Tuesday, May 28, 2019

CONQUERING THE WORLD—WITH BIAS TOWARDS ALL AND OBJECTIVITY FOR NONE


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