The House of David

"all your cities lie in dust"

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Catholic states


In 1994 I read through Dante's Inferno. In 2002 (not long before starting this blog) I read a good way through Boccaccio's Decameron. In 2007 or so I got into Mencius Moldbug's earlier posts, on Jacobitism and on Dante; earlier this year I posted some of these thoughts over at The Other Green-Themed Site. I think I'm ready now...

Catholicism implies universality. Catholicism developed in Western Europe (and north Africa) during the collapse of Rome. Before Rome, Western Europe was a hodgepodge of tribes and insular kingdoms. After Rome, that state of nature re-emerged; but the local chieftains could now share a culture, faith, and language.

Outside Rome itself, the Church was not able to rule - say - northern England. Besides, it didn't really want to. Jesus and Paul had taught Christians that being a good Christian was independent of politics - almost orthogonal. Sometimes the Church even has to countenance crimes.

Between complete dependence and orthogonality is correlation, though, and that is the relationship between the Catholic Church and the secular State. It is partly for that reason that the Church has retained the right to influence politics. The Church has an interest in protecting Catholics from harm, at the very least.

By contrast: Orthodox communions (and Judaism) are based on ethnicity and often the land; Protestant churches are voluntary associations; and in Islam the ideal is an emirate of religious leaders who command the army and thereby the state.

Boccaccio and Dante both had much to say about the Church and about the various north Italian citystates in the 1300s. These cities were politically independent but subject to a low-level factional war across all of them. These two factions, both of German descent, were the Ghibellines and the Guelphs.

The Ghibellines correspond almost exactly to High Toryism in England up to the early years of Henry VIII. Each nation should be sovereign, and the Church ought never to interfere in politics. Instead the Prince of the nation retains the right to veto any non-doctrinal Church decision in his land. The landed aristocracy and the rural villagers preferred the Ghibellines. If you want Ghibelline thought today, read Mencius Moldbug.

The Guelphs' doctrine is more alien to our way of thought, but their politics are more familiar than one might suppose. They had the merchants and in general what we'd call the "bourgeoisie". They didn't think much of Ghibelline appeals to tradition and were personally affected by their protective tariffs. Taking away the doctrinal differences, the Guelphs were transnational liberals.

The Church could tell that the Ghibellines would lead to schism - "Venetian Orthodox Church", "German Orthodox Church", "Czech Orthodox Church" and on and on. Henry VIII would one day prove them right. In the meantime the Church's choice was obvious - support the Guelphs.

If I may evaluate the Guelph model for today: It has the advantage over the Ghibellines in its separation of State from Church. In addition if we have to have transnational arbiters, the Guelph model also offers a hierarchy - the Church - with a longer pedigree than the international institutions we use now.

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posted by Zimri on 05:53 | link |

Sunday, November 08, 2009

The value of the unborn, the value of the Torah


A long time ago I looked into Exodus 21:22-25. It was well-reasoned ... from a false premise. I posted it before I'd asked any Jews on the topic (which happened in the midst of last year), and before I'd looked into its genesis (so to speak). I've since posted the thoughts here on other blogs, like The Other Green One; but I'll have to drop one here before I get called on the mistakes of that prior post.

In context, this passage derives from a lost Northern-Kingdom document called the Covenant Code. We assume that refugees from Shechem and Samaria brought it down to Jerusalem ahead of the Assyrian legions in the late 700s BCE. From there the Code became part of the Torah and the Torah became the core of what it meant to be Jewish. The Covenant Code is the Torah's Torah.

Jews look at this part of the Covenant Code and they do not see in it a weregeld for the fetus in parity with the weregeld for an adult. Damage to the mother explicitly triggers lex talionis. If the fetus were legally human, it would trigger lex talionis too. The fetus does not, and therefore is not legally human.

Jewish logic currently requires that abortion remain focused on the mother, and not her child. This is not a "pro-choice" position; it is genuinely a "march for womens' lives".

An individual Jew could be pro-life, but would have to base that on a theory of abrogation of the Covenant Code. I do not know of any school of Jewish thought which offers this theory.

By contrast Christianity has the Didache, which although not in the New Testament remains a founding document of Church Tradition. The Didache counts abortion as an evil, asserting the early Christian community's right to abrogate the Torah for the sake of The Way Of Life.

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posted by Zimri on 14:23 | link |

Forms of creationism


Conservatives propose that intelligent-design is a scientific alternative to the dominant biological paradigm (evolution via natural selection, mainly). It would help their case if they could define that alternative.

Intelligent-design proponents these days prefer to claim that they are "raising questions" about "Darwin". Evolution proponents counter that ID is a big obscurantist nothing which does not offer a testable counter-proposal.

In this country intelligent-design is a mutation which has evolved over eight decades under the restrictions of the American court system (Scopes, 1925 - Dover, 2005). The evolution of the intelligent-design argument tracks closely the evolution of creationism under the strictures of Greek philosophy 600-300 BCE. Creationism has a storied philosophical pedigree.

While I was at the Other Green-Themed Site, I discovered David Sedley's Creationism And Its Critics In Antiquity and recommended it in just about every creationism thread over there. On the weekend 16-18 October I started this essay (and several others, which I'm in the process of editing) but I'd mislaid the book, and found other topics to do, so I put all of that aside. Now that I've found the book, and also some free time...

Sedley's book describes the Greek attempts to explain life on Earth, and Earth itself, up to Galen in the 200s AD.

Greek creationism isn't taught in school, but that's not wholly the fault of the school. Sedley was the first to gather the references together and to assign them to strains of creationism (and, in two cases, anti-creationism). He also benefitted from modern papyri discoveries in Egypt. Now that we know the history, it's time to teach it.

Sedley found more advanced forms of Near Eastern creationism in the pre-Socratics. Anaxagoras figured the Creator as a cosmic Mind which separated order from primal chaos. Empedocles had the Creator stumbling upon a more ordered universe and building life from those blocks He found. Anaxagoras strikes me as a Genesis-1 Priestly sort concerned with the universe and Empedocles as a Genesis-2 Yahwist concerned with nature; both strains of thought were available to the Phoenicians as of 600 BCE. Anaxagoras and Empedocles extended these ideas and made them available to the Greek world.

Sedley found the first challenge to a theological worldview in the atomists, who proposed an arbitrarily-large cosmos of worlds - applicable also to parallel universes - of which this one happens to be the world we live in (pp. 136-7). This removes the need for any God hypothesis to explain our world.

Sedley then found in Xenophon's Memorabilia I.4 and IV.3 that Socrates was an "anti-scientific creationist" (p. 78). Socrates accepted that the world was naturalistic, but defended the gods from the atheist model by proposing a counter-model: disassociating science from theology. He assumed that if scientists wanted to, they could find out the rules by which the universe works. The universe (from a human perspective) contains an ends-based or "teleological" subset, with (e.g.) a whole class of "barnyard animals" who could never survive in the wild. Socrates concluded that gods did exist, and that some helped in creating the whole world as support for humanity; and by extension that they likely exist today, and are still the friends of humanity. Socrates asserted that scientists shouldn't bother making further discoveries, because these discoveries would do nothing to help humans live the good life. Humans should instead study their own lives to improve them, and thereby to deduce what the gods want.

Plato in the Timaeus, developed the notion of a creator god, the Demiurge, further stating that God was a pure theoretician. Aristotle fused this god with the universe, thus removing his ability to act from outside the universe; there was no act of creation, and God's thoughts and deeds were simply the actions of the universe itself.

Modern creationists from Paley to Behe base their stance on the Argument From Design / Watchmaker / "irreducible complexity" argument. That makes them Socratics.

Modern atheists (as opposed to agnostics) base their stance on the Anthropic Principle. That makes then Atomists.

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posted by Zimri on 12:23 | link |

Friday, October 30, 2009

Ismism


"Ism" is today a marker for a school of thought. This is a classic exploration of the theme, which I first viewed in the Alamo Drafthouse out on highway 6, west Houston.

The new Biblical Archaeology Review (35.6) has Steve Mason's article on Ism. X-ismos comes from the Greeks, up to 2 Maccabees and Ignatius. When I was in school, I learnt this in the context of "Medism". It was the act of X-ising; becoming X. It was never the marker for the ideology of X. For that, the Greeks had the construct X-ia; "sophia" for the domain of the wise, for instance.

This article, being a BAR piece, riffs on "Judaism". It claims that the term applied to one who was not at first a Jew; but was Judaising into one. This didn't happen much in antiquity, the Jews then being a marginal bunch who didn't take to converts; but Hanukkah changed everything. That is why the word crops up in 2 Maccabees.

Mason blames the Ism-ism of Ism on Tertullian; which he used to define Christianity ("Christianism").

In that light I'm tempted to take back the Ism. The construct X-isation for the act of X-ising has never sat well with me; it's a mix of Greek -iz and Latin -atio. Now that I know, or have been reminded, that it's just -ism; I can put down that misbegotten seven-digit horror.

I might not even have to change a lot of what I've written about Islamism or Progressivism. Ism is inherently progressive. It never gets to Dr Utopia's promised land; it is always a Whig journey. Given that Marx never quite managed to define what the end state of his Ism should look like, even that old Communist might have got it right.

That still leaves the non-Whig ideologies - and we do need new words for them. Jew-hating, for instance, is not inherently progressive. The conservative mindset (as opposed to the sundry reactionary ideologies) is anti-progressive by all definitions; it cannot contain the "Ism". "AntiSemity" and "Conservaty" would be better, at least befitting the Latin, but these terms look like a joke even to me.

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posted by Zimri on 18:00 | link |

Monday, March 29, 2004

The ancient value of the unborn


I just visited two sites, each of which linked to Allen Brill's blog "The Right Christians"; again, a blog I had never read before. One was from yet another blog I'd never read before: "The Buck Starts Here", who's now being Instalanched. The other was from one of my daily fixes, Protein Wisdom, who is no fan of TRC.

Anyway, in light of the recent Senate vote, TRC gave us the "Obscure Bible passage of the day":

"When people who are fighting injure a pregnant woman so that there is a miscarriage, and yet no further harm follows, the one responsible shall be fined what the woman's husband demands, paying as much as the judges determine. If any harm follows, then you shall give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe." Exodus 21:22-25 (NRSV)

Brill points out "The facts could hardly be more on point for the Unborn Victims of Violence Act." True, that. I applaud this man for giving us a relevant Scripture quote.

But Brill also claims that whether the Torah is claiming the fetus is human or not is "complex and ultimately, inconclusive". Begging his pardon, that is only because he is asking the wrong question of this passage. The Torah isn't about human rights, but human obligations. That is why it is called "Torah" - "Law" - and not "Bill of Rights". The Torah cannot apply to creatures unable to comply with it (or else we would be prosecuting wolves for eating wild boars!). The Torah applies to us sentient humans: in this case, whether we have a right to kill the fetus.

The Torah makes three points here that are relevant to believing Jews (and Christians and Muslims). First is that the fetus has value of a human baby (which is not the same as "human rights"!). Second is that the person who harms one ought to pay a penalty. Third - and here be the controversy - this penalty ought to be such that will satisfy the bereft household.

The pericope associates the ruling with the lex talionis. Now, the lex talionis typically kicks in when there has been personal damage done, up to murder; hence "life for life" even here. Since that law only limits revenge attacks, rather than ending them, the ancients had as of Torah-time already attempted to replace that system with what we Anglo-Saxons call the weregeld, literally "man-money". Some judge would weigh the victim's value to society, the heinousness of the crime, and the ability of the murderer to pay; come up with a suitably ruinous fine; and get that thug to pony up - to someone. Therefore: the Torah treats the fetus as a type of babyvaluable for the household.

The Torah decided that the legal father stands in for said household. This is because the Torah assumes that the father and mother are the most aggrieved parties, after the baby; and, in good Bronze Age fashion, that the father is in the best position to use the money in the service of his house. This Torah passage therefore must assume that the woman is married and that the baby is the husband's. (This has other implications for the pro/antiabortion debate, which are irrelevant here...)

Since we no longer live in the Bronze Age, we satisfy the berieved with means other than eye-for-eye or Weregeld. We have a justice system, which takes into account society's interest in keeping criminals from committing more crimes. Those of us who hope to have children just plain don't want to put up with those who are willing and able to murder the babes of pregnant women.

The Torah and the UVVA agree that the fetus has value; and that those who would harm it ought to be punished as if it were a full-term baby. Whether you believe the fetus is a person, or just a possession of a household, is not relevant to either. Brill is right that the Unborn Victims of Violence Act is a modern version of Exodus 21:22-25. No person who opposes this Act may call himself a Jew or Christian in honesty.

UPDATE 11/8/2009: I was wrong. The UVVA is a Christian overreaction to the passage and alien to the intent of the Torah. Read this.

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posted by Zimri on 18:21 | link |

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