Isegoria

In The Blood of Martyrs, Lee Harris explains a perspective that’s quite foreign to most of us:

Banners are flying today in Gaza that read: ‘The blood of martyrs has led to liberation.’ They are the banners of the popular militant Palestinian group Hamas, and they enunciate an unpleasant truth that proponents of the so called peace process would be well advised to ponder. Translated from the language of hagiography, the message of the banners is blazingly transparent: Terrorism works. It gets us what we want. Look what the intifada was able to achieve: the liberation of Gaza. Just think what more terrorism can do for our cause. If the blood of martyrs has led to the liberation of Gaza, may we not expect the blood of martyrs to lead to the liberation of Jerusalem. As the popular Palestinian T-shirt says, ‘Today Gaza, tomorrow Jerusalem.’

In The Future of Tradition, Lee Harris looks at the battle between reason and tradition:

America has been in the midst of a culture war for some time and will probably remain so for some time longer. But culture war is not peculiar to this country. Indeed, there have been at least three great culture wars fought in the course of Western history, including one contemporaneous with the rise of the Sophists in ancient Greece, the epoch identified with the French Enlightenment and the German Aufklärung, and our own current battle. The first two ended in disaster for the societies in which they occurred — the outcome of the third is still pending.

Each of these wars has its own particular antagonists, each its own weapons of combat, each its own battlefield. But the essential nature of a culture war is invariant: A set of traditional values comes under attack by those who, like the Greek Sophist, the French philosophe, and the American intellectual, make their living by their superior proficiency in handling abstract ideas, and promote a radically new and revolutionary set of values. This is precisely what one would expect from those who excel in dispute and argumentation.

In every culture war the existing customs and traditions of a society are called to the bar of reason and ruthlessly interrogated and cross-examined by an intellectual elite asking whether they can be rationally justified or are simply the products of superstition and thus unworthy of being taken seriously by enlightened men and women.

Read the whole article. There’s even a bit of a zinger near the end.

Lee Harris, author of Civilization and Its Enemies, asks, Do We All Worship the Same God?:

Starting from the premise first articulated by Xenophanes, and later developed by Feuerbach and Marx, the atheist can immediately see that the religious illusions of men will naturally reflect the immediate world, both natural and social, in which they have been reared and in which they must struggle to survive.

For a warrior elite, the gods will live lives very much like their own. There will be plenty of battles, much drinking and carousing, and a wanton disregard of all sexual proprieties. For those who must toil so that the warrior elite can live the same life as their indolent hell-raising gods, these gods will naturally appear to be capricious and dangerous — forces to be appeased and placated, like the warrior elite itself.

On the other hand, consider those men who have created communities in which hard work, and not brute courage, is the key to high status — what kind of god do you think they will project upon the heavens? Certainly not the worthless bums of the warrior pantheon. Indeed, the first step that such a community will naturally take in the religious field will be to debunk the gods of the warrior elite.

The semi-legendary Persian religious reformer Zoroaster is the paradigmatic example of this debunking process. In his eyes, the old gods of the warrior pantheon were nothing more than demons — and as demons they deserved to be hated and reviled, and not worshipped and groveled before. In their place, Zoroaster offered an entirely new vision of a supreme god of light and truth — a hardworking god who was constantly aiding and helping out the good peaceful hardworking people, and fighting valiantly against the demons from the dark side.

If you had asked Zoroaster if we all worship the same god, he would have quickly told you that no we don’t. Some worship demons; others worship a god of light.

The atheist, on hearing Zoroaster’s response, would say that neither the demons nor the god of light really existed; yet if he were a sociologist of religion, he would be bound to notice the difference in the way in which these two radically distinct illusions have manifested themselves in human communities. Indeed, he would be forced to conclude that there was in fact nothing that distinguished societies more than the illusions that they entertain about the divine. The Aztecs worshipped cruel and ruthless gods who demanded mounds of freshly ripped out human hearts; the Zoroastrians worshipped a god of light who spent day and night watching over men, struggling against evil and working always for the good. Both forms of worship were based, from our point of view, on pure illusion — and yet what a profound difference it makes to a society which illusion it chooses to go with.

Few things matter more than how men chose to deceive themselves.

Lee Harris asks Who Separated Church and State?, and answers, only semi-ironically, Jesus:

Imagine going to a Roman citizen circa 33 AD and asking him to explain the dividing line between the Roman state and the Roman religion. He would scratch his head in puzzlement. For the Roman, the state was the church, and the church was the state: the same entity performed both civic functions and religious duties. But if you had gone to Galilee at about the same time, you might have encountered a man who taught another doctrine — a revolutionary one.

This man, Jesus of Nazareth, when asked the question whether it was lawful to pay taxes to support the Roman state, replied: ‘Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and unto God that which is God’s.’

The religious community, according to Jesus, must have nothing to do with the state — which is why the Romans with their purely civic religion hated so passionately the religion he founded. These new-fangled atheist Christians, instead of permitting their god to be worshipped along side the normal gods of all other peoples, refused to abide by the rules that governed Rome’s civic religion, which was the rule of tolerance: I accept your gods if you accept ours. But these Christians, like the Jews from whom they came, not only refused to accept other people’s gods along side their own jealous god; they didn’t even think that other peoples’ gods were gods at all. At best, they might be demons — but in every case, what other men called gods were not, in the eyes of the Jews and the Christian, worthy of being worshipped. Their motto was not our god is better than your god, but our god alone is god.

Nothing could have been more politically incorrect to the collective mind of the Romans than this bizarre monotheistic fanaticism. For the placing of a god over and above the state, a god who could not be regulated by the priests appointed by the state, what else could this mean than the establishment of a higher and emphatically separate authority than that provided by the state, namely the church — and, naturally, a church that would operate in complete autonomy from the state, in no way dependent upon the state for its survival.

In The Cosmopolitan Illusion, Lee Harris weighs patriotism against cosmopolitanism. In the process, he describes how the Roman system transcended family or clan:

Families and kin can clearly work well together, but the source of their cohesion is simultaneously the source of their weakness: Either one is a member of the family or the tribe or else one is not. If not, you never will be, and you know it. But this law does not apply to societies in which the primary unit is a group able to work together — a team, and not the family. This, according to Livy’s account, is how we are to understand the secret of Rome’s initial rise to greatness: It was made up of people who could work together precisely because family could not and did not matter to them. This meant that they were free to organize and cooperate without the structural tensions that arise when there are a number of different families, each vying for positions of prestige, prominence, and power, and leading in their contentious train all sorts of juvenile rabble-rousers.

Comparing America to Rome and Iraq to Scythia is left as an exercise for the reader.