evening news broadcasts where a mention of “Gaza” or “peace process” might occur?

To discuss Palestine at Christmastime, here in the U.S. or in Europe, is to highlight the hypocrisy of so much “statecraft.” Israel was bombing Palestine and Lebanon during the last Christmas season, remember?

I have a personal Christmas story involving Palestinians. About seven years ago on New Year’s Day, I was driving my family to visit my parents, who lived almost two hours away; this was to be our “Christmas” get-together. Suddenly, the car gave out a metallic bang, then immediately the entire drive-train felt and sounded like a rapidly spinning barrel of bolts. I veered off the highway at an exit that was fortunately nearby, and coasted downhill along the exit lane, onto a street, and within a few hundred meters into a service station.

Being a holiday, I had little expectation of much help. I met the owner inside the small office, and asked for a quick evaluation of the car’s mechanical state, and recommendations. With me were my wife, my two older children and my young daughter who was about 3 years old; we were halfway between home and my parents’ house. It was quickly evident that the transmission had broken, and this could not be repaired soon. I commented that I felt like Joseph trying to take his family to Bethlehem, that my donkey had given out, and I might now have to find a manger for the night. The owner quickly perked up and asked: “Have you been to Bethlehem?” No I had not. He had, he was Palestinian and his relatives worked as the mechanics. He thought I might also have been Palestinian because I have a “swarthy Mediterranean appearance” (as one upscale paleface in New York put it years ago).

The owner was very nice, he understood my problem because he, too, was a family man. So, within an hour we had concluded a contract to have my car repaired at his shop (it would take weeks since a rebuilt transmission had to be acquired and shipped) and we were on our way. We arrived at my parents house a little late but in style, in a Mercedes Benz 280 SEL 4.5 sedan. This car was loaned to me, not rented, at the Palestinian’s insistence (“You don’t have to rent a car, I have a car for you. It’s my wife’s old car, she has a new one”).

The repair job would be expensive enough (and it’s held up since). During our stay at the service station (while the mechanics were investigating), my family walked next door to a little convenience store and bought snacks, and the older children played with the baby, to keep her occupied. The Palestinian and I chatted about — what else? — our families, our origins. He was very pleasant and low key, he knew he would make money on the repair job, and yet he was completely conscious of the human dimensions of my situation, and of our similarities: we were both “Josephs,” trying to move our families in safety.

He had a lot of cars on his lot, and he picked out one of the very best for us. I enjoyed the use of that Mercedes for a month, it had style, comfort, room and pep, but that big V8 engine sure gulped gasoline. I could see why he had retired it. Still, I wish I had one again. A month later I picked up our car, returned his, paid our bill, and didn’t see the Palestinian again. Last year, I stopped in to see the station, but it was gone, a new business development occupied the site; nobody knew about any previous gas station. I always think of that Palestinian around Christmas and New Year’s, and whenever I hear the word “Bethlehem.”

One cannot draw any grand international political conclusions out of isolated personal interactions. However, one can be reminded by such interactions that labels, like “Palestinian” or “Iranian” (another story for another time) are not just abstract elements of larger political concepts; they are first and foremost people, most of them good, ordinary, everyday people just like most of “us.” Remembering THAT is the absolute first step to any plan, any action to stop the bombings, the aggression, the land-theft, and the killings in the lands of “Phoenicia and Palestine,” which “will for ever live in the memory of mankind.”

So, in response to any inquiries about my religion, as well as to the Christian sentiments of the season, let me quote myself (from a 2004 essay) to challenge others to try this for religion:

God, let me experience life without thought of profit, preference or death.

Let me know justice, by allowing me to experience the consequences of my acts as others experience them.

Let me know You for what You are: the life in all, the knower, the known and the unknown.

Let me be curious without fear of thought.

Let me be expressive without thought of fear.

Let me be forgiving, an instrument of compassion.

Let me be alert, an instrument of knowledge.

Let me be humane, an instrument of peace.

Let me know truth.

Let me be grateful.

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“Palestine’s Gift of Christmas” was originally published at Counter Punch on 22 December 2009.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2009/12/22/palestine-s-gift-of-christmas/