On God and Individual Liberty
This little essay is written in response to a post over at The Smallest Minority. I didn't want to overwhelm Kevin's comments section, so that's why my response is here. Please be sure to read this and the respective comments before reading what follows.
--
Kevin, we already have a natural experiment: the French Revolution vs. the American Revolution. It's obvious what works and what doesn't work.
Reason is helpless against the fact that human existence is ironic. The more we try to reason the worse it gets. Where in the history of the world has pure reason ever led to anything good? It hasn't. Ever. Show me where, through pure reason, humans have elevated themselves above the muck and mire. The pinnacle of everything that is good has happended in America and because of a belief in God.
Reason will destroy you. Reason is almost always rooted in the short term, and the short term is always misleading. By reasoning you'll always do the exact opposite of what you should do. Hard lessons learned over time through trial and error are the basis for things like the Protestant/puritan way of life. What seems unreasonable in the short term, like restrictions on sexual behavior, prevent destruction in the long term: rampant, unchecked sexual behavior is ultimately destructive of both the individual and society (look at the inner cities if you don't believe me). Religion acts as a store of wisdom, learned through trial and error -- and it doesn't make sense to the rational mind. What is most pleasurable in the short term is destructive in the long term. And that's why the French Revolution turned to utter sh-t.
I read your essay. If I understand correctly, the thesis is that freedom is a natural consequence of reason + technology. You believe that people naturally come to the idea that liberty is the ultimate thought that anyone can have; it's just a matter of time, and people will realize, "Ah-hah! everyone should be free!" Well, every person thinks that HE (and maybe his friends) should be free, but everyone else is an idiot who needs to be subjugated (Hillary Clinton is a perfect example of this). The hard thought is, "Even that idiot over there should be free." That doesn't come naturally.
The ultimate denial of freedom is slavery. The vast majority of societies in history have been based on slavery and it's still happening today. (In fact, there's an interesting story in the news today about how seven thousand slaves in Niger didn't bother to show up to be emancipated. Which goes to show that you don't just tell people they're free and that's that; it's more complicated.) But who ended slavery worldwide? Evangelical Christians. And why? Because they believe that God has given each person in existence unalienable rights, and they believe that everyone deserves to exercise free will. So why didn't reasonable people like the Greeks, (who invented logic, for crying out loud), reason that they should free their slaves? Because everyone believes in freedom for themselves. Christians, on the other hand, who are oftentimes very unreasonable, went around promoting freedom and individual liberties all over the place. If reason had been enough to bring about individual liberties, then the Greeks would have invented it.
Then we have the French Revolution (what was it, Liberty, Fraternity, Equality?) and look what happened. Reason led them to "the Terror," an absolute abuse of power. And then it led to Napoleon. That's where reason got people. People are fundamentally irrational. Ideas don't sway people, it's feelings about ideas that sway people. If ideas themselves were powerful, then the world would turn on pithy arguments. We are ultimately emotional beings, and anyone who doesn't realize that doesn't understand how humans work.
For many hundreds of years Germany was a good place for Jews to live. Then Hitler came in and the Jews, who were very admirable people, turn into raving monsters in the German mind. This is what's known as a reversal of value reaction. Hitler played on things that were important to Germans: they were told that they are the most wonderful people ever (the superior Aryans or whatever), but they needed someone to which to compare who were as vile in comparsion as Germans were wonderful -- Jews. That's how people think, unless they have this tremendous belief that holds them in check. That belief is God who gives rights to everybody, and nobody is allowed to take them away; God is at every moment watching and judging you, and he's gonna send you to hell with a pitchfork up your arse if you're not careful.
Humanists are the great defenders of reason. But the most powerful reasoner in the world who reasons from one faulty assumption is totally screwed. Look at how many people believed the earth was the center of the universe, and they were all wrong. How about geometrists, the ultimate deductive reasoners, who got one silly assumption wrong (the parallel postulate) and were misled for two thousand years. With pure reason you end up with philosopher kings who deny everyone freedom. Reason by itself will lead the human race astray. You must start with something that is bigger than any person, group, or nation: God-given liberties, free will that should be exercised, and ultimate judgement of how one treats other people. The proof that the Protestant belief in God is truly dynamic and effective is that it was Evangelical Christians who ended slavery worldwide. Nobody else did. You have to deal with this historical proof somehow -- what is the explanation? And one of the most magnificent documents ever written, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, came from the Protestant American Christian society. Again, why?
You judge a system of beliefs by what it leads to. Reason leads to sh-t. Belief in God leads to freedom.
--
Kevin, we already have a natural experiment: the French Revolution vs. the American Revolution. It's obvious what works and what doesn't work.
Reason is helpless against the fact that human existence is ironic. The more we try to reason the worse it gets. Where in the history of the world has pure reason ever led to anything good? It hasn't. Ever. Show me where, through pure reason, humans have elevated themselves above the muck and mire. The pinnacle of everything that is good has happended in America and because of a belief in God.
Reason will destroy you. Reason is almost always rooted in the short term, and the short term is always misleading. By reasoning you'll always do the exact opposite of what you should do. Hard lessons learned over time through trial and error are the basis for things like the Protestant/puritan way of life. What seems unreasonable in the short term, like restrictions on sexual behavior, prevent destruction in the long term: rampant, unchecked sexual behavior is ultimately destructive of both the individual and society (look at the inner cities if you don't believe me). Religion acts as a store of wisdom, learned through trial and error -- and it doesn't make sense to the rational mind. What is most pleasurable in the short term is destructive in the long term. And that's why the French Revolution turned to utter sh-t.
I read your essay. If I understand correctly, the thesis is that freedom is a natural consequence of reason + technology. You believe that people naturally come to the idea that liberty is the ultimate thought that anyone can have; it's just a matter of time, and people will realize, "Ah-hah! everyone should be free!" Well, every person thinks that HE (and maybe his friends) should be free, but everyone else is an idiot who needs to be subjugated (Hillary Clinton is a perfect example of this). The hard thought is, "Even that idiot over there should be free." That doesn't come naturally.
The ultimate denial of freedom is slavery. The vast majority of societies in history have been based on slavery and it's still happening today. (In fact, there's an interesting story in the news today about how seven thousand slaves in Niger didn't bother to show up to be emancipated. Which goes to show that you don't just tell people they're free and that's that; it's more complicated.) But who ended slavery worldwide? Evangelical Christians. And why? Because they believe that God has given each person in existence unalienable rights, and they believe that everyone deserves to exercise free will. So why didn't reasonable people like the Greeks, (who invented logic, for crying out loud), reason that they should free their slaves? Because everyone believes in freedom for themselves. Christians, on the other hand, who are oftentimes very unreasonable, went around promoting freedom and individual liberties all over the place. If reason had been enough to bring about individual liberties, then the Greeks would have invented it.
Then we have the French Revolution (what was it, Liberty, Fraternity, Equality?) and look what happened. Reason led them to "the Terror," an absolute abuse of power. And then it led to Napoleon. That's where reason got people. People are fundamentally irrational. Ideas don't sway people, it's feelings about ideas that sway people. If ideas themselves were powerful, then the world would turn on pithy arguments. We are ultimately emotional beings, and anyone who doesn't realize that doesn't understand how humans work.
For many hundreds of years Germany was a good place for Jews to live. Then Hitler came in and the Jews, who were very admirable people, turn into raving monsters in the German mind. This is what's known as a reversal of value reaction. Hitler played on things that were important to Germans: they were told that they are the most wonderful people ever (the superior Aryans or whatever), but they needed someone to which to compare who were as vile in comparsion as Germans were wonderful -- Jews. That's how people think, unless they have this tremendous belief that holds them in check. That belief is God who gives rights to everybody, and nobody is allowed to take them away; God is at every moment watching and judging you, and he's gonna send you to hell with a pitchfork up your arse if you're not careful.
Humanists are the great defenders of reason. But the most powerful reasoner in the world who reasons from one faulty assumption is totally screwed. Look at how many people believed the earth was the center of the universe, and they were all wrong. How about geometrists, the ultimate deductive reasoners, who got one silly assumption wrong (the parallel postulate) and were misled for two thousand years. With pure reason you end up with philosopher kings who deny everyone freedom. Reason by itself will lead the human race astray. You must start with something that is bigger than any person, group, or nation: God-given liberties, free will that should be exercised, and ultimate judgement of how one treats other people. The proof that the Protestant belief in God is truly dynamic and effective is that it was Evangelical Christians who ended slavery worldwide. Nobody else did. You have to deal with this historical proof somehow -- what is the explanation? And one of the most magnificent documents ever written, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, came from the Protestant American Christian society. Again, why?
You judge a system of beliefs by what it leads to. Reason leads to sh-t. Belief in God leads to freedom.
14 Comments:
"You judge a system of beliefs by what it leads to. Reason leads to sh-t. Belief in God leads to freedom."
Except when it doesn't.
We've already been through this, I thought. Belief in God resulted in the Crusades. Belief in God resulted in the Salem Witch Trials. Belief in God resulted in The massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Eve. You ably defend Protestantism, but seem to neglect to acknowledge that Protestantism is the result of that triad I spoke of: The ability to reason, the free exchange of information, and the ability to defend that which is yours. Else Protestantism would have never arisen, since the Catholic church would have crushed it utterly. It certainly tried.
Yours is a spirited defense, and I'll hopefully have an essay up in a week or so (this one's going to take a while to ferment) that will address your point (and a lot else), but suffice it to say that a belief in God is NOT necessary to a belief in freedom. And, even further, a belief in God CAN be an impediment to a belief in freedom. A PROTESTANT belief in God lead to a philosophy of freedom, but that's an exception, not the rule.
Carefull on the witch burning thing. I saw a documentary the other day that was pretty darn convincing that belief in God had about zero to do with the witch burnings.
Apparently, if you overlay a map of rye-growing areas and witch burning areas, they overlap in an uncanny way. It seems that rye can (and often does) grow a nasty sort of fungus that leads to all sorts of nasty hallucinations, miscariages and general wierdness. Backwards, ignorant people of those days, having no scientific way to deal with this, turn to superstitions to resolve the problem. Lack of knowledge, not lack of reason, is the problem here. Anyway...
Exodus 22:18 "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live."
It goes further than just some bad rye wheat. Witch-hunts go back to the 1400's in Europe. But that's beside the point.
The proper translation of Exodus 22:18 should be along the lines of, "Thou shalt not suffer the ministrations of a witch in order to live." It's the Hebrew equivalent of "an apple a day keeps the doctor away."
Whether the Salem folks misinterpreted the Bible or not isn't really the issue here, anyway. You're operating on the assumption that these people would have behaved better if they hadn't been Christian, which isn't true. I'll substantiate this and respond to the other stuff later when I have more time.
It isn't just the Salem folks, and we're getting off topic here anyway.
My point is that Sarah's assertion that "Belief in God leads to freedom" has proven true pretty much only for Protestantism, and not for any other version of any other religion. The example of the Salem witch trials was only one small manifestation of the myriad ways in which an interpretation of holy writ has lead to fundamentally liberty-crushing behavior by adherents to a faith.
Sarah holds up the example of the failure of France's revolution as a failure of reason to support freedom, I hold up several examples of the failure of "belief in God" to do the same, and illustrate that her example of Protestantism as the the one true way is dependent not necessarily on God, but on the ability to reason, the free exchange of information and ideas, and the ability of individuals to defend themselves against infringement of those rights which they ascertain by reason are theirs.
As I said, without any one of those three supports, Protestantism would have been crushed by Catholicism, and Catholics certainly have a "belief in God."
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Argh, I hate not being able to edit comments. Here's a re-post.
Yes, there is certainly a freedom-crushing aspect to religion, and we see the hideous results of this in the news every day. So, let me qualify what I said earlier (I originally had a footnote to this effect, but deleted it): belief in a reasonable, loving God, who has a purpose for us and created a universe with consistent and knowable laws leads to freedom.
So we have this triad of freedom that you list as: "the ability to reason, the free exchange of information and ideas, and the ability of individuals to defend themselves against infringement of ... rights..." Let's look at each one of these individually. Protestants believe that God endowed us with the ability to reason, and that we are obligated to use it. (Nature, on the other hand, makes no such demand.) One of the greatest inventions in the history of mankind, which greatly facilitated the free exchange of ideas, is the Gutenberg press; what was the very first thing Gutenberg published? The Bible. And Protestants understood that the ability to defend oneself is made a whole lot easier by being a person of means, which is why they created so much wealth.
But here's the main thing. There is, to my knowledge, not a single instance where any movement based purely on reason has resulted in anything good. The only movements that have ever produced freedom for all have been based on Christianity. So, while not all religion produces freedom, all freedom comes from religion -- specifically, a belief in the Protestant God.
You can't ignore the historical fact that the only people who ended the most egregious denial of freedom -- slavery -- were Christians. How do you explain this, Kevin? You also have to be able to explain why every humanist revolution has ended in total disaster. This is the crux of my argument. You want to know the tree, you look at the fruit. You want to know the worth of a belief-system, you look at what it produces.
"You can't ignore the historical fact that the only people who ended the most egregious denial of freedom -- slavery -- were Christians. How do you explain this, Kevin? You also have to be able to explain why every humanist revolution has ended in total disaster. This is the crux of my argument. You want to know the tree, you look at the fruit. You want to know the worth of a belief-system, you look at what it produces."
How many "humanist revolutions" have there been? How many successful efforts to win freedom?
The point of my essay "Those Without Swords" was to illustrate that the march to freedom took literally centuries - if not millenia - because all three of the fundamental supports had to be present for freedom to win out. Your argument seems to be that a fourth - belief in a specific version of Christianity - is also necessary.
(Just an aside: You are correct that Gutenberg's first major project was the Bible, but note that without the printing press, Luther's 95 Theses would never have made it beyond the doors of the Wittenburg church. It was the power of that device that spread those ideas to people who would use reason on them - and Luther was protesting the established Church.)
So the one successful experiment in individual liberty can be traced back to Protestant Christian roots - I won't deny that, nor do I need to. But is Protestant Christianity another essential ingredient to a viable philosophy of individual rights? I don't think so, and I don't think that you can prove it is so. Just as "humanist revolutions" have failed, so might one succeed. Just because we cannot point to one (individual rights being a pretty new idea, culturally) does not indicate its impossibility. As I quoted Rand, "The concept of individual rights is so new in human history that most men have not grasped it fully to this day."
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Double-GRRR! Blogger ate my code. Here's another try.
"But is Protestant Christianity another essential ingredient to a viable philosophy of individual rights? I don't think so, and I don't think that you can prove it is so."
If you're asking for a deductive proof that Protestant Christianity is the fourth fundamental support, then you are correct that I can't provide that. But I have historical proof.
First, however, I want to ask you which of the three ingredients for freedom -- reason, flow of information, ability to defend -- Russia and Germany didn't have before they went the totalitarian route. Didn't they have all three, just as the United States did? Why did they end up with communism and Nazism while the United States ended up with freedom?
You are arguing that the triad is sufficient for freedom to emerge. Let's use a car as an analogy for freedom and examine this. With your model, we have an engine, a transmission, and a chassis, and that's supposed to be sufficient. But, it's not. You also need a belief-system -- values -- which constitute the steering wheel of the car. So, which belief system works? One of the belief systems out there contending for world domination is the puritan culture (based on Protestant Christianity), which led to freedom, but we know historically that it's the only one so far that has worked. What other belief sytsems have been powerful enough to command power over lots of people? (There are lots of different belief systems out there, Objectivism for instance, but if it has a small following we have to consider it irrelevant for the purposes of this discussion.) Muslim culture, which has produced islamism, is another major contender. But islamism would destroy freedom, because its highest value is state-enforced virtue. (BTW, if you want a really good explanation of all this, I highly recommend reading Dinesh D'Souza's latest book, What's So Great About America.) But there's a third culture vying for power, which is the humanist Western European/Canadian culture, whose chief value is state-enforced equality of outcome. This would destroy freedom and individual rights no less than state-enforced virtue. (There is a great quote by Milton Friedmann that is relevant here, "A society that puts equality -- in the sense of equality of outcome -- ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests.") There's also a fourth great culture promoting a fourth great political principle ("great" in the sense of having some weight) and related set of values, and that is Chinese culture, in which obedience is considered the highest good. Of course, obedience conflicts with individual freedom, and it's the reason China will never be able to compete with America as long as America is free.
Only one of these cultures is committed to freedom. You can come up with any sort of fantasy system you want, but we have to talk about what's really happening. The only way to currently preserve freedom is to support puritan culture. You don't have to be a Christian to do so (lots of people from all different backgrounds come to America to take part in the puritan culture), but puritan culture would become an empty shell without a belief in God. The whole reason people are willing to go to war in large numbers is the belief in God and an eternal set of right and wrong; a belief that God is watching and judging. Take those beliefs away, and you've got nothing.
I heartily believe that the puritan culture, rooted in the Protestant faith, is the fourth necessary ingredient for freedom. Or think of it this way, the triad are the seeds of freedom, but the puritan culture is the seedbed that allows freedom to grow. Without the puritan culture, the seeds fall on cement.
"Just because we cannot point to one (individual rights being a pretty new idea, culturally) does not indicate its impossibility."
I think you're coming perilously close to the old argument, "Just because communism/socialism hasn't worked so far doesn't mean it can't in the future." Which is true in a sense. I can't prove deductively that communism won't fail after an infinite number of tries, and I can't prove that in ten thousand years a new culture won't come along that can produce freedom without a belief in God. But if you want to talk about what is relevant in the present and the foreseeable future, then we have to address, historically, what has worked and what hasn't. We've only managed to arrive at freedom with a system that has an overriding belief in a loving and just God who demands we live up to His image. How many people have been motivated by your kind of belief system, Kevin? The true test is, how many people does it motivate? Most importantly, does it motivate them to preserve other people's freedom? The only system to pass that test is the puritan culture rooted in the Protestant faith.
I said earlier, "I can't prove deductively that communism won't fail after an infinite number of tries..."
Actually, I think I can prove that deductively, but that's the subject of another discussion.
Er, rather, I can prove that communism will fail after an infinite number of tries; i.e. communism can't work.
You know, we had this discussion already back in July? I found it quite by accident a couple of days ago looking for something to post to The Best of Me Symphony. Remember It's Not ALL Faith?
Yep, I sure do. (I also remember promising to respond to your comments and I never did.)
Post a Comment
Testing ...
<< Home