THE LEGEND OF TIKKUN OLAM

The Gentile world is closely familiar with hundreds of words and phrases of Jewish origin, both in Hebrew and in Yiddish. Yet one of the essential staples of the Jewish lexicon remains virtually unknown outside the Jewish community, and that is Tikkun Olam.

Unless one is prepared to dig deep and deeper yet, the concept of Tikkun Olam is too elusive, and very often deceptively so, to provide even a slight glimpse into the colossal significance of this concept for the Jewish national psyche. Ironically, its best clue may be found on the most superficial level in this, virtually generic personal ad frequently placed in American newspapers and magazines: “Middle-aged Jewish male searching for a woman committed to tikkun olam.” What does it mean? Not to keep my reader in needless suspense, a commitment to tikkun olam basically means the Jewish person’s commitment to his or her Jewishness, or, in a more specific elucidation, to res Judaica.

Judging by the innumerable references to tikkun olam in Jewish talk, and by the sizeable number of Jewish organizations and publications all titled after it, tikkun olam indisputably stands out as the central concept of modern Judaism as a whole, one which any self-identifying Jew would be able to recognize automatically, and would treat with utmost veneration.

The legend of Tikkun Olam is almost five hundred years old, but as we start looking around, modern liberal Jewish explications of tikkun are misleading, to the point of being ridiculous. Here is just one such example, from a modern-day Jewish pamphlet designed to educate young people in the joys of “experiencing Judaism.” The phrase Tikkun Olam is here heretically translated as perfecting the world, which is not only a mistranslation, but is also contrary to the traditional Jewish warning against the danger of the words “be perfect!” allegedly whispered into the person’s ear by Yetzer Ha-Ra, that is, roughly speaking, by the Devil.
Attention! The following is a very common soft and inaccurate treatment of Tikkun Olam, something like the very first stage of a lengthy process of initiation into this concept for the young uninitiated Jews:

“Tikkun Olam: Perfecting the World.
“Isaac Luria, the renowned sixteenth century Kabbalist, used the phrase tikkun olam, usually translated as repairing the world, to encapsulate the true role of humanity in the ongoing evolution and spiritualization of the cosmos. Luria taught that God created the world by forming vessels of light to hold the divine light. But as God poured the light into the vessels, they catastrophically shattered, tumbling down toward the realm of matter. Thus, our world consists of countless shards of the original vessels entrapping sparks of the divine light. Humanity’s great task involves helping God by freeing and reuniting the scattered light, raising the sparks back to Divinity and restoring the broken world.
“Tikkun olam encompasses both the outer and the inner, both service to society by helping those in need, and service to the Divine by liberating the spark within. As we are, the Divine spark lies hidden beneath our layers of egoistic self-centeredness. That spark is our conscience, through which the promptings of the Divine Will flow toward us. By pursuing spiritual inner work to strengthen our soul and purify our heart, we grow more able to bear that spark without shattering, more willing to act on what we know to be right, less willing to act in harmful or grasping ways, and more able to notice the quiet presence of conscience beneath the din of our chattering minds, and reactive emotions. The work of transformation, of building a soul, creates a proper vessel for the Divine spark, for our unique share of the Divine Will, returning that spark to the service of the One Who sent it. By working to perfect ourselves, perfect our soul, and serve society, we each contribute in our own unique way to the perfecting of the world. This is our duty and our calling as human beings.” (Quoted from Innerfrontier.org.)

The most ridiculous part here is that tikkun olam is not at all about all “humanity,” but only about the part of it which traces itself to the Biblical miracle at Mount Sinai, and the only “human beings” involved here are the Jews and those sincere converts to Judaism, whose pre-born souls, too, were standing before HaShem in that awesome encounter. So here now is a more accurate retelling of Isaac Luria’s (1534-1572) mystical tale of Tikkun Olam. (In order to be as authentic as possible, while avoiding Luria’s highly esoteric presentation, which would have to suffer the English translation anyway, the following is carefully recapitulated from the account of Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun):

“The God of Infinity, Ein Sof, withdraws into Himself (tzimtzum), in order to make room for the Creation, which occurs by a beam of light from the Infinite into the newly provided space. Later, the divine light is enclosed in finite vessels, most of which break under the strain, and this shevirat ha-kelim (the breaking of the vessels) catastrophe as it occurs paves the way, so to speak, for disharmony and evil to enter the world. Hence comes the struggle to free the world from evil, and to accomplish the redemption of both the cosmos and history. This occurs in the stage of tikkun, in which the divine realm itself is reconstructed, the divine sparks are returned to their source, and Adam Kadmon, the symbolic primordial man, who is the highest configuration of the divine light, is rebuilt. (Observe that rebuilt is the “primordial man,” that is man before the world was divided into Jews and non-Jews! The importance of this will soon become clear.)
“Man plays an important role in this process through various kawwanot used during the prayer and through mystical intentions, involving secret combinations of words, all of which is directed toward the restoration of the primordial harmony and the reunification of the divine name.
“The essential elements of this myth are as follows: the withdrawal (tzimtzum), executed by the divine light, which originally filled all things, in order to make room for the extradivine; the sinking, as a result of the catastrophic event that occurred during this process, of luminous particles (qelippot, shells, a term already used in Kabbalah to designate the evil powers) into matter; whence the necessity of saving these particles, by means of tikkun, repair.
“This must be the work of a Jew, who not only lives in complete conformity to the religious duties, imposed on him by tradition, but also dedicates himself, in a framework of strict asceticism, to a contemplative life, founded on mystical prayer and the directed meditation (kawwana) of the liturgy which is meant to further the harmony (yihud, unification) of the innumerable attributes within the divine life. (So, here is the central idea of Tikkun Olam, which leads me to name it as the ultimate expression of the Jewish Manifest Destiny. Only the Jews can rebuild the generic man Adam Kadmon, and thus restore the world to harmony with God and His Divine Law!)
“The successive reincarnations of the soul, a constant theme of the kabbalah that Lurianism developed and made more complex, are also invested with an important function in the work of tikkun.
“In short, Lurianism proclaims the absolute requirement of an intense mystical life with as its negative side an unceasing struggle against the powers of evil. Thus it presents a myth that symbolizes the origin of the world, its fall, and its redemption. It gives meaning to the existence and to the hopes of the Jew, not merely exhorting him to a patient surrender to God, but moving him to a redeeming activism, which becomes the measure of his sanctity.
“Obviously such requirements make the ideal of Lurianism possible only for a small elite. Ultimately, it is realizable only through the exceptional personage of the just Tzaddik, the ideal holy Jew described above.”

…Luria’s esoteric tale has needed a popular adaptation and interpretation over the centuries, and so, here is how it is in fact interpreted by most historically- and culturally-conscious Jews, remarkably, both religious and non-religious:
The catastrophic shevirat ha-kelim, the breaking of the vessels, has caused the divine light to lose its unity, as it scattered around the world in countless fragments, qelippot. It was for the purpose of collecting them all and putting them back together, to restore the oneness of divine light, that HaShem scattered his chosen people around the world. Only the Jews are capable of the tikkun olam mission. Only the Jews can repair the broken world!

Here is a striking example of how the political nationalist aspirations of a persecuted minority have sought-- and found-- their rationale in religious interpretation, and,--- in the absence of a cultural-religious continuity, as a result of the collapse of Torah Judaism in the wake of the Roman destruction of the Jewish Temple,--- found a substitute for religion in political activism of the highest intensity.
Meantime, the essence of tikkun olam as the Jewish nation-idea must now become clear. This nation-idea, like so many other things in real life, is both a blessing and a curse. As a clear Jewish calling to be helpful in the betterment of the world at large, it is a blessing. However, when interpreted as the exclusively Jewish mission to transform the world, it contains certain controversial aspects, and may result in a series of unintended and little-expected negative consequences, both for the Jews themselves, and for the whole world.

TIKKUN OLAM AS THE JEWISH NATION-IDEA

In my December 2006 lecture on Russia at the Global Security Seminar in Los Angeles, I laid down, as the key point of my presentation, the concept of nation-idea, and how it applies to Russia. Here is a short recap, with a significant elaboration of the Jewish component, which is the subject of this entry, but obviously was not the focus of my GSS lecture.

I am well aware of a number of the world’s nations trying to formulate for themselves some sort of national idea, but this is not what I have in mind. My “nation-idea” is not something labored and trivial, to end up as a generic appeal to certain generic “national” values. In my description, it is a historically established image, consistently affecting the nation’s collective and individual consciousness, in other words, nothing “thought up” on the spur of the moment. There is a second criterion here, too. In order to qualify, the nation must have a well-developed sense of Superpower Mission, or Manifest Destiny, if you like. Rather than inward-looking, it must be outward-looking. The nation must see itself supra-nationally, combining the way it sees itself with how it ought to be seen by others. Under these criteria, I have been able to identify only three such nations. In addition to Russia, with her “Third Rome” nation-idea (see my entry The Russian National Idea, posted on January 22, 2011) and America, with her historical self-awareness as “A City upon a Hill” (see my entry A City Upon A Hill, posted on May 29, 2011), the third such nation in my categorization have been the Jews.
(I confess that I do not know enough about the Chinese to make a definite judgment, but, from what I know, I have not been able to find a comparable profession of superpower destiny coming from them.)

Now, how can that possibly be?! A nation without a country (that’s what the Jews used to be, for the most part of their history), yet one of only three to possess the necessary stuff, which could be identified as a superpower consciousness? Mind you, I am not talking here about the state of Israel, but about the state of Judenthum, to use the German word, in recognition of the well-known fact that, prior to World War II, the German-speaking Ashkenazic Jews had been, by far, the most literate and the most sophisticated part of the Jewish Diaspora in modern history.

But there is nothing in the concept of Jewish nationhood that should surprise any Bible reader. “And I will make of thee a great nation,”-- such is God’s promise to Abram/Abraham in the Torah. (Bereshit [Genesis] 12:2.) And then, of course, country or no country, this is how God addresses the Jews: “Hearken to Me, My people, and My nation…” (Yeshayahu [Isaiah] 51:4.) The idea that the Jews are not only a nation (granted, I am using the English translation, which is, however, authorized by both Chabad and the KJV), but a “great nation,” and also God’s nation, thus has the official Scriptural imprimatur, and there is apparently nothing unusual and even slightly debatable here.

The most intriguing remaining question concerns not this already settled concept of the Jewish nation, but the actual identity of the Jewish nation-idea, as I have put it. I am sure that many of my readers have already questioned the telltale title of this entry. As a matter of fact, I have chosen it to build surprise, rather than to ruin it. Talking of the national idea of the Jews, the idea of Chosenness, as contained in the Bible, is the one that comes to mind the most naturally. I would argue, however, that the Biblical explanation of Chosenness is only partially indicative of the Jewish “superpower mission.” Without trying to be offensive, most nations see themselves under special Divine protection and guidance, thus, the idea of a special relationship between a nation and God can be called… generic. It is only the religious acceptance of the Bible, which makes this particular relationship religiously special. There is a catch here, however. From the Christian point of view, the New Testament effectively abolished the special relationship of the Old Testament two thousand years ago. From the Jewish point of view, the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 AD effectively suspended Torah Judaism until the future coming of Mashiach, substituting it by Rabbinical Judaism and reducing the Jewish national mission to passive patient waiting and prayer. This is the religious view, of course, but then the Chosenness idea is also entirely religious, and one cannot just pick and choose what to believe and what to dismiss.

It is therefore impossible for me to accept the idea of the Jewish Chosenness as the Jewish national idea. Its unmistakable presence is felt in one later Rabbinical/Kabbalistic idea, which I find perfectly answering every criterion of superpower national consciousness, and here it is.

Alongside Russia’s Third Rome and the American City upon a Hill, I see the Jewish nation-idea definitively formulated as Tikkun Olam.

What Tikkun Olam is, and what it really means in world-historical, social-political, national-psychological, mystical, and other terms, becomes the subject of my next entry.

HISTORY OR RELIGION?

The Jewish phenomenon is absolutely unique in many ways. In this entry I am touching upon just one area of the Jewish uniqueness: history.

Every nation whose roots go deep into ancient, or simply pre-literal, times has a history shrouded in legend, and everybody knows what a legend is, and can easily distinguish it from historical and archaeological fact. (Note: It can’t be said that America is too young to have such a tradition. In fact, it is richer in tradition than any other country in the world, being comprised of carriers of numerous diverse cultures, emigrants from all those other places, whose individual traditions never die from crossing either the Atlantic or the Pacific.)
Historical mythology is a time-honored tradition, yes, a beloved tradition, but never a scientific fact! There can never be an argument about the historicity of a nation-founder. He is either a purely legendary figure, or in some cases a well-known historical figure. In neither case an argument should arise.

It is only the early history of the Jews which does not fit the general pattern. Neither legend, nor fact, it can only be described by another word: religion. Because its basic source, we may even call it the only source, are the Holy Books of the Jews and the Christians.

This is not to say that Jewish history in the Bible has not been subjected to critical treatment. Efforts have been made to approach the Bible scientifically, both by believers and unbelievers. While the believers have not been successful to support Bible history by archaeological or independently documented fact, very few “objective researchers” have dared to dismiss it as fantasy, and have preferred some nicer ways of putting it.

Ironically, most Jewish scholars have come to an implicit agreement not to treat the Bible as a document of historical authenticity. Only among the Christian fundamentalist scholars has its absolute ‘scientific’ truth in effect become the starting point of any investigation, and its first criterion of whether to conditionally accept or to categorically reject its findings. But then, I can understand the Christians: they are not Jews, and they have histories of their own. Jewish history is not their history. They are culturally detached from it, thus for them it is not even history, but pure and simple religion.

There is nothing wrong in this general Christian attitude, to which all Russian Orthodox believers obviously subscribe as well. It is only when an effort is made, predominantly in the Evangelical Churches of America, to represent religion as science (along the lines of the long-going creation over evolution offensive), when a serious predicament is sure to arise, as religion is being seen as a truce-breaker, an invader into the secular domain, where, on foreign territory, it suddenly becomes vulnerable and eventually discredited.

The so-called “Christian Zionists” are treading on dangerous ground. Their ‘Biblical’ support of the state of Israel ought not to influence, by the number of voters at the polling booth, U.S. foreign policy toward Israel and the Arab world, as this is not religion at its best, but religion at its worst. American foreign policy must be determined by a combination of entirely secular interests, and religious bigotry must not be one of them, lest it becomes totally counterproductive, and, as we have by now witnessed, destructive. In fact, “Christian Zionism” is a clear case of prostitution of religion, and thus an unforgivable sin against the Holy Spirit. I am sure that every Orthodox Jew will tacitly agree with this characterization, as Christian Zionism is not even a religious movement, but an attempt to create a cocktail of religious incompatibles, passing it off as religion and politics blissfully sleeping with each other.

As for the properly Jewish Zionists, both religious and non-religious, who despise the religious demagoguery of the “Christian Zionists” (“Hitler was God’s hunter, who hunted the Jews” per their “signature” Pastor John Hagee), yet welcome them, their religious antagonists, with open arms in Israel, for a number of substantial reasons having nothing to do with religion per se, when they are so anxious to put a religious slogan on their banner, how can they feel free to pick and choose? After all, God’s great promise of the land of Israel to the Jews comes together with a solemn warning. Aside from thou shalt have, there is always thou shalt not do:

“But if you and your children turn away from following Me, and you will not adhere to My commandments and My statutes, which I have placed before you, but go and worship other gods and bow before them, then I will cut Israel off, from the land which I have given to them, and this house which I have made sacrosanct for My Name will I dismiss from My presence, and Israel shall be for a proverb and a byword among all nations.” (Melachim [Kings] I-9:6-7)

MONTEM PEPERIT MUS

(This is my first preambular entry in the Tikkun Olam section. Its title is a jocular reverse of the Latinized, courtesy of Phaedrus, classic Aesopian fable about a mountain giving birth to a mouse. (“Mons Peperit Murem.”) Here, it is a “mouse” giving birth to a “mountain.” Being consummately metaphorical, just as the Greek original, one cannot possibly protest that my comparison of a nation to a mouse could ever be misconstrued as demeaning to that nation, just as, by the same token, calling a Christian priest a “pastor”, that is, a “shepherd,” does not necessarily equate his parishioners to sheep.)

In Aesop’s fable, after a long and violent labor a great mountain gives birth to… a mouse. In our case, a tiny nation on the fringes of history has managed to bring about unquestionably the most momentous event of all time, in the continuously unfolding drama of human civilization, and today, more than two thousand years after that earthshaking event, this little nation’s influence on world history is even more enormous than ever, completely disproportionate to its formal statistical rankings by numerical (but by no means geographical, considering the globality of the Jewish Diaspora) size, and several other standards.

“...And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great.” (Genesis 12:2.)

It is tempting, for the upholders of the Bible, to make the mystical connection between God’s election of the Jewish people in the Genesis and the inordinate prominence of the Jews throughout the ages, culminating in their super-prominence during the past few decades. But whether or not such a mystical connection exists is beside the point, because the super-prominence we are talking about is easily discernable in purely secular terms, as a cold and demonstrably objective fact.

Indeed, the Jewish factor has long become the single most important factor in international relations, which fact has been implicitly acknowledged by friends and foes alike.

WHY RUSSIA USED TO LOVE AMERICA BUT NOT ANYMORE

My reason for posting this particular entry today, right on the borderline between April 25th and April 26th, is the sixty-seventh anniversary of the little-remembered event dubbed at the time “East meets West,” which refers to the iconic photo of the American Second Lieutenant William Robertson and the Soviet Lieutenant Alexander Silvashko, radiantly beaming at each other, hugging, and shaking hands on this very day in 1945. In a personal way, this graphic April 26th event has been of no less significance to me than the official April 25th date, that has become historically known as “the Meeting on the Elbe.”

There can be no better friend than a wartime buddy (which, I am afraid, does not transfer to the larger scale of being a wartime ally against the common enemy after the war is over). But, paradoxically, one does not have to be your ally to become your greatest friend. That distinction can very easily go to your greatest enemy and rival. Nietzsche, the great psychologist and connoisseur of the oddities of human nature, is certainly correct in putting it this way:

“How much reverence has a noble man for his enemies! And such reverence is a bridge to love. For he desires his enemy for himself, as his mark of distinction; he can endure no other enemy than one in whom there is nothing to despise and very much to honor!”

It wasn’t for nothing that Russia has always loved Nietzsche. Their thinking has always been remarkably in tune, whether in agreement or disagreement. Thus, even when the geopolitical relationship between America and Russia had swiftly changed from strategic friendship to strategic hostility, it had never managed to ruin the basic psychological determinant of the superpower relationship: mutual respect, and, consequently, deep affection for each other. Odi et amo, as the immortal Catullus had phrased it for all eternity, long before our friend Nietzsche would explain this to us in somewhat different, but politically much more explicit terms. Yes, even at the height of the Great Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis and all, America and Russia would remain great friends, by virtue of this incredible, yet perfectly factual “noble enemy” phenomenon, to which I myself can solemnly testify!…

…Well, today the old Cold War is long over, and we must be all ecstatic, if we choose to believe all those psychology professors who teach us that any kind of war is very bad and any kind of peace is very excellent. Yet, nothing could be farther from the truth. Just look around! Who of us wouldn’t take the Cold War over today’s “War on Terror” twenty times over? Back then, in 1962, boarding a short domestic flight , or even a long international flight, did not feel like entering a war zone, where the innocents are treated no better than the enemies, twenty years after America won the Cold War…

Generally speaking, even a mention of Russia as America’s strategic adversary à la “the late” Cold War has become a precious rarity in the American media. Talking about “the other superpower,” the name of China is invariably popping up, although militarily (the hardest currency of superpowerdom) it is Russia, and not China, who alone has been America’s equal, at least, in their mutual capability to destroy each other, taking the world down with them in the process. I suspect that the reason for this glaringly deliberate “negligence” is America’s latent fear of Russia as her once and future nemesis, “whose name must not be mentioned.”

So, here comes the key irony. As Russia’s main adversary, America had nothing to fear. It has been only as Russia’s main scorner, disparager, and mentoring “superior” that she has everything to fear. It used to be for the reason of being Russia’s ‘noble enemy’ that Russia loved her. It is for the reason of America stopping to treat Russia as a ‘noble enemy’ that Russia does not love her anymore, which, if America is still smart, must be the greatest source of her worry…

In the long run, a new rapprochement is inevitable, as America is a bona fide great power, worthy of respect and admiration. But, after so much damage has been done to this historic relationship in the last twenty-plus years, the rehabilitation may be quite painful and take a long time…

(An attentive reader of my blog knows that this America-Russia ground theme has been running through my geopolitical writings as undoubtedly the single most important one of all. I firmly stand by this assessment.)

THICKER THAN WATER. AN EXERCISE IN NAÏVETÉ.

All Great Religions can be philosophically represented as parts of a single “comprehensive general design of total interconnectedness,” as I put it in my earlier posted entry Judaeo-Christian Tradition. Now, there is overwhelming evidence that religion has been a great divider of humanity, as history surely teaches us. And yet, coming from the same Divine Source, aren’t all religions parts of one family, which might leave us with some hope that blood is thicker than water, and when push comes to shove they can all be reconciled and start helping each other in healing the scars of by now mostly political hatreds?


…Reconciled? God, Adam and Eve! Cain and Abel! Noah’s sons! Ishmael’s plight! Jacob and Esau!, to leaf through just the first forty pages of the voluminous Holy Book... Some family values! The case is even more sordid on the larger scale of different conflicting religions, once again according to the Bible itself. Such are the facts of history, religion, and life.

Yet, hope defies fact, and often the truth itself. There is something more and better about families, no matter what we are reading in the Bible. In other words, a family is a family! As for the world’s great religions, God’s inspiration, which is the common source of all true religions, does make them all one family, and it is up to the leaders of the conflicting religions, who deal in hope, rather than fact, to teach their flocks that hate, like love, is in most cases a matter of attitude. Where there is a lingering hatefulness, love can come in its place, if only religion were willing to do its job. Whereas human wickedness is a matter of personal choice, and there is only so much that can be done about it, religious wickedness is a matter of collective choice, which choice is controlled by the religious leaders. Thus, they must not shirk from their personal responsibilities in turning public attitudes into proper channels, stressing inter-religious family ties, rather than inter-religious animosities…

After all, blood is thicker than water…

IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE

It is the best of movies, it is the worst of movies. It makes you fall in love with America… It deceives you.

FROM ADAM TO SMITH

In order to appreciate the mild irony of my title, one might recall the previous section on Economics, where the great Scotsman Adam Smith was one of our principal characters. Needless to say, except for the amusing verbal association, the present title has nothing to do with either Adam Smith or economics, for that matter. Here we are talking about religious prophets, from the first man Adam (was he a “prophet,” and what about Eve?) to the last reasonably authentic prophet of a legitimate religion: Joseph Smith of the Mormons. (I shall definitely ignore the claims of prophet status of institutional persons among the Mormons, and among other religions, as well as of wholesale religious sects and denominations bestowing this status on all members.)

There are several major controversies concerning the prophet status, and, surprisingly, they are not limited to the question of which religions are legitimate, and which are not. It is one thing to deny such a status to, say, Joseph Smith, by all those who reject the religious legitimacy of Mormonism, but quite another thing to have a sharp difference of opinions within the monotheistic cluster of Abrahamic religions, and even among the mainstream Christians themselves. These controversies and the resulting discrepancies point to the fact that, just like with the befuddled situation with the Christian Canon (please see my entry The Stumbling Stone Of The Christian Canon posted on January 16, 2011 as part of the mega-entry And When She Was… Good She Was Horrid), the very definition of a prophet has not been set to anybody’s satisfaction. (In fact, only those are satisfied with it who are blissfully ignorant about this matter.)

Before we move on with this, let us first consult our frequent source of short ‘official’ definitions, Webster’s Dictionary, on what it says is a “prophet.” Being totally unconcerned with figurative meanings, we dismiss them from our consideration, focusing exclusively on the literal religion-related meaning.---
"Prophet:
"1. A person who speaks for God or a god, or as though under divine guidance.
"2. A religious teacher or leader regarded as, or claiming to be, divinely inspired."
In addition to these two definitions (out of four, the other two being figurative) Webster’s Dictionary names Muhammad as the Prophet of Islam, and Smith as the Prophet of Mormonism, and also names the Prophets, or Neviim, as the writers of the prophetic books of the Old Testament. Can the reader see how demonstrably incomplete and helpless (as opposed to helpful) our Webster’s Dictionary proves itself to be in this case?…

I shall not argue in this entry about the ecumenical legitimacy of such non-Abrahamic prophets as Zoroaster and Mani of Persia or the Buddha or even Confucius of the Chinese, and others. Such a discussion would be beside the point. From this point on, I shall avoid any unnecessary controversy, to stay focused on my subject in its narrowest and ostensibly least controversial application, which, as the reader is about to find out, is no less controversial, to say the least.
In other words, from now on, I am limiting myself just to those Abrahamic Prophets who appear in the Old and New Testaments of Judaism and Christianity, and who are also recognized by the religion of Islam (yet not appearing exclusively in the Holy Koran).

Our far from trivial discussion will now focus on the principal characters of the Holy Bible, recognized as exceptional persons by all three great monotheistic religions, and yet only some of these are given the status of prophet by some, while not by others. The question is why?

Thus, we are starting with the first man of monotheism, Adam. He was directly created by God, and literally inspired by God, and he lived in constant communication with God, at least until the Fall. Apparently, such experience with God was not enough to qualify him as a Prophet in the eyes of the Jews and the Christians, because he only spoke to God and listened to God, but in the official Biblical record he never spoke for God and never delivered God’s message to the rest of humanity (which included his children and their progeny). Yet, Adam is recognized as the first Prophet of Islam, and I tend to agree, at least for the reason of Adam’s special relationship with his Creator and for the other reasons stated above. Although Adam is not a prophet in Christianity, he and his two sons, Abel and Seth, are counted as the earliest Saints in Orthodox Christian liturgy. Dante, the Roman Catholic, has him seated with Virgin Mary and Saint Peter in Paradise… This is probably even better than being a prophet, but still, in Christianity, even if it treats him better than Judaism does, Adam is not seen as a Prophet.

Our next Biblical character of interest is Enoch, described as greater than Abraham and holier than Moses. According to the Bible, he was taken to Heaven by God, body and soul, without experiencing death. There is too little information about him in the Bible proper, but from what the Bible says about him, it is possible to surmise that he did not keep God’s message to himself, but shared it with other people, thus qualifying as a bona fide prophet. Understandably and logically, he is a genuine prophet in Islam, but in Christianity there are opposing views as to his prophet status. Nevertheless, even though contested, he may be counted as the only pre-Abrahamic prophet in Christianity, but he is not counted as such in Judaism, where the list begins with Abraham as the first prophet of Judaism. (Out of forty-eight prophets and seven prophetesses.) Reader, be not confused by the unofficial opinions, passing off several pre-Abrahamic personalities as Prophets of Judaism, which is not their authorized designation.

The most surprising omission of a bona fide prophet is that of Noah, who is unequivocally honored as such only in Islam (once again, be not confused by the unauthorized opinions that he is a prophet in the other two Abrahamic religions!), and that--- despite the fact that not only did Noah talk to God, but he also spoke for God to his wife, his sons, and their wives (we could probably assume that he did not speak on behalf of God to his curious neighbors), and thus he should qualify as a prophet in all religions of the Bible, and yet, so far, only the Koran has been consistent in its naming of the Biblical prophets.

Another great surprise is the omission of Daniel as a Prophet in Judaism (although he is honored as such in Christianity and in Islam). Apparently, there was a purely formal reason for his exclusion from the Neviim in the Jewish Bible, that is, because the Book of Daniel was written on the wrong side of the deadline used in closing the canon. Without denying legitimacy to Daniel himself, denying him the status of a Jewish prophet for this purely arbitrary chronological reason, best demonstrates the point that I am making in this entry.

Having parted ways with Judaism already, in the person of the Prophet Daniel, we are now in the domain of the New Testament, where Christianity, up to a (theological) point, keeps company with Islam. There are three Prophets in the New Testament: John the Baptist, or John the Forerunner; Jesus Christ; and John Theologos, or John of Patmos (so called because he spent the last years of his life exiled to the Greek island of Patmos). John the Baptist gets a particularly reverential treatment in Russian and other Orthodox Churches, who view him as the last of the Old Testament Prophets and who take a special notice of the following words of Jesus, in Luke 7:28: “For I say unto you, Among those that are born of women there is not a greater prophet than John the Baptist…” (But then, how does one account for the end of this sentence?---) “…but he that is least in the kingdom of God is greater than he.” Does it mean that being a Prophet of God makes one less than the least in the kingdom of God? As far as my own take on this enigmatic sentence is concerned, without claiming an overall comprehension, I attribute this "smallness" to the Prophet’s overwhelming humility, his personal stature utterly dwarfed by the immenseness of God’s message, obliterating, by contrast, the separate identity of the messenger.

Having said that, I still cannot quite comprehend how come the Apostles of Jesus, Saint Paul prominently among them, have not been given the status of Prophets, although they have met every criterion to deserve that status? If that is to say that the status of Apostle is higher than that of the Prophet, I will agree with the possible explanation that a Prophet can be an involuntary mouthpiece of God, whereas the Apostle chooses to be one (the superiority of the apostle over the prophet is explicitly stated by Apostle Paul in I Corinthians 12:28), but still I would be stunned to find this to be the defining distinction. Was Jesus a Prophet of God, or was Moses one? The Prophet Jonah was by no means a will-less tool in God’s hands: at the end of his story in the Bible, he obviously makes the conscious choice of becoming God’s Prophet, overcoming his previous opposition. There is nothing involuntary in the actions of the Prophet Job either, etc.

I am truly perplexed by the enigma of the status of Prophet in the Bible, and I still cannot comprehend its deep, and probably inscrutable, mystery.
Was Jesus the Prophet less important to Christianity than Paul the Apostle, by exactly the same pattern as in the “latter days” Joseph Smith the Prophet was definitely less momentous to Mormonism than his “Apostle” Brigham Young? Although there is a big school of thought insisting on exactly this conclusion, I somehow refuse to accept this view, as detrimental to religion.
…As to Luke 7:28, I confess to being unable to solve this verse’s riddle, and I doubt that I ever will. Good luck to all brave interpreters of this verse, but I will never accept any of their interpretations as definitive.

“…And I heard, but I understood not: then said I, O my Lord, what shall be the end of these things? And he said, Go thy way, Daniel: for the words are closed up and sealed till the time of the end.” (Daniel 12:8-9.)

MORALITY WITHOUT RELIGION

In his final exile to St. Helena, Napoleon observed to Gaspard Gourgaud that “a man may have no religion, and yet be moral.” This heavy-hearted remark of a thoroughly unhappy man can be easily reconciled with my earlier comment about the customary disconnect between faith and religion. While religion gives a boost to personal morality, it is the person’s faith, and not his religion, that generates his moral principles. Those who disagree with this might ask themselves the question: What is faith? To me, it is one’s mystical belief in a higher being, which is the one and only source of absolute morality. Without such a transcendent source, where does morality come from? To use Kantian language, all sources located within us amount to nothing better than a succession of “hypothetical imperatives,” whereas the “categorical imperative” relates to the universal, and, therefore, the transcendent. The moral person realizes that morality is not limited to one’s personal ends and means, but covers all, and its essence is one. Whether you call that essence “God,” or try to disassociate yourself, for some reason, from the language of religion, the substance remains the same, and you must have a faith in that essence in order to transcend the morally worthless “hypothetical” to reach the morally substantial “categorical.”


To complete Napoleon’s observation above, we might add that a man cannot be moral who has no personal faith.

ONLY IN AMERICA!

(To summarize the content of this entry, this has been my very brief comment on Mormonism and its formal legitimacy as a religion, on account of its immediate ties to the now-historical Mormon culture, centered in the American State of Utah. Non-Utahan Mormonism, on the other hand, is exceedingly questionable at the very least, and for this reason, despite its localized cultural importance, Mormonism as such cannot be considered a world religion by any stretch of imagination.)

...Its religion is as preposterous as those other Latter-Day religions. It is also fairly young, which fact should not speak in its favor, either. But its unique and well-established culture, its distinctive tradition, and its way of life, which is one of a kind too, make Mormonism a phenomenon to reckon with, and not to be dismissed on account of its foundational flakiness. In fact, I insist that, unlike any other religion since the Reformation,* Mormonism is a perfectly legitimate, albeit geographically limited, culture-based religion, that culture being wholly religion-based.
In other words, the new religion produced a new culture, and that culture legitimized the new religion.
(*With regard to my reference point being the Reformation, forgive me, Quakers, alias Friends, but despite an earlier history of violent religious persecution, at present, considering the chasmic divergence of your properly religious beliefs, particularly regarding the divinity of Jesus Christ, you are, in my view, a supremely commendable social organization, but little more than that. As for the Amish (and all other larger or smaller Christian sects), they should fall under the general umbrella of Protestantism, and thus do not qualify as a separate religion, despite their uniquely distinctive way of life.)

There is a good expression: Only in America! It applies to the Mormons with perfection. Only the singular historical experience of the American nation could produce something like that.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as Mormonism is officially called, is built around the life, revelation, and death of its founding prophet Joseph Smith, born in 1805, who gave more strength to the new religion by becoming its founding martyr in 1844. As could well be expected, there had to be someone else, rather than Smith, who would, soon thereafter, give the Mormon culture a powerful impetus, and allow it to acquire a one-of-a-kind character, by migrating with his Mormons to the happily isolated wilderness of Salt Lake City, in 1847. The hero’s name was Brigham Young. If there is any person in world history deserving to be unabashedly compared to the Biblical Moses, Brigham Young is that man...
The history of Mormonism is fairly straightforward and easy to follow for anyone who will spend an hour of his or her time to study it. I prefer to say as little as possible about the theological aspects of the Mormon religion. It might suffice to say that their God has a physical body, is married and can have children. (A very loose take on Christianity, I dare say.) The Mormons also believe that humans can themselves become gods in the afterlife…
But who can argue against all this? Like any other religion, Mormonism is based on an irrational belief, and must be considered a matter of faith, rather than of knowledge, and even less so of theological comprehension.

On a note of sanity (or should I say rationality?), the Mormons believe that their Church is a restoration of the Church as conceived by Jesus Christ, and that all other Christian churches have gone astray. (By the way, considering the general degradation of the latter in modern times, moral retreat and all, this Mormon belief and concern has not been altogether misguided…) They claim to practice a “traditional” way of life, and to uphold traditional family values, ever since polygamy was officially outlawed by their leaders. They oppose abortion, homosexuality, unmarried sexual acts, pornography, gambling, tobacco, consumption of alcoholic beverages, and they even deprive themselves of tea and coffee, not to mention the use of “other” drugs.

Mormonism is an explicitly American religion. In Mormon mythology, God has pointed to America as His ultimate Promised Land. Forget the Jews: the Mormon Utah is the New Zion! Which makes them all most exceedingly happy, although at Israel’s expense, concerning which the Israelis do not seem to mind. After all, as they say, when the Mashiach comes, he will tell the world who was right and who was wrong…

(As an aside, I am not too sure that the Jews [or the traditional Christians, for that matter] would ever want a Mormon, like the new Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, to become the next President of the United States. Who is there to see to it then that the old Zion does not end up in the circular file? American foreign policy has already had a precedent like this, even if relatively brief: Old Europe-- New Europe! God forbid the newest version to be: Old Zion -- New Zion!
But don’t get me wrong on this. I do not expect that Mr. Romney’s allegiances will ever be put to a test like this. America’s Christian Republicans will see to it that he does not get elected, no matter what he might say or what President Obama might do between now and the November 2012 Election.)

JUDE AND JUDAS

(This is a by no means trivial vignette in my Religion section.)


For the record, both these New Testament names: Jude and Judas are indistinguishable in the Greek original (Ιούδας). They are also the same in the Russian Bible (Иуда).

The good old St. Jude and the bad Judas Iscariot… The English-speaking world wishes to disassociate these two persons so much that the same name in Greek is translated differently into English. The Russians do not suffer from the same type of hypocrisy. They correctly call St. Jude “St. Judas,” and they see nothing wrong in that. After all, “What’s in a name?!” Incidentally, this question was not asked by a Russian, but by a bona fide Englishman.

UNITY CONTRA TRINITY

(In my Religion section I have a number of entries on a variety of non-mainstream religions. This one offers my very short comment on the quasi-religious phenomenon known as Unitarianism, comprising a rather elite group of some 800,000 individuals worldwide. [Mind you, the differing membership numbers are quite confusing.])

Unitarianism is billed as an open-minded and individualistic approach to religion, allowing for a very wide range of beliefs and doubts. Religious freedom for each individual is at the heart of this “approach.” Every Unitarian is free to search for the meaning of life in a responsible way and to reach his own conclusions. No standard set of faith and practice exists. People of all religions are invited to join without renouncing their former or current beliefs.
“No individual or group in Unitarianism makes an exclusive claim to the truth. Each Unitarian can believe what they feel is right. Unitarians believe religion should make a difference to the world, so, they are often active in social justice and community work…”

This wholesome and undemanding act of interfaith seems like a bucketful of honey, with just two spoonfuls of bitterness, which make Unitarianism both misleading and disingenuous.
One is this. Whatever you call it, Unitarianism is a distinctive religion, and, as such, it virtually demands that each “former” leave his or her previous religion at the doorstep of the Unitarian temple. Whether one might pick it back up afterwards, is another matter: If one does, good riddance! (But one is always welcome back, of course.) If one doesn’t, smart move, neophyte!
The other spoonful is its in-your-face nametag. “Unity contra Trinity” is a declaration of war. Incorporating this challenge into their name, the Unitarian universalistic call for mutual accommodation and compatibility is off to a bad start.

So, what’s in a name? On the one hand, the Unitarians insist that they are so called because they profess the oneness of God and affirm the essential unity of humankind and all creation. On the other hand, however, ever since the early times of the sixteenth century, when the original Unitarian movement started in Poland and in Transylvania, the openly contentious point of the movement was that the language of the Bible spoke clearly of one God and that the traditional Christian idea of God being a Trinity was therefore wrong.

No wonder then that, from the viewpoint of mainstream Christianity, Unitarianism is a heretical belief, and that for many centuries the Unitarians were persecuted by the Christian Churches as a bunch of heretics.

Today’s universalist status of the Unitarian movement is plagued by the same bitter conflict with the rest of Christendom as before. It is quite surprising that despite its wholesale tolerance toward women-priests, homosexual flock and clergy, and other such permissiveness, the one and only matter of intolerance which remains, and where the Unitarians have no intention to give in, is their categorical rejection of the Trinity.

As if they are on a mission to defy Christianity by their stubborn intolerance, while destroying all classical religions by their overindulging tolerance.

FROM STUPIDITY TO WISDOM...

From Stupidity To Wisdom But One Small Nuance.
Nietzsche says that “to forget one’s purpose is the commonest form of stupidity.” To which I reply that, on the other hand, to pretend to forget one’s purpose is an uncommon form of cleverness, while to try to forget it, is perhaps the rarest form of wisdom.

Kicking It Down A Notch…
Another, much simpler, and definitely dissimilar, way of putting this: to forget is folly (sorry, Mirabeau!), to pretend to forget is cleverness, to try to forget is wisdom.

HAPPINESS ON THE RACK

“De tout mon coeur t’exalterai…”
(This epigraph is taken from a Bible-based [Psalm 9] French Huguenot hymn, sung by the condemned to be burned at the stake, as their ultimate profession of faith…)

“No one can be happy on the rack,” says Aristotle, and when I read it first, a very long time ago, I rushed to agree with him, obviously taking this as a truism. For, indeed, physical torture hardly seems to be conducive to the happiness of the tortured. Ugh!!!
In those childhood years, although I had already proved myself of possessing the contrarian spirit, there had been many things I would be taking at their face value, just because my comprehension had not been up to par, then. But, looking at it today, maybe this is not such a truistic statement, after all? What about the early Christians, and all those persecuted “heretics” of the later times? (I mean the Protestants in the eyes of the Catholics, the Catholics in the eyes of the Protestants, the small denominationalists in the eyes of the larger denominationalists, etc.) How did they all face excruciating death, I wonder? Did they see it as the ultimate horror, or as a glorious road to the Kingdom of Heaven? Weren’t they supersensually ecstatic, to be tortured to death for their faith? Weren’t they all unimaginably, superiorly happy under torture, knowing, rather than believing, that, in emulation of Jesus Christ, torture was their gateway to Heaven, and to eternal life? In fact, I believe that the horrific pain of the rack and the scaffold had been, in a sort of masochistic way, increasing the intensity of their happiness to heights unknown to normal men under normal circumstances, bringing them to the point where extreme pain and extreme pleasure meet, mate, and become one…

Mind you, I am not talking about crazy people. Those “flagellants” and other self-torturers, hiding a clinical case of deviant psychopathology behind their penitent zeal. I am talking about sincere believers, who just wanted to be left alone to practice their faith, yet were forced by the circumstances to take a stand for their religious convictions. Or patriots captured on the battlefield by the enemy and tortured for information.

How can one endure torture and die a glorious martyr in the process? I realize that such exalted experiences are not something a normal man can identify with, although, one can certainly understand it. Our attitude to pain is entirely Schopenhauerian, in the sense that we consider it a nuisance at best, or a horror at worst, to be left out of serious contemplation for the sheer dread it infuses into the mind. Indeed, very few of us would have made a “good” early Christian, and it is definitely hard to imagine one going to the stake over the trifle matter of consubstantiation.

Yet, describing a “normal man,” we are erroneously assuming a normal man under normal circumstances, whereas the circumstances of the rack or an imminent brutal death are by no means “normal circumstances” by any stretch of imagination. This is where a normal man may become indistinguishable from a lunatic and become a genuine hero for the posterity…

So, dear Aristotle, it is quite possible for a normal man to be happy on the rack, just because the experience of the rack is not a rational experience, and it cannot be described in detached rational terms…

...But enough of the physical rack. Now, aside from the physical rack, there is also the mental rack, and this one gives no excuse for happiness whatsoever… Except for the Stoic attitude, of course, which is not exactly a happiness on the rack, but a happiness in spite of the rack. I am extremely doubtful though that Stoicism can perform the kind of miracle on the rack that religious or patriotic zeal (I guess, these two probably amount to the same thing) can. However, with regard to the mental rack, it can do wonders.

The Stoic attitude to mental anguish is well-known. One can inure oneself to it. What this means has already been discussed elsewhere. The Stoic attitude in this case can be best described by the modern term positive thinking, meaning that we are actually capable of molding our own attitude, liberating ourselves from such negative emotions, as pity for ourselves, compassion for our family and neighbors, and for the whole human race as such, as we become immoral and insensitive, to the point of monstrous metaphysical selfishness.

What happens in the end of this Stoic exercise is that our positive attitude turns into a deplorable, immoral condition, where it can be fairly observed that our “positive attitude” has killed our positive attitude, that is, that our morality has committed suicide.

SALVATION STOPS HERE

There is a huge inter-denominational rift in Christianity’s treatment of salvation, along the lines of works vs. grace. In my view, there should not be any distinction between the two; they should rather be fused together as one: man’s salvation surely depends entirely on God’s grace, but God surely must discriminate between a good person and a scoundrel, in which sense, salvation does depend on “works.” Yet, the irreconcilable difference on this matter still exists, and it does not get any better.


I agree with the Protestants that an excessive emphasis on works may indeed lead to an attitude that one can “buy” salvation with good deeds, and this is a wrong attitude. Salvation is not a commodity, and charity has no saving value if it wants something in return.
But I strongly disagree with the Evangelical argument that only by accepting Jesus Christ as one’s personal savior, can one achieve salvation. (For, looking at you, God sees an appalling sinner deserving nothing but a damnation eternal. Only seeing you through the blood of His Son Jesus Christ as your savior will God be able to accept you in His Kingdom.) This is commonly known as “salvation by grace.”

This strange argument is supported by one of the most troubling parts of the interpretative Christian dogma: that humanity bears a collective responsibility for the Original Sin of Adam and Eve.
…I have a problem with this interpretation. I think that it encourages immoral behavior, an assumption that the sum of our life is unimportant for our salvation, as long as we have the time to utter the magic name that tilts the balance of our fate in our favor. This creates a virtually irresistible temptation to succumb to sin, in the expectation of an ex ante redemption. When we are so tainted with a “sin” that we did not commit, what difference does it make if we add a few of our own to the list which condemns us anyway, unless we accept the ransom paid on our behalf by Jesus Christ?

But this is all wrong! We need not bear any personal responsibility for the actions of others before us, like Adam and Eve. By the same token, we must not relegate our personal responsibility for our own deeds and misdeeds to the account of Agnus Dei qui tollis peccata mundi. God made each of us a free chooser, and no one should be made responsible, ex post or ex ante, for our bad choices. That responsibility is all ours... Salvation stops here.

XB!

DEATH AND RESURRECTION

Having just transposed, in the previous entry, the Christian Paschal mystery of God to the human mystery of death and man’s hope of a life after death, I do not intend to stop there. As a student of Russian history, I can see yet another such transposition.

Russian history to me is a history of death and resurrection, which proceeds in cycles. The twentieth century alone brought us two such metaphysical cycles-- the death of Tsarist Russia in 1917 and her resurrection as the mighty Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and next the death of the USSR in the 1990’s and the newest Russian resurrection at the dawn of the new millennium…

THE HUMAN MYSTERY OF RESURRECTION

(A Paschal meditation, intended for posting on Friday, April 13th, 2012. Russian Orthodox Pascha (Easter) is coming this Sunday, April 15th, 2012.)

Christian Pascha (Easter) is the greatest symbol of the Christian faith: Jesus Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection. It can be said, however, that the meaning of Pascha “contrácts” from the transcendent of God to the theologically inferior, yet no less transcendent, in the sense of unknowable, mystery of man.

Looking into the faces of our dead, unseeing, unfeeling, we are awestruck by the perennial puzzle of life: Is this all there is, or is there a sequel more meaningful than being a miniscule part of the giant cycle of nature, as the atheists and some others insist? But even for the believing Bible readers, God’s punishing verdict on Adam is nothing short of frightening and disconcerting:

“In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” (Genesis 3:19.)

…From dust to dust… Ipse dixit!…

Man’s fear of death as the end of subjective existence goes hand-in-hand with a hope for future existence in some form of continued consciousness. Most nations of old had an idea of reincarnation, or transmigration of souls, which, however, habitually failed to address the question of continued consciousness. Pythagoras’s dog was not supposed to remember its previous life as a human: otherwise, each of us would have had some memory of our previous lives as well. Now, granted that we carry no such memory (Kant’s aprioris are not very helpful in establishing the fact of our prior existence), the theological significance of reincarnation has as much comfort for man as the general realization that, just like trees living on as coal, or, like lower animals living on as part of nature’s food chain, the end of “me” is to serve as fodder for a reincarnated something.

Now, here comes the Christian idea of life after death. Although in religious terms it is strictly limited to just one cluster of historical cultures, and I would be among the first to object to its imposition on non-Christian cultures (my blistering opposition to all forms of proselytizing should already be well known to the attentive readers of my blog), the oh-so-comforting promise of a life eternal, although philosophically unsustainable, is, psychologically, probably the strongest in Christianity through the mystery of one person’s death, burial, and resurrection, which, for the Christians, has become the symbol of their religious faith.

ABSOLUTE DEPENDENCE

One of Friedrich Schleiermacher’s most profound and far reaching theological-philosophical statements, in my opinion, is contained in the following short and simple sentence: “The essence of religion consists in the feeling of an absolute dependence.”
It is important to note that although, as a Christian theologian, he puts Christianity at the top of all religions, he does not deny legitimacy to the non-Christian religions, even if he goes too far, in my view, in his religious tolerance, including polytheistic mythology and animistic worship among the legitimate religions, albeit giving them (correctly, to put it mildly) a lower standing than to the great monotheistic religions. For this reason, his reference to the essence of religion in the above quotation is definitely generalized toward all religion, rather than being limited to Christianity, or a handful of other “Jewish religions,” using Schopenhauer’s terminology.

Now, why is this important? Because it raises the most curious and challenging question in this connection: Does a sincerely religious person’s dependence on God necessarily psychologically transfer into the social sphere as a dependence on the person’s church, religious community, proceeding upwards to a dependence on a higher civil authority, namely, the State, particularly, but not necessarily, when the State professes the same religion as our religiously and socially dependent person?

Equating religion with dependence, Schleiermacher inadvertently reminds us of the natural affinity between religion and socialistic-communistic social systems, as opposed to the economic system of capitalism, where the entrepreneur seeks personal independence from the State (a natural secular-impersonal parallel to God), yet eagerly invites forced dependence of many others upon himself through the practice of employment, the concept of trickle-down, and such, thus rather sacrilegiously playing a personal substitute to God.

Such treatment of this issue may lead us to an understanding of several other things at once. Christians in capitalist societies often boast among themselves of being superior workers and employees to the secularists and the atheists. There has to be some truth in this, in so far as an acute sense of personal dependence may be naturally triggering a higher level of the person’s dependability on the job, and obedience to authority in social life.

Thus, a paradox develops in capitalistic societies. Although religious people should be more attuned, than the non-religious, to the socialistic and communistic principles of social organization, and make better citizens under socialism than the non-religious, they may feel quite all right under capitalism, even if they may not profit from it at all, just because of that propensity for dependence, which “trickles down” from allegiance to, and dependence on, God, to their allegiance to, and dependence on, the secular authority of the State and of their employer.

It is also possible that Max Weber, singling out Protestantism as the best religion for good business, ergo the most capitalism-friendly of all, does not so much imply the Protestant’s will to personal profit (this does not mean, of course, that a Protestant cannot do very well for himself and his family, far from it!), as his will to "surplus value," to use the Marxian jargon, thus making our good Protestant supremely more capable of maximizing capitalist profits, and thus producing a much better strain of capitalism, as a result.

As for Weber’s insistence on the Protestant’s independence and personal initiative, this may have something to do with the Protestant's religious separation from an outside central authority (such as, say, the Pope’s, in Roman Catholicism). In this sense, the Protestants may indeed be less “communistically-minded” than the Catholics, or the Christian Orthodox, for that matter, but wasn’t this what Nietzsche, most curiously, had explicitly said well before Weber, in Jenseits 48? (My entry Talent For Religion on this subject will be posted one of these days.)

I must say that Max Weber’s cocktail of religion and economics needs to be served with a huge rock of salt, but doesn’t every thinking person agree that the subject he raises is absolutely fascinating, and it needs to be explored far more than it has been so far, in modern scholarship? Rest assured, I intend to do it amply in my subsequent writings.

POOR IN AMERICA

Having almost reached the end of this Contradiction section, I am coming back to the necessary question raised before. It is possible to argue about the comparative advantages of capitalism and socialism till the end of time, but the ultimate arbiter must be the ethics of both, in comparison. We have heard a lot about “capitalism with a human face,” but the test of humaneness lies not in abstract words, but in concrete deeds. Being the richest nation on earth, has America with her rampant capitalism solved the problem of poverty, at least to the level to which it has been solved in the countries of Western Europe?

...One may still argue that poverty is a relative thing. What is poverty in a rich Western democracy, amounts to a comfortable living, say, in Bangladesh. However, it is demeaning for an industrialized Western nation to be compared to the poorest of the poor, and the comparative standards we are using must be sought within the top echelon of comparable nations, rather than among the bottom part of the world’s list of nations.

Bearing this in mind, let us look at the following summary statement from PennState’s Poverty in America Project (2006). It can be instantaneously accused of a liberal bias by every pro-capitalist demagogue, but, dismissing these defenders of America’s wealthiest class as hopelessly biased, we can glean certain facts and figures of the non-demagogical kind, from this unsettling PennState account:

“The United States of America is a nation pulling apart to a degree unknown in the last twenty-five years. A decade of strong national economic growth in the 1990’s left many of America’s communities falling far behind median national measures of economic health. Despite the investments in transportation and public facility infrastructures, massive movements of capital and people, and the expectations of most regional economists over the past forty years, the nation’s regional development patterns are becoming more uneven. Income inequality is on the rise. The number of communities falling behind the national economic average is increasing. This tendency has been most pronounced in recent years, when trade liberalization and globalization have greatly opened the American economy.
According to our estimates in 2003, almost 25% of the nation’s counties had low per-capita incomes below one half the national average, or less, high unemployment, low labor force participation rates, and a high dependency on government transfer payments,--- all measures of economic distress. These communities are located in timber, agricultural, and mineral and energy resource areas in the nation and in regions of the Deep South, including the Mississippi Delta, the eastern coal belt of Appalachia, historic New Mexican and Native American communities, and along our borders. More recently, newly distressed counties are experiencing the collapse of their post-war low-wage manufacturing economies. At a smaller spatial scale, communities in persistent poverty also are present in the nation’s cities, where long-term decline has left core urban areas of cities such as Washington, DC, Detroit, Michigan, and Los Angeles, California, with limited job opportunities, high levels of poverty, and populations with few effective means of economic advancement.
The problem of persistent poverty is a complex one that includes communities and individuals who, through no fault of their own, find themselves unable to make ends meet in this globalizing, information-intensive world. People at risk are women, children, and people of color, single-parent families and the elderly. Large numbers of the nation’s citizens live at or below the poverty threshold which means each month is a struggle to pay the bills and provide the basics, including food, clothing, and shelter, not to mention access to health care and simple comforts. (Bear in mind that America’s very high standard of living implies a higher cost of living, which puts a serious burden on the poor and makes their plight non-comparable to other much poorer countries where the cost of living is ridiculously low.) How can the richest country in the world still have more than 12% of its total population, and almost 20% of all children under the age of 18, unable to meet, let alone be guaranteed coverage of, basic needs? Today, as a nation, we are significantly different than we were in 1960, when more than 20% of the population was visibly poor and lacked basic goods, including food, clothing, proper shelter, clean water, heating, health care, and access to decent schools. We are a more diverse population and a more dispersed population; we are older and remain divided by race, income, and location. Certainly progress has been made over the intervening forty years in terms of an overall minimum standard of living as measured by material conditions. And yet the lived experience of poor people is starkly different from that of individuals and families who enjoy some degree of economic security as measured by income levels which provide comfortable and worry-free circumstances. If anything, the gap between the economically secure and the poor is more severe than it was four decades ago. Increasingly, the nation is composed of persons who look to a future in which circumstances include the expectation of more wealth, security, and opportunity; and the alternative: those who struggle to make ends meet. In many families today children cannot say that they expect to be better off than their parents. This is perhaps the greatest challenge now facing our society. Forty years ago, public officials took a stand against economic deprivation.(*) For a short period of time we made huge strides in reducing economic insecurity. Yet America is again facing this serious challenge. Once again we can make a difference if we choose to look this issue in the eye and invest in people and communities.”

(*Note for the underlined sentence: “Forty years ago” here refers to President Lyndon B. Johnson’s massive social program, historically known as the “Great Society.” [See my eponymous entry posted on July 4th, 2011.] It seems almost incredible that this great humanitarian role of attacking poverty on a large and comprehensive national scale fell upon ostensibly one of the least likable among all American Presidents, yet a home-grown Texan, and, therefore, unquestionably, a genuine article: no hillbillying, no pretense…)

It is certainly commendable to end this grim statement of fact on a somewhat positive note, but does it make the situation better? What the summary makes clear is that the gap between the rich and the poor has grown quite considerably in the past several decades, just as Karl Marx had predicted. It is thus an additional and a formidable challenge for the American humanitarians of today and tomorrow, to prove to an increasingly distrustful world that Karl Marx’s disturbing prediction can be overcome by “kinder and gentler” means than a world revolution.

THE MISERABLE SELFISHNESS OF THE STOICS

(An argument against the philosophy of Stoicism.)


What was it that the Greeks were saying about happiness being always inside you? Do not let the problems of your loved ones, the distresses of your family, the death of your friends, the misery of your nation, bother you… “Don’t worry, be happy!” Has Bobby McFerrin’s song been translated from the Stoic Greek, too?…

I guess, one could always become a stoic, which does not mean happiness, but only indifference to life, or an utterly selfish, “happy” sort of attitude, enjoying a normal feast in the midst of plague. I could even imagine such a pure and radiant Aristotelian happiness that is too refined and out-of-this-worldly to have anything to do with the deliberateness of a special effort, no, not an excuse, not a pretext, but the real natural thing…

I may even be jealous of those who are philosophically capable to attain such bliss on earth. Maybe, I could have been there too?
No, hardly. I have always been too much affected by the worst bane of happiness: compassion. One may be immune to his own state of misery, but the unhappiness of the others, the loved ones, the cared-about ones, is sure enough to penetrate through the pseudo-stoic defenses, and sting the soul. For, indeed, compassion is a destructive passion. Once you have it, it makes you… well, human. All-too-human, I am afraid…

On the other hand, being a stoic is like being on a powerful numbing drug. No feeling, which presumably means no pain. Such is the happiness of the stoic!

But then, the price has to be complete loneliness. No family, no friends, no country, no love…

Oh, yes, the Stoic ideal must be… Nothing!

WARTS AND ALL...

How often have we cried over the spilled milk of our mistakes, asking ourselves Why?! and wishing to relive our life so that we would not repeat them… again, in retrospect?! How silly of us, however. Our past mistakes are just like birthmarks on our body: they are what we are, and there is no way for us to go back to the past, trying to undo what cannot be undone, that is, trying to be born again without them. But, instead of thus keeping torturing ourselves over these blights, we can venture to learn something about ourselves and do for our future what cannot be done for our past.

Learning from our mistakes is always a good thing. But “self-condemnation, continual self-reproach, self criticism, a constant looking into self” (quoting the great American doctor James Tyler Kent), in other words, dwelling on our past mistakes and complaining, "What if?", is quite another. It’s like trying to perform a cosmetic plastic surgery on our past. But, like with any cosmetic plastic surgery, there ought to be an understanding that it works only superficially and only as an expression of our vanity in most cases, whereas occasionally such a surgery on our image of ourselves can do us more harm than good, when wishing to repair what is essentially us we may end up renouncing our whole life and our own peculiar individuality.

PEOPLE'S CAPITALISM

Gilbert Keith Chesterton is well known and loved as a delightfully original writer, heavily influenced by his Christian religiosity and love for the paradox. George Bernard Shaw called him “a man of colossal genius,” and in this case he was not saying it for fun. Chesterton was a consummate philosophizer, spiritually akin to the Russian intelligent. He saw himself as an “orthodox” Christian, in the sense that would be best conveyed by the word “consistent.” Finding more “orthodoxy” in Catholicism, he became a convert to it from original Anglicanism, into which he had been born.

As befits any consistent Christian, he questioned the morality of capitalism and found it lacking. But he was not satisfied with the morality of socialism either, believing that under socialism the State becomes a capitalist of sorts, whereas the people lose out just as much as under capitalism. “Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists,” he famously quipped, and, according to his thinking, socialism was reducing their number to just one. (This is of course a consistent view, as long as the role of the State is seen through Chestertonian eyes. It may be a sincere belief, with just a tad of posturing, perhaps, but even if I disagree with Chesterton on the moral evaluation of the socialist idea, his thinking in this case is certainly interesting and well worth taking note of.)
He, therefore, nonchalantly dismissed both these unsatisfactory socio-economic systems, in favor of a third one, his choice, which he, together with the French-born British writer and philosopher Hilaire Belloc (who was his collaborator on matters of economic philosophy) called distributism. According to their theory, the ownership of the means of production should not be taken away from the owners (which is supposedly the case under socialism), but should not be left in the hands of the few, either, as is obviously the case under capitalism. On the contrary, ownership should be encouraged and, most significantly, expanded to include all!
Distributism, in other words, distinguishes itself by the way it distributes property. It does not extend to all property, but only to productive property, which produces the necessities of life. Such property, obviously, includes land, tools, and other things.

The idea behind this “third economic way,” which can be suitably called “people’s capitalism,” smacks of a hopeless case of wishful thinking, and for this reason should properly belong in that eponymous section. But I am interested in its ethical component, first and foremost, seeing it as a rebellion of consistent Christianity against the immoral practices of capitalism. For this reason, the present discussion may be most suitable for this Contradiction section, especially under its original title Capitalism And Christianity.

But there is still more to it, and in a limited sense the idea of Distributism may not be so outlandish after all. An American Chestertonian follower, the unorthodox political economist Louis O. Kelso, gets the credit for inventing the so-called “ESOP” (Employee Stock Ownership Plan, 1956), a spinoff of the Distributism idea, soon followed by the “CSOP” (Consumer Stock Ownership Plan, 1958), both these ideas further developed in later years, and still in use today. One can argue that Chesterton’s idea gets diluted in both these plans and polluted through its implementation in an unaltered capitalistic environment, but the fact itself is remarkable that from a seed of patently wishful thinking certain decent practical results could thus sprout.

Incidentally, I am quite impressed by an incredibly apt representation of capitalist immorality by Kelso (who was also co-author, with Mortimer J. Adler, of the Capitalist Manifesto (1958), and of The New Capitalists (1961); and of a very influential 1986 book, coauthored with his wife Patricia Hetter Kelso, Democracy and Economic Power, translated into several languages, including Russian and Chinese.) Here is his metaphor of capitalist “equality,” which I find stunning, in the context of Capitalism and Christianity.---

"The Roman arena was technically a level playing field. But on one side were the lions with all the weapons, and on the other the Christians with all the blood. That’s not a level playing field. That’s a slaughter. And so is putting people into the economy without equipping them with capital, while equipping a tiny handful of people with hundreds and thousands of times more than they can use." [Quoted in Bill Moyers’s A World of Ideas (1990).]

It must be noted that Kelso was writing in the politically charged years of the coldwar hysteria. He could not easily dismiss capitalism in favor of socialism; therefore his choice had to be the Chestertonian third way, a utopian idea on a large scale, but a reasonably practicable idea when applied on a smaller scale, such as was his California-oriented ESOP, and his other similar plans.

As an afterthought: it would have been good for America, as she is throwing her weight around the world, to throw some ESOP’s and CSOP’s around as well, particularly, in the Third World nations, where a few doses of Chestertonian goodwill may do more good for the American image than the billions of dollars squandered on buying bloody dictators and catastrophically unreliable opposition movements.

NATIONAL CAPITALISM AND OUR LITTLE BEGGAR NATIONAL INTEREST

National Capitalism… Here is another interesting socio-economic term in a row, also utterly compromised by its instant association with the proscribed monster of National-Socialism. Don’t get me wrong, though. I am by no means suggesting to dispose of our historical sensibilities, and adopt an offensively sounding term, which, as I know perfectly well, simply can’t be adopted. Yet, there is something definitely attractive in the linguistic concept of national capitalism, which is supposed to favor national private business, as opposed to the practice of a “capitalism without borders,” in which the general laws of capitalism are allowed to rule with a marked disregard for national interest, and, in too many instances, in opposition to it.

In the age of Globalism, when America’s capitalists have attempted to maximize their personal profits at the expense of the nation via outsourcing, untaxed offshore accounts, and unregulated hedge funds, the title term national capitalism sounds like a healthy national alternative to super-internationalized multiple-citizenship adventurism of the get-superrich-quick predators of stateless speculation and manipulation. To put it simply, national capitalism sounds like a good thing, compared to Globalism, and can, hopefully, lead to some kind of recognition of greater state regulation, which gently nudges “free capitalism” onto the socialist path.

Incidentally, I have already used this strangely sounding term "national capitalism" in my entry titled Socialism According To Mises. Here is that important paragraph again:

“The validity of my criticism becomes even more obvious when we look at the system of national subsidies within modern capitalist economies, particularly in the citadel of capitalism, the United States. Tariffs and subsidies undermine the capitalist system of values, introducing certain elements of “socialism” (or should I say national capitalism?) and creating the mixed basket I have been constantly talking about.”

Ironically, the bulk of today’s government bailouts and subsidies in the United States goes to delinquent and often explicitly criminal financial institutions and businesses, which themselves customarily act anti-socially and anti-nationally, and hardly deserve national public assistance. Thus, paradoxically, the government of the United States practices the proverbial devil “socialism” where it is the least defensible, and the recipients of these handouts happen to be the most conspicuous standard-bearers of capitalism-gone-amok!

…Returning to the title phrase “national capitalism,” being an unattached tag, this term can be utilized in a variety of usages, another one being to describe the current vigorous and unquestionably healthy nationalist counter-offensive against the Globalist folly.
This counter-offensive comes in two distinctive varieties. One is the defensive reaction of the world nations to the American neo-imperialist offensive under the guise of globalization and interdependence. The other has to be the domestic American defensive reaction against the negative impact of the Globalist policies on the American national scene, the reckless policies of greed and short-term expediency, along with a selfishly misguided obsession with outsourcing, and the trust of the most sensitive areas, the “soft underbelly” of the national economy and national security, including the military sector, to foreigners, mistakenly convinced that “our dollar” can buy anything and everything, including the loyalty of strangers! The bottom line of my thought here is, of course, whether an introduction of the concept of “national capitalism” in one or several possible senses would actually make sense in practical terms, and, then, how it would relate to the already existing, but overly multifaceted, ergo, ambiguous concept of state capitalism?

But even having reservations about “national capitalism” as a term, I insist that something constructive has to be done. Apparently, anything having to do with the word “socialism” is a no-no, while the term national interest seems to have lost all meaning. Which leaves us with the term “capitalism,” which simply has to be included in the new term, not to antagonize the rich and powerful. The remaining question is how to qualify this term, so that it might sneak in our little beggar “national interest” under the large cloak of the fat, cigar-smoking, topper-wearing acceptability.

NATIONAL-SOCIALISM... A FRENCH IMPORT?

Financial capitalism and capitalist libertarianism are not the only culprits in the game of false identifications, muddying the already dirty linguistic waters in the ‘political’ struggle between the two principal ‘economic’ systems in contention: capitalism and socialism (obviously communism, being “not of this world” has never been in any serious contention in this struggle).


The theoretically inoffensive concept of national socialism, albeit vague and requiring elucidation, has been pinned down in historical usage to designate a particular negatively tagged political system and its ideology, namely, Hitler’s Third Reich, and everything it has represented ever since World War II. Fortunately for the word socialism, the inglorious German phenomenon has been reduced to the short form Nazism, so that all those modern-day neo-nazi movements around the world have presumably lost the connection to the anchor word socialism, and yet, I am convinced that, psychologically speaking, national-socialism will keep giving socialism a black eye for decades to come.

What exactly is “national-socialism”? Does its substance have any relevance to its pseudo-economic label? Webster’s Dictionary has no other clue to its core meaning, except for the obvious “forwarding address” to the Nazi entry, in reference to the infamous National Socialist German Workers’ Party, created in 1919 and brought to power in 1933 by Hitler. There is little, if any, knowledge of the fact that this term had been first introduced not in Germany, but in France in 1898, by the prominent nationalist writer and politician Auguste Maurice Barrès (1862-1923). It is important to note that, to those who know his name today, Barrès can be easily identified as Hitler’s ideological precursor, and, in this sense, the fact that he was the one to coin the infamous term is of an immense historical significance, even more so, considering that the substance is essentially the same. It can even be said that Hitler may have borrowed his fundamental ideas not from some Austrian Czech ideologues, as is customarily alleged, but from this undeservedly forgotten Frenchman, who died in the same year that the future German Führer’s München Putsch failed, and he was about to be sent to prison to write, originally under the guidance of Rudolf Hess (see my entry The Remarkable Case Of Rudolf Hess, posted on February 15, 2011), his momentous monstrosity Mein Kampf.

Thus, the question of Is there more to this than meets the eye? is intriguing, and well worth an investigation. After all, for an alien from another galaxy, the words national socialism carry no historical baggage, and his curiosity as to what exactly it could mean deserves to be rewarded. I shall be developing this line of inquiry in my Acorn section at a later time.

RIGHTEOUS MALGRÉ LUI

There is a great temptation for one who has lost everything as a result of his folly or recklessness to declare himself righteous in his own eyes, and to seek an excuse for his shortcomings by identifying them with virtue. It does not matter, however, under what exact circumstances he had become what he is now, as long as he does not look back with regret, and remembers the other far more authentic condition of righteousness:
If one wishes to be righteous, let him be righteous grâce à lui, not righteous malgré lui.

LIBERTARIANISM, STATISM, AND FREEDOM

This entry is designed to address a very popular misconception suggesting that the libertarians of both kinds (socialist and capitalist) are the most committed promoters of individual freedom, whereas the statists, who happen to be overwhelmingly socialistically-minded, are anti-freedom. Partly for this reason, the American self-proclaimed libertarians have renounced socialism, rallied behind laissez-faire capitalism, and effectively joined the pro-capitalist Republican Party in the United States.
I happen to disagree with this stereotypical claim that libertarianism is pro-freedom, and statism is an enemy of freedom. The idea that the socialist state deprives its citizens of freedom, because of its power to coerce, is nonsense. In the natural stateless state of man, there are always the strong and the weak, and therefore no equality, no freedom for the weak. Likewise, in a “stateless,” unregulated capitalist society there are always the rich and the poor, and therefore no equality, no freedom for the poor, who become totally dependent on the rich, in a form of virtual slavery, unless they stage a revolution and overpower the rich by the power of their vastly superior numbers. Society has to handicap the contest, to achieve a reasonable level of fairness, and also to prevent a violent revolution. The Socialist State therefore serves not so much as a coercer, as an equalizer. It is precisely because of the nature of human nature that such equalization decisions must not be relegated to a private benevolence of the rich, but belong to the public domain of an equitably functioning State.
To sum it up, even if this may sound paradoxical, only the State can guarantee individual freedoms, whereas a stateless paradise quickly turns into a domination of the fittest, who also happen to be the least scrupulous, over everybody else, turning the very concept of freedom into a joke.

LIBERTARIAN SOCIALISM: A NICER NAME FOR ANARCHISM

I find no more fitting way to open this entry than with this epigraphic quotation from Nietzsche’s Antichrist (#57): “The anarchist and the Christian have the same ancestry.” At the very least, it sets the tone.

I like Nietzsche’s “in-your-face” breath of fresh air. I also like Noam Chomsky’s description of himself as a “fellow traveler to the anarchist tradition,” and his self-identification with anarcho-syndicalism. In essence, anarcho-syndicalism does not merely “abolish” the State, but provides a competent substitute for the State, in the labor unions, working on socialist/communist principles, ideally, in a stateless society. (My lengthy entry on this subject: Syndicalism And Its Apostle Sorel, will be posted later.)

It should be clear right away that both anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism are not really some viable social alternatives for an immediate, or even gradual, practical implementation, but they are rather theoretical, and primarily intellectual exercises in social engineering, even if the actual historical practice of anarchism has led to some demonstrable excesses. The reader will be correct to surmise that I am by no means an advocate of social violence, but I do find an inexhaustible source of intellectual fascination in the genesis and subsequent development of challenging ideas, even if some of them prove too controversial and end up condemned, not on the basis of their intellectual merit or demerit, but as a result of their failed, or otherwise discredited and disavowed malpractice in real life.

Returning to the title subject, in my mind, anarchism brings an immediate association with none other than Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin, one of the most colorful characters in history, whose name has a special ring to the Russian soul. I have several Bakunin entries in this book, some of them already posted, others to be posted later. Ironically, a Bakunin biographer can do his job in two very different fashions: one as a joke and a caricature, and the other as a serious philosophical study, not so much of the man (whose life has been an unwarranted distraction from his work, to historians), as of his controversial ideas, and their perennial significance. Having read his works, and having read works about him, I can confidently conclude that an adequate book about Bakunin’s intellectual legacy is yet to be written.

Thus, I believe, the most interesting thing about anarchism is not its history of political action, but a history of its political thought. There is another word for it: libertarian socialism, the kind of political philosophy that Chomsky gladly subscribes to, summarized by him as challenging all forms of hierarchy and attempting to eliminate them, if they are unjustified. He says that libertarian socialist values exemplify the rational and morally-consistent extension of classical liberal ideas to an industrial context.

The words libertarianism and anarchism are inextricably linked: one literally created as an euphemism for the other. The first man to describe himself as a libertarian was Joseph Déjacque, a French anarchist, who made up this word to fool the censors under a French ban on anarchist publications.

There is, however, a chasmal gap between the traditional European meaning of the word libertarian and its usage in the United States, where, paradoxically, it has come to denote the antipode of libertarian socialism which is libertarian capitalism, a fraudulent usurper of the name libertarian, described in my next entry as “a case of stolen identity.”
Libertarian socialists (thus called out of necessity, to distinguish them from the identity thieves now going under the name of “libertarians” in the United States, or of libertarian capitalists, as a compromise) differ from socialists in that the latter rely on the power of the State to deliver socialist policies, while the former stand for individual freedoms to such an extent that they view even the most dedicated, welfare-promoting state as the enemy. Not a very practical attitude, of course, logically making them the inheritors of Thomas More’s Abraxa (after all, why should anti-statists prefer the name of the state-founder King Utopus and its phantasmal, “no-such-place” pseudo-etymology, contained in the name Utopia?), but, by the same token, Thomas More’s successors in his idealistic, yet inspired, form of social thought that has stood the test of the ages.