Day 278: Black Earth

Nothing can be known about the future, thought Hitler, except the limits of our planet: “the surface area of a precisely measured space.” Ecology was scarcity, and existence meant a struggle for land. The immutable structure of life was the division of animals into species, condemned to “inner seclusion” and an endless fight to the death. Human races, Hitler was convinced, were like species. The highest races were still evolving from the lower, which meant that interbreeding was possible but sinful. Races should behave like species, like mating with like and seeking to kill unlike. This for Hitler was a law, the law of racial struggle, as certain as the law of gravity. The struggle could never end, and it had no certain outcome. A race could triumph and flourish and could also be starved and extinguished.

In Hitler’s world, the law of the jungle was the only law. People were to suppress any inclination to be merciful and be as rapacious as they could. Hitler thus broke with the traditions of political thought that presented human beings as distinct from nature in their capacity to imagine and create new forms of association. Beginning from that assumption, political thinkers tried to describe not only the possible but the most just forms of society. For Hitler, however, nature was the singular, brutal, and overwhelming truth, and the whole history of attempting to think otherwise was an illusion. Carl Schmitt, a leading Nazi legal theorist, explained that politics arose not from history or concepts but from our sense of enmity. Our racial enemies were chosen by nature, and our task was to struggle and kill and die.

“Nature knows,” wrote Hitler, “no political boundaries. She places life forms on this globe and then sets them free in a play for power.” Since politics was nature, and nature was struggle, no political thought was possible. This conclusion was an extreme articulation of the nineteenth-century commonplace that human activities could be understood as biology. In the 1880s and 1890s, serious thinkers and popularizers influenced by Charles Darwin’s idea of natural selection proposed that the ancient questions of political thought had been resolved by this breakthrough in zoology. When Hitler was young, an interpretation of Darwin in which competition was identified as a social good influenced all major forms of politics. For Herbert Spencer, the British defender of capitalism, a market was like an ecosphere where the strongest and best survived. The utility brought by unhindered competition justified its immediate evils. The opponents of capitalism, the socialists of the Second International, also embraced biological analogies. They came to see the class struggle as “scientific,” and man as one animal among many, instead of a specially creative being with a specifically human essence. Karl Kautsky, the leading Marxist theorist of the day, insisted pedantically that people were animals.

Yet these liberals and socialists were constrained, whether they realized it or not, by attachments to custom and institution; mental habits that grew from social experience hindered them from reaching the most radical of conclusions. They were ethically committed to goods such as economic growth or social justice, and found it appealing or convenient to imagine that natural competition would deliver these goods. Hitler entitled his book Mein Kampf—My Struggle. From those two words through two long volumes and two decades of political life, he was endlessly narcissistic, pitilessly consistent, and exuberantly nihilistic where others were not. The ceaseless strife of races was not an element of life, but its essence. To say so was not to build a theory but to observe the universe as it was. Struggle was life, not a means to some other end. It was not justified by the prosperity (capitalism) or justice (socialism) that it supposedly brought. Hitler’s point was not at all that the desirable end justified the bloody means. There was no end, only meanness. Race was real, whereas individuals and classes were fleeting and erroneous constructions. Struggle was not a metaphor or an analogy, but a tangible and total truth. The weak were to be dominated by the strong, since “the world is not there for the cowardly peoples.” And that was all that there was to be known and believed.

Hitler’s worldview dismissed religious and secular traditions, and yet relied upon both. Though he was no original thinker, he supplied a certain resolution to a crisis of both thought and faith. Like many before him he sought to bring the two together. What he meant to engineer, however, was not an elevating synthesis that would rescue both soul and mind but a seductive collision that destroyed both. Hitler’s racial struggle was supposedly sanctioned by science, but he called its object “daily bread.” With these words, he was summoning one of the best-known Christian texts, while profoundly altering its meaning. “Give us this day,” ask those who recite the Lord’s Prayer, “our daily bread.” In the universe the prayer describes, there is a metaphysics, an order beyond this planet, notions of good that proceed from one sphere to another. Those saying the Lord’s Prayer ask that God “forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” In Hitler’s “struggle for the riches of nature,” it was a sin not to seize everything possible, and a crime to allow others to survive. Mercy violated the order of things because it allowed the weak to propagate. Rejecting the biblical commandments, said Hitler, was what human beings must do. “If I can accept a divine commandment,” he wrote, “it’s this one: ‘Thou shalt preserve the species.’ ”

~~Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning -by- Timothy Snyder

Day 273: Atheist Manifesto

Enter the forgers. Clearly, Christ existed — like Ulysses and Zarathustra, of whom it is hardly important to know whether they were flesh-and-blood people living at a precise time and in an identifiable place. Jesus’s existence has not been historically established. No contemporary documentation of the event, no archaeological proof, nothing certain exists today to attest to the truth of a real presence at this meeting point between two worlds, abolishing one and naming its successor.

No tomb, no shroud, no archives, except for a sepulcher invented in 325 by Saint Helena, mother of Constantine. She must have been a woman of supreme gifts, since we are also indebted to her for the discovery of Golgotha and of the titulus, the wooden fragment bearing the charges brought against Jesus. Then there is that piece of cloth from Turin, which carbon-14 dating has situated in the thirteenth century CE, and which only a miracle could have wrapped around Christ’s corpse more than a thousand years earlier! Finally, there are of course two or three vague references in ancient texts — Flavius Josephus, Suetonius, and Tacitus — but in copies made several centuries after the alleged crucifixion of Jesus and — significantly — after the success of his supporters was assured.

On the other hand, how can we deny Jesus’s conceptual existence? For the same reason as Heraclitus’s Fire, Empedocles’s Friendship, Plato’s Ideas, or Epicurus’s Pleasure, Jesus functions wonderfully as an Idea on which a vision of the world is articulated, a conception of the real, a theory of a sinful past and of future salvation. We must leave it to lovers of impossible debates to decide on the question of Jesus’s existence and address ourselves to the questions that matter. What exactly is this construction named Jesus? What was its purpose? Its aims? To serve whose interests? Who created this fiction? How did the myth take shape? How did this fable evolve in the centuries that followed?

The answers to these questions require a detour via a hysterical thirteenth apostle, Paul of Tarsus (a “bishop of foreign affairs,” as he called himself), the author of a successful coup d’état (the emperor Constantine), and his successors (Justinian, Theodosius, Valentinian) who incited Christians to despoil, torture, and slaughter pagans and burn pagan libraries. From Jesus the invisible ectoplasm to Jesus the absolute master of an empire and then of the world, history evolves alongside the family tree of our civilization. It begins in a historical fog in Palestine, continues in Rome, and then settles into the gold, pomp, and purple of Christian power in Byzantium. It thrives even today in millions of minds formatted by the unbelievable story — built on the wind, on the improbable, on contradictions that the church has invariably dispelled through bouts of political violence.

So we know that most existing documents are skillfully executed forgeries. Burned libraries, repeated orgies of vandalism, accidental fires, Christian persecutions and autos-da-fé, earthquakes, the media revolution that replaced papyrus with parchment and presented the copyists, sectarian zealots of Christ, with a choice between the documents to be saved and those to be cast into outer darkness . . . Then there were the liberties taken by monks who established editions by ancient authors to which they added what they considered (with the hindsight of the conquerors) to be missing. It all added up to a philosophical nightmare.

Nothing of what remains can be trusted. The Christian archives are the result of ideological fabrication. Even the writings of Flavius Josephus, Suetonius, or Tacitus, who mention in a few hundred words the existence of Christ and his faithful in the first century of our era, obey the rules of intellectual forgery. When an anonymous monk recopied the Antiquities of the Jewish historian Josephus (arrested and turned into a double agent, a collaborator with Roman power), when that monk had before him the Annals of Tacitus or Suetonius’s Lives of Twelve Caesars (and was astonished to find no mention of the story he believed in), he added a passage in his own hand and in all good faith, without shame and without a second thought, without wondering whether he was doing wrong or committing a forgery. He could do it the more easily because in those days one did not approach a book with the eye of a modern reader, concerned with the truth and respectful of the authenticity of the text and the author’s rights . . . Even today we read these writers of antiquity in manuscripts copied several centuries after they were written, and contemporaneous with Christian copyists who redeemed their contents by arranging them to swim with the flow of history.

Hysteria crystallized. The ultra-rationalists — from Prosper Alfaric to Raoul Vaneigem — were probably right to deny the historical existence of Jesus. The closed corpus of texts, documents, and information we possess has been pored over for decades without ever producing a definitive conclusion or winning general approval. From Jesus the fiction to Jesus the Son of God the spectrum is broad, and the number of theories advanced offers equal justification to the aggressive atheism of the Rationalist Union and to the beliefs of Opus Dei.

What can be said is that the period in which Jesus supposedly appeared teemed with individuals of his kind, fire-breathing prophets, exalted madmen, hysterics convinced of the rightness of their grotesque truths, heralds of apocalypse. A history of that incandescent century would include countless such examples. The Gnostic philosophers themselves proceeded from the millenarian effervescence and fiery lunacy which marked that period of anguish, fear, and change in a world nobody understood. The old was crumbling, splintering, threatening to collapse. And that threatened collapse generated fears to which certain individuals responded with frankly irrational proposals.

On the banks of the Jordan, a region familiar to Jesus and his apostles, a man named Theudas claimed to be Joshua, the prophet of promised salvation (and also an etymon, or earlier form, of the name Jesus) . . . Arriving from his native Egypt with four hundred followers, all spoiling for a fight, he sought an end to Roman power and claimed the ability to divide a river with his words alone, thus allowing his men to advance and put an end to the colonial power. Roman soldiers beheaded this poor man’s Moses before he could display his hydraulic talents.

On another occasion, in 45, Jacob and Simon, sons of Judas the Galilean — yet another place-name familiar to Jesus — began an uprising that ended as badly as that led by their father in the year 6. The Romans crucified the rebels. Menahem, grandson of a family prolific in freedom fighters, followed in his ancestors’ footsteps and rebelled in 66, triggering the Jewish War that ended in 70 with the destruction of Jerusalem.

In this first half of the first century, prophets, messiahs, and bearers of good tidings abounded. Some invited their supporters to follow them into the desert, there to witness prodigies and manifestations of divinity. A visionary from Egypt with forty thousand followers occupied the Garden of Olives, another area associated with Jesus. He claimed that his voice alone could shatter the walls of Jerusalem and lay the city open to his men. Once again, the Roman soldiery dispersed them. Multitudes of stories describe this Jewish determination to unseat Roman power with the sole help of religious, mystical, millenarian, and prophetic discourse announcing the good tidings predicted in the Old Testament.

Their resistance was legitimate: the wish to eject occupying armies seeking to force their language, laws, and customs on the conquered always justifies resistance, rebellion, refusal, and struggle, even armed struggle. But to believe — spurred only by their belief in the impossible — that they could oppose the world’s most battle-tested troops, hardened in all the major conflicts of the day, trained and professional, possessing impressive equipment and full powers, merely transformed their magnificent struggle into battles lost in advance. Brandished like a battle flag before the Roman legions, God was outmatched.

Jesus thus embodied the period’s hysteria, its belief that with goodwill alone and with action undertaken in the name of God, one could conquer and triumph. Breaking down walls with one’s voice instead of with battering rams and siege artillery, crossing rivers with a word and not in military craft worthy of the name, opposing battle-hardened troops with hymns, prayers, and amulets and not with spears, swords, or cavalry: there was nothing there to trouble the Roman army of occupation. Mere scratches on the Roman hide.

The name of Jesus crystallized the diffuse and disparate energies wasted against the imperial machinery of the day. It furnished the emblematic patronymic of all Jews who (armed only with their will and the belief that their God could miraculously free them from the colonial yoke) refused to accept Roman occupation. But if God’s power and his love of his people were so great, surely he could have spared them from having to endure, even briefly, the occupiers’ unjust laws. Why would he tolerate such injustice before encompassing its abolition?

Thus, whether Jesus really lived or not must be reduced to the status of a mere hypothesis. This Jesus may well have been the son of a carpenter and a virgin. He may well have been born in Nazareth, he may well have given lessons as a child to the doctors of the law and spoken as a grown-up to fishermen, craftsmen, and other humble folk working on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. He may well have had more trouble with Jewish communities than with the Roman authorities, accustomed as they were to these sporadic and unimportant rebellions. But he synthesized, focused, sublimated, and crystallized what roiled the period and the history of the first century of his era. Jesus gave a name to Jewish rejection of Roman domination.

Etymology supports this claim. “Jesus” means “God saves, has saved, will save.” There could be no clearer expression of the name’s symbolic freight: his very name pointed to his destiny. The patronymic heralded a future that was already known, and implied that the adventure ahead was written somewhere in a corner of heaven. Thenceforth, history was content to allow its revelation to unfold day by day. How could one imagine that such a given name did not mandate the fulfillment of these earlier prophecies and potentialities? Or what better way of saying that the construction of Jesus implies a forgery reaching down to the smallest details, itself serving as a pretext and an occasion for this ontological catalyst?

~~Atheist Manifesto- The Case Against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam -by- Michel Onfray

Day 259: Hinduism and Modernity

On the morning of Thursday, 21 September 1995, a miracle took place in a Delhi temple. The image of elephant-headed Ganesha drank up the milk offered to him in worship. News of this event spread throughout India and was reported world-wide the next day. Hindus in every continent, in temples and in homes reported that their Ganesha too was drinking the milk offered to him. A barrister reported from Malaysia that the plastic Ganesha on his car dashboard had exhibited the same thirst. The London Guardian of 23 September reported it as ‘probably the first example of global religious fervour propagated by mass telecommunications’.

 This world-wide Hinduism was counterbalanced by the modernity of the national press in India which generally declared it to be no miracle, to be indeed a waste of time and milk – under such headlines as ‘Ganesh Hysteria Peters Out’, ‘Have the Gods had their Fill?’ and ‘Temples Deserted, Rationalists Prove Capillary Action Works Always’. The usual editorial line was that such superstitious credulity was incompatible with the secular and scientific orientation of independent India. Among English-language publications it was left to the Hawaii-published Hinduism Today to lament that ‘in India, which has taught mankind so much about religious tolerance, it is a surprise to see such an antiHindu bias. Years of British “divide and rule” policy, Christian missionary attacks and Marxist influence have created this atmosphere of bias. Lord Ganesha, Guardian of Dharma and Remover of Obstacles, has now revealed this anomalous situation to the entire world.’ That is, Ganesha had deliberately exposed the anti-Hindu bias of the Indian press. Here we see at once the global scope of Hinduism today, the strength of traditional belief, the rational scepticism of the Indian press, and the embattled attitude of the new fundamentalism.

 Ganesha became the first god to span the world instantaneously. What occurred was not simply world-wide reporting of a miracle, but the instantaneous world-wide occurrence of multiple instances of the same miracle. This miracle contrasts with the popular myth wherein the chubby Ganesha opts out of the hassle of circumnavigating the globe: when Shiva offers his two sons a mango as prize for the first to race round the world, six-headed Skanda dashes off on his peacock, while Ganesha merely ambles round his parents to claim the mango, explaining that they are the universe in themselves.
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 Like six-headed Skanda, modernity encircles the globe. Ganesha, with his elephant trunk, pot belly, and plate of sweets, most bizarre of gods to Western eyes, sums up in himself the chaotic variety of Hinduism. Shiva got his sons to run a race. I venture to set Hinduism against modernity: I propose a consideration of Hinduism and modernity by means of which each will cast light on the other. Skanda, of course, is no less profoundly Hindu than Ganesha, an ‘ejaculation’ of Shiva’s semen while Ganesha is made from a fold of Parvati’s sari; Skanda’s origins lie deep in south India. But the rivalry of the two brothers justifies for the moment my metaphor.

 Both Hinduism and modernity are somewhat arbitrary intellectual constructs. Modernity is not a word used in ordinary speech. Modernity is not simply the modern world or modern times; it is the theorization of the modern world. Hinduism too, though an older term than modernity, began as an extraneous, external term for the indigenous religions of India other than the reform movements that became separate, clearly self-identified, religions: Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism. Hinduism comprises Vaishnavism, Shaivism, and Shaktism, themselves refracted in turn into more distinct groupings. Both terms – Hinduism and modernity – constitute theorizations.

 Our point of focus is not India and the West today, though that combination is the background of our investigation, the theatre in which this performance proceeds, the stage that Hinduism and modernity tread. Hinduism is the religion of 80 per cent of Indians, but it has only recently been sharply defined. Modernity is the time in which we all live, but here it is used in the sense of a coherent body of doctrine, a kind of sociological theology, a reified entity. Hinduism as a unit is set out in a stream of mainly Western books; it is mainly Western scholarship that has set out for inspection Hinduism as a ‘world religion’. Modernity is conjoined with endless subjects in hundreds of book titles; its hard core is provided by studies of such authors as Max Weber and Walter Benjamin. The world has become disenchanted, art has lost its aura. For Weber the peculiar conditions of the modern world were to be explained by the uniqueness of Europe; for Benjamin, messianic materialist, modernity is the landscape of the metropolis. For Weber, modern bureaucracy has created an iron cage for mankind; for Benjamin, mankind is seduced by the bright lights of arcades of shops in the big city. These two cult figures for current definers of modernity serve to delimit our view of modernity.

~~Hinduism and Modernity -by- David Smith