It is a curious, surely not insignificant observation that the universe appears (or appears to appear) to us in a comprehensible way. Children, for example, prior to any specific instruction, are capable of discerning emotions on faces, finding patterns in numbers and predicting with admirable precision the path that a ball makes through the air. As an adult living in the 21st century, we can be similarly amazed by the extent to which our universe seems to make itself understandable enough to us for its behaviour to be expressed in the language of mathematics. It is difficult not to be taken in by the elegant efficiency of Newtonian laws, for example, which compress the behaviour of physical phenomena into a few simple formulae, each containing just a handful of variables. With such examples in mind, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the universe is ordered according to a rational plan, designed to obey laws amenable to human understanding.
It is this conclusion, certainly, that many theologians would like us to reach. With all other avenues of "natural theology" blocked off by the march of scientific progress, the role of God in nature has since been resigned to the above observation: that the universe is, and could only ever be, the way it is due to the premeditated design of some rational creator. Superficially, the argument doesn't appear to be without merit: even some non-theistic scientists have marvelled at the fact that the universe is comprehensible to us to the extent that it is. There is no inherent reason for the universe to have made itself comprehensible to us, so we are right to find something remarkable in the fact that we can explain certain facets of the universe with such extreme precision and, what is more, that these explanations appear to be true for all places at all times. Is this necessarily a sign that the universe is inherently rational, though?
One trouble with using the word "laws" to explain the behaviour of the universe is that we've inadvertently introduced an anthropic concept to explain otherwise inert, purposeless objects and events. A "law", of course, is something that is designed with forethought to control or modify the behaviour of people in a society. When we use "law" to describe physical phenomena, then, we inadvertently smuggle in a package of unintended theological implications. If there are "laws", afterall, and physical phenomena obey these "laws", then that immediately implies the existence of a law-maker who intended to control or modify the physical phenomena to facilitate the development of some teleological end. This a consequence of the poverty of the current terminology, and in lieu of replacing such terms with more teleologically neutral language, we must instead endeavour to explore why the "laws" of the universe are not the kind of "laws" that necessitate a law-maker.
The first observation to make is that all physical laws have necessarily been designed by human beings. The universe did not appear to us with any kind of comprehensible blueprint, so whatever regularities we observe in the universe have had to be mined from nature through years of dedicated observation and number-crunching. That is, if the "laws" of nature are presently clear, comprehensible and rational to us, they certainly weren't to the ancients, who were no less intelligent or perceptive than we are. So let us be clear on this: it is we who superimpose our "laws" onto the phenomena we observe in the universe, not the universe which imposes its inherently rational nature onto our consciousness. An example used by Stephen Hawking is to imagine the kind of laws a goldfish might create to explain his world from the confines of its bowl. It could (were it sufficiently clever) certainly invent some rules that were true from its vantage point (which would include the refraction of light as it hit the fishbowl, hence why the universe would appear to be inherently curved to the fish) but that these rules plainly wouldn't be universal for the simple reason that they probably would not be applicable to those who live beyond the confines of a fishbowl. Hawking uses this example to posit the idea that "there is no theory-independent concept of reality".1 This is not to say that all attempts at an objective explanation of universal phenomena are futile, or that we should all collapse into solipsistic despair as prisoners of our own mind with no possibility of ever accessing "true" reality, but simply that all the physical "laws" we create are necessarily mere "approximations" of reality that constitute our attempts at imposing rationality upon nature, rather than the discernment of rationality in nature itself. This is why scientific theories can be supplanted despite never really being shown to be wrong (or definitively right): the latter theory simply constitutes a better approximation of reality than the one which preceded it.
Allow me to illustrate with an example, shamelessly cribbed from Isaac Asimov's Essay, The Relativity of Wrong. For most people in the ancient world, it was accepted wisdom that the world was flat. For the first several thousand years of human existence, people had no way of knowing that they actually lived upon the surface of a three dimensional sphere. We may smirk now at their naivete, but in truth they weren't far wrong. At the human scale, the curvature of the earth is extremely slight, almost exactly zero. When building a house or undertaking a car journey we can safely disregard the curvature of the Earth entirely: that is to say, to treat it as though it were flat and two-dimensional. We know now that the Earth is not flat, of course, but for most human endeavours, if we proceed under the assumption that it is, then we will not be penalised for it. In a purely pragmatic sense, the flat Earth theory is correct enough to correctly guide us upon the undertaking of most everyday activities.
Next it was realised that the Earth was actually three-dimensional in shape, and that if one started walking in one direction that one would eventually return to the point at which one started, rather than falling of the edge of the Earth. It was therefore presumed that the Earth was spherical in shape, a misapprehension shared by most people down to this very day. For although it is true that the Earth closely resembles a sphere, due to the influence of centrifugal forces it is actually wider around the equator than it is from pole to pole. Thus, although the spherical Earth theory is more correct than the flat Earth which preceded it (more correct in the sense that it is able to make accurate predictions for a wider variety of phenomena) it still fails to accurately depict the state of nature so as to conform to our best, most precise observations. Though the story doesn't even end here: according to Asimov at least, there is actually slightly more mass in the Earth's southern hemisphere than in its northern hemisphere, thus making it ever so slightly pear-shaped. So note the progress here: each theory along the way has been correct on its own terms, in the sense that it can be used accurately as the basis for some action or prediction, though there is also a definite progression towards being more "correct. It is clear, for example, that spherical Earth theory is more correct than the flat Earth theory, the distended sphere theory is more correct than the sphere theory and so on. As our body of evidence grows and changes, earlier theories come to be displaced by theories that better fit the evidence.
Another example - perhaps more pertinent to the topic at hand - is the progression in our understanding of the movement of the planets. It is the elegant, almost metronomic order of planetary orbits that epitomise the theologians insistence that this rationally comprehensible universe could only be the product of some divine watchmaker. Indeed, the regularity of the planetary movements through the sky have long been used by religious authorities as evidence of divinity in the universe. For the ancients - including the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Mayans and so on - the planets themselves were gods, their daily wandering across the sky associated with the personalities of the divine. Venus, for example, was commonly linked to gods of love and fertility in the ancient world. Again, it may be tempting to snigger at such naivete, but when we consider that the appearance cycle of Venus (the period during which it is visible in the night sky) occurs in periods of around 260 days - almost exactly the same period a human pregnancy takes - we can begin to see that the connection makes sense. In fact, doubtless the ancient Mayan theologians would have tried to tell us that the universe must be rationally ordered to some divine plan, because the simultaneity of the human reproduction cycle and the cycle of the fertility God in the sky is simply too perfect to be the result of mere chance or coincidence. Furthermore, the astrological tables drawn up by these ancient cultures could still be used today to predict the future positions of planets in the sky. Within the social context that they lived, the astrological "theories" the ancients proffered concerning the movement of the planets in the sky were perfectly rational and perfectly consistent with the data that they had so assiduously collated.
Next came the Greeks, who believed - for theological reasons as much as for scientific ones - that the universe must be ordered to according to perfect geometric principles, expressible in simple mathematical formulae. Ptolemy, rejecting the crass arbitrariness of astrological tables, took it upon himself to find some universal order in the movement of the planets during the sky, some pattern expressible in the perfect language of geometry. His solution was a geocentric model comprised of nested spheres and epicycles, based, he claimed, on over 800 years of observations. The model he proposed was in some sense an improvement on what came before it, and like the astrological tables of the ancients, we could still use Ptolemy's model today to predict the movement of planets relatively accurately for a period of at least some months or years (the accuracy of the more distant, slower moving planets would hold for longer than those of the inner planets, particularly Mercury, whose orbit wasn't well understood until the 20th century).
The next major development came with Nicolaus Copernicus who was the first to develop a heliocentric model of the solar system, and while again we can view it is an improvement over what came before it due to its correct placement of the sun at the centre of the solar system, it still contained a fatal inaccuracy that limited the long-term scope of its predictive powers. Like the Greeks before him, Copernicus believed that the universe must be order according to some perfect schema, namely one based on perfect circles. As the planets actually revolve along elliptic orbits, it wasn't until Isaac Newton elucidated his laws for the movement of the planets in his masterful Principia Mathematica that we had a relatively accurate depiction of our solar system that could be used to predict and explain the movement of the planets over a long period of time. In fact, Newton's theories proved to be so accurate that they are still used today to navigate spacecraft over a distance of millions of kilometres to within an astronomical hair's width of their intended target. In time, however, it was recognised that even Newton's theories fail under particularly extreme circumstances - e.g. in situations involving very high speeds or masses. Newtonian physics therefore came to be replaced by Einsteinian Relativity at the beginning of the 20th century, and even that may not mark the end of our story: the fundamental incompatibility of quantum mechanics and relativity (despite each proving to be powerfully accurate in their own fields of application) hints strongly at the need for the development of some newer theory, of which string theory is just one of the potential candidates.
So again note the development here: at each stage in the understanding of the shape of our planet or the behaviour of bodies in our solar system, human beings have been able to devise seemingly "rational" theories to explain the available observations, and all of the aforementioned were capable of making accurate predictions concerning future events. We must, however, be careful not to presume that our ability to express the patterns of physical behaviour in "rational" terms says anything about the inherent rationality of the universe. The ancient Babylonians could say, with some justification, that the universe must be inherently rational because the fertility god represented by the planet Venus was born and killed with such regularity (one which parallels the human reproductive cycle) that it could only be the work of a divine presence in the world. However, we moderns would be similarly justified in baulking at the suggestion that the explanation proffered by the Mayans could give us any genuine insight into the rational order (or lack thereof) of our universe, as we now know that any correlation between the heavenly cycles of Venus and the human reproductive cycle are entirely coincidental and share no causal relationship. Perhaps, then, our descendants will look back on our curious proclivity to try to explain such complex phenomena in the form of simple, rarefied mathematical language in the same disdainful way that we look back on the proclivity of the ancients to explain such complex phenomena in the form of dying and rising gods. That we are capable of making the universe rationally comprehensible to ourselves is indeed a remarkable achievement, without which our modern world would have proved unrealisable, but we must make sure that our wonder is directed at just that fact - that is, that we can make the universe rationally comprehensible, not that the universe is rational in and of itself.
On this latter point, again we might do well to return to Newton. The simple, elegant laws he devised were - after an initial period of resistance - eventually employed by theologians as evidence for the fact that the universe must be run like clockwork; so ordered and intricate in its construction that it would be literally impossible for it to have come into being without pre-ordained instruction from some all-powerful watchmaker. The argument continues to be used with great regularity among modern theologians, though the sense of awe has been expanded beyond the periodic movement of the planets to deeper cosmological facts (such as the value of the cosmological constant and other physical values) that, frankly, they are not qualified to ruminate upon quite so casually. In any case, the wonderment they express is entirely backwards: these "values" and their relationship to one another were not rationally programmed into the universe, just waiting for some perceptive scientist to reverse engineer them, but rather had to be created and elucidated by these same preceptive minds. Newton didn't simply discern some obvious mathematical relationship governing the movement of bodies in the solar system, he actually had to invent some new method by which he could create some laws. When the existing body of mathematical logic failed to help him in his quest to "uncover" the rational basis of the movement of heavenly bodies, he was actually forced to create an entirely new form of mathematics (calculus) in order to make this movement rationally expressible. In other words, there is nothing about the universe (at least in this case) that makes it inherently amenable to human logic. Where the universe doesn't make itself amenable to human reason in an immediately obvious way, we just happen to have been clever enough on occasion (or, rather, certain pre-eminent members of our species have been clever enough) to devise a new form of logic in which the observed relationships and regularities can be expressed.
And this is something that we are coming to appreciate ever more deeply: the universe does seem to be, in a very fundamental sense, operating on principles that are at best counter-intuitive to human beings, or - perhaps more accurately - deeply and inexorably irrational in nature. In one way, we should expect that world around us - that is, the everyday world, divorced from the loftier concerns of theology - be, in some sense, rationally comprehensible. Our "folk-physics" - our innate ability to predict the flight of a ball in the air, for example - and our ability to express these predictions logically, do seem to be in such a state of consonance with nature which must surely must transcend mere coincidence. Our ability to track a ball through the air, predict its path and then to catch it in our outstretched hands is a feat beyond even the most advanced robots we have been able to develop, and it would be tempting to discern a divine teleology at work in this regard: Earthly physics are so rational - and our minds so rationally attuned to them - that it could again only be the result of divine forethought. While it would be correct to note that there is nothing "coincidental" about the consonance of human rationality and the rationally discernible laws of Earthly physics, the explanation has nothing to do with the divine. We are the product of 4 billion years of evolution that has ruthlessly culled those whose understanding of their immediate environment was subpar: only those with a functional understanding of the physical world (e.g. that falling from a tall cliff would kill you) stood any chance of surviving to produce offspring. Our folk-physics have been slowly refined by this evolutionary process to help us navigate the world in which we live, each minor improvement in our innate understanding of the world being preserved down future generations. So yes there does seem to be a compatibility between our "logic" and the "logic" of physical events on Earth, but we needn't look for divine explanations: given our existence as physical beings and the relentless drive of evolutionary pressures, it simply could not have been any other way.
When we leave our immediate human world and begin to explore the nature of the universe on the smallest and largest scales, however, we find that our intuitive preconceptions about the nature of physical events very quickly cease to conform to reality. We expect the universe to adhere to certain "rules" concerning cause and effect (as Hume noted some three centuries ago) and for objects to adhere universally to rationally discernible principles. We now know, however, that the universe often fails to conform to our expectations in this regard. The most blatant examples can be drawn from the science of quantum physics, where the universe at the most fundamental level has shown itself to be irrational, indeterministic and completely irreconcilable with the expectations of our folk-physics. The completely random (and seemingly uncaused) appearance and disappearance of sub-atomic particles is not possible to square with the idea of a rationally apprehensible universe, as even a suitably well-informed observer (i.e. a god) would have no way of predicting exactly where or when a particle and it's anti-particle might come into existence. As a consequence, even the most mundane predictions concerning the behaviour of objects in the universe turn out to be mere probabilistic statements rather than inviolable natural laws. For example, we can take it for granted that I will not be able to walk through my wall were I to try, yet it turns out that this is merely a statement of probability: it actually isn't impossible for me to walk through my wall (i.e. it's not an inviolable "law" of the universe) it's just overwhelmingly unlikely.2
Such randomness and indeterminacy on the quantum scales may still credibly be dismissed as irrelevant by the believer in the rational universe, however. They may, for example, argue that even if the universe is predicated upon random and indeterminate factors, that on bigger scales determinate laws can still be discerned. That is to say, even if the location of an electron is entirely indeterminate, the location of large groups of electrons (for example, those in my body) appear to behave collectively in ways that are roughly deterministic. In other words, I could try to walk through my wall every day until the end of the universe and could reasonably expect to get the same result every time, which if not strictly an "inviolable law" of the universe surely constitutes the next best thing. Such an argument is problematic, though, because it fails to address the reality that the universe was formed at least in part by completely random factors that even a hypothetical being blessed with omniscience could not have predicted. While it may be true that it is not necessary to take quantum factors into account when presently addressing the orbital path of a planet, say, the argument breaks down when we examine the early history of the universe: at the very beginning, a fraction of a second after the big bang, the universe was still small enough for quantum effects to have a massive influence on the path that the evolution of the universe would take. We now know from our mapping of the early universe that these very early quantum jitters came to have a lasting influence on the shape of the universe, including (most likely) the distribution of matter that may have permitted the formation of galaxies. This prohibits the possibility of the current universe being created with genuine teleological foresight: there is no way that any being - omniscient or otherwise - could have predicted that the universe would emerge with the exact structure it presently has. If we rewound the clock to zero and started the universe again, we would end up with a universe very different from our present one, and this is due entirely to the influence of quantum randomness in the earliest fraction of a second of the universe's being. God may have rationally chosen to create a universe with quantum jitters, but he couldn't have rationally chosen to create a universe with human beings.
Even on bigger scales we find that probability plays a much higher role in the behaviour of matter than could have ever been envisaged by the classical, deterministic physics that the theologians seem to remain beholden to. The distribution of gas in a room, for example, can only really be probabilistically determined. We can take it is as something akin to a "law" that gas in an enclosed space (the air in a room, for example) will tend to distribute itself fairly evenly given enough time. That is, we should expect the air pressure and the distribution of molecules within such a space to be distributed relatively evenly from one cubic centimetre to the next. In actuality, though, there is no physical reason why the molecules of air couldn't find themselves confined only to one side of the room, for example, leaving the other half a complete vacuum. Such a bizarre eventuality wouldn't violate any physical principles, it would just be exceedingly unlikely (in the sense that there are far more ways for the air in a room to be evenly distributed than for the air in a room to be confined entirely to one half). So, even when we're talking about the behaviour of physical processes on scales far greater than that of the quantum level, we find that these process are often not governed by rationally discernible "laws" so much as they are governed by probabilities. Even on distinctly human scales, it seems that God enjoys playing dice.
But we can take such indeterminacy to even greater scales. When it comes to the belief of rationally discernible laws governing physical objects in the universe, there is surely no more elegant example than the aforementioned metronomic movement of planets around the sun. If nothing else in the universe could be said to obey rationally apprehensible laws, expressible in the elegant, efficient language of mathematics, then surely it could still at least be said about the "music of the spheres". In practice, however, when physicists attempt to quantify the gravitational relationship (and therefore the movement and periodicity of planetary orbits) between anything more than three bodies, the mathematics because ungainly and completely unworkable. This is known as the n-Body problem, which remains unsolved. So even here, with something as simple as the orbit of a spacecraft around the Earth, we lack the ability to rationally express or predict with any sort of exactitude the path the spacecraft will take. We could of course get a good approximation by taking into account only the effect of the gravity of the Earth on the spacecraft (and if such approximations weren't pretty close to reality then satellite technology would be entirely impossible) but such a method would only be an approximation of reality, because we have failed to take into account the gravitational influence of the sun and the moon into the equation. And the gist of the n-Body problem is that calculating the orbital path of a spacecraft around the Earth is fundamentally impossible with such precision, because we don't have the mathematical tools to calculate fully the gravitational relationship between all 4 bodies simultaneously.
And so we return to the point I wished to make at the beginning of this post: even where the universe appears to be obeying rational laws, we find that these "laws" are little more than approximations of reality (albeit very good ones) that cannot be treated as reflections of some deeper logic governing the behaviour of physical events in our universe. We will continue to find patterns and regularity in the universe - to do so is part of our nature as a species - and we will continue to create physical "laws" that approximate reality with ever greater precision, but we shouldn't suffer under the conceit that we are therefore "discovering" the laws the were programmed into the universe into the universe from its very beginning. On almost any scale we probe, the universe frequently shows us that it is under no obligation to conform to the expectations of human rationality. Perhaps we should just accept that - certainly at the most fundamental levels - the universe is an impenetrably irrational place.
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1) The Grand Design, Chapter 3.
2) This is a consequence of a phenomenon known as Quantum Tunnelling. Essentially, the precise location of an electron around an atomic nucleus can never be determined with exact precision - this is Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle at work. As such the location of an electron can only be specified fuzzily - as a kind of "cloud" - governed by laws of probability. In principle, there is nothing preventing all of the electrons in your body to "jump", simultaneously, to a location on the other side of the wall, it would just take an unfathomable amount of time for such an event to occur.
Monday, April 1, 2013
Wednesday, November 14, 2012
"The Reason of Unreason" - José Ortega y Gasset and the Revolt of the Masses
In 1930, as Spain teetered on the cusp of fascism, José Ortega y Gasset penned one of his most famous works, The Revolt of the Masses. In approaching this work, we must be mindful of the historical context in which it was born. Spain, at this stage, was mired in an internal struggle for power that would culminate in civil war and the eventual triumph of fascist General Franco, who - with Nazi support - assumed power in 1939. When Ortega wrote this book, the horrors of Franco's regime still lay in the future, but the seeds of this regime - like all such fascisms, predicated on fear, ignorance and a rank form of nationalism - were already being sowed. The nation was crippled by divisions, with the population split into a wide plurality of irreconcilable factions. There were, on one side, the monarchists and Catholics. On the other, the socialists and communists. Many more were caught somewhere in the middle. I do not know for sure, but I imagine that the work in question was to a large extent a reaction to - and warning against - precisely these divisive, popularly led movements.
Reading the book now, we may be taken aback by the disdain Ortega heaps upon "masses", itself a term that even the most shamelessly haughty of us today would baulk at using. For Ortega, the "mass-man" emerges for the first time in the 20th century as a fulcrum of political power, and - as a consequence of his ignorance and his critical lack of preparedness to govern - threatens the very basis of civilization. This "mass-man" fails to understand the lessons of history - forever facing forwards, as he inevitably must, because he believes himself to be the apex of history - and he rejects the possibility of there existing an authority any higher than himself. The culmination of the mass-man's ascent to power lies in the emergence of what Ortega terms "hyperdemocracy", "in which the mass acts directly, outside the law, imposing its aspirations and its desires by means of material pressure". Mass-man, however, lacks the competence to run a state - such a job is presumably best left with the "artisans", as Ortega puts it - and this was the source of Ortega's angst: how could civilization persist in such unworthy hands?
In the largely egalitarian democracies in which we live today ("one man, one vote") such thoughts must strike us as repugnantly conceited, if not outright dangerous. Such open disdain for quotidian folk (I struggle to find a better euphemism for "masses") runs against our modern democratic principles, and one might find it quite easy to draw a direct line from such disdainful views to the eugenic mania of various mid 20th century ideologies. If we start isolating swathes of the population as being somehow below our contempt, then what logical reason do we retain to defend them from persecution or extermination? However, I must defend this work against such charges, since in referring to the "masses" Ortega makes it clear that he has in mind no specific race, class or creed: the overwhelming majority of us comprise this gormless, faceless "mass", so I take Ortega's work predominantly as a warning against "falling in with the herd" (to invoke an unsuitably trite idiom) rather than as the disparaging identification of an inherently defective class of people. To the extent that Ortega has a specific group in mind, it appears to the burgeoning bourgeoisie class, a group - then as now - that scarcely requires our dolorous coddling.
Nonetheless, we exist in a political environment that - quite rightly, for the most part - discourages the gradation of human being into superior or inferior classes. That way, as the crimes of the 20th century still show us, leads to the greatest realisations of misery. The political zeitgeist of the current age is increasingly one of toleration, mutual respect and individual sovereignty - once again, we can count our blessings that it should be so. However, for all the unquestionable benefits of such politics, it also runs the risk of mistaking equality for crass undifferentiation: that, in a system where all should be granted equal political rights, that all political or social claims - and those who espouse them - deserve to be treated with completely undifferentiated and uncritical respect. Even in America - a supposed meritocracy of almost Darwinian degrees - the idea that every political opinion is as valid as the next one, has led to a kind of intellectual morass where the possibility of an honest, intellectual inquiry into the fitness of a given idea - particularly in the domain of mass media - has completely vanished.
Ortega puts it like this:
Now many Americans may baulk at the suggestion that "to be different is to be indecent" in the avowedly individualistic context of American politics, but I believe it rings true. The peculiarities of the US electoral system renders the possibility of a sizeable third-party presence completely moot, with the entire political dialogue in the country consequently entirely confined to that which is most electorally convenient to the two major parties. Issues that do not carry a clear electoral advantage to either of these parties are simply ignored or glossed over. I'm certainly not one to suggest that the two parties lack clear ideological differences as others might, but however unique they may be in constitution, the presence of only two major political voices clearly dilutes the potential for open and honest political dialogue.
In the first place, each party knows that it need only discredit the other party in order to win power - it needn't trouble itself selecting the best policies from a wide plurality of options, for example, which would be necessary if their primary objective were to govern effectively on behalf of the American people. Rather, it need only seek to scandalise the positions of the opposing party: if the other party finds itself discredited, the populace is left, after all, with only one alternative. The result is a ongoing process of acrimonious gainsaying, in which neither side is truly prepared to commit itself to any policies that might benefit the other electorally, completely irrespective of their merits. This process leads not to a confluence of positions between the two parties as many have suggested, but rather an increasing dichotomisation. For the first time, the most conservative Democratic congressman is more liberal than the most liberal Republican congressman, and this makes the possibility of compromise on any number of important issues increasingly low. There are several flow-on effects to this.
The first is that electoral politics is increasingly portrayed as a two-horse race, and that all media narratives must inevitably cohere to such a portrayal. This leads to an endless and evermore tedious cycle of promiscuous politicisation, where literally every event - no matter how insignificant - is pitched as yet another battle waged in the ongoing war between the blue and red teams. This leads us to further polarisation, where the supporters of each side believe quite sincerely that all the nation's woes can be attributed to the glaring sins of the opposite side. For their part, the media - fearful of losing 50% of their market - are increasingly apprehensive about reporting unambiguous facts that may be detrimental to one side, and therefore muddy every issue by unthinkingly - yet somehow meticulously - presenting the deliberately obfuscatory "spin" of both sides on every issue. The public are therefore starved of quality information, and - with the lack of any third party to keep the two major parties honest - the Republicans and Democrats find themselves receding further and further from reality into the safe, hermetically sealed discourse of partisan politics.
The increasing polarisation of American politics presents a second problem. With each party virtually guaranteed around 40% of the vote1, that leaves both with the need to target their message with increasing specificity to the remaining 20%. Now despite what they might like to think about themselves, these unaffiliated 20% are generally not independent-minded people, heroically guarding their vote until a full, rational analysis of the respective party platforms has been completed, but rather low-information dolts who are capable of being swung to one side or the other for the most trivial of reasons. Since these are the people who decide elections one way or another, the level of political discourse is severely downgraded and the micro-targeting strategies of each of the major parties lead us to policies which yield nothing beyond the most asinine, populist pap. Now populism in itself is not necessarily something that should concern us (sometimes the best ideas also happen to be the most popular), but when the entire political process tends inexorably towards rank populism (because neither party can win power without this middling 20%) then we start to have the kind of problems that Ortega has warned us about.
Until now I have spoken as though both of the major parties deserve their share of blame for the current malaise in US political discourse, but I think such a portrayal would be disingenuous and just another example of the insidious need to render US politics as a two-horse race. Rather, when it comes to leading political discourse down into the sewers of rank, unthinking populism, the Republicans must clearly accept the lion's share of the blame. It has long been recognised that conservatives in the US have hitched their wagon to the forces of anti-intellectualism, forgoing open and honest policy debates in favour of the much more poisonous methods of the deliberately eristic and paranoid. Once you have completely abandoned the pretence of "facts" and "reason", your only justification now lies in the realm of the instinctive and the popular. To protect these justifications from the harsh light of reality, it becomes necessary to sacralise instinctive, populist politics by placing them beyond any possibility of rational reproach. This is achieved via the advancement of the notion that to reproach the political opinions of the "common man" on rational or empirical grounds is to engage in "elitism": the views of each man must be considered inherently valid and to dispute this claim is to violate the very basis of democracy. I think such a view - in and of itself - is rather cynical, but not necessarily pernicious. The trouble arises when "the masses" adopt it as a pseudo-religious mantra.
What we have now in the American populace is the idea that to simply have a political opinion carries with it its own justification, and that it needn't be justified any further to anyone. To believe in something, in a principled way, is inherently meritorious and that no-one has the right to disabuse one of that notion. This process culminates with Ortega's notion that "the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will": namely, everyone has the obligation to respect the intrusion of my "commonplace" opinion, no matter how ignorant or inapt it may be. All views are inherently valid, every man a qualified authority on that which he happens to be passionate.
Yet, to the extent he believes himself to lie beyond any possibility of reproach (what politician, after all, has ever won votes by telling him otherwise?), the "mass-man" can accept the authority of no-one beyond himself. The rejection of scientific and political authorities - under the banner of "freedom" - is a particular feature of modern Republicanism, though it happens to be one presaged by Ortega in the "mass-man" some 80 years ago:
This arrogance, obdurate certainty and complete disdain for authority beyond himself leads the "mass-man" to a sickening degree of self-congratulatory selfishness. To the extent that he has found himself born into a comfortable position, he sees no need to protect and maintain the kind of structures - including strong government - that allowed him to be born into such privilege in the first place. The plight of future generations - or present generations born into quite different circumstances - should be left entirely to chance. The government - or any other organisation which challenges the quite gratuitous autonomy of the "mass-man" - must be challenged and rejected at every step. Consequently, the "mass-man" is "incapable of creating or conserving that very organisation [namely, the civilised state] which gives his life the fullness and contentedness on which he bases this assertion of his personality". Ortega continues:
It is for this reason - the complete lack of respect for or appreciation of social structures that took centuries to erect - that Ortega feels the "mass-man" threatens civilisation. The Republicans would be his modern-day equivalent. The demure capitulation of at least one of the major US political parties to this new "mass-man" and his abhorrent politics has left the entire political system impoverished, with all discourse now conducted in thrall of the lowest common denominator. The possibility of sensible, rational debate has been completely exhausted by a climate in which the populace have been pandered to and indulged to such a degree that they no longer have the capacity to recognise the limits of their wisdom. A child who is not used to being told "no" will not grow-up into a mature, thoughtful and considerate adult and that is the dilemma facing us today. The genie of simply untethered freedom (i.e. that which has been granted without any corresponding responsibilities) and entitlement has been taken from the bottle, and we may find it difficult to replace him. How can a child who has grown up to respect no authority beyond itself ever be told otherwise?
So, what to do? What lessons can we draw from Ortega? I think that the most sage advice we can take from Revolt of the Masses is the idea that there are such things as legitimate authority, and that we shouldn't be so hasty in sacrificing the need for such authority on the altar of democratic liberalism and tolerance. The events of the mid-20th century rightly made us wary of the dangers of unchecked political authority, but that doesn't mean we should race as far as possible in the other direction. There are people who understand the world far better than we, and we should have no qualms about ceding them at least some power to do what is right for us. If they are unsuccessful to this end, we retain the hard-won right to vote them out.
Ultimately, mass populist movements, who respect no perspective beyond their own, need to be challenged, no matter how electorally inconvenient this might be. We need to abandon the idea that all opinions are equally valid and that all deserve to be listened to. We already do this when we marginalise those at the fringes of political discourse (the 9/11 Truthers, the Birthers etc.), we just need to be a little more discriminating. As far as the Republican Party is concerned, we can take some solace from the fact that the unthinking and unfeeling crassness of its electoral strategy is teetering, and has been rejected at the last two presidential elections. The reports of its impending death are surely exaggerated, though it is clear that they must start listening to the voices of a much more diverse electorate if they are to enjoy any future success. Perhaps they might start by reading this book, and recognising the inherent dangers of their current strategy of populist pandering and reactionary anti-statism.
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1) This partly has to do with brand recognition, and partly has to do with tribal politics. The "brand recognition" of the parties means, for instance, that the GOP is forever seen as the party of small government, despite all evidence to the contrary. So people will vote for the GOP as the small government party despite the massive debts run up by recent GOP administrations, their appalling records on civil liberties and so on. Petty tribalism is also a factor now. There are many people who will never vote for one of the parties - regardless of what policies they espouse - simply because they have been conditioned to hate that party in the current electoral climate. It is here that US politics, as much as anywhere else, begins to resemble a sport.
Reading the book now, we may be taken aback by the disdain Ortega heaps upon "masses", itself a term that even the most shamelessly haughty of us today would baulk at using. For Ortega, the "mass-man" emerges for the first time in the 20th century as a fulcrum of political power, and - as a consequence of his ignorance and his critical lack of preparedness to govern - threatens the very basis of civilization. This "mass-man" fails to understand the lessons of history - forever facing forwards, as he inevitably must, because he believes himself to be the apex of history - and he rejects the possibility of there existing an authority any higher than himself. The culmination of the mass-man's ascent to power lies in the emergence of what Ortega terms "hyperdemocracy", "in which the mass acts directly, outside the law, imposing its aspirations and its desires by means of material pressure". Mass-man, however, lacks the competence to run a state - such a job is presumably best left with the "artisans", as Ortega puts it - and this was the source of Ortega's angst: how could civilization persist in such unworthy hands?
In the largely egalitarian democracies in which we live today ("one man, one vote") such thoughts must strike us as repugnantly conceited, if not outright dangerous. Such open disdain for quotidian folk (I struggle to find a better euphemism for "masses") runs against our modern democratic principles, and one might find it quite easy to draw a direct line from such disdainful views to the eugenic mania of various mid 20th century ideologies. If we start isolating swathes of the population as being somehow below our contempt, then what logical reason do we retain to defend them from persecution or extermination? However, I must defend this work against such charges, since in referring to the "masses" Ortega makes it clear that he has in mind no specific race, class or creed: the overwhelming majority of us comprise this gormless, faceless "mass", so I take Ortega's work predominantly as a warning against "falling in with the herd" (to invoke an unsuitably trite idiom) rather than as the disparaging identification of an inherently defective class of people. To the extent that Ortega has a specific group in mind, it appears to the burgeoning bourgeoisie class, a group - then as now - that scarcely requires our dolorous coddling.
Nonetheless, we exist in a political environment that - quite rightly, for the most part - discourages the gradation of human being into superior or inferior classes. That way, as the crimes of the 20th century still show us, leads to the greatest realisations of misery. The political zeitgeist of the current age is increasingly one of toleration, mutual respect and individual sovereignty - once again, we can count our blessings that it should be so. However, for all the unquestionable benefits of such politics, it also runs the risk of mistaking equality for crass undifferentiation: that, in a system where all should be granted equal political rights, that all political or social claims - and those who espouse them - deserve to be treated with completely undifferentiated and uncritical respect. Even in America - a supposed meritocracy of almost Darwinian degrees - the idea that every political opinion is as valid as the next one, has led to a kind of intellectual morass where the possibility of an honest, intellectual inquiry into the fitness of a given idea - particularly in the domain of mass media - has completely vanished.
Ortega puts it like this:
"The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will. As they say in the United States: "to be different is to be indecent." The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated."
Now many Americans may baulk at the suggestion that "to be different is to be indecent" in the avowedly individualistic context of American politics, but I believe it rings true. The peculiarities of the US electoral system renders the possibility of a sizeable third-party presence completely moot, with the entire political dialogue in the country consequently entirely confined to that which is most electorally convenient to the two major parties. Issues that do not carry a clear electoral advantage to either of these parties are simply ignored or glossed over. I'm certainly not one to suggest that the two parties lack clear ideological differences as others might, but however unique they may be in constitution, the presence of only two major political voices clearly dilutes the potential for open and honest political dialogue.
In the first place, each party knows that it need only discredit the other party in order to win power - it needn't trouble itself selecting the best policies from a wide plurality of options, for example, which would be necessary if their primary objective were to govern effectively on behalf of the American people. Rather, it need only seek to scandalise the positions of the opposing party: if the other party finds itself discredited, the populace is left, after all, with only one alternative. The result is a ongoing process of acrimonious gainsaying, in which neither side is truly prepared to commit itself to any policies that might benefit the other electorally, completely irrespective of their merits. This process leads not to a confluence of positions between the two parties as many have suggested, but rather an increasing dichotomisation. For the first time, the most conservative Democratic congressman is more liberal than the most liberal Republican congressman, and this makes the possibility of compromise on any number of important issues increasingly low. There are several flow-on effects to this.
The first is that electoral politics is increasingly portrayed as a two-horse race, and that all media narratives must inevitably cohere to such a portrayal. This leads to an endless and evermore tedious cycle of promiscuous politicisation, where literally every event - no matter how insignificant - is pitched as yet another battle waged in the ongoing war between the blue and red teams. This leads us to further polarisation, where the supporters of each side believe quite sincerely that all the nation's woes can be attributed to the glaring sins of the opposite side. For their part, the media - fearful of losing 50% of their market - are increasingly apprehensive about reporting unambiguous facts that may be detrimental to one side, and therefore muddy every issue by unthinkingly - yet somehow meticulously - presenting the deliberately obfuscatory "spin" of both sides on every issue. The public are therefore starved of quality information, and - with the lack of any third party to keep the two major parties honest - the Republicans and Democrats find themselves receding further and further from reality into the safe, hermetically sealed discourse of partisan politics.
The increasing polarisation of American politics presents a second problem. With each party virtually guaranteed around 40% of the vote1, that leaves both with the need to target their message with increasing specificity to the remaining 20%. Now despite what they might like to think about themselves, these unaffiliated 20% are generally not independent-minded people, heroically guarding their vote until a full, rational analysis of the respective party platforms has been completed, but rather low-information dolts who are capable of being swung to one side or the other for the most trivial of reasons. Since these are the people who decide elections one way or another, the level of political discourse is severely downgraded and the micro-targeting strategies of each of the major parties lead us to policies which yield nothing beyond the most asinine, populist pap. Now populism in itself is not necessarily something that should concern us (sometimes the best ideas also happen to be the most popular), but when the entire political process tends inexorably towards rank populism (because neither party can win power without this middling 20%) then we start to have the kind of problems that Ortega has warned us about.
Until now I have spoken as though both of the major parties deserve their share of blame for the current malaise in US political discourse, but I think such a portrayal would be disingenuous and just another example of the insidious need to render US politics as a two-horse race. Rather, when it comes to leading political discourse down into the sewers of rank, unthinking populism, the Republicans must clearly accept the lion's share of the blame. It has long been recognised that conservatives in the US have hitched their wagon to the forces of anti-intellectualism, forgoing open and honest policy debates in favour of the much more poisonous methods of the deliberately eristic and paranoid. Once you have completely abandoned the pretence of "facts" and "reason", your only justification now lies in the realm of the instinctive and the popular. To protect these justifications from the harsh light of reality, it becomes necessary to sacralise instinctive, populist politics by placing them beyond any possibility of rational reproach. This is achieved via the advancement of the notion that to reproach the political opinions of the "common man" on rational or empirical grounds is to engage in "elitism": the views of each man must be considered inherently valid and to dispute this claim is to violate the very basis of democracy. I think such a view - in and of itself - is rather cynical, but not necessarily pernicious. The trouble arises when "the masses" adopt it as a pseudo-religious mantra.
What we have now in the American populace is the idea that to simply have a political opinion carries with it its own justification, and that it needn't be justified any further to anyone. To believe in something, in a principled way, is inherently meritorious and that no-one has the right to disabuse one of that notion. This process culminates with Ortega's notion that "the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will": namely, everyone has the obligation to respect the intrusion of my "commonplace" opinion, no matter how ignorant or inapt it may be. All views are inherently valid, every man a qualified authority on that which he happens to be passionate.
Yet, to the extent he believes himself to lie beyond any possibility of reproach (what politician, after all, has ever won votes by telling him otherwise?), the "mass-man" can accept the authority of no-one beyond himself. The rejection of scientific and political authorities - under the banner of "freedom" - is a particular feature of modern Republicanism, though it happens to be one presaged by Ortega in the "mass-man" some 80 years ago:
"...the modern mass finds complete freedom as its natural, established condition, without any special cause for it. Nothing from outside incites it to recognise limits to itself and, consequently, to refer at all times to other authorities higher than itself... He is satisfied with himself exactly as he is. Ingenuously, without any need of being vain, as the most natural thing in the world, he will tend to consider and affirm as good everything he finds within himself: opinions, appetites, preferences, tastes. Why not, if, as we have seen, nothing and nobody force him to realise that he is... subject to many limitations..."
This arrogance, obdurate certainty and complete disdain for authority beyond himself leads the "mass-man" to a sickening degree of self-congratulatory selfishness. To the extent that he has found himself born into a comfortable position, he sees no need to protect and maintain the kind of structures - including strong government - that allowed him to be born into such privilege in the first place. The plight of future generations - or present generations born into quite different circumstances - should be left entirely to chance. The government - or any other organisation which challenges the quite gratuitous autonomy of the "mass-man" - must be challenged and rejected at every step. Consequently, the "mass-man" is "incapable of creating or conserving that very organisation [namely, the civilised state] which gives his life the fullness and contentedness on which he bases this assertion of his personality". Ortega continues:
"...the new masses find themselves in the presence of a prospect full of possibilities, and furthermore, quite secure, with everything ready to their hands, independent of any previous efforts on their part, just as we find the sun in the heavens without our hoisting it up on our shoulders. No human being thanks another for the air he breathes, for no one has produced the air for him; it belongs to the sum-total of what "is there," of which we say "it is natural," because it never fails. And these spoiled masses are unintelligent enough to believe that the material and social organisation, placed at their disposition like the air, is of the same origin., since apparently it never fails them, and is almost as perfect as the natural scheme of things."
It is for this reason - the complete lack of respect for or appreciation of social structures that took centuries to erect - that Ortega feels the "mass-man" threatens civilisation. The Republicans would be his modern-day equivalent. The demure capitulation of at least one of the major US political parties to this new "mass-man" and his abhorrent politics has left the entire political system impoverished, with all discourse now conducted in thrall of the lowest common denominator. The possibility of sensible, rational debate has been completely exhausted by a climate in which the populace have been pandered to and indulged to such a degree that they no longer have the capacity to recognise the limits of their wisdom. A child who is not used to being told "no" will not grow-up into a mature, thoughtful and considerate adult and that is the dilemma facing us today. The genie of simply untethered freedom (i.e. that which has been granted without any corresponding responsibilities) and entitlement has been taken from the bottle, and we may find it difficult to replace him. How can a child who has grown up to respect no authority beyond itself ever be told otherwise?
So, what to do? What lessons can we draw from Ortega? I think that the most sage advice we can take from Revolt of the Masses is the idea that there are such things as legitimate authority, and that we shouldn't be so hasty in sacrificing the need for such authority on the altar of democratic liberalism and tolerance. The events of the mid-20th century rightly made us wary of the dangers of unchecked political authority, but that doesn't mean we should race as far as possible in the other direction. There are people who understand the world far better than we, and we should have no qualms about ceding them at least some power to do what is right for us. If they are unsuccessful to this end, we retain the hard-won right to vote them out.
Ultimately, mass populist movements, who respect no perspective beyond their own, need to be challenged, no matter how electorally inconvenient this might be. We need to abandon the idea that all opinions are equally valid and that all deserve to be listened to. We already do this when we marginalise those at the fringes of political discourse (the 9/11 Truthers, the Birthers etc.), we just need to be a little more discriminating. As far as the Republican Party is concerned, we can take some solace from the fact that the unthinking and unfeeling crassness of its electoral strategy is teetering, and has been rejected at the last two presidential elections. The reports of its impending death are surely exaggerated, though it is clear that they must start listening to the voices of a much more diverse electorate if they are to enjoy any future success. Perhaps they might start by reading this book, and recognising the inherent dangers of their current strategy of populist pandering and reactionary anti-statism.
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1) This partly has to do with brand recognition, and partly has to do with tribal politics. The "brand recognition" of the parties means, for instance, that the GOP is forever seen as the party of small government, despite all evidence to the contrary. So people will vote for the GOP as the small government party despite the massive debts run up by recent GOP administrations, their appalling records on civil liberties and so on. Petty tribalism is also a factor now. There are many people who will never vote for one of the parties - regardless of what policies they espouse - simply because they have been conditioned to hate that party in the current electoral climate. It is here that US politics, as much as anywhere else, begins to resemble a sport.
Friday, November 2, 2012
Socio-Historical Background of the Bible: Part 5 (609 BC - 538 BC)
The Babylonian Invasion
After the death of King Josiah, Judah was thrown into a period of political chaos which culminated in its invasion at the hands of the Babylonians. At least as far as the Biblical record can be trusted, Josiah was able to oversee the complete centralisation of power in Judah, to institute the formation of a monolithic religion and to apparently unite the nation and its surrounding territories - violently, if necessary - under a single nationalist ideology. Upon his death, his immediate political project seems to have been undone in a hurry and the nation began to be torn apart, both from within and without.
The spark for all these difficulties can be identified with the decline of Assyrian Empire and the resulting power vacuum it created. Initially, this spurred an assertion of independence in Judah: free from the Assyrian yoke, Josiah was able to implement his political program in Judah without interference and Judah stood - for perhaps the first time in its history - as a strong, dominant power in the region. In the shadows of the Assyrian empire, however, emerged two more empires: those of Babylonia (who delivered the final blow to the Assyrian empire in 605 BC) and Egypt (who had allied themselves with Assyria). Judah found itself trapped between these two powers - both geographically and politically - and the competing forces would eventually tear the nation apart. Like a planet passing between two suns, Judah found itself pulled towards two powerful spheres of influence simultaneously, and the internal strain generated would prove too much.
Josiah, as we saw in the last post, allied himself with the Babylonians against the Assyrians and their Egyptian allies. After he was killed in battle by the Egyptian Pharaoh Necho II, his son, Jehoahaz, was installed on the throne by "the people of the land" (i.e. the same coalition that had installed Josiah). The Egyptian military presence, which by this time had stretched its influence far into the Levant, ensured that a king without sympathies to the Egyptian empire would not last long. Indeed, Jehoahaz was deposed just three months into his reign by the Egyptian Pharaoh and sent into exile in Egypt. He was replaced by king Jehoiakim, who agreed to make Judah a vassal state and to pay an onerous tribute to the Egyptians. In order to do this, he "exacted the silver and the gold from the people of the land" (2 Kings 24:35), another indication of the hardship placed on rural communities by imperial conquest. Signs of reprieve would fleetingly arrive in short time, though.
In 605 BC, the Babylonians defeated the Egyptians decisively in a battle at Carchemish, and Jehoiakim used the opportunity to transfer allegiance to the Babylonians in return for their protection. Babylon agreed, and for the next three years Judah was a Babylonian vassal state. Here, though, his allegiance began flip-flopping periodically between the Egyptians and the Assyrians, which should give some indication of the confused political state in the region during his reign. With the war between the Egyptians and Babylonians continuing apace, he transferred his allegiance back to the Egyptians and ceased paying tribute to Babylon sometime shortly before 600 BC. The reasons behind his equivocation are not easy to elucidate with any certainty, but his switching of allegiances may reflect his judgement on the state of the war (i.e. which side appeared more likely to claim victory in the region) or - perhaps more likely - the divided loyalties that existed within Judah itself. As I shall explain in more detail below, there was apparently a genuine rift that existed in Judah at the time about where it's loyalties should be placed: with Egypt, with Babylon or with neither. Jehoiakim's dithering on the issue may simply be a reflection of the irreconcilable rifts that existed within his court.
In any case, the Babylonian reaction to this transference of loyalty was predictably swift and harsh, and by 598 BC the Babylonians had come to occupy the majority of the land of Judah and were knocking on the gates of Jerusalem. It was in this year that Jehoiakim died without explanation. Some have averred that the Biblical text implies that he was killed by marauding bands of foreign warriors (cf. 2 Kings 24:2) but the Bible doesn't say so specifically, noting simply that Jehoiakim "slept with his ancestors" (v. 6). In any case, it's difficult to see how he might have been exposed directly to the presence of such foreign warriors when Jerusalem apparently stood strong for several more months after his death. The possibility of a domestic plot to end his life cannot be discounted, as there is Biblical precedent for the assassination of kings in siege situations: for instance, the murder of King Pekah in the Kingdom of Israel in the face of the Assyrian advance in 734 BC (see part 3). Jehoiakim had also apparently angered religious figures in the nation during his reign through his persecution of prophets (Uriah was killed, and Jeremiah put on trial for his life at the hands of the king), and the religious figures in Jerusalem must have held considerable political clout in the city since the reforms of Josiah. Whatever the case, the final defence of Jerusalem was left to Jehoiakim's son Jehoiachin, but he was capable of resisting the Babylonians for only 3 months. The fortified walls of Jerusalem were finally breached, and the Babylonian forces spilled into the city in 598 BC.
Jehoiachin submitted voluntarily to the Babylonians, and was taken immediately into forced exile to live within the city of Babylon. He was joined by many other members of the Jerusalem elite, including Ezekiel (who we will discuss below) and other members of the Jerusalem priesthood. Jehoiachin's story shall be resumed shortly. For now, though, we will focus on the events within Judah following the first Babylonian invasion and the deposition of their king.
Rebellion and Exile
After sending King Jehoiachin into exile, the Babylonian king Nebuchadrezzar II installed a man by the name of Zedekiah onto the throne in his place. Predictably, Zedekiah was to act as a puppet-king to Nebuchadrezzar II and would be required to pay onerous tributes to the Babylonian empire. As was an all too common in the history of Israel and Judah, however, Zedekiah decided after just three years to turn away from the obligations he had towards his conquerors and to sow the seeds of rebellion.
In 594 BC he hosted an international conference in Jerusalem, where leaders were summoned from the nearby regions to discuss (presumably) their relationship with the Babylonian Empire. The Babylonian king naturally viewed this activity as subversive, and requested that Zedekiah visit him in Babylon to explain his actions and to reaffirm his loyalty to the king. This apparently patched things up for a while, but the decisive break came when Zedekiah rebelled against the Babylonians and allied himself with the Egyptians in the year 589 BC. The Babylonians invaded Judah and laid siege to Jerusalem for a second time, though this siege proved to be more gruesome and prolonged. In 587/586 BC, the Babylonians forces camped outside the walls of Jerusalem for months, preventing anyone (or anything) from entering or leaving. The horrors of such a city siege in the ancient world are difficult to overstate. Cities were so dependant on rural areas to supply it with provisions, that when such avenues of supply were cut-off the city was usually only able to sustain itself for a matter of weeks before starvation and disease began to run rampant. It is worth quoting the Biblical account of this siege (Lamentations 4) at length to convey the abject misery it entailed:
The will of the king and his immediate entourage were soon broken by the conditions that had left such an indelible imprint on the mind of the author of Lamentations, and they attempted to flee the city through a hole that they had made in the wall. The Babylonians had the city completely surrounded, however, and Zedekiah was soon apprehended. For his role in the rebellion, he watched as his sons were" slaughtered... before his eyes", had these same eyes "put out" by the soldiers and was then carried away - blind, childless and "in fetters" - to Babylon (2 Kings 25:7). His subsequent fate is not recorded, but he would prove to be the last ever king of Judah.
The fate of those left behind in the city, however, was no less grim. The Babylonians immediately sacked the Temple - the last holy place remaining in Judah, and quite literally the earthly house of YHWH - breaking its "bronze pillars", taking away "the pots, the shovels, the snuffers, the dishes for incense, and all the bronze vessels used in the temple service" as well as all "the gold, and what was made of silver" (v. 13-15). The Temple - along with the kings house and much of the rest of the city - were "burnt down" (v. 9) and the great walls around the city were also destroyed (v. 10). Much of the population - certainly all of the remaining elite - were carried away into exile in Babylon. According to the Biblical account, the only people who were left in Judah were "the poorest people of the land, to be vine-dressers and tillers of the soil" (v. 12). While some of these accounts might be viewed as somewhat embellished, the archaeological record does paint a picture of widespread destruction and a precipitous decline in population within Judah during the period of Babylonian exile. The economic aftermath of the exile will be explored more fully in part 6, but for now we need only note that Judah had been lain to waste and the last embers of its independence had been extinguished. Judah was now just another Babylonian province.
The Resistance
With the Temple and the king's residence destroyed, and with all the elite members of Jerusalem now deported, the royal Davidic lineage was at an end. In its place, the Babylonians elected a governor named Gedeliah, who was a member of a prominent Jerusalem family at the time. At this point, the society of Judah (or what remained of it) was divided between professing loyalty to Egypt, professing loyalty to Babylon and those who rejected loyalty to both. Those who believed that the loyalties of the Judahites should lie with Babylon could mostly be found among the exiled populations, and I'll address them in the next section. Here, though, it's important to demonstrate the political ambivalence that divided those who remained behind.
We learn from the Book of Jeremiah (a prophet active at the time of the Babylonian exile, though we cannot be sure how much of the material in this book can be traced directly back to him) that immediately after assuming power, Gedeliah was viewed as a target for assassination by certain revolutionary Judahite groups (Jer 40:13-16). This is one crucial difference between the Babylonian occupation and the earlier Assyrian occupation: in this instance, the occupation does seem to have been met by an organised resistance, as compared with some hundred years of relative stability in the Assyrian case. According the the account in Jeremiah 41, one "Ishmael son of Nethaniah son of Elishama" went to eat bread with Gedeliah along with ten of his men in the year 582 BC - under what pretext, we cannot be sure. In any case, Ishmael and his men used the opportunity to "[strike] down Gedaliah son of Ahikam son of Shaphan with the sword and [kill] him" (41:2), before laying waste to all the guards and the Judahite consort present as well. We must be clear what this act represents: a political assassination in protest against imperial designs. This kind of reactionary militarism was to become a regular occurrence in the history of Judah and Israel, and we shall explore similar instances in future posts.
In the Biblical account, though, the actions of the assassin are rather unequivocally denounced. In order to emphasise the mindlessly violent disposition of the perpetrator, we get gory details about his future movements. In addition to murdering all the Judahites present in Gedeliah's court, Ishmael during his escape enconounters some eighty pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem to leave offerings at the Temple. For seemingly no reason, he simply slaughters seventy of them, before crudely disposing of their bodies in a well (itself an unthinkably hostile gesture, given the rules which govern burial of the dead in Judaism). The remaining ten men are then kept as hostages, and remain with Ishmael as he attempts to flee. The polemical subtext of this account is rather clear: Ishmael (and presumably other would-be resisters) weren't really acting in the best interests of Judah, and were in fact little better than common thugs who did not hesitate to slaughter their own people. This appears to be the Biblical view, but it stands to reason that from an alternative perspective, these groups who violently opposed the Babylonian occupation probably saw themselves as freedom fighters, who would have deeply resented the pro-imperial overtures emanating from the exiled community in Babylon (and preserved in Biblical books like Ezekiel and Jeremiah). What we really have here, then, is yet another manifestation of the moral ambiguities inherent to political violence: one man's terrorist is always another man's freedom fighter.
At this point Ishmael decides to flee for "the Ammonites" with his hostages, but is stopped on the way by a Judean militia headed by one "Johanan son of Kareah". Given that the king of Judah was in exile at this time - along with virtually all the other people of power in the region - it seems likely that this militia must have been a private, self-assembled one which operated with relative autonomy - though towards what aims we cannot be certain. The historicity of this specific scene needn't concern us especially, but what it does appear to show is a state of lawlessness and violence, where the normal structures of society had completely broken down, and competing militia groups had risen up to fill the power vacuum. This is partly speculation on my part, but it does seem to be borne out by the Biblical account.
In any case, Johanan is unable to contain Ishmael at this encounter, and the latter flees. This leaves Johanan with a quandary: he knew that there would soon be a Babylonian reprisal for the assassination of their puppet leader and he knew that the Judahite people (including himself) would be left to bear the consequences. As a result, he attempts to organise for his group to flee to Egypt at the first opportunity. At this point, Jeremiah is depicted as delivering them (and other would-be runaways) a prophecy from God, an order to remain in the land of Judah. The prophet is rebuffed, though, and taken with the aspiring refugees into the land of Egypt. In the meantime, the Babylonians invade the land of Judah for a third and final time, quashing definitively whatever little resistance there remained to meet them.
This account of the travails of Johanan and Jeremiah in the Bible may not have much basis in historical fact, but they almost certainly reflect the kind of situation the Judahites were faced with in their first decade and a half under Babylonian occupation. Firstly, the fact that the governor of Judah was assassinated and the fact that the Babylonians still had at least some militia forces to mop up in their final invasion in 582 BC indicates that there was violent resistance to their imperial designs within Judah that - in the absence of any government - must have been spontaneously organised. The reasons why the Babylonians may have been met with a degree of opposition that the Assyrians never seem to have faced are worth exploring briefly.
Now it is certainly plausible enough that there was popular resistance to the Assyrian occupation as well - the available historical sources documenting this earlier period are far more sparse than those detailing the Babylonian occupation - but the reaction in the Babylonian case does seem to have been markedly more vehement and more sustained (the Assyrians, for example, were never required to seize the territory in three separate waves of military campaigning). In part, this may have been a reaction to two different modes of empire. In the Assyrian case, much time and effort was expended in its vassal states investing in "nation-building" (to use the modern terminology), particularly so far as governance and economic growth were concerned. It may have been borne of a rather paternalistic chauvanism, but the Assyrians took pride in exporting their systems of writing, account-keeping and governance, and the consequence was a rapid growth in urbanisation in many of the regions under the Assyrian yoke (including Judah). Where their vassal states experienced genuine economic growth, the benefit to Assyria came in the form of increased tribute. In other words, the Assyrian model of empire building had the capacity to benefit both the empire and the vassal state economically (much in the same vein as the later Roman empire), which - at least in the case of Judah - may have dampened popular resistance towards the empire.
The Babylonians, on the other hand, appear to have had a rather different modus operandi, at least in the Judahite case. Here, the ruling city of Jerusalem was looted for everything it was worth in the first invasion, and presumably little was left that might have been used for restimulating economic growth and international trade. In the second invasion, the power structure at the centre of the state was completely dismantled, and most of those capable of wielding political power over the territory (including most of the scribes, priests and statesmen) were sent into exile. The loss of such experience and skill from the centre of the Judahite society rendered any possibility of an ordered, productive society ever re-emerging from the glowing embers of the conquered state far less likely. Finally, after the third invasion, the Babylonians seem to have abandoned any pretence of governing the land of Judah at all. What happened in the 44 years between the final Babylonian invasion of 582 BC and the eventual liberation of Judah in 538 BC is almost completely unknown, but there is there is little evidence for the implementation of any kind of strong, centralised political structure. The "capital" of the state had been officially moved from Jerusalem to the northern city of Mizpah, but it is unclear what kind of government presided there. The fact that virtually no writings survive from Judah during this period - in addition to an archaeological record which evidences a precipitous population decline in the region - tells the story of a land laid almost completely to waste, one which the Babylonians never had any interest in ever developing economically. The exploitative nature of the Babylonian occupation may go some way to explaining the degree of resistance it faced - at least initially - within Judah during the early stages of the 6th century BC.
The Exile
As we noted in the previous section, it seems that many Judahites fled the region in the aftermath of Gedeliah's assassination and in the lead-up to the final Babylonian invasion. The subsequent depressed economic state of the region probably led to further waves of emigration, as people left the stagnant region in search of better opportunities. Based on archaeological evidence (and the Biblical account itself) it seems that many of these refugees ended up in Egypt, which experienced a flourishing of Semitic communities at this time. The expulsion of the Hebrew people from their land (whether forced or voluntary) marks the first stages of the Jewish diaspora, which (as we shall see in future posts) would continue for many centuries to come. Some of the Jewish communities established in Egypt would remain there, as future Jewish communities continued to be established all around the Mediterranean in reaction to a seemingly endless succession of imperial occupations.
The other half of the Babylonian enforced diaspora, however, found themselves living as captives in Babylon. It is this community that we know the most about, because their experiences are the virtually the only ones to have achieved a written expression that has survived to the modern day. As has already been noted, many - probably most - of these exiled Judahites were drawn from the "elite" segments of their society. Among them we find scribes, priests and even King Jehoiachin. The preservation of their culture - particularly its religious aspects - was taken seriously, and we can reasonably postulate that many of the Old Testament texts must have taken on a somewhat recognisable form during this time, or at least the period shortly succeeding it. This implies that the exiled Judahite community retained a degree of autonomy in their land of exile, and the Biblical material that can be most reliably dated to this period exhibits a conspicuous lack of anti-Babylonian sentiment. The question immediately presents itself: why should this be?
Before answering this question, we must first concede that the experience of the exile was scarcely a pleasant one for those who found themselves in Babylon. Perhaps the most famous expression of this is Psalm 137, which expresses a genuine longing for the now distant land of Zion. The final verse - where the author fantasises about dashing the children of the Babylonians against rocks - is an indication of genuine anger and resentment, one often overlooked when scholars try to downplay the degree of suffering experienced by those in Babylonian exile. Similarly, the prophetic texts from this time (most notably Ezekiel and Jeremiah) do not attempt to downplay the misery of the Babylonian invasion, they merely couch it in theological terms which absolve the Babylonians from moral culpability (see next section). But perhaps that only makes the question more perplexing: if there was an undeniable degree of suffering involved in the exile, why do the Babylonians get off so lightly in the Biblical texts?
Part of the answer surely lies with the on-going influence of King Jehoiachin. We know from the Bible and independent archaeological evidence that Jehoiachin was treated comparatively well by his Babylonian captors. In addition to being afforded (along with the other exiles) the relative luxury of continuing to practice his religion and to speak in his native tongue, he was also given relatively generous rations as compared to other captives. The production and preservation of sacred literature during this time also points to a degree of freedom which belies the language of "bonds" and "fetters" sometimes used in the Bible in connection with the exile. Given that he had surrendered to the Babylonians willingly (2 Kings 24:12), that he was treated favourably by them and that he was (presumably) involved in the literature penned at this time, can there be any surprise that the literature penned in and around this time was comparatively gentle in its depiction of the Babylonians?
Ezekiel in this respect is particularly noteworthy: in forty-eight chapters, scarcely a single bad word is spoken against the Babylonians. In fact, the Babylonians are depicted as acting with YHWH's explicit help and support (e.g. 26:7-14). Perhaps even more noteworthy is Ezekiel's attitude towards Zedekiah, the man named king by the Babylonians in Jehoiachin's absence. Ezekiel denounces him as the "evil prince of Israel" (21:25) and condemns him for his rebellion against Babylon (2:3). Similar sentiments can be found in Jeremiah, who likens those who remained in Judah (including Zedekiah) to "bad figs" (24:16-17), councils those in exile to "seek the welfare of" (i.e. assist) Babylon (29:7) and to serve its king (27:17). What this all points to is the fact that the exiled community had gathered round Jehoiachin as the only legitimate king of Judah, and - at his instigation, or at least under his watchful eye - penned a whole host of texts that justified the legitimacy of his rule and denounced the illegitimacy of those who had stayed behind in Judah after the first wave of exile. The surprisingly pro-Babylonian tone of these texts can be seen as a way of strengthening the continuing political legitimacy of those in exile, over and against those who had fled to Egypt (which remained an enemy of Babylon at the time) and those unlucky few who remained in Judah. The full force of this argument, however, requires an understanding of the theology of the period, particularly in how it was influenced by the circumstances of the Babylonian invasion.
The Theology of the Exile
If it is true - as the exiled authors claimed - that Jehoiachin was a good and legitimate king, then why was it that YHWH had decided to move against Israel? More to the point, why should he have moved against Israel so soon after the reforms of Josiah, which finally saw all the aberrant religious practices removed from the land of Israel? Disasters can provoke theological soul-searching at the best of times, but the issue facing the exiled Judahites seems to have been particularly pronounced. Given all that they had done to placate YHWH, why had he still seen fit to visit his wrath so vehemently against them? If the previous inequities which faced them were the consequence of wicked kings and an unfaithful population, why had the rectification of these facts done nothing to curb God's anger?
The texts from this period exhibit a great deal of doubt and uncertainty, and clearly demonstrate to us that the theology crystalised during Josiah's time was not necessarily of any help or comfort. The author of Lamentations (2:20-22) almost appears to directly rebuke YHWH for what he had done to Judah:
From this, the author goes on to conclude his work by asking YHWH "Why have you forgotten us completely? Why have you forsaken us these many days?" (5:20) and then speculating that "you have utterly rejected us, and are angry with us beyond measure" (5:22). These are not the confident ruminations of an individual who felt he understood his god with any confidence, but the mournful cries of a man whose theology that had been cast into a morass of utter confusion and despair.
Nonetheless, the authors of this time clearly set themselves the task of providing an explanation for the events that wouldn't require the entire theological edifice they had created to be torn down. The first theological solution to the problem was to identify that the Babylonian invasion was indeed a sign of YHWH's strength rather than a sign of his weakness. In the ancient world, it was often assumed that a nation's strength was directly proportional to the strength of its god(s), which goes some way to explaining why the gods of powerful nations were worshipped with such alacrity in the region (including in Israel and Judah prior to Josiah's religious reforms). These gods could be absorbed into the polytheistic pantheon of a given nation without the need for much theological teeth-gnashing: many gods inhabited the world, so there was little sense in forgoing the opportunity to worship just one more who had already proven the efficacy of his powers. For the Judahites who lived in the shadow of Josiah, however, such hedging of ones theistic bets had ceased to be an option. The religion of Judah had become entirely centralised under a single god, whose power and pre-eminence (in the land of Judah at least) had been enforced by fiat with the destruction of the places of worship devoted to all the other gods. If Judah had been destroyed by foreign forces who worshipped foreign gods, this could have only been possible with the direct complicity of YHWH. And if YHWH had seen fit to inflict such violence on the people of Judah, then it stands to reason that they must have done something to anger him.
But, again, why would YHWH have been so angry if the Judahites had finally turned away from centuries of polytheistic worship towards the monolatrous worship of YHWH? The theology of the Book of Kings made it quite clear that God's punishment (for instance the destruction of Israel and the Assyrian annexation of Judah) was a response to the "evil" of the people and the kings who oversaw them. So, if Josiah had truly "turned to the Lord with all his heart, with all his soul, and with all his might" (2 Kings 23:25) then what could have possibly driven YHWH to such anger? The solution to this problem first consisted of absolving Josiah and (to a lesser extent) subsequent kings for direct responsibility for what had happened. The text added to the Book of 2 Kings after the death of Josiah attempts to make it plain that YHWH still held a grudge for the gross "provocations" of king Manasseh (23:26-27; cf. Jer 15:4):
In other words, the theology of the Book of Kings (and therefore of the centralised Judahite religion) was not challenged by the Babylonian invasion: it was merely a sign that a generation could be punished for the iniquities of their forebears (not so coincidentally a major theme in the Torah, which was likely completed in more or less its present form shortly after the period of exile). But a second problem arises: if YHWH, in a very literal sense, occupied the Jerusalem Temple, and if this temple was to be the central focus of all worship, what was to be done pursuant to its destruction? It's not entirely clear how the exiled Judahites responded to this problem, or what form their religious worship took (only that it persisted and that it remained entirely separate from the Babylonian religion), but we can perhaps piece together some speculations based on the fragmentary evidence we have in the Bible.
Firstly we should note that many of the the hymns that were used in the Temple (in a liturgical context) prior to its destruction were collated and - if they weren't already - expressed in a written form. These would contribute to the Book of Psalms we have today, and we can presume that they continued to be sung (albeit mournfully) by the exiles in Babylon (Ps 137) outside of the Temple context. Secondly, the importance of God's law (i.e. the Torah, or the elements of it which had been penned by this time) was strongly emphasised in the writings from this nime. Notions here of sacrifices and other ritual forms of worship that would have been performed at the Temple are largely ignored, and the adherence to God's laws are now taken to be the central duty of the Judahites. This deviation from the law is also cited as a central reason for the wrath that has just been visited upon them (e.g. Jer 9:13; 32:23 etc.). Additionally, this notion of adherence to God's law is tied in with the Egyptian Exodus (and God's covenant with the Hebrews via the mediation of Moses), and explicit parallels are drawn between this event and the plight of the Judahites exiled in Babylon (e.g. Isaiah 40:3-5; 55:12–13). Although we can be relatively confident that the Exodus was an important event in the mythology of the Northern Kingdom, the Babylonian exile appears to have been the event that secured its place as one of the most defining events in the history of the Hebrew people as a whole.
But perhaps the most important theological development here - particularly as it impacts on our modern world - is that by the end of the exile we find the very first unambiguous declaration of monotheism in the history of Israel and Judah. In the book of Deutero-Isaiah (i.e. Isa 40-55), penned at the very end of the exile period, are the words: "I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god" (44:6). In response to the trauma of being conquered, being thrown into exile and watching as the house of their God was destroyed by marauding foreigners, the exiled community developed a theory of their God which placed his reign of influence not merely beyond the Temple of the land of Israel and Judah, but as a universal and (perhaps?) all-powerful being who had literally no equal. The religion of Josiah, far from being destroyed by the conquering Babylonians, was taken and built into something far grander, and far more universal as a seemingly inevitable reaction to suffering they had undergone. I've been saying throughout these posts that the content of theology can often be explained as a reaction to the forces of history, and the development of monotheism in the religion of the Judahites serves as a perfect example.
After the death of King Josiah, Judah was thrown into a period of political chaos which culminated in its invasion at the hands of the Babylonians. At least as far as the Biblical record can be trusted, Josiah was able to oversee the complete centralisation of power in Judah, to institute the formation of a monolithic religion and to apparently unite the nation and its surrounding territories - violently, if necessary - under a single nationalist ideology. Upon his death, his immediate political project seems to have been undone in a hurry and the nation began to be torn apart, both from within and without.
The spark for all these difficulties can be identified with the decline of Assyrian Empire and the resulting power vacuum it created. Initially, this spurred an assertion of independence in Judah: free from the Assyrian yoke, Josiah was able to implement his political program in Judah without interference and Judah stood - for perhaps the first time in its history - as a strong, dominant power in the region. In the shadows of the Assyrian empire, however, emerged two more empires: those of Babylonia (who delivered the final blow to the Assyrian empire in 605 BC) and Egypt (who had allied themselves with Assyria). Judah found itself trapped between these two powers - both geographically and politically - and the competing forces would eventually tear the nation apart. Like a planet passing between two suns, Judah found itself pulled towards two powerful spheres of influence simultaneously, and the internal strain generated would prove too much.
Josiah, as we saw in the last post, allied himself with the Babylonians against the Assyrians and their Egyptian allies. After he was killed in battle by the Egyptian Pharaoh Necho II, his son, Jehoahaz, was installed on the throne by "the people of the land" (i.e. the same coalition that had installed Josiah). The Egyptian military presence, which by this time had stretched its influence far into the Levant, ensured that a king without sympathies to the Egyptian empire would not last long. Indeed, Jehoahaz was deposed just three months into his reign by the Egyptian Pharaoh and sent into exile in Egypt. He was replaced by king Jehoiakim, who agreed to make Judah a vassal state and to pay an onerous tribute to the Egyptians. In order to do this, he "exacted the silver and the gold from the people of the land" (2 Kings 24:35), another indication of the hardship placed on rural communities by imperial conquest. Signs of reprieve would fleetingly arrive in short time, though.
In 605 BC, the Babylonians defeated the Egyptians decisively in a battle at Carchemish, and Jehoiakim used the opportunity to transfer allegiance to the Babylonians in return for their protection. Babylon agreed, and for the next three years Judah was a Babylonian vassal state. Here, though, his allegiance began flip-flopping periodically between the Egyptians and the Assyrians, which should give some indication of the confused political state in the region during his reign. With the war between the Egyptians and Babylonians continuing apace, he transferred his allegiance back to the Egyptians and ceased paying tribute to Babylon sometime shortly before 600 BC. The reasons behind his equivocation are not easy to elucidate with any certainty, but his switching of allegiances may reflect his judgement on the state of the war (i.e. which side appeared more likely to claim victory in the region) or - perhaps more likely - the divided loyalties that existed within Judah itself. As I shall explain in more detail below, there was apparently a genuine rift that existed in Judah at the time about where it's loyalties should be placed: with Egypt, with Babylon or with neither. Jehoiakim's dithering on the issue may simply be a reflection of the irreconcilable rifts that existed within his court.
In any case, the Babylonian reaction to this transference of loyalty was predictably swift and harsh, and by 598 BC the Babylonians had come to occupy the majority of the land of Judah and were knocking on the gates of Jerusalem. It was in this year that Jehoiakim died without explanation. Some have averred that the Biblical text implies that he was killed by marauding bands of foreign warriors (cf. 2 Kings 24:2) but the Bible doesn't say so specifically, noting simply that Jehoiakim "slept with his ancestors" (v. 6). In any case, it's difficult to see how he might have been exposed directly to the presence of such foreign warriors when Jerusalem apparently stood strong for several more months after his death. The possibility of a domestic plot to end his life cannot be discounted, as there is Biblical precedent for the assassination of kings in siege situations: for instance, the murder of King Pekah in the Kingdom of Israel in the face of the Assyrian advance in 734 BC (see part 3). Jehoiakim had also apparently angered religious figures in the nation during his reign through his persecution of prophets (Uriah was killed, and Jeremiah put on trial for his life at the hands of the king), and the religious figures in Jerusalem must have held considerable political clout in the city since the reforms of Josiah. Whatever the case, the final defence of Jerusalem was left to Jehoiakim's son Jehoiachin, but he was capable of resisting the Babylonians for only 3 months. The fortified walls of Jerusalem were finally breached, and the Babylonian forces spilled into the city in 598 BC.
Jehoiachin submitted voluntarily to the Babylonians, and was taken immediately into forced exile to live within the city of Babylon. He was joined by many other members of the Jerusalem elite, including Ezekiel (who we will discuss below) and other members of the Jerusalem priesthood. Jehoiachin's story shall be resumed shortly. For now, though, we will focus on the events within Judah following the first Babylonian invasion and the deposition of their king.
Rebellion and Exile
After sending King Jehoiachin into exile, the Babylonian king Nebuchadrezzar II installed a man by the name of Zedekiah onto the throne in his place. Predictably, Zedekiah was to act as a puppet-king to Nebuchadrezzar II and would be required to pay onerous tributes to the Babylonian empire. As was an all too common in the history of Israel and Judah, however, Zedekiah decided after just three years to turn away from the obligations he had towards his conquerors and to sow the seeds of rebellion.
In 594 BC he hosted an international conference in Jerusalem, where leaders were summoned from the nearby regions to discuss (presumably) their relationship with the Babylonian Empire. The Babylonian king naturally viewed this activity as subversive, and requested that Zedekiah visit him in Babylon to explain his actions and to reaffirm his loyalty to the king. This apparently patched things up for a while, but the decisive break came when Zedekiah rebelled against the Babylonians and allied himself with the Egyptians in the year 589 BC. The Babylonians invaded Judah and laid siege to Jerusalem for a second time, though this siege proved to be more gruesome and prolonged. In 587/586 BC, the Babylonians forces camped outside the walls of Jerusalem for months, preventing anyone (or anything) from entering or leaving. The horrors of such a city siege in the ancient world are difficult to overstate. Cities were so dependant on rural areas to supply it with provisions, that when such avenues of supply were cut-off the city was usually only able to sustain itself for a matter of weeks before starvation and disease began to run rampant. It is worth quoting the Biblical account of this siege (Lamentations 4) at length to convey the abject misery it entailed:
How the gold has grown dim,
how the pure gold is changed!
The sacred stones lie scattered
at the head of every street.
The precious children of Zion,
worth their weight in fine gold—
how they are reckoned as earthen pots,
the work of a potter’s hands!
Even the jackals offer the breast
and nurse their young,
but my people has become cruel,
like the ostriches in the wilderness.
The tongue of the infant sticks
to the roof of its mouth for thirst;
the children beg for food,
but no one gives them anything.
Those who feasted on delicacies
perish in the streets;
those who were brought up in purple
cling to ash heaps.
[...]
Happier were those pierced by the sword
than those pierced by hunger,
whose life drains away, deprived
of the produce of the field.
The hands of compassionate women
have boiled their own children;
they became their food
in the destruction of my people.
The Lord gave full vent to his wrath;
he poured out his hot anger,
and kindled a fire in Zion
that consumed its foundations.
The will of the king and his immediate entourage were soon broken by the conditions that had left such an indelible imprint on the mind of the author of Lamentations, and they attempted to flee the city through a hole that they had made in the wall. The Babylonians had the city completely surrounded, however, and Zedekiah was soon apprehended. For his role in the rebellion, he watched as his sons were" slaughtered... before his eyes", had these same eyes "put out" by the soldiers and was then carried away - blind, childless and "in fetters" - to Babylon (2 Kings 25:7). His subsequent fate is not recorded, but he would prove to be the last ever king of Judah.
The fate of those left behind in the city, however, was no less grim. The Babylonians immediately sacked the Temple - the last holy place remaining in Judah, and quite literally the earthly house of YHWH - breaking its "bronze pillars", taking away "the pots, the shovels, the snuffers, the dishes for incense, and all the bronze vessels used in the temple service" as well as all "the gold, and what was made of silver" (v. 13-15). The Temple - along with the kings house and much of the rest of the city - were "burnt down" (v. 9) and the great walls around the city were also destroyed (v. 10). Much of the population - certainly all of the remaining elite - were carried away into exile in Babylon. According to the Biblical account, the only people who were left in Judah were "the poorest people of the land, to be vine-dressers and tillers of the soil" (v. 12). While some of these accounts might be viewed as somewhat embellished, the archaeological record does paint a picture of widespread destruction and a precipitous decline in population within Judah during the period of Babylonian exile. The economic aftermath of the exile will be explored more fully in part 6, but for now we need only note that Judah had been lain to waste and the last embers of its independence had been extinguished. Judah was now just another Babylonian province.
The Resistance
With the Temple and the king's residence destroyed, and with all the elite members of Jerusalem now deported, the royal Davidic lineage was at an end. In its place, the Babylonians elected a governor named Gedeliah, who was a member of a prominent Jerusalem family at the time. At this point, the society of Judah (or what remained of it) was divided between professing loyalty to Egypt, professing loyalty to Babylon and those who rejected loyalty to both. Those who believed that the loyalties of the Judahites should lie with Babylon could mostly be found among the exiled populations, and I'll address them in the next section. Here, though, it's important to demonstrate the political ambivalence that divided those who remained behind.
We learn from the Book of Jeremiah (a prophet active at the time of the Babylonian exile, though we cannot be sure how much of the material in this book can be traced directly back to him) that immediately after assuming power, Gedeliah was viewed as a target for assassination by certain revolutionary Judahite groups (Jer 40:13-16). This is one crucial difference between the Babylonian occupation and the earlier Assyrian occupation: in this instance, the occupation does seem to have been met by an organised resistance, as compared with some hundred years of relative stability in the Assyrian case. According the the account in Jeremiah 41, one "Ishmael son of Nethaniah son of Elishama" went to eat bread with Gedeliah along with ten of his men in the year 582 BC - under what pretext, we cannot be sure. In any case, Ishmael and his men used the opportunity to "[strike] down Gedaliah son of Ahikam son of Shaphan with the sword and [kill] him" (41:2), before laying waste to all the guards and the Judahite consort present as well. We must be clear what this act represents: a political assassination in protest against imperial designs. This kind of reactionary militarism was to become a regular occurrence in the history of Judah and Israel, and we shall explore similar instances in future posts.
In the Biblical account, though, the actions of the assassin are rather unequivocally denounced. In order to emphasise the mindlessly violent disposition of the perpetrator, we get gory details about his future movements. In addition to murdering all the Judahites present in Gedeliah's court, Ishmael during his escape enconounters some eighty pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem to leave offerings at the Temple. For seemingly no reason, he simply slaughters seventy of them, before crudely disposing of their bodies in a well (itself an unthinkably hostile gesture, given the rules which govern burial of the dead in Judaism). The remaining ten men are then kept as hostages, and remain with Ishmael as he attempts to flee. The polemical subtext of this account is rather clear: Ishmael (and presumably other would-be resisters) weren't really acting in the best interests of Judah, and were in fact little better than common thugs who did not hesitate to slaughter their own people. This appears to be the Biblical view, but it stands to reason that from an alternative perspective, these groups who violently opposed the Babylonian occupation probably saw themselves as freedom fighters, who would have deeply resented the pro-imperial overtures emanating from the exiled community in Babylon (and preserved in Biblical books like Ezekiel and Jeremiah). What we really have here, then, is yet another manifestation of the moral ambiguities inherent to political violence: one man's terrorist is always another man's freedom fighter.
At this point Ishmael decides to flee for "the Ammonites" with his hostages, but is stopped on the way by a Judean militia headed by one "Johanan son of Kareah". Given that the king of Judah was in exile at this time - along with virtually all the other people of power in the region - it seems likely that this militia must have been a private, self-assembled one which operated with relative autonomy - though towards what aims we cannot be certain. The historicity of this specific scene needn't concern us especially, but what it does appear to show is a state of lawlessness and violence, where the normal structures of society had completely broken down, and competing militia groups had risen up to fill the power vacuum. This is partly speculation on my part, but it does seem to be borne out by the Biblical account.
In any case, Johanan is unable to contain Ishmael at this encounter, and the latter flees. This leaves Johanan with a quandary: he knew that there would soon be a Babylonian reprisal for the assassination of their puppet leader and he knew that the Judahite people (including himself) would be left to bear the consequences. As a result, he attempts to organise for his group to flee to Egypt at the first opportunity. At this point, Jeremiah is depicted as delivering them (and other would-be runaways) a prophecy from God, an order to remain in the land of Judah. The prophet is rebuffed, though, and taken with the aspiring refugees into the land of Egypt. In the meantime, the Babylonians invade the land of Judah for a third and final time, quashing definitively whatever little resistance there remained to meet them.
This account of the travails of Johanan and Jeremiah in the Bible may not have much basis in historical fact, but they almost certainly reflect the kind of situation the Judahites were faced with in their first decade and a half under Babylonian occupation. Firstly, the fact that the governor of Judah was assassinated and the fact that the Babylonians still had at least some militia forces to mop up in their final invasion in 582 BC indicates that there was violent resistance to their imperial designs within Judah that - in the absence of any government - must have been spontaneously organised. The reasons why the Babylonians may have been met with a degree of opposition that the Assyrians never seem to have faced are worth exploring briefly.
Now it is certainly plausible enough that there was popular resistance to the Assyrian occupation as well - the available historical sources documenting this earlier period are far more sparse than those detailing the Babylonian occupation - but the reaction in the Babylonian case does seem to have been markedly more vehement and more sustained (the Assyrians, for example, were never required to seize the territory in three separate waves of military campaigning). In part, this may have been a reaction to two different modes of empire. In the Assyrian case, much time and effort was expended in its vassal states investing in "nation-building" (to use the modern terminology), particularly so far as governance and economic growth were concerned. It may have been borne of a rather paternalistic chauvanism, but the Assyrians took pride in exporting their systems of writing, account-keeping and governance, and the consequence was a rapid growth in urbanisation in many of the regions under the Assyrian yoke (including Judah). Where their vassal states experienced genuine economic growth, the benefit to Assyria came in the form of increased tribute. In other words, the Assyrian model of empire building had the capacity to benefit both the empire and the vassal state economically (much in the same vein as the later Roman empire), which - at least in the case of Judah - may have dampened popular resistance towards the empire.
The Babylonians, on the other hand, appear to have had a rather different modus operandi, at least in the Judahite case. Here, the ruling city of Jerusalem was looted for everything it was worth in the first invasion, and presumably little was left that might have been used for restimulating economic growth and international trade. In the second invasion, the power structure at the centre of the state was completely dismantled, and most of those capable of wielding political power over the territory (including most of the scribes, priests and statesmen) were sent into exile. The loss of such experience and skill from the centre of the Judahite society rendered any possibility of an ordered, productive society ever re-emerging from the glowing embers of the conquered state far less likely. Finally, after the third invasion, the Babylonians seem to have abandoned any pretence of governing the land of Judah at all. What happened in the 44 years between the final Babylonian invasion of 582 BC and the eventual liberation of Judah in 538 BC is almost completely unknown, but there is there is little evidence for the implementation of any kind of strong, centralised political structure. The "capital" of the state had been officially moved from Jerusalem to the northern city of Mizpah, but it is unclear what kind of government presided there. The fact that virtually no writings survive from Judah during this period - in addition to an archaeological record which evidences a precipitous population decline in the region - tells the story of a land laid almost completely to waste, one which the Babylonians never had any interest in ever developing economically. The exploitative nature of the Babylonian occupation may go some way to explaining the degree of resistance it faced - at least initially - within Judah during the early stages of the 6th century BC.
The Exile
As we noted in the previous section, it seems that many Judahites fled the region in the aftermath of Gedeliah's assassination and in the lead-up to the final Babylonian invasion. The subsequent depressed economic state of the region probably led to further waves of emigration, as people left the stagnant region in search of better opportunities. Based on archaeological evidence (and the Biblical account itself) it seems that many of these refugees ended up in Egypt, which experienced a flourishing of Semitic communities at this time. The expulsion of the Hebrew people from their land (whether forced or voluntary) marks the first stages of the Jewish diaspora, which (as we shall see in future posts) would continue for many centuries to come. Some of the Jewish communities established in Egypt would remain there, as future Jewish communities continued to be established all around the Mediterranean in reaction to a seemingly endless succession of imperial occupations.
The other half of the Babylonian enforced diaspora, however, found themselves living as captives in Babylon. It is this community that we know the most about, because their experiences are the virtually the only ones to have achieved a written expression that has survived to the modern day. As has already been noted, many - probably most - of these exiled Judahites were drawn from the "elite" segments of their society. Among them we find scribes, priests and even King Jehoiachin. The preservation of their culture - particularly its religious aspects - was taken seriously, and we can reasonably postulate that many of the Old Testament texts must have taken on a somewhat recognisable form during this time, or at least the period shortly succeeding it. This implies that the exiled Judahite community retained a degree of autonomy in their land of exile, and the Biblical material that can be most reliably dated to this period exhibits a conspicuous lack of anti-Babylonian sentiment. The question immediately presents itself: why should this be?
Before answering this question, we must first concede that the experience of the exile was scarcely a pleasant one for those who found themselves in Babylon. Perhaps the most famous expression of this is Psalm 137, which expresses a genuine longing for the now distant land of Zion. The final verse - where the author fantasises about dashing the children of the Babylonians against rocks - is an indication of genuine anger and resentment, one often overlooked when scholars try to downplay the degree of suffering experienced by those in Babylonian exile. Similarly, the prophetic texts from this time (most notably Ezekiel and Jeremiah) do not attempt to downplay the misery of the Babylonian invasion, they merely couch it in theological terms which absolve the Babylonians from moral culpability (see next section). But perhaps that only makes the question more perplexing: if there was an undeniable degree of suffering involved in the exile, why do the Babylonians get off so lightly in the Biblical texts?
Part of the answer surely lies with the on-going influence of King Jehoiachin. We know from the Bible and independent archaeological evidence that Jehoiachin was treated comparatively well by his Babylonian captors. In addition to being afforded (along with the other exiles) the relative luxury of continuing to practice his religion and to speak in his native tongue, he was also given relatively generous rations as compared to other captives. The production and preservation of sacred literature during this time also points to a degree of freedom which belies the language of "bonds" and "fetters" sometimes used in the Bible in connection with the exile. Given that he had surrendered to the Babylonians willingly (2 Kings 24:12), that he was treated favourably by them and that he was (presumably) involved in the literature penned at this time, can there be any surprise that the literature penned in and around this time was comparatively gentle in its depiction of the Babylonians?
Ezekiel in this respect is particularly noteworthy: in forty-eight chapters, scarcely a single bad word is spoken against the Babylonians. In fact, the Babylonians are depicted as acting with YHWH's explicit help and support (e.g. 26:7-14). Perhaps even more noteworthy is Ezekiel's attitude towards Zedekiah, the man named king by the Babylonians in Jehoiachin's absence. Ezekiel denounces him as the "evil prince of Israel" (21:25) and condemns him for his rebellion against Babylon (2:3). Similar sentiments can be found in Jeremiah, who likens those who remained in Judah (including Zedekiah) to "bad figs" (24:16-17), councils those in exile to "seek the welfare of" (i.e. assist) Babylon (29:7) and to serve its king (27:17). What this all points to is the fact that the exiled community had gathered round Jehoiachin as the only legitimate king of Judah, and - at his instigation, or at least under his watchful eye - penned a whole host of texts that justified the legitimacy of his rule and denounced the illegitimacy of those who had stayed behind in Judah after the first wave of exile. The surprisingly pro-Babylonian tone of these texts can be seen as a way of strengthening the continuing political legitimacy of those in exile, over and against those who had fled to Egypt (which remained an enemy of Babylon at the time) and those unlucky few who remained in Judah. The full force of this argument, however, requires an understanding of the theology of the period, particularly in how it was influenced by the circumstances of the Babylonian invasion.
The Theology of the Exile
If it is true - as the exiled authors claimed - that Jehoiachin was a good and legitimate king, then why was it that YHWH had decided to move against Israel? More to the point, why should he have moved against Israel so soon after the reforms of Josiah, which finally saw all the aberrant religious practices removed from the land of Israel? Disasters can provoke theological soul-searching at the best of times, but the issue facing the exiled Judahites seems to have been particularly pronounced. Given all that they had done to placate YHWH, why had he still seen fit to visit his wrath so vehemently against them? If the previous inequities which faced them were the consequence of wicked kings and an unfaithful population, why had the rectification of these facts done nothing to curb God's anger?
The texts from this period exhibit a great deal of doubt and uncertainty, and clearly demonstrate to us that the theology crystalised during Josiah's time was not necessarily of any help or comfort. The author of Lamentations (2:20-22) almost appears to directly rebuke YHWH for what he had done to Judah:
Look, O Lord, and consider!
To whom have you done this?
Should women eat their offspring,
the children they have borne?
Should priest and prophet be killed
in the sanctuary of the Lord?
The young and the old are lying
on the ground in the streets;
my young women and my young men
have fallen by the sword;
on the day of your anger you have killed them,
slaughtering without mercy.
You invited my enemies from all around
as if for a day of festival;
and on the day of the anger of the Lord
no one escaped or survived;
those whom I bore and reared
my enemy has destroyed.
From this, the author goes on to conclude his work by asking YHWH "Why have you forgotten us completely? Why have you forsaken us these many days?" (5:20) and then speculating that "you have utterly rejected us, and are angry with us beyond measure" (5:22). These are not the confident ruminations of an individual who felt he understood his god with any confidence, but the mournful cries of a man whose theology that had been cast into a morass of utter confusion and despair.
Nonetheless, the authors of this time clearly set themselves the task of providing an explanation for the events that wouldn't require the entire theological edifice they had created to be torn down. The first theological solution to the problem was to identify that the Babylonian invasion was indeed a sign of YHWH's strength rather than a sign of his weakness. In the ancient world, it was often assumed that a nation's strength was directly proportional to the strength of its god(s), which goes some way to explaining why the gods of powerful nations were worshipped with such alacrity in the region (including in Israel and Judah prior to Josiah's religious reforms). These gods could be absorbed into the polytheistic pantheon of a given nation without the need for much theological teeth-gnashing: many gods inhabited the world, so there was little sense in forgoing the opportunity to worship just one more who had already proven the efficacy of his powers. For the Judahites who lived in the shadow of Josiah, however, such hedging of ones theistic bets had ceased to be an option. The religion of Judah had become entirely centralised under a single god, whose power and pre-eminence (in the land of Judah at least) had been enforced by fiat with the destruction of the places of worship devoted to all the other gods. If Judah had been destroyed by foreign forces who worshipped foreign gods, this could have only been possible with the direct complicity of YHWH. And if YHWH had seen fit to inflict such violence on the people of Judah, then it stands to reason that they must have done something to anger him.
But, again, why would YHWH have been so angry if the Judahites had finally turned away from centuries of polytheistic worship towards the monolatrous worship of YHWH? The theology of the Book of Kings made it quite clear that God's punishment (for instance the destruction of Israel and the Assyrian annexation of Judah) was a response to the "evil" of the people and the kings who oversaw them. So, if Josiah had truly "turned to the Lord with all his heart, with all his soul, and with all his might" (2 Kings 23:25) then what could have possibly driven YHWH to such anger? The solution to this problem first consisted of absolving Josiah and (to a lesser extent) subsequent kings for direct responsibility for what had happened. The text added to the Book of 2 Kings after the death of Josiah attempts to make it plain that YHWH still held a grudge for the gross "provocations" of king Manasseh (23:26-27; cf. Jer 15:4):
Still the Lord did not turn from the fierceness of his great wrath, by which his anger was kindled against Judah, because of all the provocations with which Manasseh had provoked him. The Lord said, ‘I will remove Judah also out of my sight, as I have removed Israel; and I will reject this city that I have chosen, Jerusalem, and the house of which I said, My name shall be there.’
In other words, the theology of the Book of Kings (and therefore of the centralised Judahite religion) was not challenged by the Babylonian invasion: it was merely a sign that a generation could be punished for the iniquities of their forebears (not so coincidentally a major theme in the Torah, which was likely completed in more or less its present form shortly after the period of exile). But a second problem arises: if YHWH, in a very literal sense, occupied the Jerusalem Temple, and if this temple was to be the central focus of all worship, what was to be done pursuant to its destruction? It's not entirely clear how the exiled Judahites responded to this problem, or what form their religious worship took (only that it persisted and that it remained entirely separate from the Babylonian religion), but we can perhaps piece together some speculations based on the fragmentary evidence we have in the Bible.
Firstly we should note that many of the the hymns that were used in the Temple (in a liturgical context) prior to its destruction were collated and - if they weren't already - expressed in a written form. These would contribute to the Book of Psalms we have today, and we can presume that they continued to be sung (albeit mournfully) by the exiles in Babylon (Ps 137) outside of the Temple context. Secondly, the importance of God's law (i.e. the Torah, or the elements of it which had been penned by this time) was strongly emphasised in the writings from this nime. Notions here of sacrifices and other ritual forms of worship that would have been performed at the Temple are largely ignored, and the adherence to God's laws are now taken to be the central duty of the Judahites. This deviation from the law is also cited as a central reason for the wrath that has just been visited upon them (e.g. Jer 9:13; 32:23 etc.). Additionally, this notion of adherence to God's law is tied in with the Egyptian Exodus (and God's covenant with the Hebrews via the mediation of Moses), and explicit parallels are drawn between this event and the plight of the Judahites exiled in Babylon (e.g. Isaiah 40:3-5; 55:12–13). Although we can be relatively confident that the Exodus was an important event in the mythology of the Northern Kingdom, the Babylonian exile appears to have been the event that secured its place as one of the most defining events in the history of the Hebrew people as a whole.
But perhaps the most important theological development here - particularly as it impacts on our modern world - is that by the end of the exile we find the very first unambiguous declaration of monotheism in the history of Israel and Judah. In the book of Deutero-Isaiah (i.e. Isa 40-55), penned at the very end of the exile period, are the words: "I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god" (44:6). In response to the trauma of being conquered, being thrown into exile and watching as the house of their God was destroyed by marauding foreigners, the exiled community developed a theory of their God which placed his reign of influence not merely beyond the Temple of the land of Israel and Judah, but as a universal and (perhaps?) all-powerful being who had literally no equal. The religion of Josiah, far from being destroyed by the conquering Babylonians, was taken and built into something far grander, and far more universal as a seemingly inevitable reaction to suffering they had undergone. I've been saying throughout these posts that the content of theology can often be explained as a reaction to the forces of history, and the development of monotheism in the religion of the Judahites serves as a perfect example.
Saturday, October 6, 2012
Mark 6:30-44 and 8:1-10: The Meaning of the Feeding of the Multitudes
When examining the significance of the two accounts of the "Feeding of the Multitudes" in Mark's Gospel, a number of theories have been put forward regarding the significance of the events depicted. The first possibility is to deny that there is really any deeper significance at all: perhaps, according to one particularly naive theory, the multitude simply brought their own lunches when they came to hear Jesus speak, and the event simply became embellished with time. A more plausible alternative is that the two events are simply recollections of the same event with slightly different details, and that Mark elected to preserve both in his Gospel for the sake of thoroughness. Scholars advocating such a theory would dismiss the numbers of loaves, baskets and people present as being purely incidental to the narrative. The original story on this interpretation might have originally been an allegory of Elisha's feeding of the Hebrews (2 Kings 4:42-44) or of the significance of the Eucharist, which eventually became furnished with two different sets of numerical detail in its subsequent retelling. Such an approach may have its merits, but it ultimately fails to explain why Mark (and Matthew later) saw fit to include both accounts.
Another approach views the numbers as holding a particular significance to the stories. Whatever the origin of these stories may have been, it seems clear that the numbers held some special significance to Mark in his Gospel. See, for example, verses 8:19-21:
This passage would make little sense if we were to presume that the numbers held no significance for Mark or Mark's Jesus. Given that, a more interesting question can be posed: what, exactly, are the numbers supposed to represent?
We'll begin with the first incident, the one found in Mark 6:30-6:44. It runs as follows:
Traditionally, scholars have attempted to trace the significance of these numbers back to their significance in Judaism. The twelve baskets, on such a reading, signify the twelve tribes of Israel, where the 5,000 and / or the five loaves denote the five books of the Pentateuch. Such a view is plausible, but I will shortly argue against it in favour of a different interpretation. For now, though, note merely here that the symbolism is a little contorted: as the Oxford Bible Commentary puts it, "surely 'twelve' would be better as parallel to the number of people, and 'five' to what they are fed with, if the above symbolism were in mind".
Next in Mark's Gospel - that is, in chapter 7 - we have Jesus arguing with some Pharisees about dietary laws and purity (7:1-23) before a curious episode involving Jesus and a Phoenician woman:
I'll return to the significance of this episode shortly.
Next, we come to the second feeding of the multitude:
The first observation to make here is that this episode appears to take place in or near the Decapolis (cf. Mk. 7:31) a particularly Gentile part of the region. Although the story doesn't specifically identify the crowd as being Gentile, I believe that's the most reasonable inference for reasons I shall attempt to explain now. The numbers involved certainly hint at the fact that we are to treat this crowd as Gentile, though perhaps not for the reasons that many scholars suspect. For many scholars, the number 4,000 here represents the "four corners of the Earth" (a Hebrew idiom referring to the entire globe) and the number seven refers to "the seven nations of Canaan" - i.e. the Pagan nations that once bordered Israel (e.g. cf. Acts 13:19). Such an approach is plausible enough, but I believe there is an alternative explanation.
First of all, I agree that these two "feeding" events as presented in Mark represent a deliberate juxtaposition of Jesus' ministry to the Jews and his (purported) ministry to the Gentiles. The numbers are one clue (which I shall elaborate more fully on below), but so is the kind of narrative framing Mark uses here and elsewhere in his Gospel. It has been long noted by scholars that Mark frequently interrupts his narrative in places to introduce a story that appears - prima facie - to be unrelated to the surrounding material. This A-B-A narrative format has been named by scholars as the "Markan Sandwich" technique. Although the two feeding events do not otherwise constitute a continuous narrative, and although the material placed between them is rather too expansive and diverse to be considered mere filling in a sandwich, I still believe that we can look to the structure of Mark's narrative as deliberate and meaningful, and therefore use this material as a clue on how to interpret the two "feeding" stories that surround it.
As mentioned above, the bulk of the material in Mark 7 pertains to Jesus debating with the Pharisees over the interpretation of - and continuing applicability of - dietary and purity laws within the Torah. This may or may not have been a topic of debate during Jesus' ministry itself, but we do know that it was a burning question in the years following Jesus' death, up until the time that Mark's Gospel was written in around 70 AD. Essentially, the early Christians couldn't agree on exactly how relevant the old Jewish laws should be within their community, particularly when it came to Gentiles. It seems that it eventually became settled that Gentiles who converted to the faith would not be required to keep kosher or to circumcise themselves, but such a conclusion was only arrived at after much acrimonious debate. Paul, for example, suggests that those who advocate circumcision for Gentile converts should castrate themselves (Gal 5:12)! This episode in Mark touches on the same themes, and perhaps offers us the clue that the surrounding "feeding" episodes should similarly be interpreted in the context of the relationship between Gentile converts and Jewish converts and how Jesus might have mediated them.
The next episode in Mark 7 is that of the Phoenician woman posted above. This has been a troubling passage for many Biblical scholars, for it appears to have Jesus comparing the Jews to children and the Gentiles to dogs! That is, salvation - in the form of the coming Kingdom of God - would be apportioned first to the Jews and then later the "scraps" of this salvation would be apportioned to the Gentiles. It seems like a fairly harsh soteriology, but it does seem to have been the common understanding. Paul too suggests that the gospel of salvation is given "to the Jew first, and [then] also to the Greek" (Rom. 1:16). This story might offer the clue for the given order that the "feeding" episodes are given in the Bible, and also for the curious emphasis placed on the collecting of "broken pieces" (i.e. scraps) after the meals were finished.
If that is the case, then we can perhaps suggest that the episode in Mark 6:30-44 represents Jesus' mission to the Jews and that the second episode in Mark 8:1-10 represents his mission to the Gentiles: "to the Jews first, and [then] also to the Greek". When the other evidence is included (for instance, the situation of the second episode near the Decapolis, and the fact that a more Jewish word for basket is used in the first account and a more Greek word is used for the same object in the second account), I would say that the scholars have it got it mostly right on that point: the first audience we are to take as being Jewish and the second audience we are to take as Gentile. The numbers offer further evidence on this point, but perhaps not in the sense that many scholars have imagined. Here I'll offer a different take on the numbers to the ones given by scholars above.
In the case of the first episode, perhaps "the twelve" here is not supposed to signify the twelve tribes of Israel, but rather the 12 disciples: a group of men who were apparently Jews selected by Jesus in Galilee and its surrounding regions, and who apparently never ventured far from Jerusalem after Jesus' death. Once the nascent movement was scattered from Jerusalem and became more of a Gentile faith, the role of the twelve shrinks accordingly. That is, we must presume that they were a Jewish collective who ministered only to a Jewish in and around Jerusalem. This may be why they are alluded to in the "Jewish" feeding episode.
As for the "5,000" we must note that this number - or a very similar number - is well attested in the NT in connection with converts to the new movement immediately after the death of Jesus. Paul, for example, mentions Jesus' appearance to "the 500" in 1 Cor 15:6, which - compellingly - is included in what appears to be part of a pre-existing formula that Paul inherited which links "the twelve" (v.5) and "the 500" together in a single kerygmatic pericope. In the Book of Acts, Luke suggests that the amount of people "who believed... numbered about five thousand" (4:3). Again compellingly, this number must pertain only to the number of believers in Jerusalem (i.e. predominantly Jewish), since the action here is situated at the Jerusalem Temple, Peter has been addressing himself so far only to the "men of Judea" (2:14) and his "fellow Israelites" (vv. 22, 29) and the mission to the Gentiles is not taken up in Luke's account until chapter 6. In other words, there seems to be a tradition that existed - quite independently of Mark - numbering the early believers in Jerusalem at 500(0), who were overseen and ministered to by "the twelve".
As for the second "feeding" episode, the numbers are rather more difficult to source, but again we might be best served by looking to the situation in the early Christian movement rather than the OT. In Acts 6, we learn that after a dispute between Gentile and Jewish believers over food (!), the twelve assent to the election of a council of seven whose responsibility would be closely linked to the needs of the growing number of Gentile believers (vv. 1-6). Could the seven baskets in the "Gentile" feeding episode represent this council of seven, just as the twelve baskets represent the twelve disciples in the "Jewish" feeding account? I think that would be a distinct possibility. The number 4,000 is rather more problematic, since it doesn't appear anywhere in the NT, but it could well have the same meaning as the 5,000 in the first episode: that is a tradition surrounding the number of (in this case, Gentile) believers that the new movement could boast. This can only be speculation, but it seems to me as well-supported a speculation as any other.
The fact that Luke fails to mention these "4,000" may not necessarily count against this theory. In his Gospel, for example, Luke excises the bulk of the Markan material examined in this post. He includes the first "feeding of the multitudes" but everything else - all the material from Mark 6:45-8:13 - has simply been left out of Luke's account. His reasoning for this is uncertain, but it seems that he didn't want to indicate that any signs of debate or controversy existed concerning dietary laws until he presents Peter's "revelation" on the issue in Acts 11. This is part of a general desire on Luke's behalf to downplay or smooth over early divisions within the church, particularly those concerning divisions between Jews and Gentiles. As such, there seems to be a pretty compelling reason for Luke to have left out any mention of the second feeding account (as it appears to indicate a division between Jesus' ministry to the Jews and the Gentiles, with the first apparently given preferential treatment) as well as any reference to the "4,000" Gentile believers to which this episode may have been referring. Again I must confess that this is mostly speculative, but the idea that the numbers are referencing fixed contemporary situations that would have been recognisable to the first century reader seems more likely to me than the idea that they are referencing - in a particularly abstruse way - some aspects of earlier Judaism.
So perhaps the 5,000 represents the traditionally given number of Jewish believers, the 4,000 represents the traditionally given number of Gentile believers, the twelve represents Jesus' immediate apostles and the seven represents the later established Gentile council of Acts 6: what about the fish and the loaves, though? The number of fish and loaves involved here may not be especially significant (Jesus gives them no weight in his later questioning in Mark 8:17-21, for example) but the substances themselves almost certainly do. Fish and bread were apparently used from very early on in the communal dinners that the early Christians held, and where the eucharist was performed. In this respect, they held a special spiritual significance within these Christian communities. The connection between the eucharist and this episode is made even more explicit in the version given in the Gospel of John, where the verb "eucharisteo" is actually used (John 6:11). In other words, the fish and the bread seem to either be directly representing the eucharist or - more abstractly - the soteriological elements that the eucharist itself entails.
But what about the meaning of the passage as a whole? Even if my analysis is correct, it doesn't seem to make much sense: why are the Apostles, for example, receiving the scraps of the 5,000? Shouldn't it be the other way around? Not necessarily. The first thing to note is the pervasive sense of irony in Mark's Gospel, and even in the very teachings of Jesus himself. Both delight in turning the expected and the established order on its head: remember Jesus' claim that "the last will be first and the first will be last" (Mt. 20:16)? Mark also takes a rather dim view of Jesus' disciples in his Gospel, a feature that has been long noted by scholars. The disciples of Jesus are regularly depicted as dim and prone to missing the true meaning of Jesus' teachings, including at the conclusion of these two episodes (i.e. Mk. 8:21). Could it not be, then, that Mark - in his two episodes of the "feeding of the multitudes" - is here downplaying the privileged status of "the twelve" and the "council of seven" using subversive irony? That rather than occupying a privileged position in the context of Jesus' soteriology, they should rather view themselves as receiving the scraps of the spiritual nourishment that were apportioned first and foremost to the wider community?
This is undoubtedly an ironic and counter-intuitive position to draw, but then doesn't "ironic" and "counter-intuitive" describe quite beautifully the nature of Jesus' ministry and Mark's Gospel?
Another approach views the numbers as holding a particular significance to the stories. Whatever the origin of these stories may have been, it seems clear that the numbers held some special significance to Mark in his Gospel. See, for example, verses 8:19-21:
When I broke the five loaves for the five thousand, how many baskets full of broken pieces did you collect?’ They said to him, ‘Twelve.’ ‘And the seven for the four thousand, how many baskets full of broken pieces did you collect?’ And they said to him, ‘Seven.’ Then he said to them, ‘Do you not yet understand?’
This passage would make little sense if we were to presume that the numbers held no significance for Mark or Mark's Jesus. Given that, a more interesting question can be posed: what, exactly, are the numbers supposed to represent?
We'll begin with the first incident, the one found in Mark 6:30-6:44. It runs as follows:
The apostles gathered around Jesus, and told him all that they had done and taught. He said to them, ‘Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.’ For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat. And they went away in the boat to a deserted place by themselves. Now many saw them going and recognized them, and they hurried there on foot from all the towns and arrived ahead of them. As he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things.
When it grew late, his disciples came to him and said, ‘This is a deserted place, and the hour is now very late; send them away so that they may go into the surrounding country and villages and buy something for themselves to eat.’ But he answered them, ‘You give them something to eat.’ They said to him, ‘Are we to go and buy two hundred denarii worth of bread, and give it to them to eat?’ And he said to them, ‘How many loaves have you? Go and see.’ When they had found out, they said, ‘Five, and two fish.’ Then he ordered them to get all the people to sit down in groups on the green grass. So they sat down in groups of hundreds and of fifties. Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to his disciples to set before the people; and he divided the two fish among them all. And all ate and were filled; and they took up twelve baskets full of broken pieces and of the fish. Those who had eaten the loaves numbered five thousand men.
Traditionally, scholars have attempted to trace the significance of these numbers back to their significance in Judaism. The twelve baskets, on such a reading, signify the twelve tribes of Israel, where the 5,000 and / or the five loaves denote the five books of the Pentateuch. Such a view is plausible, but I will shortly argue against it in favour of a different interpretation. For now, though, note merely here that the symbolism is a little contorted: as the Oxford Bible Commentary puts it, "surely 'twelve' would be better as parallel to the number of people, and 'five' to what they are fed with, if the above symbolism were in mind".
Next in Mark's Gospel - that is, in chapter 7 - we have Jesus arguing with some Pharisees about dietary laws and purity (7:1-23) before a curious episode involving Jesus and a Phoenician woman:
He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there. Yet he could not escape notice, but a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit immediately heard about him, and she came and bowed down at his feet. Now the woman was a Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. He said to her, ‘Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.’ But she answered him, ‘Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.’ Then he said to her, ‘For saying that, you may go—the demon has left your daughter.’ So she went home, found the child lying on the bed, and the demon gone.
I'll return to the significance of this episode shortly.
Next, we come to the second feeding of the multitude:
In those days when there was again a great crowd without anything to eat, he called his disciples and said to them, ‘I have compassion for the crowd, because they have been with me now for three days and have nothing to eat. If I send them away hungry to their homes, they will faint on the way—and some of them have come from a great distance.’ His disciples replied, ‘How can one feed these people with bread here in the desert?’ He asked them, ‘How many loaves do you have?’ They said, ‘Seven.’ Then he ordered the crowd to sit down on the ground; and he took the seven loaves, and after giving thanks he broke them and gave them to his disciples to distribute; and they distributed them to the crowd. They had also a few small fish; and after blessing them, he ordered that these too should be distributed. They ate and were filled; and they took up the broken pieces left over, seven baskets full. Now there were about four thousand people. And he sent them away. And immediately he got into the boat with his disciples and went to the district of Dalmanutha.
The first observation to make here is that this episode appears to take place in or near the Decapolis (cf. Mk. 7:31) a particularly Gentile part of the region. Although the story doesn't specifically identify the crowd as being Gentile, I believe that's the most reasonable inference for reasons I shall attempt to explain now. The numbers involved certainly hint at the fact that we are to treat this crowd as Gentile, though perhaps not for the reasons that many scholars suspect. For many scholars, the number 4,000 here represents the "four corners of the Earth" (a Hebrew idiom referring to the entire globe) and the number seven refers to "the seven nations of Canaan" - i.e. the Pagan nations that once bordered Israel (e.g. cf. Acts 13:19). Such an approach is plausible enough, but I believe there is an alternative explanation.
First of all, I agree that these two "feeding" events as presented in Mark represent a deliberate juxtaposition of Jesus' ministry to the Jews and his (purported) ministry to the Gentiles. The numbers are one clue (which I shall elaborate more fully on below), but so is the kind of narrative framing Mark uses here and elsewhere in his Gospel. It has been long noted by scholars that Mark frequently interrupts his narrative in places to introduce a story that appears - prima facie - to be unrelated to the surrounding material. This A-B-A narrative format has been named by scholars as the "Markan Sandwich" technique. Although the two feeding events do not otherwise constitute a continuous narrative, and although the material placed between them is rather too expansive and diverse to be considered mere filling in a sandwich, I still believe that we can look to the structure of Mark's narrative as deliberate and meaningful, and therefore use this material as a clue on how to interpret the two "feeding" stories that surround it.
As mentioned above, the bulk of the material in Mark 7 pertains to Jesus debating with the Pharisees over the interpretation of - and continuing applicability of - dietary and purity laws within the Torah. This may or may not have been a topic of debate during Jesus' ministry itself, but we do know that it was a burning question in the years following Jesus' death, up until the time that Mark's Gospel was written in around 70 AD. Essentially, the early Christians couldn't agree on exactly how relevant the old Jewish laws should be within their community, particularly when it came to Gentiles. It seems that it eventually became settled that Gentiles who converted to the faith would not be required to keep kosher or to circumcise themselves, but such a conclusion was only arrived at after much acrimonious debate. Paul, for example, suggests that those who advocate circumcision for Gentile converts should castrate themselves (Gal 5:12)! This episode in Mark touches on the same themes, and perhaps offers us the clue that the surrounding "feeding" episodes should similarly be interpreted in the context of the relationship between Gentile converts and Jewish converts and how Jesus might have mediated them.
The next episode in Mark 7 is that of the Phoenician woman posted above. This has been a troubling passage for many Biblical scholars, for it appears to have Jesus comparing the Jews to children and the Gentiles to dogs! That is, salvation - in the form of the coming Kingdom of God - would be apportioned first to the Jews and then later the "scraps" of this salvation would be apportioned to the Gentiles. It seems like a fairly harsh soteriology, but it does seem to have been the common understanding. Paul too suggests that the gospel of salvation is given "to the Jew first, and [then] also to the Greek" (Rom. 1:16). This story might offer the clue for the given order that the "feeding" episodes are given in the Bible, and also for the curious emphasis placed on the collecting of "broken pieces" (i.e. scraps) after the meals were finished.
If that is the case, then we can perhaps suggest that the episode in Mark 6:30-44 represents Jesus' mission to the Jews and that the second episode in Mark 8:1-10 represents his mission to the Gentiles: "to the Jews first, and [then] also to the Greek". When the other evidence is included (for instance, the situation of the second episode near the Decapolis, and the fact that a more Jewish word for basket is used in the first account and a more Greek word is used for the same object in the second account), I would say that the scholars have it got it mostly right on that point: the first audience we are to take as being Jewish and the second audience we are to take as Gentile. The numbers offer further evidence on this point, but perhaps not in the sense that many scholars have imagined. Here I'll offer a different take on the numbers to the ones given by scholars above.
In the case of the first episode, perhaps "the twelve" here is not supposed to signify the twelve tribes of Israel, but rather the 12 disciples: a group of men who were apparently Jews selected by Jesus in Galilee and its surrounding regions, and who apparently never ventured far from Jerusalem after Jesus' death. Once the nascent movement was scattered from Jerusalem and became more of a Gentile faith, the role of the twelve shrinks accordingly. That is, we must presume that they were a Jewish collective who ministered only to a Jewish in and around Jerusalem. This may be why they are alluded to in the "Jewish" feeding episode.
As for the "5,000" we must note that this number - or a very similar number - is well attested in the NT in connection with converts to the new movement immediately after the death of Jesus. Paul, for example, mentions Jesus' appearance to "the 500" in 1 Cor 15:6, which - compellingly - is included in what appears to be part of a pre-existing formula that Paul inherited which links "the twelve" (v.5) and "the 500" together in a single kerygmatic pericope. In the Book of Acts, Luke suggests that the amount of people "who believed... numbered about five thousand" (4:3). Again compellingly, this number must pertain only to the number of believers in Jerusalem (i.e. predominantly Jewish), since the action here is situated at the Jerusalem Temple, Peter has been addressing himself so far only to the "men of Judea" (2:14) and his "fellow Israelites" (vv. 22, 29) and the mission to the Gentiles is not taken up in Luke's account until chapter 6. In other words, there seems to be a tradition that existed - quite independently of Mark - numbering the early believers in Jerusalem at 500(0), who were overseen and ministered to by "the twelve".
As for the second "feeding" episode, the numbers are rather more difficult to source, but again we might be best served by looking to the situation in the early Christian movement rather than the OT. In Acts 6, we learn that after a dispute between Gentile and Jewish believers over food (!), the twelve assent to the election of a council of seven whose responsibility would be closely linked to the needs of the growing number of Gentile believers (vv. 1-6). Could the seven baskets in the "Gentile" feeding episode represent this council of seven, just as the twelve baskets represent the twelve disciples in the "Jewish" feeding account? I think that would be a distinct possibility. The number 4,000 is rather more problematic, since it doesn't appear anywhere in the NT, but it could well have the same meaning as the 5,000 in the first episode: that is a tradition surrounding the number of (in this case, Gentile) believers that the new movement could boast. This can only be speculation, but it seems to me as well-supported a speculation as any other.
The fact that Luke fails to mention these "4,000" may not necessarily count against this theory. In his Gospel, for example, Luke excises the bulk of the Markan material examined in this post. He includes the first "feeding of the multitudes" but everything else - all the material from Mark 6:45-8:13 - has simply been left out of Luke's account. His reasoning for this is uncertain, but it seems that he didn't want to indicate that any signs of debate or controversy existed concerning dietary laws until he presents Peter's "revelation" on the issue in Acts 11. This is part of a general desire on Luke's behalf to downplay or smooth over early divisions within the church, particularly those concerning divisions between Jews and Gentiles. As such, there seems to be a pretty compelling reason for Luke to have left out any mention of the second feeding account (as it appears to indicate a division between Jesus' ministry to the Jews and the Gentiles, with the first apparently given preferential treatment) as well as any reference to the "4,000" Gentile believers to which this episode may have been referring. Again I must confess that this is mostly speculative, but the idea that the numbers are referencing fixed contemporary situations that would have been recognisable to the first century reader seems more likely to me than the idea that they are referencing - in a particularly abstruse way - some aspects of earlier Judaism.
So perhaps the 5,000 represents the traditionally given number of Jewish believers, the 4,000 represents the traditionally given number of Gentile believers, the twelve represents Jesus' immediate apostles and the seven represents the later established Gentile council of Acts 6: what about the fish and the loaves, though? The number of fish and loaves involved here may not be especially significant (Jesus gives them no weight in his later questioning in Mark 8:17-21, for example) but the substances themselves almost certainly do. Fish and bread were apparently used from very early on in the communal dinners that the early Christians held, and where the eucharist was performed. In this respect, they held a special spiritual significance within these Christian communities. The connection between the eucharist and this episode is made even more explicit in the version given in the Gospel of John, where the verb "eucharisteo" is actually used (John 6:11). In other words, the fish and the bread seem to either be directly representing the eucharist or - more abstractly - the soteriological elements that the eucharist itself entails.
But what about the meaning of the passage as a whole? Even if my analysis is correct, it doesn't seem to make much sense: why are the Apostles, for example, receiving the scraps of the 5,000? Shouldn't it be the other way around? Not necessarily. The first thing to note is the pervasive sense of irony in Mark's Gospel, and even in the very teachings of Jesus himself. Both delight in turning the expected and the established order on its head: remember Jesus' claim that "the last will be first and the first will be last" (Mt. 20:16)? Mark also takes a rather dim view of Jesus' disciples in his Gospel, a feature that has been long noted by scholars. The disciples of Jesus are regularly depicted as dim and prone to missing the true meaning of Jesus' teachings, including at the conclusion of these two episodes (i.e. Mk. 8:21). Could it not be, then, that Mark - in his two episodes of the "feeding of the multitudes" - is here downplaying the privileged status of "the twelve" and the "council of seven" using subversive irony? That rather than occupying a privileged position in the context of Jesus' soteriology, they should rather view themselves as receiving the scraps of the spiritual nourishment that were apportioned first and foremost to the wider community?
This is undoubtedly an ironic and counter-intuitive position to draw, but then doesn't "ironic" and "counter-intuitive" describe quite beautifully the nature of Jesus' ministry and Mark's Gospel?
Thursday, September 27, 2012
The Concept of "Rights" in American Political Discourse
In his recent speech to the Values Voters Summit, Paul Ryan said the following:
In the increasingly eristical dialectic of American politics, it has become a general and inviolable law that, given enough time, the concept of "rights" will somehow eventually be introduced into every political dialogue one encounters. Usually they are gratuitously invoked as a kind of moral bludgeon - as a blunt and unequivocal way of demonstrating to one's opponent exactly where the boundaries of acceptable moral debate lie, and to demonstrate forcefully that these boundaries have just been transgressed. In my last post I suggested that moral thoughts act as a means of terminating internal dialogues that might otherwise lead to socially damaging actions, and here I suggest that the concept of inalienable "rights" serve the same function in socio-political dialogues: that is, they set the inviolable limits beyond which no political discourse is ever permitted to transgress. They are cognitive "conversation-stoppers", only writ large and on a wider social context.
In this respect, "rights" might be viewed as little more than universalised moral judgements, supported and enforced by some legitimate authority (I will expand upon the nature of this authority shortly). Like moral judgements, they can be regarded as cognitive strategies wielded by the mind to set specific limits on the range of acceptable human actions. Unlike moral judgements, however, judgements concerning rights tend not to be quite so personal, nor quite so visceral in their origin. Although "human rights" can inspire great emotional reactions, it seems that there is quite a difference between saying "slavery is wrong" and "freedom from slavery is a fundamental human right". The former sentence concerns the kind of cognitive projectivism I discussed in my last post: that "wrongness" is an inherent, ontological feature of the institution of slavery. The second sentence, on the other hand, has abstracted, depersonalised and universalised the moral judgement involved, such that it no longer resembles a moral statement in many respects. The opposition to slavery no longer seems to be predicated on the kind of personal moral judgements I explored in my last post ("Slavery is repulsive" / "I am repulsed by slavery") but rather appears to have some external source, completely independent from the fickle caprice of individual human judgement. This sense of "externality" - of supra-human authority - is critical to the way that rights are processed and invoked in political discourse.
So what is this "supra-human" authority from which "human rights" are derived? From where are these declarations concerning the nature human rights derived, if not from the human mind? For many, the answer self-evidently lays with God: as the supreme authority and creator of human life, the boundaries of human rights could only be delineated by him. Indeed, the creators of the US Declaration of Independence held it to be "self-evident" that all men "are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights" (the use of the word "endowment" here implies the kind of external imposition mentioned above). For others, these rights have a natural origin: they are an inexorable aspect of the ontological facticity of human beings as forged by nature. In this respect no different from other aspects of human facticity - such as bipedalism - in the sense that they exist as a priori and essential aspects of "humanity". Still others are happy to have it both ways: human rights are both naturally and divinely ordained. Paul Ryan is apparently one of those people.
But let's examine this claim in the wider context of his speech. While it partly served as a means of hammering home the "godlessness" of the Democratic Party, it was also used as a means to stress the widely-held conservative belief in the superfluity of government: that is, that "our rights come from nature and nature’s God, not from government". There are several objections I can raise to this comment, and to this conservative American attitude to "rights" in general. The first can be found in the Declaration of Independence itself, which - shortly after emphasising the divine origin of "Rights" - goes on to suggest that "to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed". This explicates the important difference between the assertion of human rights and their actual enforcement. To simply assert that one possesses some right is completely futile if there is no authority to recognise or secure this assertion. It is - I am quite sure - of very little comfort to the adulteress stoned to death in Nigeria, or the political dissidents imprisoned in China to know that they have inherent and inalienable rights derived "from nature and nature’s God": rights simply have no practical meaning without some institution there to enforce them. The only institutions with the power to effectively enforce human rights are governments, or something closely resembling them. Ryan's tactless contempt aside, human rights have never been - nor could they ever be - present in the absence of human government.
The second objection comes from the observation that identifying the origin of human rights in nature or God is of no help to us in determining specifically what the content of these rights might be. For example, noting that human rights have a divine origin doesn't give us any clue as to what precisely it is that governments should be enforcing. Is healthcare a fundamental right, for example? How about education? Or food? It's not easy to say, and compelling arguments can be raised for and against each of these putative "rights". Even a right as self-evident as the freedom from slavery was violently resisted until 150 years ago and some might even argue that it still persists in some parts of the world today. The recognition that our concept of "rights" continually change with time - or that such a concept scarcely existed at all prior to the political philosophy of Locke and others - should indicate to us that however "natural" or "God-given" our rights may be, it is still entirely incumbent upon human beings to delineate their scope.
The above also leads me to my third objection: that, ultimately, human rights have an entirely human origin. There are ways of approaching the nature of human rights that preserve their transcendently authoritative nature, without the frankly superfluous metaphysical invocation of God or "Nature". William Downes, for example, notes that our conceptualisation of human rights might be best explained in the context of the "authority of the species-mind". That is, we can reach largely universal judgements about human rights due to the almost identical nature of human minds, and the similar things that are likely to make us happy or miserable. If human slavery creates a degree of misery that every human can empathise with, then it makes sense for all of us - collectively - to universally denounce such a practice. This explains the somewhat contingent nature of human rights and why we can expect them to change with time: if human rights are the consequence of a global, inter-subjective agreement that must necessarily shift with time as our subjective inclinations also change. This might make human rights seem unduly contingent, but that does seem to be their nature: what possible meaning could the claim to a universal human right have if the majority of human beings simply refuse to recognise it?
In any case, the recognition that human rights have an entirely human origin needn't necessarily blunt the moral force that they carry. It obviously becomes incumbent upon all of us to collectively agree upon what these rights might be, but - as I wrote above - exactly the same must be done even if we assume a divine or natural origin for these beliefs. Secondly, it is perfectly acceptable to process and enforce these rights as though they carried a "supra-human authority", only instead of appealing to the transcendent authority of "God" or "Nature" we are now appealing to the transcendent authority of "Humanity". Humanity, as a singular collective, is a metaphysical being whose whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Moreover, it is a being whose nature changes with its individual constituents: as we evolve individually, so does humanity. This both explains and justifies changes over time in what constitutes a "human right" in a manner that explanations invoking "God" and "Nature" simply cannot. "Crimes against Humanity" remain, for this reason, the most serious moral transgressions of our time.
So it is clear that although "rights" have a purely subjective construction they can still have a concrete, objective influence on the way we process moral judgements. Their origin is irrelevant - that they exist, and that they are upheld by common assent is the only authority we need appeal to in their defence. However, like the moral judgements I examined in my last post, there are some who approach the concept of rights in an entirely promiscuous way, introducing them into areas of consideration in which they have no rightful place. Just as it is possible to dull one's capacity for rational moral consideration by reacting with instinctive disapprobation to every action one opposes, and treating all such acts as equally grave moral transgressions (e.g. morally conflating abortion and the holocaust), it is also possible to view to invoke "rights" in such a way that all other moral concerns - concerns that should be central to the issue at hand - are swept away by a all-encompassing logic of petty legalism. In other words, while a moralist terminates all further consideration once she believes she has found the moral locus of the issue at hand, the "right-monger" (I can't think of a better expression) terminates all further consideration once she has found the legal locus. The only relevant question in her mind becomes "Does this conform with / infringe upon some 'right'?", and no other considerations - moral or otherwise - are taken into account.
This, it seems to me, is particularly prevalent in US political discourse, where discussions that should most properly be conducted on a moral or logical plane are instead conducted with regard only for the turgid expression of legal "rights". We have all been in an argument with someone who - when backed into a corner and with the argument long lost - will react against the evidence piling-up against them with the denouement that they are merely "expressing their opinion" and that they "have the right to voice it". The issue that should be central here - whether they have reality on their side - is completely ignored. Similarly, we have fundamentalist Christian groups who wield their "right to free speech" as a shield against the criticism they receive for demonising gays and Muslims. Again, the issue as to whether the speech they offer is any sense justified - or the potential concern that their speech might causing a great deal of harm and anguish - just doesn't figure in their thought. They have identified their personal "rights" in this regard, and further considerations - including their moral obligations to others - are simply ignored.
What inspired this particular post was Mitt Romney's now infamous comments to donors, secretly filmed (most likely) by a member of the "help":
There is not much I can say here that hasn't already been said, only to point out that this is an prime example of the kind of "right-mongering" I mentioned above. For Mitt Romney, the primary consideration when faced with poverty - with people who are sick, starving and homeless - are what kind of "rights" they might be able to claim under the circumstances. For Mitt Romney, the issue isn't one of human suffering or basic human decency, but rather a legalistic inquiry into the constitutional status of the impoverished in the United States. In essence, he resents the poor for treating "healthcare... food... [and] housing" as entitlements; that is, inalienable rights that we are obliged to act upon. For Romney, the issue is clear-cut: such provisions are not god-given "rights", therefore our sphere of moral concern need not be penetrated by their futile bleating. We have no inherent legal obligation to assist those who are so poor as to not be able to afford food and they are wrong to impose their suffering on us in any way: such a recognition marks the terminus of our social dialogue. No-one has the "right to food", so all other considerations are secondary.
The genuine poverty (if you'll excuse the pun) of such thinking is that it entirely misses where our focus should be. Perhaps Romney is correct in saying that access to food is not a fundamental human right, and that no-one should be criminally sanctioned for eating a hearty meal while her neighbour goes without. I would disagree, to be honest, but that's scarcely the point. The question is not whether someone else has the right to demand something of me, but rather whether I am right to deny them this something. I am completely unaware of any sensible moral system on the planet which treats assisting the poor as anything but an unequivocal good. Indeed, unqualified compassion for those less fortunate exists at the centre of most religions that I am familiar with, including the religion of Jesus that Mitt Romney claims adherence to. In the petty legalism that Romney wields in lieu of a compassion-based morality, however, questions of being "good" are simply ignored. The only question that guides his conduct (and the conduct of his ideological brethren) centres around a set of negative rights - that is, rights that delineate moral behaviour solely on the basis of whether they negatively impact upon someone else - and the moral status of positive, proactive behaviour is treated as lying beyond our concern.
It is this fundamental mistake - confusing having rights with being right - that exists at the centre of all modern, right-wing American thought.
So much of our history has been a constant striving to live up to the ideals of our founding, about rights and their ultimate source. At [the Democratic] convention, a rowdy dispute broke out over the mere mention of that source.
For most of us, it was settled long ago that our rights come from nature and nature’s God, not from government.
In the increasingly eristical dialectic of American politics, it has become a general and inviolable law that, given enough time, the concept of "rights" will somehow eventually be introduced into every political dialogue one encounters. Usually they are gratuitously invoked as a kind of moral bludgeon - as a blunt and unequivocal way of demonstrating to one's opponent exactly where the boundaries of acceptable moral debate lie, and to demonstrate forcefully that these boundaries have just been transgressed. In my last post I suggested that moral thoughts act as a means of terminating internal dialogues that might otherwise lead to socially damaging actions, and here I suggest that the concept of inalienable "rights" serve the same function in socio-political dialogues: that is, they set the inviolable limits beyond which no political discourse is ever permitted to transgress. They are cognitive "conversation-stoppers", only writ large and on a wider social context.
In this respect, "rights" might be viewed as little more than universalised moral judgements, supported and enforced by some legitimate authority (I will expand upon the nature of this authority shortly). Like moral judgements, they can be regarded as cognitive strategies wielded by the mind to set specific limits on the range of acceptable human actions. Unlike moral judgements, however, judgements concerning rights tend not to be quite so personal, nor quite so visceral in their origin. Although "human rights" can inspire great emotional reactions, it seems that there is quite a difference between saying "slavery is wrong" and "freedom from slavery is a fundamental human right". The former sentence concerns the kind of cognitive projectivism I discussed in my last post: that "wrongness" is an inherent, ontological feature of the institution of slavery. The second sentence, on the other hand, has abstracted, depersonalised and universalised the moral judgement involved, such that it no longer resembles a moral statement in many respects. The opposition to slavery no longer seems to be predicated on the kind of personal moral judgements I explored in my last post ("Slavery is repulsive" / "I am repulsed by slavery") but rather appears to have some external source, completely independent from the fickle caprice of individual human judgement. This sense of "externality" - of supra-human authority - is critical to the way that rights are processed and invoked in political discourse.
So what is this "supra-human" authority from which "human rights" are derived? From where are these declarations concerning the nature human rights derived, if not from the human mind? For many, the answer self-evidently lays with God: as the supreme authority and creator of human life, the boundaries of human rights could only be delineated by him. Indeed, the creators of the US Declaration of Independence held it to be "self-evident" that all men "are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights" (the use of the word "endowment" here implies the kind of external imposition mentioned above). For others, these rights have a natural origin: they are an inexorable aspect of the ontological facticity of human beings as forged by nature. In this respect no different from other aspects of human facticity - such as bipedalism - in the sense that they exist as a priori and essential aspects of "humanity". Still others are happy to have it both ways: human rights are both naturally and divinely ordained. Paul Ryan is apparently one of those people.
But let's examine this claim in the wider context of his speech. While it partly served as a means of hammering home the "godlessness" of the Democratic Party, it was also used as a means to stress the widely-held conservative belief in the superfluity of government: that is, that "our rights come from nature and nature’s God, not from government". There are several objections I can raise to this comment, and to this conservative American attitude to "rights" in general. The first can be found in the Declaration of Independence itself, which - shortly after emphasising the divine origin of "Rights" - goes on to suggest that "to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed". This explicates the important difference between the assertion of human rights and their actual enforcement. To simply assert that one possesses some right is completely futile if there is no authority to recognise or secure this assertion. It is - I am quite sure - of very little comfort to the adulteress stoned to death in Nigeria, or the political dissidents imprisoned in China to know that they have inherent and inalienable rights derived "from nature and nature’s God": rights simply have no practical meaning without some institution there to enforce them. The only institutions with the power to effectively enforce human rights are governments, or something closely resembling them. Ryan's tactless contempt aside, human rights have never been - nor could they ever be - present in the absence of human government.
The second objection comes from the observation that identifying the origin of human rights in nature or God is of no help to us in determining specifically what the content of these rights might be. For example, noting that human rights have a divine origin doesn't give us any clue as to what precisely it is that governments should be enforcing. Is healthcare a fundamental right, for example? How about education? Or food? It's not easy to say, and compelling arguments can be raised for and against each of these putative "rights". Even a right as self-evident as the freedom from slavery was violently resisted until 150 years ago and some might even argue that it still persists in some parts of the world today. The recognition that our concept of "rights" continually change with time - or that such a concept scarcely existed at all prior to the political philosophy of Locke and others - should indicate to us that however "natural" or "God-given" our rights may be, it is still entirely incumbent upon human beings to delineate their scope.
The above also leads me to my third objection: that, ultimately, human rights have an entirely human origin. There are ways of approaching the nature of human rights that preserve their transcendently authoritative nature, without the frankly superfluous metaphysical invocation of God or "Nature". William Downes, for example, notes that our conceptualisation of human rights might be best explained in the context of the "authority of the species-mind". That is, we can reach largely universal judgements about human rights due to the almost identical nature of human minds, and the similar things that are likely to make us happy or miserable. If human slavery creates a degree of misery that every human can empathise with, then it makes sense for all of us - collectively - to universally denounce such a practice. This explains the somewhat contingent nature of human rights and why we can expect them to change with time: if human rights are the consequence of a global, inter-subjective agreement that must necessarily shift with time as our subjective inclinations also change. This might make human rights seem unduly contingent, but that does seem to be their nature: what possible meaning could the claim to a universal human right have if the majority of human beings simply refuse to recognise it?
In any case, the recognition that human rights have an entirely human origin needn't necessarily blunt the moral force that they carry. It obviously becomes incumbent upon all of us to collectively agree upon what these rights might be, but - as I wrote above - exactly the same must be done even if we assume a divine or natural origin for these beliefs. Secondly, it is perfectly acceptable to process and enforce these rights as though they carried a "supra-human authority", only instead of appealing to the transcendent authority of "God" or "Nature" we are now appealing to the transcendent authority of "Humanity". Humanity, as a singular collective, is a metaphysical being whose whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Moreover, it is a being whose nature changes with its individual constituents: as we evolve individually, so does humanity. This both explains and justifies changes over time in what constitutes a "human right" in a manner that explanations invoking "God" and "Nature" simply cannot. "Crimes against Humanity" remain, for this reason, the most serious moral transgressions of our time.
So it is clear that although "rights" have a purely subjective construction they can still have a concrete, objective influence on the way we process moral judgements. Their origin is irrelevant - that they exist, and that they are upheld by common assent is the only authority we need appeal to in their defence. However, like the moral judgements I examined in my last post, there are some who approach the concept of rights in an entirely promiscuous way, introducing them into areas of consideration in which they have no rightful place. Just as it is possible to dull one's capacity for rational moral consideration by reacting with instinctive disapprobation to every action one opposes, and treating all such acts as equally grave moral transgressions (e.g. morally conflating abortion and the holocaust), it is also possible to view to invoke "rights" in such a way that all other moral concerns - concerns that should be central to the issue at hand - are swept away by a all-encompassing logic of petty legalism. In other words, while a moralist terminates all further consideration once she believes she has found the moral locus of the issue at hand, the "right-monger" (I can't think of a better expression) terminates all further consideration once she has found the legal locus. The only relevant question in her mind becomes "Does this conform with / infringe upon some 'right'?", and no other considerations - moral or otherwise - are taken into account.
This, it seems to me, is particularly prevalent in US political discourse, where discussions that should most properly be conducted on a moral or logical plane are instead conducted with regard only for the turgid expression of legal "rights". We have all been in an argument with someone who - when backed into a corner and with the argument long lost - will react against the evidence piling-up against them with the denouement that they are merely "expressing their opinion" and that they "have the right to voice it". The issue that should be central here - whether they have reality on their side - is completely ignored. Similarly, we have fundamentalist Christian groups who wield their "right to free speech" as a shield against the criticism they receive for demonising gays and Muslims. Again, the issue as to whether the speech they offer is any sense justified - or the potential concern that their speech might causing a great deal of harm and anguish - just doesn't figure in their thought. They have identified their personal "rights" in this regard, and further considerations - including their moral obligations to others - are simply ignored.
What inspired this particular post was Mitt Romney's now infamous comments to donors, secretly filmed (most likely) by a member of the "help":
There are 47% of the people who will vote for the President no matter what... there are 47% who are with him, who are dependent on government, who believe that they are victims, who believe government has the responsibility to care for them, who believe they are entitled to healthcare, to food, to housing.
There is not much I can say here that hasn't already been said, only to point out that this is an prime example of the kind of "right-mongering" I mentioned above. For Mitt Romney, the primary consideration when faced with poverty - with people who are sick, starving and homeless - are what kind of "rights" they might be able to claim under the circumstances. For Mitt Romney, the issue isn't one of human suffering or basic human decency, but rather a legalistic inquiry into the constitutional status of the impoverished in the United States. In essence, he resents the poor for treating "healthcare... food... [and] housing" as entitlements; that is, inalienable rights that we are obliged to act upon. For Romney, the issue is clear-cut: such provisions are not god-given "rights", therefore our sphere of moral concern need not be penetrated by their futile bleating. We have no inherent legal obligation to assist those who are so poor as to not be able to afford food and they are wrong to impose their suffering on us in any way: such a recognition marks the terminus of our social dialogue. No-one has the "right to food", so all other considerations are secondary.
The genuine poverty (if you'll excuse the pun) of such thinking is that it entirely misses where our focus should be. Perhaps Romney is correct in saying that access to food is not a fundamental human right, and that no-one should be criminally sanctioned for eating a hearty meal while her neighbour goes without. I would disagree, to be honest, but that's scarcely the point. The question is not whether someone else has the right to demand something of me, but rather whether I am right to deny them this something. I am completely unaware of any sensible moral system on the planet which treats assisting the poor as anything but an unequivocal good. Indeed, unqualified compassion for those less fortunate exists at the centre of most religions that I am familiar with, including the religion of Jesus that Mitt Romney claims adherence to. In the petty legalism that Romney wields in lieu of a compassion-based morality, however, questions of being "good" are simply ignored. The only question that guides his conduct (and the conduct of his ideological brethren) centres around a set of negative rights - that is, rights that delineate moral behaviour solely on the basis of whether they negatively impact upon someone else - and the moral status of positive, proactive behaviour is treated as lying beyond our concern.
It is this fundamental mistake - confusing having rights with being right - that exists at the centre of all modern, right-wing American thought.
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