There is a myth which the western
intellectual tradition perpetuates about itself: We love the search for
objective truth. The practical reality is that westerners want to conquer (the
world, nature, other cultures). You cannot have both. If you are interested in
conquering, winning, dominating, then you are not really interested in
objectivity. Western thinkers cherry pick the evidence that comprises the
entire world and favor only that which will help them achieve victory over
others. This is true even of the hard sciences. We have our biases and we use
them to win at any cost.
I can put this another way. If
there is one basic bias underlying western tradition, it is that we believe
life is arranged in a hierarchy. There is higher and lower, superior and
inferior (all four of these terms appear frequently throughout Charles Darwin’s
The Origin of Species), and we
further believe that those at the upper end have a right, maybe even a duty, to
conquer and dominate those at the lower end. We deem it the law of life. Live
by it and you gain respect in the world. Defy or ignore it and you deserve
disrespect. Darwin, most scientists, the Mafia, big religions, all sorts of
politicians, and more subscribe to this vision.
It is not just other people and
cultures we treat this way. It is all of nature. Do we study nature to achieve
objective results? I don’t think so. We look for facts that will help us
dominate and control nature. When we find them, we pay close attention. If we
come across anything that does not help our quest for power, we blind ourselves
to it. We simply do not see anything that does not serve the goal of complete
domination.
If this approach to nature sounds
like racism, that’s because it is. Westerners relate to nature in the same way
we relate to human groups. Consider how Jews have traditionally been fit into
the western, Christian world. They have always been regarded as wandering
Aborigines, exiled from their aboriginal home. Like Aborigines everywhere, they
are seen as an obstacle to the progress of empire. Jews are small, a nuisance,
and will never truly assimilate.
Jews have never dreamed of
conquering the world, neither its souls or its territories. The biblical dream
of Jewish culture was to have a relatively small homeland with well-defined
borders. No empire for Jews. In the Torah, God does not especially like the
state, let alone an empire. Even the biggest Zionist dream (which most Jews are
not in favor of) is ludicrously small, compared to the dream of many (not all)
Christians and Moslems to conquer the world, or if not the entire world, at
least a large portion of it.
It is because the Jewish dream is
so small that Jews have been considered inferior. Smallness is a sin in western
culture. All Aborigines are disrespected because their cultures stand, or are
perceived to stand, in the way of greatness and progress. That bin Laden guy
was fond of calling Israel “that puny little state.” For many Christians, it
has always been “that puny little religion.”
What about the historical, Jewish
Jesus? In his time, there was a Jewish tradition, which he too embraced, that chutzpah (an Aramaic word) towards
fellow human beings was bad, but chutzpah
towards God, especially a grandiose God, was a good thing. God encouraged Jews
to challenge abuse of power by human beings (like western Europe’s empires) by
respecting them when they challenged abuse of power by God. If you can say no
to God, you can say no to human political leaders.
So Abraham will challenge God at
Sodom and Gomorrah and request him to give these people due process before he
judges them. Moses does the same when God inflicts Miriam with leprosy. Moses
demands a reconsideration of her case because here too God failed to follow due
process. This is what Jewish civilization was heading towards.
The idea of western civilization
has been to flip this and teach instead a phony reverence for God while
practicing chutzpah towards other
human beings. And since Jewish culture has never joined or endorsed this
western tradition, it is considered inferior and possibly worthy of
extermination. That has been the logic of western civilization towards all
cultures that do not bow down and obey the western imperative of total
domination.
Aboriginal cultures have usually
been content with the small. That has long been the key Jewish sin and failing
in the eyes of the west. The U.S. Constitution at its best also embraces
smallness—the humblest and the highest class in theory stand equal before the
law. The rule of law means to defend the smallest. I would trace this idea at
least as far back as John Locke who was a keen reader of Torah, the Jewish
Constitution. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court has not understood the U.S.
Constitution this way. It has followed western imperialism and has generally
had more regard for the powerful than for the powerless. With only a few
exceptions, the Court has never been that interested in defending the small.
Objectively speaking, the small
have played as great a role in evolution as the powerful and dominant. Nature
produced both and without favoritism. The small and weak are not one of
nature’s mistakes. Like the U.S. Constitution, again at its best, nature has
regard for all. Everything that comes into existence is, in a sense, loved by
nature. There are no defects. The judgment that some forms of life are
defective is exactly that. It is a subjective judgment. Success, failure,
superior, inferior—these are all subjective ideas which serve western empires
but little else.
If we want to reach objectivity
in our knowledge of the world, we might have to knock down our pretentious
systems of knowledge and start all over again, Go back to the beginning and
discover our true human origins.
© 2019 Leon Zitzer
