[Peace-discuss] Fear renders men…stupid and miserable…

[C. G. Estabrook]

Mort--

The subject is the conventional but tendentious account of the rise of
capitalist (aka bourgeois, liberal) society - simply assumed by the writer of
the comment (a guy?) - sometimes called the "Whig interpretation of history."
Chomsky has shown himself remarkably free of conventional accounts of history
(in re e.g. the Hebrew prophets and 17th c. Rationalists), especially those that
are employed to show the virtues of the capitalist order.  As he says, one has
to be highly educated to believe such things (as the commentator clearly is).
You yourself have recently posted to this list views on Christianity from
Chomsky (an atheist) that are nevertheless far from the liberal paradigm ("The
Legacy of 1989").

Whiggishness characterizes accounts from Fukuyama's "End of History" to courses
in "Western Civilization" (about which Chomsky is fond of quoting Gandhi: "It
would be a good idea").  And a staple of Whiggishness is that, with the coming
of capitalism, humanity has moved from a millennium of benighted religiosity to
five hundred years of clear scientific rationally.  (The 500 years before that
1500 is a bit of a problem, but since no one learns Latin any more, it can be
safely ignored).

To take your examples - those cathedrals "magnificent as art and architecture"
(but not magnificent apparently in some other way?) were not designed "to bring
forth the support of multitudes" as much as they were the work of those
multitudes - communes, originally monastic, then urban; they were often the
result of regional rivalries - the modern equivalent would be regional football
teams.

They were not "icons of feudalism," because ecclesiastical institutions were
opposed to feudalism - hence the great political struggle of the Middle Ages,
the Investiture Controversy.  (The opposition to feudalism gave medieval
Catholicism some of its characteristic institutions, like clerical celibacy):
see "Sex and power in Catholicism," <www.counterpunch.org/estabrook0420.html>.

Nor were they "built largely on the donations of royalty and the merchant
class": feudalism as a polity was opposed to "royalty" (see Perry Anderson,
Lineages of the Absolutist State) and the merchant class hardly existed before
the collapse of the medieval mode of production in the 14th century, by which
time the great age of cathedral building was over.

Nor did "exalted power and wealth at the expense of the vast poor and laboring
classes" characterize the ruling class of the European Middle Ages but that of
the next period.  (As the author of the Manifesto understood.) The rise of the
modern world (i.e., capitalism) depends on "free labor" - i.e., the confiscation
of the right to life and the use of productive property that was general in the
Middle Ages, and the subjection of labor to the wage contract, "the equal
exchange between free agents which reproduces, hourly and daily, inequality and
oppression."

I'm not sure how you know that "an important motivation for ... contributions
[to cathedral building] was to exonerate themselves of their 'sins' [sic] and to
win a place in Heaven," but one can find statements to that effect from late
medieval and Renaissance grandees, particularly in Italy, from about the
fifteenth century -- once the modern age had dawned.  Such attitudes, like the
witch-craze, is a phenomenon of the European Renaissance, not the Middle Ages.
(One of the best accounts remains John Bossy's Christianity in the West
1400-1700.)  Your evocation of judgment day in art seems to refer primarily to
the danse macabre, a late-medieval (i.e., after the 14th century collapse) theme
that was directed primarily against the new (post-feudal) exploiters - an
insistence on equality before the law of God.

As you say, "This is not at all to say that religion [by which you seem to mean
medieval Christianity] has only been an agency of fear."  But that's the burden
of the commentator's crude caricature - which has nothing to do with the Middle
Ages but a great deal to do with ahistorical anti-Catholicism - the
anti-semitism of the intellectual, as has been said. The motive for a statement
has nothing necessarily to do with its truth, but in this case the commentator
simply doesn't know what s/he's talking about.

Regards, CGE


Morton K. Brussel wrote:
> Carl,
> 
> Your first paragraph below strikes me as disparagement without substance, 
> buttressed only with some here irrevelent favorite thoughts from Chomsky, 
> who, I'm not sure would agree with either the tenor or truth of what you say
> about the issue at hand.
> 
> I have visited a great many of the old cathedrals and churches in Europe, 
> Romanesque and Gothic, especially in France. One cannot be unimpressed with 
> their magnificence as art and architecture, with their attractive power to 
> bring forth the support of the multitudes, low and high. But I've always had
> a guilty feeling in visiting and admiring them, being conscious that they 
> were icons of feudalism, built largely on the donations of royalty and the 
> merchant class, who gained their exalted power and wealth at the expense of 
> the vast poor and laboring classes.  And it is clear that an important 
> motivation for their contributions was to exonerate themselves of their 
> "sins" and to win a place in Heaven. Evidence for this is overwhelming. The 
> other side of the coin is that Hell was a great fear, a motivator. That the 
> judgement day could be terrible and terrifying is sculpted in innumerable 
> portrayals of the last judgement at entrances to these medieval edifices, and
> elsewhere. That (western) religion has seemed to prosper in fearful and 
> terrible times, and has profited by inculcating fear seems to me undeniable.
> 
> 
> This is not at all to say that religion has only been an agency of fear.
> 
> So in conclusion, I think the guy who wrote the comment I copied has made an
> insightful observation.
> 
> 
> On Jan 2, 2010, at 8:52 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
> 
>> Although the commentator's penultimate paragraph is accurate, her/his 
>> account of the "Middle Ages," common as it is, is as intellectually 
>> respectable (if not so sophisticated) as a belief in phlogiston.  This sort
>> of ignorance is pervasive among the college-educated political class of 
>> the US; as Chomsky says, you have to be highly educated to believe stuff 
>> like that. A proper corrective would be to read some actual history - or 
>> even basic works like the Communist Manifesto.
>> 
>> It's certainly true that fear has been a political motivator particularly 
>> in the US.  A society founded on two of the greatest crimes in human 
>> history - the extinction of the native Americans and the enslavement of 
>> native Africans - has a lot to be afraid of, perhaps principally its own 
>> conscience, if not the revenge of the victims. But the fear of just 
>> retribution expands in the last fifty years as America's victims come to 
>> include much of the world.
>> 
>> In their supreme cynicism, that fear has been mobilized by the American 
>> elite. The post-WWII domestic policy of the USG is encapsulated in the 
>> advice of Michigan Senator Arthur Vandenberg to President Truman, that he 
>> "scare the hell out of the American people," in order to get his 
>> imperialist policies accepted - policies necessitated by the fact that only
>>  WWII had cured the Depression, and the end of the war seemed to mean the 
>> return of the Depression.
>> 
>> Luckily for our rulers, the new bete noire, terrorism, was conjured within
>> a decade of the disappearance of its predecessor, communism.  --CGE
>> 
>> 
>> Morton K. Brussel wrote:
>>> Fear is what makes our world turn…  GGreenwald's piece, 
>>> [http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/01/02] is followed by several 
>>> perceptive comments. I cite one of them below ... Here is a comment I 
>>> found interesting:
>>> 
>>> The fear mechanism is an old one. In the middle ages the best artists of
>>> the time were hired to depict it. The murals in European churches show
>>> the wonderfully imagined horrors and tortures of hell. You can understand
>>> why a populace would be willing to submit to the rituals and tithing of
>>> the church and to support a group of parasitic clergy living in gold
>>> plated luxury in order to avoid those torments. The people would be
>>> willing to go out on Crusades to prove their devotion and to bring
>>> salvation to the heathens. The practices of the aristocracy, the 
>>> practices that caused poverty, faded into the background.
>>> 
>>> For a while the paradigm shifted away from worshipping a church and
>>> submitting to the powerful. It shifted toward rationalism and personal
>>> responsibility.
>>> 
>>> We have regressed to a people quivering before authority. "Terror" is the
>>> devil on earth. Terrorism is marvelously imagined, magnified, created, 
>>> publicized and depicted in great vivid detail by the most skilled story 
>>> tellers available. It is used to get us to submit to the rituals and 
>>> spending required to control it. Out of our sometimes meager incomes, we 
>>> will support a consortium of wealthy weapons producers in order to 
>>> protect ourselves. Manufactured fear infantilizes us and distracts us 
>>> from the business of life, from education, jobs and health. We follow 
>>> anyone like children, joining Crusades, hoping for the illusion of 
>>> safety.
>>> 
>>> In both cases, the imagination is far more destructive than the reality.

	###