From “The Scratching Post”: Tyranny

By Ken Marks

[Opening from the original on The Scratching Post, June 17, 2021, published here by permission of the author.]

In 2017, as America was beginning its obsession with a tyrant, a short book titled On Tyranny was published. Its author, Timothy Snyder, writes brilliantly about political tyranny, but I wish he had explored other forms of tyranny. As I studied it, my mind drifted to the Jefferson Memorial and the words inscribed there: I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. Every form of tyranny. Was Jefferson’s conception of tyranny larger than Snyder’s? I’m inclined to think so. I understand tyranny as Jefferson did: a cruel, oppressive power that denies life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in all of human experience.

    In its simplest manifestation, in the family and the neighborhood, tyranny is a leech, sucking the joy from our conscious hours and leaving despair behind. I think of child abuse, spousal abuse, elder abuse, and bullying on the play ground. I think of gangs on inner city streets using swagger, contempt, and intimidation to hold their egos together. In their ambit, there is suffocating unease.

[Read the whole thing on The Scratching Post.]

Copyright © 2021 by Ken Marks Ken Marks was a contributing editor with Paul Clark & Tom Lowe when “Moristotle” became “Moristotle & Co.” A brilliant photographer, witty conversationalist, and elegant writer, Ken contributed photographs, essays, and commentaries from mid-2008 through 2012. Late in 2013, Ken birthed the blog The Scratching Post. He also posts albums of his photos on Flickr.

The reading is great

If the writings of the atheists are so much more in vogue today than anything by the "believers" (and they are more in vogue, aren't they?), I'm wondering whether it isn't because what the atheists are saying seems more to the point and sometimes even more inspirational?

At any rate, I'm relishing the latest "atheist book," God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. And I don't even grant that "religion poisons everything," which is an obviously overgrasping, sell-some-more-books sort of thing to say. Plus, if God actually exists, then I'm certain that He (or She or It) is very great indeed, thank you very much, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens (the author of the latest). Hitchens's book crackles with erudition. And, because I've become surer of my own tolerant position in the middle—where I "believe all things"—I'm finding it very entertaining.

For you to enjoy with me if you can, here are some excerpts from Chapter Five, "The Metaphysical Claims of Religion." I may have enjoyed this chapter particularly, because it sort of surveys the territory I trod as an undergraduate forty-five years ago:

...Aquinas half believed in astrology, and was convinced that the fully formed nucleus (not that he would have known the word as we do) of a human being was contained inside each individual sperm. One can only mourn over the dismal and stupid lectures on sexual continence that we might have been spared if this nonsense had been exposed earlier than it was...He also fabricated the mad and cruel idea that the souls of unbaptized children were sent to "Limbo." Who can guess the load of misery that this diseased "theory" has placed on millions of Catholic parents down the years, until its shamefaced and only partial revision by the church in our own time? Luther was terrified of demons and believed that the mentally afflicted were the devil's work. Muhammad is claimed by his own followers to have thought, as did Jesus, that the desert was pullulating with djinns, or evil spirits. [p.64]
      ...Laplace (1749-1827) was the brilliant French scientist who took the work of Newton a stage further and showed by means of mathematical calculus how the operations of the solar system were those of bodies revolving systematically in a vacuum. When he later turned his attention to the stars and nebulae, he postulated the idea of gravitational collapse and implosion, or what we now breezily term the "black hole." In a five-volume book entitled Celestial Mechanics he laid all this out, and like many men of his time was also intrigued by the orrery, a working model of the solar system as seen, for the first time, from the outside. These are now commonplace but were then revolutionary, and the emperor asked to meet Laplace in order to be given either a set of the books or (accounts differ) a version of the orrery. I personally suspect that the gravedigger of the French Revolution wanted the toy rather than the volumes: he was a man in a hurry and had managed to get the church to baptize his dictatorship with a crown. At any event, and in his childish and demanding and imperious fashion, he wanted to know why the figure of god [Hitchens doesn't capitalize the word] did not appear in Laplace's mind-expanding calculations. And there came the cool, lofty, and considered response. "Je n'ai pas besoin de cette hypothèse.".... [pp.66-67]
      One medieval philosopher and theologian who continues to speak eloquently across the ages is William Ockham....
      He was interested, for example, in the stars. He knew far less about the nebulae than we do, or than Laplace did. In fact, he knew nothing about them at all. But he employed them for an interesting speculation. Assuming that god can make us feel the presence of a nonexistent entity, and further assuming that he need not go to this trouble if the same effect can be produced in us by the actual presence of that entity, god could still if he wished cause us to believe in the existence of stars without their being actually present. "Every effect which God causes through the mediation of a secondary cause he can produce immediately by himself." However, this does not mean that we must believe in anything absurd, since "God cannot cause in us knowledge such that by it a thing is seen evidently to be present though it is absent, for that involves a contradiction."...
      ...It has taken us several hundred years since Ockham to come to the realization that when we gaze up at the stars, we very often are seeing light from distant bodies that have long since ceased to exist. It doesn't particularly matter that the right to look through telescopes and speculate about the result was obstructed by the church; this is not Ockham's fault and there is no general law that obliges the church to be that stupid...[W]e can now do this [knowing] while dropping (or even, if you insist, retaining) the idea of a god. But in either case, the theory works without that assumption. You can believe in a divine mover if you choose, but it makes no difference at all, and belief among astronomers and physicists has become private and fairly rare. [pp. 69-70]
      Credo quia absurdum, as the "church father" Tertullian put it, either disarmingly or annoyingly according to your taste. "I believe it because it is absurd." It is impossible to quarrel seriously with such a view. If one must have faith in order to believe something, or believe in something, then the likelihood of that something having any truth or value is considerably diminished. The harder work of inquiry, proof, and demonstration is infinitely more rewarding, and has confronted us with findings far more "miraculous" and "transcendent" than any theology.
      Actually, the "leap of faith"—to give it the memorable name that Soren Kierkegaard bestowed upon it—is an imposture. As he himself pointed out, it is not a "leap" that can be made once and for all. It is a leap that has to go on and on being performed, in spite of mounting evidence to the contrary. This effort is actually too much for the human mind, and leads to delusions and manias. Religion understands perfectly well that the "leap" is subject to sharply diminishing returns, which is why it often doesn't in fact rely on "faith" at all but instead corrupts faith and insults reason by offering evidence and pointing to confected "proofs." This evidence and these proofs include arguments from design, revelations, punishments, and miracles. Now that religion's monopoly has been broken, it is within the compass of any human being to see these evidences and proofs as the feeble-minded inventions that they are. [p. 71]

Ah, my potato-sack miracle! my two angelic interventions! Reading Hitchens leaves me with the contented feeling of a reader enjoying himself and not feeling dismayed by the multifarious contradictions of a world that seems more and more to be mad enough to have been made by the Being its beings into Being prayed.

People can (and will!) continue to believe what they want to believe, and I will not condemn them, so long as they do so benignly, not proselytizing me or others or trying to tyrannize us in any way.

Only thing is, of course, what are the chances of that?

What counts as "religious tyranny"?

My friend Ed commented on yesterday's post that

There are many in this country that would go along with the killing of anyone that wrote against Jesus. Two months in the desert with only the Bible and I could have these same people blowing themselves up for the faith.

I don't think Ed means to say that he has actual experience exploiting certain "religious vulnerabilities." I think he's just pointing out that those vulnerabilities do exist, and they can be exploited. (Actually, the vulnerabilities may be a good deal more available than the religious context implies. "The Milgram Experiment" of the early 1960's^* showed that there were enough ordinary people in the State of Connecticut to man all of the Nazis' concentration camps. That is, ordinary people could be manipulated appropriately to think that what they were doing was acceptable.)

So, the question I have now is whether all tyrannies involving people who are correctly categorized as religious are "religious tyrannies." I suspect that more than a few are, rather, cynical manipulations of religious people by other people whose motives are anything but religious. Do all of the "suicide bombers" among the Palestinians and the Sunnis blow themselves and their "enemies" up from truly religious motivation, or have they been hoodwinked by people whose true lust is for...political power...or revenge...or nationalism...or...?

Ditto for the Bush administration's cynical exploitation of the religious right wing's vote. The lust of Bush and Cheenie and Rove and DeLay seems to have been to establish a Republican Party hegemony lasting "for a thousand years" (to echo an appropriately fascist precedent).
_______________
* Written up recently in the Yale Alumni Magazine.

"Religious tyranny"

On Sunday I wrote about people's "holding onto" religious beliefs to the extent of trying to foist various practices on others, and as an example I cited the furor in some parts of the world over the knighting of Salman Rushdie. An editorial in today's New York Times (titled "Honoring Rushdie") discusses that case and provides an excellent phrase for the very thing:

Salman Rushdie’s knighthood is causing a furor — especially in Pakistan and Iran — among Islamic extremists, who see it as an official state endorsement of a writer who has been anathema to them ever since the publication of The Satanic Verses. And it has caused a few ripples of conscience in the West, too, a part of the world where writers are not routinely threatened with death but where we do try, often perplexedly, to respect the validity and the intensity of other people’s feelings.

Mr. Rushdie’s new honor raises the same question now that his work raised when Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced a fatwah against him in 1989. Do we choose to live in a world that honors writers or in a world that kills them?

It is tempting to say that this is too simple a way to look at it. It’s possible to argue that our desire to protect free speech — and, in effect, do away with the very notion of literary heresy — is as much an acculturation as the desire to enforce religious orthodoxy. But the problem Mr. Rushdie raises is not about the origins of human belief. It is about the consequences of human belief and, specifically, the consequences of religious tyranny [emphasis mine].

The imaginative range of his work, its complexity and its ability to test the limits of what we know and believe entitle him to the respect and the honors he has earned. Yet in some parts of the world it would earn him assassination. You cannot judge a society only by the way it treats writers. But you can be certain that if a society treats writers badly, it treats ordinary people no better.