[syndicate] the human factor

[Yasir Husain]

http://www.edge.org/ <http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/goldstein.html>


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REASONABLE DOUBT

[REBECCA NEWBERGER GOLDSTEIN:] Thursday marked the 350th anniversary of the
excommunication of the philosopher Baruch Spinoza from the Portuguese Jewish
community of Amsterdam in which he had been raised.

Given the events of the last week, particularly those emanating from the
Middle East, the Spinoza anniversary didn't get a lot of attention. But it's
one worth remembering - in large measure because Spinoza's life and thought
have the power to illuminate the kind of events that at the moment seem so
intractable and overwhelming.

The exact reasons for the excommunication of the 23-year-old Spinoza remain
murky, but the reasons he came to be vilified throughout all of Europe are
not. Spinoza argued that no group or religion could rightly claim infallible
knowledge of the Creator's partiality to its beliefs and ways. After the
excommunication, he spent the rest of his life - he died in 1677 at the age
of 44 - studying the varieties of religious intolerance. The conclusions he
drew are still of dismaying relevance.The Jews who banished Spinoza had
themselves been victims of intolerance, refugees from the Spanish-Portuguese
Inquisition.

The Jews on the Iberian Peninsula had been forced to convert to Christianity
at the end of the 15th century. In the intervening century, they had been
kept under the vigilant gaze of the Inquisitors, who suspected the "New
Christians," as they were called even after generations of Christian
practice, of carrying the rejection of Christ in their very blood. It can be
argued that the Iberian Inquisition was Europe's first experiment in
racialist ideology.

Spinoza's reaction to the religious intolerance he saw around him was to try
to think his way out of all sectarian thinking. He understood the powerful
tendency in each of us toward developing a view of the truth that favors the
circumstances into which we happened to have been born. Self-aggrandizement
can be the invisible scaffolding of religion, politics or ideology.

Against this tendency we have no defense but the relentless application of
reason. Reason must stand guard against the self-serving false entailments
that creep into our thinking, inducing us to believe that we are more
cosmically important than we truly are, that we have had bestowed upon us -
whether Jew or Christian or Muslim - a privileged position in the narrative
of the world's unfolding.Spinoza's system is a long deductive argument for a
conclusion as radical in our day as it was in his, namely that to the extent
that we are rational, we each partake in exactly the same identity.

Spinoza's faith in reason as our only hope and redemption is the core of his
system, and its consequences reach out in many directions, including the
political. Each of us has been endowed with reason, and it is our right, as
well as our responsibility, to exercise it. Ceding this faculty to others,
to the authorities of either the church or the state, is neither a rational
nor an ethical option.

Which is why, for Spinoza, democracy was the most superior form of
government - only democracy can preserve and augment the rights of
individuals. The state, in helping each person to preserve his life and
well-being, can legitimately demand sacrifices from us, but it can never
relieve us of our responsibility to strive to justify our beliefs in the
light of evidence.

It is for this reason that he argued that a government that impedes the
development of the sciences subverts the very grounds for state legitimacy,
which is to provide us physical safety so that we can realize our full
potential. And this, too, is why he argued so adamantly against the
influence of clerics in government. Statecraft infused with religion not
only dissolves the justification for the state but is intrinsically
unstable, since it must insist on its version of the truth against all
others.

Spinoza's attempt to deduce everything from first principles - that is,
without reliance on empirical observation - can strike us today as
quixotically impractical, and yet his project of radical rationality had
concrete consequences. His writings, banned and condemned by greater
Christian Europe, but continuously read and discussed, played a role in the
audacious experiment in rational government that gave birth to this country.

The Declaration of Independence, that extraordinary document first drafted
by Thomas Jefferson, softly echoes Spinoza. John Locke, Spinoza's
contemporary - both were born in 1632 - is a more obvious influence on
Jefferson than Spinoza was. But Locke had himself been influenced by
Spinoza's ideas on tolerance, freedom and democracy. In fact, Locke spent
five formative years in Amsterdam, in exile because of the political
troubles of his patron, the Earl of Shaftesbury.

Though Spinoza was already dead, Locke met in Amsterdam men who almost
certainly spoke of Spinoza. Locke's library not only included all of
Spinoza's important works, but also works in which Spinoza had been
discussed and condemned.

It's worth noting that Locke emerged from his years in Amsterdam a far more
egalitarian thinker, having decisively moved in the direction of Spinoza. He
now accepted, as he had not before, the fundamental egalitarian claim that
the legitimacy of the state's power derives from the consent of the
governed, a phrase that would prominently find its way into the Declaration.

Locke's claims on behalf of reason did not go as far as Spinoza's. He was
firm in defending Christianity's revelation as the one true religion against
Spinoza's universalism. In some of the fundamental ways in which Spinoza and
Locke differed, Jefferson's view was more allied with Spinoza. (Spinoza's
collected works were also in Jefferson's library, so Spinoza's impact may
not just have been by way of Locke.)

If we can hear Locke's influence in the phrase "life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness," (a variation on Adam Smith's Locke-inspired "life,
liberty and pursuit of property"), we can also catch the sound of Spinoza
addressing us in Jefferson's appeal to the "laws of nature and of nature's
God." This is the language of Spinoza's universalist religion, which makes
no reference to revelation, but rather to ethical truths that can be
discovered through human reason.

Spinoza had argued that our capacity for reason is what makes each of us a
thing of inestimable worth, demonstrably deserving of dignity and
compassion. That each individual is worthy of ethical consideration is
itself a discoverable law of nature, obviating the appeal to divine
revelation. An idea that had caused outrage when Spinoza first proposed it
in the 17th century, adding fire to the denunciation of him as a godless
immoralist, had found its way into the minds of men who set out to create a
government the likes of which had never before been seen on this earth.

Spinoza's dream of making us susceptible to the voice of reason might seem
hopelessly quixotic at this moment, with religion-infested politics on the
march. But imagine how much more impossible a dream it would have seemed on
that day 350 years ago. And imagine, too, how much even sorrier our sorry
world would have been without it.


[EDITOR'S NOTE: First published as an Op-Ed Page article in THE NEW YORK
TIMES on Saturday, July 29th]


On 8/2/06, A. G-C <guibertc at criticalsecret.com> wrote:

 but none of them can annex exclusively the collective things tothier
> respective private part as common mode of public part.
>
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