Posts Tagged ‘anti-semitism’
“Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful”*…
On the rise of organized religion in human life: our species has, for thousands of years, been affected by widespread belief in a watchful presence above us. But did moralizing Big Gods spark a surge in cooperation, or did they simply grow out of complex civilization? Brian Klaas explores….
… For most of human history, our species lived in small bands, often groups of fewer than a hundred people. Then, suddenly, around 12,000 years ago, complex civilizations began to pepper the landscape, as cooperation and coordination surged. This presents a puzzle: why the sudden shift in our behavior?
Some have argued that “Big Gods”—complete with their watchful eyes gazing down on us from above and threatening to punish us for sin—were the key component in social cooperation and the rise of civilization, moving us from our simple hunter-gatherer roots to sophisticated, sprawling empires. But is that true?…
… Intellectual historians often point to two major divergent explanations for the emergence of religion. The great philosopher David Hume argued that religion is the natural, but arbitrary, byproduct of human cognitive architecture.
Since the beginning, Homo sapiens experienced disordered events, seemingly without explanation. To order a disordered world, our ancestors began to ascribe agency to supernatural beings, to which they could offer gifts, sacrifices, and prayers to sway them to their personal whims. The uncontrollable world became controllable. The unexplainable was explained—a comforting outcome for the pattern detection machines housed in our skulls.
By contrast, thinkers like Émile Durkheim argued that religion emerged as a social glue. Rituals bond people across space and time. Religion was instrumental, not intrinsic. It emerged to serve our societies, not comfort our minds. As Voltaire put it: “If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him.”
In the last two decades, a vibrant strand of scholarship has sought to reconcile these contrasting viewpoints, notably through the work of Ara Norenzayan, author of Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict.
Norenzayan’s “Big Gods” refer to deities that are omniscient, moralizing beings, careful to note our sins and punish us accordingly. Currently, roughly 77 percent of the world’s population identifies with one of just four religions (31% Christian; 24% Muslim; 15% Hindu; 7% Buddhist). In all four, moral transgressions produce consequences, some immediate, others punished in the afterlife.
Norenzayan aptly notes that the omniscience of Big Gods assumes total knowledge of everything in the universe, but that the divine is always depicted as being particularly interested in our moral behavior. If God exists, He surely could know which socks you wore yesterday, but deities focus their attentions not on such amoral trifles, but rather on whether you lie, covet, cheat, steal, or kill.
However, Norenzayan draws on anthropology evidence to argue that early supernatural beings had none of these traits and were disinterested in human affairs. They were fickle demons, tricksters and spirits, not omniscient gods who worried about whether any random human had wronged his neighbor…
… These deities may have fulfilled the conditions outlined by Hume—they explained the unexplainable as machinations of supernatural forces—but they didn’t serve much of a social deterrence function, because you wouldn’t need to fear being struck down by a lightning bolt from above if you wronged a rival.
Every social species that thrives, from wasps to humans, requires a mechanism of stopping individual members from working against the group’s interests. In complex hives, specialized “police wasps” serve as enforcers, seeking out and destroying any wasps producing larvae that may lead to an excess number of queens in the colony. When detected, any rogues are “beheaded or torn apart by the workers soon after they emerge from their cells in the brood comb,” explain Professors Francis Ratnieks and Tom Wenseleers.
Unlike wasps, early human societies didn’t have police forces. Without an enforcement mechanism, social complexity and large civilizations came with enormous risks of predatory, anti-social behavior that could undermine survival.
Over time, Norenzayan argues, divine forces shifted within these administratively weak human groupings. Thus emerged what Norenzayan calls “supernatural monitoring,” a belief in an omniscient presence that never averts His gaze from sin. Everything is tracked, monitored, then punished…
… It is now a nearly universal feature of religious belief systems that a divine presence prohibits certain behaviors—and rewards others. And that presence is always watching. In addition to the omniscient sky gods of today’s major religions, ancient Egypt was home to Horus of Two Eyes. The Incans were watched by Viracocha. Today, in modern Tibet and Nepal, Buddhist depictions of eyes are dotted across villages, reminding everyone that nothing can ever be truly hidden.
The “Big Gods” hypothesis argues that divine gazes provided a far more effective form of deterring anti-social behavior than any mortal police force…
Did the watchful gaze of moralizing gods produce the rise of complex civilizations? “Big Gods and the Origin of Human Cooperation,” from @brianklaas.bsky.social. Eminently worth reading in full.
* Seneca the Younger
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As we brood on belief, we might recall that on this date in 1349 a group of Christian guilds, fearful of the Black Death, carried out the Basel Massacre…
… an anti-Semitic massacre in Basel, which occurred in 1349 in connection with alleged well poisoning as part of the Black Death persecutions, carried out against the Jews in Europe at the time of the Black Death. A number of Jews, variously given as between 300 and 600 (according to contemporary Medieval chronicles) or 50 to 70 (according to some modern historians) were burned alive, after being locked in a wooden structure built on a nearby island in the Rhine. Jewish children were apparently spared, but forcibly baptized and sent to monasteries…
…Contemporary chronicler Matthias of Neuenburg describes the event with these words:
Therefore all the Jews of Basel, without a legal sentence [being passed] and because of the clamor of the people, were burned on an island in the Rhine River in a new house” (Cremati sunt igitur absque sentencia ad clamorem populi omnes Judei Basilienses in una insula Rheni in domo nova).
Similar pogroms took place in Freiburg on 30 January, and in Strasbourg on 14 February. The massacre had notably taken place before the Black Death had even reached the city. When it finally broke out in April to May 1349, the converted Jews were still blamed for well poisoning. The officials of Basel placed judgement on some baptized Jews, and on 4 July four of them were tortured on the wheel, “confessing” that they had poisoned Basel’s fountains (Juden … Offenlich vor gerichte verjahen und seiten, das sie die brunnen ze unserre state etlich vergift hettent).[4] The remaining converted Jews were partly executed, partly expulsed. By the end of 1349, the Jews of Basel had been murdered, their cemetery destroyed and all debts to Jews declared settled.
– source
“Those who control the past control the future”*…
Matt Seaton, editor of the New York Review of Books Daily, recounts his investigation into what might seem a small issue– the wording of a photo caption…
The photograph above appeared with Sarah Churchwell’s June 22 article for the Daily, “American Fascism: It Has Happened Here.” It shows Senator Burton K. Wheeler, former aviator Charles Lindbergh, and novelist and newspaper columnist Kathleen Norris at a rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden of the isolationist America First Committee (at right, mostly cropped out in this use, is also the pacifist minister and socialist Norman Thomas). Per the information from Getty Images with this photo, one of several similar images, our original caption in the piece read thus: Senator Burton K. Wheeler, Charles Lindbergh, and novelist Kathleen Norris giving the Nazi salute at an America First Committee rally, New York, October 30, 1941. (As can still be viewed via the Wayback Machine.)
A few days after publication, I received an email from a biographer of Wheeler that insisted the senator was not giving a Nazi salute; it was, he wrote, a “Bellamy salute,” a patriotic gesture to the American flag widely used at pledge of allegiance ceremonies. We should certainly correct our caption, I was told, since it was an unmerited slur against Wheeler, who was no fascist or anti-Semite.
We do, it is true, occasionally find errors of fact with captions from Getty—hardly surprising for one of the world’s most comprehensive photo archives, with some 200 million “assets.” If we have good reason to believe there is an error, we communicate that to Getty staff; they review our report, make their own assessment, and, if need be, correct the caption.
On this occasion, however, I was not persuaded of an error. While I could see that Wheeler’s gesture appeared half-hearted and not very Nazi, Lindbergh’s salute looked full-on fash to me.
But what of this Bellamy business?
The Bellamy salute is named for Francis Bellamy, a minister who, in 1892, wrote the American Pledge of Allegiance. A socialist and internationalist, he hoped that his original wording would be adopted by all nations (the words “of the United States of America” were added after “Flag” only in 1923; and “under God” was later added after “one nation,” during the Eisenhower administration, the better to ward off godless Communists). Bellamy also described the physical gesture to accompany the pledge-taking; hence the Bellamy salute.
A quick search of Getty stock for flag salutes from the first half of the twentieth century revealed plenty of images of mainly young people saluting the flag with either a conventional military salute (crooked arm, hand to the forehead) or the also-familiar hand-on-heart; only a few showed Bellamy salutes, from around the turn of the century, with the straight, outstretched arm, though also generally with the palm open, not facing downward. So I advised the biographer that he should take up the issue directly with Getty, rather than with us. And I said the same when, a few days later, I received a similar remonstration from another teacher and author, who also happened to be a great-grandson of Burton K. Wheeler.
A couple of weeks later, I heard back from the Wheeler biographer, notifying me that Getty had agreed to amend its caption. I checked the new wording, which was now uncommonly long and detailed for an archive photo, with the following sentence added: “They are giving the Bellamy Salute, which was replaced by the hand-over-heart salute the following year, because of concerns about its similarity to the Nazi ,or fascist salute, used in Italy and Germany.” Well, I wasn’t going to quibble over a misplaced comma, and I did update the caption in Churchwell’s—by removing any statement about what kind of salute this was.
But I was perturbed: I felt that Getty had accepted too readily the lobbying of one person (or possibly two, if the Wheeler relative was also a party to the effort), and I worried that the scenario in the photograph—which seemed, on its face, dubious and equivocal at best—had been declared far too affirmatively in one direction…
And so Mr. Seaton went to work… what he learned is both historically important and painfully timely: Saluting the Flag.
* George Orwell, 1984
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As we face history, we might (or might not) send birthday greetings to Henry Ford; he was born on this date in 1863. Founder of the Ford Motor Company, he was a chief developer of the assembly line technique of mass production. By creating the first automobile that middle-class Americans could afford, he converted the automobile from an expensive curiosity into an accessible conveyance that profoundly impacted the landscape of the 20th century.
Ford was also a fellow-traveler of Lindbergh, a ferocious anti-Semite who used his newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, to publish the fabricated The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and a series of his own essays that were subsequently collected into a book, The International Jew, which Ford distributed in English, and had translated into German (where the subtitle “the World’s Foremost Problem” was added)– where it became a powerful influence on the development of Nazi thought. Indeed, Ford is the only American mentioned favorably in Mein Kampf.
“O teach me how I should forget to think”*…
When members of the Unite the Right rally marched through Charlottesville on August 11, 2017 in polo shirts and carrying tiki torches, Twitter went wild with jokes. “When you have to use a Polynesian cultural product (tiki torches) to defend and assert white supremacy,” wrote one Twitter pundit. Another captioned a photo of the marchers: “Y’all, we can’t get dates on Friday night (again) so we’re fixin’ to pick up some tiki torches at Walmart & have a klan rally. Who’s in?”
But Sarah Bond, an associate professor of classics at the University of Iowa, didn’t find the jokes funny. “Something horrible is going to happen,” she remembered thinking.
For the past several years, Bond has written about “classical reception” — or how Greco-Roman culture is received and interpreted — for Forbes online, the art and culture website Hyperallergic, and Eidolon, an informal online journal devoted to the classics. Because classical thinkers, institutions, writings, and art have been portrayed as the epitome of “civilization” since the Renaissance, she’s also documented how hate groups have latched onto the perceived legitimacy of antiquity to make themselves seem more legitimate.
“Torches are very much tied to violence in antiquity,” she says. “They are meant to intimidate people. There are a number of examples from antiquity of the use of mob violence where fire and torches are specifically used prior to an assassination.” The Ku Klux Klan, the Nazis, and the Golden Dawn all marched with flames.
The day after the August rally and the Twitter jokes, violence erupted between the marchers and counter-protestors, and alt-right supporter Alex Fields Jr. drove his car into a crowd of anti-racism demonstrators, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring dozens of others. Bond, a Virginia native who’d attended undergrad at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, was upset but not surprised. “That was the tipping point where I was like, you know what? Fuck their use of antiquity.”
White supremacists, misogynists, and anti-Semites see the ancient Mediterranean as a touchstone. Would a better sense of history change their minds? “Hate Groups Love Ancient Greece and Rome. Scholars Are Pushing Back.”
* Shakespeare, Romeo and Julliet
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As we correct our corollaries, we might send cooperative birthday greetings to zoologist Warder Clyde Allee; he was born on this date in 1885. One of the great pioneers of American ecology, Allee is best remembered for his research on animal behavior, protocooperation— for which he’s considered by many to be the “Father of Animal Ecology”– and for identifying what is now known as “the Allee effect“: a positive correlation between population density and the per capita population growth rate in very small populations, the product of cooperation– of the organisms acting as a group as opposed to individually.
By any other name…
General Order Number Eleven was short. Three items were wrapped into one edict. It read:
- The Jews, as a class violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department and also department orders, are hereby expelled from the Department within twenty-four hours from the receipt of this order.
- Post commanders will see to it that all of this class of people be furnished passes and required to leave, and any one returning after such notification will be arrested and held in confinement until an opportunity occurs of sending them out as prisoners, unless furnished with permit from headquarters.
- No passes will be given these people to visit headquarters for the purpose of making personal application of trade permits.
In short, “no Jews allowed,” effective nearly immediately.
But the “Department” wasn’t a section of Nazi-controlled Europe or Inquisition-era Spain. The edict wasn’t issued by Adolf Hitler. It was issued by Ulysses S. Grant, who would later be President of the United States. The year was 1862, and the “Department” was the “Department of Tennessee,” an area consisting of western Tennessee, western Kentucky, and northern Mississippi.
Read the whole sordid story at “General Order Number Eleven.”
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As we wince at realization that Twain was right that “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes,” we might recall that it was on this date in 1925 that Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf was published (Volume One; the second volume followed the next year). Part autobiography and part political philosophy– an announcement of his hatred of what he believed to be the world’s twin evils: Communism and Judaism– Mein Kampf was begun as dictation while Hitler was imprisoned for what he considered the “political crime” of his failed 1923 Munich Putsch. It sold 228,000 copies between 1925 and 1932, and one million copies in 1933, Hitler’s first year in office.
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