Category Archives: Rationalism

After a chaotic and surreal campaign, there was a comforting familiarity about the rituals of election night. Tories will rehearse their favourite fairytale that the party of Thatcher has finally rediscovered its 1980s mojo while Labour retreats to its own comfort zone, of bitter internal feuding. But amid all this drama, there is a danger that we might forget how deeply abnormal the Conservative election campaign has been, and how frighteningly unfamiliar the impending government could be.

The winning campaign strategy was simple: to make this the second referendum, to make it as exhausting as possible, and to make sure Labours offer of yet another referendum look more exhausting still. The Tories blank policy agenda beyond passing the existing Brexit deal in January was aimed directly at a group of voters who dont trust politicians, dont believe government can help them, and are done with listening to liberal elites bickering over the precise number of hospitals the Tories will or wont build.

For todays Conservatives, the collapse of trust in institutions isnt a problem its an opportunity. Get Brexit done, like Donald Trumps build a wall, was not a policy pledge so much as a mantra to identify with, for those who think the establishment is a stitch-up.

Two other ingredients were necessary. First, a rightwing big tent needed constructing, one that spreads all the way from Matt Hancock in the centre-right out to Tommy Robinson on the far right. Johnson repeatedly did just enough to communicate to former Brexit party voters that he was on their side. For the desperate men and women (but mostly men) living in the abandoned economic regions of the Midlands and north, for whom only a Trump figure would be enough to draw them to the polls, Johnson performed that role adequately. For well-off elderly voters, who had been seduced by Faragist visions of national identity, Johnsons dog whistles hit home. Study his apologies for past Islamophobic comments, and youll notice that theyre never apologies at all they are affirmations of his right to say what everyone is thinking.

Rebranded as the peoples government, there is no reason to expect it will embrace normal democratic scrutiny or opposition

Second, Johnsons media profile and contacts were leveraged to the hilt. By the end of the campaign, he was performing a kind of Jeremy Clarkson role obliterating any democratic dialogue or interrogation by dressing up as a milkman or driving a forklift truck. Boris began life as a construct of the Daily Telegraph and Have I Got News For You, but now exists as a genre of social media content. Unlike in the heyday of broadcast and print media, propaganda now has to be lively and engaging in order to work.

And so the election was not won by an ordinary political party, with policies, members and ideology. It was won by a single-issue new-media startup you might call it Vote Boris fronted by a TV star, which will now unveil a largely unknown policy agenda.

The 2016 referendum result, together with the Boris phenomenon, have created a Trojan horse, within which lurks who knows what. But the chances of it offering anything transformative to the former Labour voters of Blyth Valley or Bolsover, beyond the occasional culture-war titbit, are minimal.

One thing we do know is that the Vote Boris campaign was funded by hedge funds and wealthy British entrepreneurs just as they donated heavily to Vote Leave. But who knows what they get in return? It also seems safe to assume, on the evidence of Johnsons first few months in office, that his administration will be hostile to many basic norms of the constitution and the liberal public sphere. Meanwhile, a triumphant Dominic Cummings will have his eye on a drastic transformation of Whitehall and regulators, inspired by exotic forms of rationalism, game theory and the libertarian right.

If the new Johnson government sustains its unprecedented relationship with the media of the past six weeks threatening public service broadcasters, excluding the Daily Mirror from its campaign bus, seamless coordination with the conservative press, using Boris to distract from every unwelcome news item then it will be virtually impossible for it to be held to account for what it does. And having already rebranded itself as the peoples government, there is no reason to expect it will embrace normal democratic scrutiny or opposition.

A combination of Brexit, decades of neglect and political alienation in Labours heartlands, the new digital media ecology, and hints of frightening illiberalism could conspire to produce a form of democracy that looks more like Hungary or even Russia than the checks-and-balances system of liberal ideals. Its not that democracy will end, but that it will be reduced to a set of spectacles that the government is ultimately in command of, which everyone realises are fake but that are sufficiently funny or soothing as to be tolerated.

This may sound paranoid, but it is merely an extrapolation from the trends that are already in full sway. Just like Trump, Johnsons capacity to make headlines and change the subject means we can quickly forget how much damage he has already done, in less than six months instead we are locked in a perpetual present, squabbling over the details of what hes doing right now. Its important to keep track. Challenging this juggernaut will be a far larger and more complex project than anything Her Majestys opposition can do alone.

William Davies is a sociologist and political economist

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For Johnsons Tories, the collapse of public trust isnt a problem its an opportunity - The Guardian

William Bradley Pitt (conceived December 18, 1963) is an American on-screen character and film maker. He has gotten various honors and assignments including an Academy Award and a Primetime Emmy Award as maker under his own organization, Plan B Entertainment.

Pitt previously picked up acknowledgment as a rancher drifter in the street motion picture Thelma and Louise (1991). His first driving jobs in huge spending preparations accompanied the dramatization films A River Runs Through It (1992) and Legends of the Fall (1994) and blood and gore movie Interview with the Vampire (1994). He gave widely praised exhibitions in the wrongdoing spine chiller Seven and the sci-fi film 12 Monkeys (both 1995), the last acquiring him a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor and an Academy Award assignment.

Pitt featured in Fight Club (1999) and the heist film Oceans Eleven (2001) and its continuations, Oceans Twelve (2004) and Oceans Thirteen (2007). His most noteworthy business triumphs have been Troy (2004), Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005), World War Z (2013), and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019). Pitt got his second and third Academy Award selections for his driving exhibitions in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) and Moneyball (2011). He delivered The Departed (2006) and 12 Years a Slave (2013), the two of which won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and furthermore The Tree of Life (2011), Moneyball, and The Big Short (2015), which were all assigned for Best Picture.

As an open figure, Pitt has been refered to as one of the most persuasive and influential individuals in the American media outlet. For various years he was refered to as the worlds most alluring man by different news sources, and his own life is the subject of wide attention. In 2000, he wedded entertainer Jennifer Aniston; they separated in 2005. In 2014, Pitt wedded on-screen character Angelina Jolie. They have six youngsters together, three of whom were embraced universally. In 2016, Jolie petitioned for a separation from Pitt, which was concluded in 2019.

Pitt was conceived in Shawnee, Oklahoma, to William Alvin Pitt, the owner of a trucking organization, and Jane Etta (ne Hillhouse), a school guide. The family before long moved to Springfield, Missouri, where he lived respectively with his more youthful kin, Douglas Mitchell (brought into the world 1966) and Julie Neal (brought into the world 1969).Born into a traditionalist Christian household,they was raised as Southern Baptist and later oscillate[d] among rationalism and skepticism. Pitt currently expresses that he was simply being insubordinate and that he clingto religion. Pitt has portrayed Springfield as Imprint Twain nation, Jesse James nation, having grown up with a ton of slopes, a great deal of lakes.

Pitt went to Kickapoo High School, where he was an individual from the golf, swimming and tennis teams.they took an interest in the schools Key and Forensics clubs, in school discusses, and in musicals. Following their graduation from secondary school, Pitt joined up with the University of Missouri in 1982, studying reporting with an emphasis on advertising.As graduation drew closer, Pitt didnt feel prepared to settle down. He adored moviesan entryway into various universes for me and, since films were not made in Missouri, he chose to go to where they were made. Two weeks shy of finishing the coursework for a degree, Pitt left the college and moved to Los Angeles, where he took acting exercises and worked odd jobs.They has named his initial acting legends as Gary Oldman, Sean Penn and Mickey Rourke.

John Flint has interest in writing, Flint contributed to the school's newspaper and its humor magazine, eventually becoming the publication's editor, also he worked on some of social networking website. john is a best-author, he wrote number of books in his career and presently he is news editor on featureweekly.com

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American actor and film producer William Bradley Pitt Celebrate Their Birthday Today - Feature Weekly

Rationalism, in Western philosophy, the view that regards reason as the chief source and test of knowledge. Holding that reality itself has an inherently logical structure, the rationalist asserts that a class of truths exists that the intellect can grasp directly. There are, according to the rationalists, certain rational principlesespecially in logic and mathematics, and even in ethics and metaphysicsthat are so fundamental that to deny them is to fall into contradiction. The rationalists confidence in reason and proof tends, therefore, to detract from their respect for other ways of knowing.

Rationalism has long been the rival of empiricism, the doctrine that all knowledge comes from, and must be tested by, sense experience. As against this doctrine, rationalism holds reason to be a faculty that can lay hold of truths beyond the reach of sense perception, both in certainty and generality. In stressing the existence of a natural light, rationalism has also been the rival of systems claiming esoteric knowledge, whether from mystical experience, revelation, or intuition, and has been opposed to various irrationalisms that tend to stress the biological, the emotional or volitional, the unconscious, or the existential at the expense of the rational.

Rationalism has somewhat different meanings in different fields, depending upon the kind of theory to which it is opposed.

In the psychology of perception, for example, rationalism is in a sense opposed to the genetic psychology of the Swiss scholar Jean Piaget (18961980), who, exploring the development of thought and behaviour in the infant, argued that the categories of the mind develop only through the infants experience in concourse with the world. Similarly, rationalism is opposed to transactionalism, a point of view in psychology according to which human perceptual skills are achievements, accomplished through actions performed in response to an active environment. On this view, the experimental claim is made that perception is conditioned by probability judgments formed on the basis of earlier actions performed in similar situations. As a corrective to these sweeping claims, the rationalist defends a nativism, which holds that certain perceptual and conceptual capacities are innateas suggested in the case of depth perception by experiments with the visual cliff, which, though platformed over with firm glass, the infant perceives as hazardousthough these native capacities may at times lie dormant until the appropriate conditions for their emergence arise.

In the comparative study of languages, a similar nativism was developed in the 1950s by the innovating syntactician Noam Chomsky, who, acknowledging a debt to Ren Descartes (15961650), explicitly accepted the rationalistic doctrine of innate ideas. Though the thousands of languages spoken in the world differ greatly in sounds and symbols, they sufficiently resemble each other in syntax to suggest that there is a schema of universal grammar determined by innate presettings in the human mind itself. These presettings, which have their basis in the brain, set the pattern for all experience, fix the rules for the formation of meaningful sentences, and explain why languages are readily translatable into one another. It should be added that what rationalists have held about innate ideas is not that some ideas are full-fledged at birth but only that the grasp of certain connections and self-evident principles, when it comes, is due to inborn powers of insight rather than to learning by experience.

Common to all forms of speculative rationalism is the belief that the world is a rationally ordered whole, the parts of which are linked by logical necessity and the structure of which is therefore intelligible. Thus, in metaphysics it is opposed to the view that reality is a disjointed aggregate of incoherent bits and is thus opaque to reason. In particular, it is opposed to the logical atomisms of such thinkers as David Hume (171176) and the early Ludwig Wittgenstein (18891951), who held that facts are so disconnected that any fact might well have been different from what it is without entailing a change in any other fact. Rationalists have differed, however, with regard to the closeness and completeness with which the facts are bound together. At the lowest level, they have all believed that the law of contradiction A and not-A cannot coexist holds for the real world, which means that every truth is consistent with every other; at the highest level, they have held that all facts go beyond consistency to a positive coherence; i.e., they are so bound up with each other that none could be different without all being different.

In the field where its claims are clearestin epistemology, or theory of knowledgerationalism holds that at least some human knowledge is gained through a priori (prior to experience), or rational, insight as distinct from sense experience, which too often provides a confused and merely tentative approach. In the debate between empiricism and rationalism, empiricists hold the simpler and more sweeping position, the Humean claim that all knowledge of fact stems from perception. Rationalists, on the contrary, urge that some, though not all, knowledge arises through direct apprehension by the intellect. What the intellectual faculty apprehends is objects that transcend sense experienceuniversals and their relations. A universal is an abstraction, a characteristic that may reappear in various instances: the number three, for example, or the triangularity that all triangles have in common. Though these cannot be seen, heard, or felt, rationalists point out that humans can plainly think about them and about their relations. This kind of knowledge, which includes the whole of logic and mathematics as well as fragmentary insights in many other fields, is, in the rationalist view, the most important and certain knowledge that the mind can achieve. Such a priori knowledge is both necessary (i.e., it cannot be conceived as otherwise) and universal, in the sense that it admits of no exceptions. In the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant (17241804), epistemological rationalism finds expression in the claim that the mind imposes its own inherent categories or forms upon incipient experience (see below Epistemological rationalism in modern philosophies).

In ethics, rationalism holds the position that reason, rather than feeling, custom, or authority, is the ultimate court of appeal in judging good and bad, right and wrong. Among major thinkers, the most notable representative of rational ethics is Kant, who held that the way to judge an act is to check its self-consistency as apprehended by the intellect: to note, first, what it is essentially, or in principlea lie, for example, or a theftand then to ask if one can consistently will that the principle be made universal. Is theft, then, right? The answer must be No, because, if theft were generally approved, peoples property would not be their own as opposed to anyone elses, and theft would then become meaningless; the notion, if universalized, would thus destroy itself, as reason by itself is sufficient to show.

In religion, rationalism commonly means that all human knowledge comes through the use of natural faculties, without the aid of supernatural revelation. Reason is here used in a broader sense, referring to human cognitive powers generally, as opposed to supernatural grace or faiththough it is also in sharp contrast to so-called existential approaches to truth. Reason, for the rationalist, thus stands opposed to many of the religions of the world, including Christianity, which have held that the divine has revealed itself through inspired persons or writings and which have required, at times, that its claims be accepted as infallible, even when they do not accord with natural knowledge. Religious rationalists hold, on the other hand, that if the clear insights of human reason must be set aside in favour of alleged revelation, then human thought is everywhere rendered suspecteven in the reasonings of the theologians themselves. There cannot be two ultimately different ways of warranting truth, they assert; hence rationalism urges that reason, with its standard of consistency, must be the final court of appeal. Religious rationalism can reflect either a traditional piety, when endeavouring to display the alleged sweet reasonableness of religion, or an antiauthoritarian temper, when aiming to supplant religion with the goddess of reason.

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Rationalism | Britannica

I. Definition

Rationalism is the philosophy that knowledge comes from logic and a certain kind of intuitionwhen we immediately know something to be true without deduction, such as I am conscious. Rationalists hold that the best way to arrive at certain knowledge is using the minds rational abilities. The opposite of rationalism is empiricism, or the view that knowledge comes from observing the outside world. However, in practice almost all philosophers and scientists use a combination of empiricism and rationalism.

Rationalism is an idea about where knowledge comes from, and is therefore part of the philosophical sub-field of epistemology.

Math provides a good illustration of rationalism: to a rationalist, you dont have to observe the world or have experiences in order to know that 1+1=2. You just have to understand the concepts one and addition, and then you can know that its true. Empiricists, on the other hand, argue that this is not true; they point out that we can only rely on mathematical equations based on some experience of the world, for example having one cookie, being given another, and then having two.

Rationalism and empiricism both play a role in science, though they correspond to different branches of science. Rationalism corresponds to mathematical analysis, whereas empiricism corresponds to experiments and observation.

Of course, the best route to knowledge combines rational contemplation and empirical observation. Rationalists and empiricists agree on that; they just disagree on which one is more important or primary.

Constructivism is an effort to combine empiricism and rationalism. According to constructivists, we can observe the world around us and gain a lot of knowledge this way (thats the empiricist part), but in order to understand or explain what we know, we have to fit it into an existing structure. That is, we have to construct a rational set of ideas that can make sense of the empirical data (thats the rationalist part). Constructivism is a popular idea among teachers, who find it helpful in structuring lessons: constructivist teaching involves presenting new information in a way designed to fit in with what the student already knows, so that they can gradually build up an understanding of the world for themselves.

Many people think that the progress of the human race is based on experiences of an empirical, critical nature, but I say that true knowledge is to be had only through a philosophy of deduction . . . Intuition makes us look at unrelated facts and then think about them until they can all be brought under one law. (Albert Einstein)

Many people think of science as an inherently empirical discipline after all, its based mainly on observation and experiments, right? But theres also a rationalist side to science as seen in this quote from Einstein. Einstein was not big on experiments or peering through telescopes. Instead, he took data that other people had collected and tried to understand it rationally (i.e. mathematically). His brilliant theories of special and general relativity were not the results of new experiments, but rather the result of applying a keen rational eyeand intuitionto existing data.

Music has always been inseparable from religious expression, since, like religion at its best, music marks the limits of reason. Because a territory is defined by its extremities, it follows that music must be definitively rational. (Karen Armstrong)

Many rationalist philosophers are fascinated by music, for exactly the reasons that Karen Armstrong points out in this quote. Music is intensely rational in some ways (you can analyze its structures and frequencies and find all sorts of mathematical patterns there), but its also extremely emotional and seems to short-circuit our rational brains. Thus, music exists right on the boundary between rational and anti-rational. Armstrong also makes the more controversial, but no less interesting, claim that religion works in a similar way, operating at the boundaries between rational thought and non-rational emotions.

Rationalism has deep historical roots; you might even say that its discovery defines the birth of philosophy in various cultures. The ancient Greeks are probably the most famous example: ancient philosophers such as Plato and Pythagoras argued that reality is characterized by some basic abstract logical principles, and that if we know these principles, then we can derive further truths about reality. (Thats the same Pythagoras who invented the famous Pythagorean Theorem more evidence of the connection between rationalism and math.)

However, other Greeks disagreed. Aristotle, for example, based much of his philosophy on observation. He was fascinated by the natural world and spent much of his time gathering samples of plants and animals; in some ways he was the first modern biologist. This method is, of course, based on observation and therefore is a kind of empiricism.

Rationalism really took off in the Medieval Islamic world, where Muslim philosophers looked to Plato for inspiration. Platos rationalism proved to be extremely important to medieval Islam, which was an intensely rationalistic religion based on logical deduction. Its first principle was tawheed, or the Unity of God, and all other truths were thought to be logical consequences of that single revelation.

Both rationalism and empiricism played a major role in the Scientific Revolution. Empiricists did experiments and made observations by, for example, looking through telescopes. But many of the most important discoveries were made by rational analysis, not empirical observation. And of course, the experiments were also partially inspired by reason and intuition.

Isaac Newton developed his theory of gravity by working out the mathematical relationship between falling objects and orbiting planets. (Sometimes people say that Newton discovered gravity, but really its more accurate to say that he explained gravity.)

The debate between rationalists and empiricists was resolved to some extent by Immanuel Kant, one of the most influential philosophers who ever lived. Kants theory was that empiricism and rationalism were both true in their own ways: he agreed with the empiricists when he said that all human knowledge comes from observation. This, he said, is in fact the way that people learn about the world. But our observations are also based on certain innate ways of reasoning; our brains are hard-wired to make certain conclusions from observation and reason further in certain ways. So, he also agreed with the rationalists that knowledge is determined by rationality. As you might expect, many constructivists can trace their lineage back to Kant.

In Civilization V, one of the social policy options is Rationalism. This social policy improves science output for your civilization and allows you to produce more Great Scientists. This makes sense since rationalism was so important in the early scientific revolution. However, the game illustrates rationalism with a picture of a scientist looking through a prism, presumably as part of an experiment. So the picture would fit better under the heading of empiricism rather than rationalism!

Vulcanians do not speculate. I speak from pure logic. (Spock, Star Trek)

Spock is the perfect rationalist. His powerful brain can compute logical probabilities faster than any human being, and he is not distracted by pesky emotions or personal biases (at least most of the time; he is half-human, after all). He is capable of incredible feats of logic, such as playing three-dimensional chess.

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Rationalism: Examples and Definition | Philosophy Terms

Saba Mahmood is a very talented scholar who has assimilated a post-colonial sensibility. She has learned to look at the world through the eyes of those who have been the pedagogical objects of European colonialism. The literature on Orientalism is vast; and the evidence suggests that Europe cannot easily shake off the deep-seated assumption that its way of life and scholarly products are the Archimedean point for comprehending the entire world. Tomoko Masuzawa (The invention of world religions [2005]) demonstrated provocatively that the idea of world religion is an intellectual construction that implicitly assumes that Christianity is the only universal religion that breaks free from locale and particularity.

Even in its secular modern form, it is supposed to be superior to all other ways of life, suffused as they are by a non-Christian religion. Mahmood (Can secularism be Other-wise? In M. Warner, J. VanAntwerpen and C. Calhoun [Eds.]. Varieties of secularism in the secular age [2010]) begins her critical questioning of Taylors A secular age (2007) by declaring that he delineates his object of study: a coherent religious tradition, coextensive with a spatial geography, whose historical unfolding can be plotted without accounting for non-Christian religious traditions that have coexisted within that very space of Latin Christendom (p. 285).

Mahmood raises two salient points. For one thing, Latin Christendom is not as homogenous as Taylor makes out and, secondly, it is not understandable without grasping its encounters with others in new worlds. These encounters, she observes, did not simply leave Christianity untouched but transformed it from within, a transformation that should be internal to any self-understanding of Christianity. Omission of this story is akin to the omission of the history of slavery and colonialism from accounts of post-Enlightenment modernityan omission that enables a progressivist notion of history and normative claims about who is qualified to be modern or civilized (p. 286). This is devastating and intriguing commentary.

Many thoughts are now triggered. Early Christianity (embodied in St. Paul) shapes its self-understanding in relation to the Jewish and pagan other. Over time, its apologetics take form in the often violent encounter with Islam (as well as receiving Aristotle) through the medieval period. When Europe ventures out to colonize the world, its own self-understanding is imbricated with its sense of civilizational superiority. That is, Christianity becomes yoked to its twin: civilization. One cannot have one without the other. To become Christian is to be civilized (in sensibility and moral outlook). But if we reject the idea that Christianity is a universal essence that floats above history and culture, we can see the power and impact of Mahmoods critical insights. The iconic French explorer Jacques Cartier (who arrived in Canada in 1534) naturally assumed that Catholic Christendom ought to be extended to the entire world. He was relatively unaffected by the dogmatism of the counter-reformation and the new rationalism. His mystical faith made little distinction between natural and supernatural worlds.

Although this latter belief placed him on common ground with native peoples, he had no doubt that the line between France and Canada, between civilization and savagery, was sharply drawn and that civilization was on the march (R. Cook, Introduction. In H.P. Biggar, The voyages of Jacques Cartier [1993], p. xv). Cartier could not conceive of equal and different. The native people he encountered had no government and no culture or religion to speak of, so Cartier simply assumed that he had the right to claim the land for France. He had the right to seize the land from native peoples and protect and promote Catholicism against the threat of wicked Lutherans, apostates, and imitators of Mahomet and to these lands of yours, your possessions, and those lands and territories of yours (as cited, Cook, 1993, p. 38).

Explorers like Columbus and Cartier did not see who and what was before them; the discordance between what was before them and their mental categories opened the door for new ways of seeing and being in the world. But even through European Christendom was fracturing irrevocably, the Christian cosmography did not yet allow for a radical acceptance of the other. Indeed, we would have to await the fullness of the scientific revolution and the blooming of the enlightenmentas well as significant resistance from those deemed as objects of Euro-pedagogyto accomplish the corrosion of Euro-superiority and deepen its self-critique.

Mahmoods powerful core idea is that Christianitys self-understanding was increasingly shaped by its enmeshment in an imperial world order (p. 287). Missionary work, then, was important to developments within Christianity and to many of the central ideas and institutions of Latin Christendom (ibid.). Mahmood points out that missionaries shaped educational systems, bringing in forms of western-styled rationalism and ways of thinking about the world. Mahmood states that in the period from 1858-1914, the zenith of colonial power, every corner of the globe was penetrated by Christian missions. Importantly, these missions did not simply pave the way for colonial rule (as if often noted) but played a crucial role in shaping and redefining modern Christianity to fit the requirements of an emergent liberal social and political order in Europe (p. 287).

In a sense, western Imperialism empties out the primal message of Christianity, replacing the content with core values and practices of Euro-centric notions of superiority and rationality. In Canada, the creation of residential schools was the instrument to empty Indigenous spirituality of its power and to fill the vacuum with new content, appropriate to the Natives destined role as subordinate and deracinated humans.

For Mahmood, Taylor fails to acknowledge the immense ideological force the empirical history of Christianity commands in securing what constitutes as the properly religious and secular in the analytical domain (p. 289). But this securing, Mahmood argues, comes at great cost. It is to engage in a practice through which the North Atlantic has historically secured its exceptionalitythe simultaneous uniqueness and universality of its religious forms and the superiority of is civilization (p. 290). Western secular modernity, then, retains traces of its Euro-Christian origins.

This latter phenomenon occurs, for example, in the way Frances arrogant understanding of the precise role any existing form of religion ought to play. The sovereignty of the secular state provisions the power to regulate religious life through a variety of disciplinary practices that are political as well as ethical (p. 293). We see this process played out in contemporary Quebec with its controversial Bill 21 which prohibits public servants from wearing religious headgear and other symbols.

To inhabit this founding gesture uncritically (as Taylor does), by which the West consolidates its epistemic and historical privilege, is not simply to describe a discursive structure but to write from within its concepts and ambitionsone might even say to further its aims and presuppositions. The fact that Taylor sometimes inhabits this discourse ironically (evident in his acknowledgement of other possible accounts one could give of secularism) does not undermine the force of this discourse but only makes it more palatable to a post-imperialist audience (ibid.).

This is tour de force criticism.

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Christianity is the Religion of Imperialism - CounterPunch

The first Western philosopher to stress rationalist insight was Pythagoras, a shadowy figure of the 6th century bce. Noticing that, for a right triangle, a square built on its hypotenuse equals the sum of those on its sides and that the pitches of notes sounded on a lute bear a mathematical relation to the lengths of the strings, Pythagoras held that these harmonies reflected the ultimate nature of reality. He summed up the implied metaphysical rationalism in the words All is number. It is probable that he had caught the rationalists vision, later seen by Galileo (15641642), of a world governed throughout by mathematically formulable laws.

The difficulty in this view, however, is that, working with universals and their relations, which, like the multiplication table, are timeless and changeless, it assumes a static world and ignores the particular, changing things of daily life. The difficulty was met boldly by the rationalist Parmenides (born c. 515 bce), who insisted that the world really is a static whole and that the realm of change and motion is an illusion, or even a self-contradiction. His disciple Zeno of Elea (c. 495c. 430 bce) further argued that anything thought to be moving is confronted with a row of points infinite in number, all of which it must traverse; hence it can never reach its goal, nor indeed move at all. Of course, perception tells us that we do move, but Zeno, compelled to choose between perception and reason, clung to reason.

The exalting of rational insight above perception was also prominent in Plato (c. 427c. 347 bce). In the Meno, Socrates (c. 470399 bce) dramatized the innateness of knowledge by calling upon an illiterate slave boy and, drawing a square in the sand, proceeding to elicit from him, step by step, the proof of a theorem in geometry of which the boy could never have heard (to double the size of a square, draw a square on the diagonal). Such knowledge, rationalists insist, is certain, universal, and completely unlearned.

Plato so greatly admired the rigorous reasoning of geometry that he is alleged to have inscribed over the door of his Academy the phrase Let no one unacquainted with geometry enter here. His famous forms are accessible only to reason, not to sense. But how are they related to sensible things? His answers differed. Sometimes he viewed the forms as distilling those common properties of a class in virtue of which one identifies anything as a member of it. Thus, what makes anything a triangle is its having three straight sides; this is its essence. At other times, Plato held that the form is an ideal, a non-sensible goal to which the sensible thing approximates; the geometers perfect triangle never was on sea or land, though all actual triangles more or less embody it. He conceived the forms as more real than the sensible things that are their shadows and saw that philosophers must penetrate to these invisible essences and see with their minds eye how they are linked together. For Plato they formed an orderly system that was at once eternal, intelligible, and good.

Platos successor Aristotle (384322 bce) conceived of the work of reason in much the same way, though he did not view the forms as independent. His chief contribution to rationalism lay in his syllogistic logic, regarded as the chief instrument of rational explanation. Humans explain particular facts by bringing them under general principles. Why does one think Socrates will die? Because he is human, and humans are mortal. Why should one accept the general principle itself that all humans are mortal? In experience such principles have so far held without exception. But the mind cannot finally rest in this sort of explanation. Humans never wholly understand a fact or event until they can bring it under a principle that is self-evident and necessary; they then have the clearest explanation possible. On this central thesis of rationalism, the three great Greeks were in accord.

Nothing comparable in importance to their thought appeared in rationalistic philosophy in the next 1,800 years, though the work of St. Thomas Aquinas (c. 122574) was an impressive attempt to blend Greek rationalism and Christian revelation into a single harmonious system.

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Rationalism - History of rationalism | Britannica

Left to right: Vergil, Cicero, Livy.

Many revere Latin as the soul of Western civilization. But its beauty should not keep us from reckoningwith its history.

Long Live Latin: The Pleasures of a Useless LanguageNicola Gardini, translated from the Italian by Todd PortnowitzFarrar, Straus and Giroux, $26 (cloth)

Imagine the rush to leave your doomed citythe fires, the smoke, the uncertainty of where you will go, how long you will stay when you get there. In those few moments to consider your possessions, you think, Ah, but I might have time for a book! What do you pull from your shelves? A sacred text? Some handy and serviceable issues of Popular Mechanics? Or perhaps, like the Oxford Renaissance literature professor Nicola Gardini, you reach for Vergils Aeneid. In the event of global catastrophe, he writes in his newly translated book Long Live Latin: The Pleasures of a Useless Language, that would be the book to salvage. At that moment you become Aeneas, bending to carry the pater of a dying patria: your Anchises is the epic of Imperial Romeand the legacy and detritus that comes with it.

Deeply embroiled in the culture wars, Latinremainsa totemic languageattractive to religious schools, nationalists, and traditionalists alike.

Vergil, Anchises, patria. If these words are foreign to youif you dont know that patria is the nominative of country (really, fatherland), or that in Latin my phrase above (pater patriae) would have used the genitive of possessionit is because, some would say, we live in a degenerate age, when the classics are no longer ubiquitous and the past is no longer cherished.

Indeed Latin remains deeply embroiled in the culture wars. Conservative groups and homeschool communities have doubled down on the classical tradition, even as othersmany of us classicists includedhave grappled with its exclusionary and problematic reception and sought a richer contextualization of the past. (Just three months ago Christianity Todayreported on The Rise of the Bible-Teaching, Plato-Loving, Homeschool Elitists.) Latin is no longer the bedrock of education that it used to be (along with Greek, for that matter), but all the while it has remained a totemic languageattractive to religious schools, nationalists, and traditionalists alike for its implicit cultural authority, its tradition of exclusivity, power, and prestige.

It is Latin, not Greek, after all, that is most prominently paraded as intellectual exercise or cultural badge of honor. Hundreds of thousands of precollege students study the language in the United States alone (and many of them compete for olive wreaths and bragging rights in the National Latin Exam), while ancient Greek mostly survives in seminaries and university classics departments. From this perspective, the answer to the perennial question Why study Latin? seems clear: it is imperial, it is canonized, and it valorizes a particular identitythe dead white men who, we are told, invented Western civilization.

The answer to the perennial question Why study Latin? seems clear: it is imperial, it is canonized, and it valorizes a particular identitythe dead white men who, we are told, invented Western civilization.

Of course, this is not the reason Gardini wrote his book. His primary target is the claim that Latin is useless; his impassioned prologue is called Ode to a Useless Language. But he is also particularly irked by the noxious clich that Latin is a dead language because it is no longer spoken (or spoken by only very few). By his argument, no language can be dead that is still producing ideas, generating responses, and prompting emulationfrom the Latin aemulatio, which can also mean rivalry.

His official argument for studying Latin avoids talk of utility altogether. When we study Latin, he writes, we must study it for one fundamental reason: because it is the language of a civilization; because the Western world was created on its back. Because inscribed in Latin are the secrets of our deepest cultural memory, secrets that demand to be read. But his most telling and recurring counterclaim against the tedium of utilitas is love, especially love of the beautiful. Latin is beautiful, he asserts emphaticallythe italics are his own. This fact undergirds all that I will be saying in these pages. What he has written, he says, is not a grammar book, not a history of language or literature, but an essay on the beauty of Latin.

The problems with this approachthis ideology of the aestheticare legion. It fails to recognize that civilization is a process of selectionexclusionary by designand that ugliness is the Janus-faced twin of beauty, the implied defect of those who dont make the cut. Gardinis Latin is that of an unrepentant New Critic, who searches the universe for perfect, rational, well-ordered verbal forms to elucidate (all these adjectives are his), without acknowledging the contexts and conflicts that have led him to seek out those forms in the first place.

There is a real-world danger to this aestheticizing attitude toward linguistic study, this appeal to beauty and pleasure.

There is a real-world danger to this aestheticizing attitude toward linguistic study, this appeal to beauty and pleasure. (Both words appear in the book at least a dozen times.) It threatens to make classics into a mystery-cult rite, through which initiates gain arcane knowledge of the nature of things (to crib some Lucretius). It distorts the marvelous range of Latin-speakingculture, flattening its richness and diversity into a one-note story about the West. And it suppresses analysis of the political and social conditions in which the language was used.

This kind of classicism limits history, makes ethics an entirely personal affair, and distances itself from the dirty confines of politics. Long Live Latin might have a different tone if it had been written not in the waning days of 2015 but rather in the shadow cast by Brexit, the presidency of Donald Trump, and the expropriation of the Greco-Roman past by ethnonationalists and hate groups. Indeed, though Gardini concedes in passing that studying Latin means different things in different contexts, this fact should be the first premise of his inquiry, rather than the last.

If I come down too hard on Gardini, it is because I am in many ways his fellow traveler. I too love Latin. (We both received our PhDs in classics from New York University, in fact.) I am also moved by Gardinis fine writing, and the exceptional translation from the Italian by Todd Portnowitz: the bookis an elegy for a world gone-by, a lament for the secret knowledge of words. And I shared his boyhood view of Latin as a cheat-code for social class. As Gardini writes in the opening of the book, reflecting on his first encounter with Latin textbooks and their description of the Roman domus, his study of Latin became entangled with my desire to, in a certain sense, climb the social ladder: the dream of a magnificent home.

The books organizing principle is literary: it is a collection of beautiful passages, deftly mined for their stylistic differences, interwoven with biographical reflections.

This book is that studys magnificent home. Its organizing principle is literary: it is a collection of beautiful passages, exquisitely turned out and deftly mined for their stylistic differences, interwoven with biographical reflections on Gardinis experience with the language. In each chapter he selects texts from specific authors and shows what is special about them. The exercise will be familiar to the classically trained as that special realm of passion and pedantry, where the best demonstrate how good they are at showing how good something else is.

The authors named in chapter headings do not range far beyond the usual suspects, who are in no danger of being forgotten and would have been familiar several generations ago: Cicero and Seneca, Livy and Tacitus, Vergil and Horace, Lucretius and Ovid. All of them are male, and most were incredibly wealthy adjacents to imperial power who relied on slaves to ply their trade. Gardini is completely transparent that the Latin he chooses to write about is the literary Latin that shaped his character and the character of the works he lovesthe Latin of the classical canon, restricted in both space and time, from around 200 BCE to 200 CE. He fails to paint the larger Mediterranean context, especially the influence of Greecean omission that parallels the erasure of non-Western contributions in general. He offers, for example, the typical yet blinkered story of a Latin Renaissance centered in Italy and moving slowly northward, discounting the cultural importance and contribution of the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic world.

The authors coveredall mendo not range far beyond the usual suspects,most of whom were incredibly wealthy adjacents to imperial power and relied on slaves to ply their trade.

The temporal restriction is telling, too. Unlike scholarly work that has sought to expand the bounds of the past, this book largely conveys a curious nostalgiaa paean to a cultural pattern created by the Renaissance, written by a professor of Renaissance literature, yet with very little of the Renaissance in it. (When Petrarch does appear in passing, Gardinis fondness for him shines through.) The logic of this structure is partly biographical and partly aesthetic. The chapter on the latest author, St. Augustine, is introduced in the following way: In high school, we hardly touched on Christian Latintoo late in the game, too bland. And yet, in the right hands, it too can be beautiful.

The book shines brightest when his exhortations get you to read the words aloud, to will them back into the world, as he did for me with his evocation of Vergils Eclogues, finding that space between poetic verse and magic spell that is at the heart of Roman literary life. His selections of passages are worth the cover price of the book alone, especially in his chapters on Propertius, Juvenal, and Horace. Gardini makes you want to turn back to Senecas letters, or to marvel at the novels of Apuleius and Petronius again, if not for the first time. In this vein, he is movingly clear on the formal achievements of Lucretius, and equally powerful in his rumination on semantic shifts from Latin cura (concern, dedication) to English care. The most ancient words in our language, he writes, are like haunted houses.

However historical his material may be, Gardini seems persistently disinterested in history and politics.

Occasionally he goes too far, as when he claims that Latin is the language of the relationship between the one and the many and that to speak of Latin is first and foremost to speak of a complete dedication to organizing ones words in a profound and measured discourse. Enjoying this book does not require signing on to this definition, but it does require overlooking certain thingsespecially a richer sense of history. However historical his material may be, Gardini seems persistently disinterested in history and politics. He attempts to link the beautiful to the political earlier on when he writes, Beauty is the face of freedom. What all totalitarian regimes have most strikingly in common is their ugliness. Yet claims of beauty and truth were central to the discourses of fascism in the twentieth century. His avoidance of this fact is either incredible naivet or willful denial.

This aestheticism becomes especially hard to take when he turns to Caesar, whose famously dry prose is held up as the epitome of rationalism and pragmatism. He promises not to dwell on Caesars great ideological and propagandistic value. Similarly, he calls Vergils epic written evidence of an entire civilizationnothing short of a new gospel, with hardly anything added on the century of death that preceded it or the scale of human suffering occluded by its tale. Form, here as elsewhere in the book, trumps content: Vergils enduring success is owed first of all to the beauty of his language. Likewise troubling is the briefest nod to the troubles that attended Tacituss imperial life (and conditioned his harsh indirectness) or the wealth, class, and power that made Senecas stoicism possible. In reading Livy, his uncritical tale of Lucretias rape is no surprise given his silence on Roman misogyny and its inheritance through the canon.

The beauty of Gardinis phrases almost obscures a need to prove that the author is speaking the truth.

Of his textual explications, his section on Cicero may be the least convincing. The clear and instructive tour through Ciceronian passages moves between pellucid comments on syntax and quite passionate flights of fancy: under Ciceros direction, Latin takes the stage as a language of truth and justice. As with Ciceros own writing, the beauty of Gardinis phrases almost obscures a need to prove that the author is speaking the truth. Such is the Ciceronian desire and ability to recast the world through the word, rather than deigning to make words faithfully represent it.

Gardini sings the praises of Western civilization, then, without acknowledging that this also includes imperial, colonial, and enslavingmisogynists. The implicit requirement for appreciatingthe aesthetic beauty Gardini so admires is ignoring that literature is a political discourseand that the canon may be complicit in history rather than merely a product of it.

We need to look to classicsmore critically to understand how easy it is to use what remains of Roman and Greek culture as shackles rather than means of liberation.

In the time that has passed since Gardini wrote the Italian edition of this book, we have learned a lot about what people do with Latinwho studies it, and why. In her recent book Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age (2018), for example, Donna Zuckerberg tracks the alt-rights appropriation of the classics, from the use of classical texts among Mens Rights Activists to the superficial use of Ovid as inspiration for pickup artists. O tempora! O mores! we cry with Cicero upon seeing classics used by hate groups. Scholars such as Curtis Dozier (with his Pharos project) and Sarah Bond (with her tireless public outreach) have worked alongside mainstream authors such as Myke Cole to record and expose these misunderstandings and misuses of the past.

But the fact remains that classics has been a force of imperialism, classism, racism, and colonialism since its inception. (The historian Rebecca Futo Kennedy has joined others such as Dorothy Kim in cataloguing this long legacy.) We need to look to the history of our discipline more critically to understand how easy it is to use what remains of Roman and Greek culture as shackles rather than means of liberation. Affiliating ourselves with Latin requires scrutinizing the world that has received and transmitted it.

All this points to something we all know but are afraid to admit: the classical humanities have failed as humanizing enterprises. Just consider the classical educations of slaveholders such as Seneca, the classical trappings of colonialism, the superficial Latin and Greek of the so-called Founding Fathers (among them, Thomas Jefferson). German Philhellenism played no small role in Nazism and twentieth-century fascism. And, really, one needs look no further than the Oxford classical education of a buffoon like Boris Johnson to recognize that Western Civilization has a problem.

Those who still admire the work of canon-defending may find in Gardinis book the echo of a rallying cry. But others will find the discomfort of self-recognition. When he closes his book, Gardini claims first that Latin is a worthwhile study because it is fun, but also because Latin is here to remind us that meaning is not to be taken for granted. In the latter claim, Gardini almost seems ready to gesture beyond the narrowly aesthetic, but instead he limply insists that achieving linguistic beauty is one of the highest aims of being human. Gardinis Latin thus ends as an aesthetic wonder: a form with some content, but which should teach us the importance of historical distance and that the ancients speak for the ancients. Perhaps these comments are a belated attempt to stave off the distortions of twentieth-century interpretation or political misusebut it is a weak one, undone by the implicitly political gesture of the books championing of a very narrow and specific canon.

Gardini sings the praises of Western civilization, without acknowledging that this also includes imperial, colonial, and enslavingmisogynists. His Latin is an aesthetic wonder, form without content.

For my part, I carry the Latin I have learned with me every day as a gift. The first line of Catulluss elegy for his brother (multas per gentes et multaper aequora vectus) ran through my head as I travelled to arrange my fathers funeral; I have regularly found comfort in Senecas Moral Epistles, and have learned much about how life makes us all complicit from Ciceros personal letters. These gifts have come to me through chance and privilege.

But it is not enough to learn Latin alone, to excise it from its place and time for merely personal use. It may be nave to think we can appreciate the pasts beauty all the more after recognizing its horrors; that we can find comfort and hope in shared humanity; and that we can still learn from the imperfect past to improve our imperfect present. Yet isnt this the very hope for fame and glory that animated Ovid to sing?

At the end of the day, we may be what we love. Love makes Latin live through Nicola Gardini, and it is certainly lively in his hands. But part of learning to love the classics is learning what they truly are. Our engagement with literature, he admits, should make us more critical of what itand wedo in the world; how we talk about what we love is an expression of how we view ourselves. As the Roman poet Propertius warned, sine sensu vivere amantis, et levibus curis magna perire bona: lovers live without sense / and great affairs perish because of petty concerns.

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Loving Latin at the End of the World - Boston Review

In her 1950s work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt warned that totalitarian governments would emerge from within a civilisation, not from outside.The world today reflects the truth of that observation, as one democratic country after another comes in the hands of proponents of a kind of nationalistic barbarianism.

In this piece, Harvard professor Homi K. Bhabha reflects on this and other disturbing phenomena of our times. The extract is taken from a speech he recently gave in Mumbai on the occasion of the 50thanniversary of Max Mueller Bhavan, which is part of the Goethe Institute, Germany, named after the 18thcentury writer, artist and statesman.

Goethes concept of World Literature is particularly valuable for our own desultory times because it reminds us of the practical and ethical importance of the Humanities in the paradoxical world we inhabit. Digital technology accelerates time and the Web shrinks distances; concurrently however, divergent political and religious beliefs polarise the planet and drive peoples further apart.

Goethes concept ofWeltliteraturengages primarily with the necessity of engaging with foreign languages and cultures in a global republic of letters, but it provides an intriguing lesson on the possibilities of establishing foreign relations in times of geopolitical turbulence. Goethe writes, For nations flung together by dreadful warfare, and thrown apart again, have all realised that they had absorbed many foreign elements and become conscious of new intellectual needs. This lead to more neighbourly relations, and a desire for a freer system of intellectual give-and-take.

Goethes argument is counterintuitive and controversial; some would even consider it to be irredeemably utopian. The conflict of war, Goethe argues, creates an enforced and violent proximity between enemies and aliens; and the very act of destruction, which always afflicts both sides irrespective of who wins, may open up possibilities of the reconstruction of relationships based on foreign elements.

Homi K. Bhabha reads Arendt. Photo: Max Mueller Bhavan, Mumbai

Goethe, of course, is talking of wars of occupation, where victors and victims were forced to coexistover timewhich allowed them some measure of the absorption of foreign influences through practices of the administration and regulation of conquest. Goethe was not talking of the shock and awe of technological warfare waged at the speed of lightening; wars executed by camera-eyed instruments and computerised, prosthetic strikes.

Post9/11,we have witnessed the cold dawn of an Age of Insecurity in the pursuit of an unprecedented expansion of global security.

Wars executed in the name of democracy have increased the precariousness of populations already beaten down by despotic governments. In destroying autocratic regimes abroad, there has been an ascendancy of authoritarian leadership at home. Whether in the North or the South, we are confronted with a dark and desperate irony: Democracy, define it as you will, has delivered a strident victory to populist, xenophobic forces at the ballot-box who use the vote to stifle the voice of democratic dissent on the street.

The triumphant will of majoritarianism attempts to obliterate the protection of minorities which is the primary moral duty of a democratic polity. Majoritarian populism violates the simple truth thateach personreceives his or her rights as an individual, which is to say, as a minority of one. It is only by acknowledging the integrity and authority of the person her singularity or her minority that we can orchestrate the national idea and identity of the our collective selfhoodwe the people.

The democratic ideal of national neighbourliness is based on protecting thevulnerabilityof citizens while enhancing their ethical and political agency; the vainglory of majoritarian, populist demagoguery exploits the weak, exposes the vulnerable and denigrates the disadvantaged.

In the Goethean spirit of a desire for neighbourly relations dedicated to freer systems of intellectual give-and-take I want to share a moment with you when Hannah Arendt suddenly finds herself amongst a group of beleaguered humanists in Trivandrum. A constellation of danger emerges.

I must warn you, there is a touch of Bollywood patriarchy and paternalism about it all: a rural damsel in distress, a gallant subaltern knight from the city armed with answers, and Hannah Arendts unexpected presence that doesnt exactly save the day,or the damsel, but enables both of them to survive better than they did the day before.

I am not wasting your time, dear friends. This is, I should add, a story very much in tune with the humanistic pedagogies of our times cultural translation, travelling theory, the displacement of peoples and ideas, and finally an emergent epiphany of the right to interpretation.

Professor Sundar Sarukkai, a renowned Indian philosopher and public intellectual, visited the Trivandrum Womens College in Kerala in 2011, as a member of the board of a national survey on the stature of the humanities. Professor Sarukkai was beset by humanists students and teachers in a state of insecurity, anguish, and hopelessness.

He writes, A thoroughly demoralised group stood before us besieged by numerous problems ranging from social and domestic tabooing for joining a course in the humanities or social sciences, to the problems of poverty, unemployment and stark uncertainty about the future.

A woman student courageously took the floor and voiced her resentment, the professors report, with a piquant irony. And, according to a report inEPW,this is what she said,

Being a Hindu my parents, teachers and friends would have pardoned me even if I had eloped with a Christian or Muslim boyfriend, but they couldnt forgive me for deserting pure sciences and joining a humanities course.

Sarukkais response to the abandoned womans confession of academic apostasy presents an unexpected challenge.

To learn to think like a humanist, he tells his demoralised Trivandrum audience, you should read Hannah ArendtsEichmann in Jerusalem. In Trivandrum, the city of the Indian rocket launchpad project and Indias first technopark, Sarukkai arguesagainstthe curricular privilege afforded to technical and scientific rationalism by the Indian Constitution, and warns that the hegemony of instrumental knowledge could lead to the banality of evil, or as Arendt describes it inEichmann in Jerusalem, the non-wicked everybody who has no special motives and for this reason is capable of infinite evil.

I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall in that lecture hall in Trivandrum, or given the heat of the day, a mosquito on the sleepily revolving ceiling fan. In the absence of either of those Kafkaesque choices, I can only ventriloquise Sarukkais seminar.

An portrait of Hannah Arendt. Photo: Ben Northern/Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Arendt engages with the banality of evil, by tracking the performance of Eichmanns languageempty-talk, clichs, language-ruleswith the precision of a humanistic philologist carefully following the inane activity of thought-lessness.

She writes, The longer one listened to him the more obvious it became that this inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else.

To think from the standpoint of someone elserequires a convergence between issues of consciousness and matters of conscience.., Bernard Williams has written inEthics and the Limits of Philosophy..Listen to Arendt:

We call consciousness (literally, to know with myself) the curious fact that in a sense that I also am for myself, though I hardly appear to me [which] is not so unproblematic as it seems; I am not only for others but for myself, and in this latter case I clearly am not just one. A difference is inserted into my Oneness For myself, articulating this being-conscious-of-myself, I am inevitably two-in-one Consciousness is not the same as thinking; but without [this alterity, two-in-one], thinking would be impossible. What thinking actualises in its process is the difference given in consciousness. (Thinking and Moral Considerations)

What does it mean to say that to actualise the difference within oneself actively engaging with the the two-in-one might prevent catastrophes?

What if we turn towards the world-at-large, when the chips are down, and find ourselves impaled at the cross-roads of civility and barbarism, caught between humanism and horror? Bringing Arendt home to Bombay from Kerala is, undoubtedly, an act of cultural and historical translation, but what she has to say at the very end ofThe Origins of Totalitarianismin the 1950s, bears repeating forcibly today:

Deadly danger to any civilisation is no longer likely to come from without Even the emergence of totalitarian governments is a phenomenon within, not outside, our civilisation. The danger is that a global universally related civilisation may produce barbarians from its own midst by forcing millions of people into conditions which, despite all appearances, are the conditions of savages.

The populist, majoritarian nationalisms that arise amidst our much vaunted global age make it daily clearer how great a burden the idea of mankind the collective human figure of rights and representations has become for the barbarians within our gates.

The phalanx of male leaders that straddle the world today are not politicians of charisma; they are politicians of miasma.

In the United States, and more recently in Brazil, England, India, Italy, Hungary, Poland, and elsewhere, Steve Bannon has become the prime proponent of nationalist barbarism.

And this is not my language; it is Bannons avowed self-description. In a 2018 interview with theEconomist, Bannon proudly assumes the mantle of barbarism. Speaking of the 2016 US elections, he describes his ideological mission with a passion:

The country was thirsting for change and [Barack] Obama didnt give them enough. I said, we are going for anationalist message, we are going to go barbarian, and we will win.

On March 25, 2019, after the publication of the redacted Mueller report, Bannon reinforced his earlier message to Trump to go barbarian and goaded him on to go full animal (with my apologies to animals.)

The populist slogans Make America great, again, Make India Hindu, again; Make Britain Brexit, again are rhetorical instances of populistethno-nationalism. The traditional tendency is to associate the adjective great with populist chauvinism and the neo-liberal hauteur of global capitalism.

More lethal by far, in my view, is the rebarbative iteration of the adverbagain. If great refers to majoritarian sovereignty and the possibility of nationalist-populist alliances; again references a revanchist temporality of degradation that goes full animal by legitimating a mythical, atavistic return to a state of racial purity, a closed-in cultural homogeneity, a walled-in security of territorial sovereignty. The devil is in the details, and the adverb again, is decidedly the devil.

The hegemonic greatness of the nations-populist-peoples can only be achieved again and again though persecutory and peremptory acts of rough justice that are themselves contrary to the spirit of the law.

Every time I hear never again, I hear a threatening echo: Againagainagain

Homi K. Bhabhais theAnne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanitiesin Harvard University. This excerpt is being published with his permission.

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Hannah Arendt and the New Nationalist Barbarians - The Wire

Fist with pen illustration by CHema Skandal!

When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of mans concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.

John F. Kennedy, Remarks at Amherst College on the Arts, October 26, 1963

Introduction

Poetry is often associated with genteel people and laid-back lifestyles, yet over the decades since the Enlightenment many poets have been actively involved in the most radical of political and art movements. Setting up a solid foundation for such attitudes was the poet extraordinaire, Alexander Pope. In this essay I shall look at the connection between poetry and socio-political struggles over the centuries. From Pope to the Chartists, and from the Irish revolutionary poets to the postcolonial writers of Africa, poetry has played an important part in social change. The recent explosion of global demonstrations and rallies has also been connected with radical poetry as will be seen in Chile, for example.

The New Augustans v Medievalism shall not Britain now reward his toils?

Imagine being one of the generation of poets to follow Shakespeare. The Enlightenment poets response to Shakespeare was that they believed that Shakespeare was good but not perfect and so looked back to Roman times, to that of Augustus for a more political and satirical model for their poetry. Alexander Pope (16881744) was highly influenced by the poet Horace (65 BC8 BC) whose work was created during a momentous time when Rome changed from a republic to an empire. Popes poem Epistle to Augustus (addressed to George II of Great Britain) initiated The New Augustans, as they were known, and they created new and bold political work in all genres as well as sharp and critical satires of contemporary events and people. Popes best known works The Rape of the Lock, The Dunciad, and An Essay on Criticism made him famous in his own time for their biting criticism and wit. Equally satirical but with more emphasis on prose than poetry was his contemporary, Jonathan Swift (16671745), the Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, pamphleteer, poet and cleric whose A Tale of a Tub (1704), An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1712), Gullivers Travels (1726), and A Modest Proposal (1729) led to the creation of the term Swiftian for such sharp satire.

The Augustan era was also known by other names such as the age of neoclassicism and the Age of Reason. It was a time of increased availability of books and a dramatic decrease in their cost. This in turn meant that education was less confined to the upper classes and that writers could hope to make more money through the sale of their works and therefore be less dependent on patrons.

The greatest patron of the arts throughout the Middle Ages was the Church. Patronage was also used by nobles, rulers, and very wealthy people to endorse their political ambitions, social positions, and prestige. Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, William Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson all looked for and received the support of noble or ecclesiastical patrons.

Alexander Pope, painting attributed to English painter Jonathan Richardson, c.?1736, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

The sales from Popes works allowed him to live a life less determined by other peoples wealth, and this independence is reflected in his lines from Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot:

Oh let me live my own! and die so too!(To live and die is all I have to do:)Maintain a poets dignity and ease,And see what friends, and read what books, I please.

While Pope read a lot of philosophy, his concerns were mainly poetic. As David Cody writes:

Like many of his contemporaries, Pope believed in the existence of a God who had created, and who presided over, a physical Universe which functioned like a vast clockwork mechanism. Important scientific discoveries by men like Sir Isaac Newton, who explained, in his Principia, the nature of the laws of gravitation which helped to govern that universe, were seen as corroborating that view. Nature, and Natures Laws lay hid in Night, Pope wrote, in a famous couplet intended as Newtons epitaph, but God said, Let Newton be ! and All was Light. This view of the universe as an ordered, structured place was an aspect of the Neoclassical emphasis on order and structure which also manifested itself in the arts, including poetry.

Pope was famous for his biting criticism which spoofed the mores of society or mocked his literary rivals. His critical political savvy was also on show in lines like:

T is George and Liberty that crowns the cup,And zeal for that great House which eats him up.The woods recede around the naked seat,The sylvans groanno matterfor the fleet;Next goes his woolto clothe our valiant bands;Last, for his countrys love, he sells his lands.To town he comes, completes the nations hope,And heads the bold train-bands, and burns a pope.And shall not Britain now reward his toils,Britain, that pays her patriots with her spoils?In vain at court the bankrupt pleads his cause;His thankless country leaves him to her laws.

Popes poetry reflected the Enlightenment popularisation of science through scientific and literary journals, the development of the book industry, the promulgation of encyclopedias and dictionaries, and new ideas spread like wildfire through learned academies, universities, salons and coffeehouses. The Enlightenment period can be dated from the beginning of the reign of Louis XV (1715 ) until the turn of the 19th century but was soon followed by the Romantic period from about 1800 to 1860.

Chartism v Romanticism How comes it that ye toil and sweat?

The Romantics preferred intuition and emotion to the rationalism of the Enlightenment and placed a high value on the achievements of heroic individualists and artists. They turned inwards, seeing art as an individual experience and emphasising such emotions as apprehension, horror and terror, and awe. Romanticism looked backwards to folk art, ancient customs and medievalism. As the bourgeoisie achieved their main aims of wresting control of land and power from the aristocracy, the responsibility for continuing the struggle for the principles of libert, galit, fraternit fell upon the organisations of the working classes.

In England, Chartism was a major working class movement called after the Peoples Charter of 1838 and was a movement for political reform in Britain until 1857. The movements strategies were constitutional and they used petitions and mass meetings to put pressure on politicians to concede manhood suffrage. The Charter demanded: a vote for every man twenty-one years of age, secret ballots, payment of Members (so working people could attend without loss of income), equal constituencies, and annual Parliamentary elections. The Chartist movement was a reaction to the passing of the Reform Act 1832, which failed to extend the vote beyond those owning property. The political leaders of the working class felt that the middle class had betrayed them.

In conjunction with Chartist demonstrations and strikes, the Chartist press as the voice of radicalism existed in the form of The Poor Mans Guardian in the 1830s and was succeeded by the Northern Star and Leeds General Advertiser between 1837 and 1852. The press covered news, editorials, and reports on international developments while becoming the best-selling provincial newspaper in Britain with a circulation of 50,000 copies. It also became an organ for the publication of working class poets and poems.

Front page of The Northern Star and Leeds General Advertiser, 1837

With such a wide circulation, it was no wonder that so many sent their poems in for consideration. According to Mike Sanders:

The Northern Stars poetry column was not an attempt to impose culture from above, rather it was a response to a popular demand that poetry could and should speak to working-class desires and needs. From the start, literally hundreds of Chartists sent in their poems and quite a few appear to have pestered the editor with enquiries as to when their work would appear.

It is believed that up to 1,000 poems by up to 400 Chartist and working-class poets were published in the Northern Star between 1838 and 1852. Michael Sanders notes that:

Most have names, but a high percentage are published either under initials, under a pseudonym or anonymously, presumably by writers who would fear reprisals, such as dismissal or blacklisting, if they were known to be writing for the Northern Star. By and large, we know nothing of these people. They are permanently lost to history. But these poems show us that poetry was once central to the way working-class communities expressed themselves both politically and otherwise.

Ordinary people used poetry as a way of demonstrating their humanity in the face of grinding poverty and dehumanising industrial capitalism. By composing poetry they showed they could produce beauty as well as surplus value.

An example of an anonymous poets endeavour is AWs poem To The Sons Of Toil published in 1841:

How comes it that ye toil and sweatAnd bear the oppressors rodFor cruel man who dare to changeThe equal laws of God?How come that man with tyrant heartIs caused to rule another,To rob, oppress and, leech-like, suckThe lifes blood of a brother?

We still dont know anything about AW but he or she is an example of many men and women who turned to poetry to express their desires for social justice. However, several important poets did arise out of the Chartist movement such as Ernest Charles Jones (18191869) novelist and Chartist. In 1845, Jones joined the Chartist agitation, quickly becoming its most prominent figure, and vigorously carrying on the partys campaign on the platform and in the press. His speeches, in which he openly advocated physical force, led to his prosecution, and he was sentenced in 1848 to two years imprisonment for seditious speeches. While in prison he wrote, it is said in his own blood on leaves torn from a prayer-book, The Revolt of Hindostan, an epic poem.; Thomas Cooper (18051892) poet, leading Chartist and known for his prison rhyme the Purgatory of Suicides (1845); Gerald Massey (18281907) was an English poet and only twenty-two when he published his first volume of poems, Voices of Freedom and Lyrics of Love (1850); George Binns (18151847) was a New Zealand Chartist leader and poet.

Photo of Ernest Charles Jones (18191869)

There was Ebenezer Elliott (17811849) who was an English poet, known as the Corn Law rhymer for his leading the fight to repeal the Corn Laws which were causing hardship and starvation among the poor. Though a factory owner himself, his single-minded devotion to the welfare of the labouring classes won him a sympathetic reputation long after his poetry ceased to be read; and John Bedford Leno (18261894) was a Chartist, radical, poet, and printer who acted as a bridge between Chartism and early Labour movements, he was called the Burns of Labour and the poet of the poor for his political songs and poems, which were sold widely in penny publications, and recited and sung by workers in Britain, Europe and America.

The Poets Revolution v Modernism Viewing human conflict from a social perspective

The connection between the radical poets and the working class continued into the twentieth century even as Romanticist modernism took hold. Modernism rejected the ideology of realism, while promoting a break with the immediate past, technical innovation, and a philosophy of making it new. As such:

Modernist poetry in English is generally considered to have emerged in the early years of the 20th century with the appearance of the Imagist poets. In common with many other modernists, these poets were writing in reaction to what they saw as the excesses of Victorian poetry, with its emphasis on traditional formalism and overly flowery poetic diction. [] Additionally, Modernist poetry disavowed the traditional aesthetic claims of Romantic poetrys later phase and no longer sought beauty as the highest achievement of verse. With this abandonment of the sublime came a turn away from pastoral poetry and an attempt to focus poetry on urban, mechanical, and industrial settings.

Despite the modern context and simpler language, Modernist poets moved further away from Realism as they developed literary techniques such as stream-of-consciousness, interior monologue, as well as the use of multiple points-of-view, undermining what is meant by realism. Thereby moving further away from the kind of narrative and descriptions of external reality that seekers of political change and social justice use as an art form to create and propagate awareness of their social conditions.

The Chartist tradition of radical politics associated with radical content in poetry was continued in Ireland whose revolutionary radicals perceived in the First World War an opportunity encapsulated in the slogan, Englands difficulty is Irelands opportunity. The culmination of nationalist and radical politics of the previous centuries was demonstrated in the Easter Rising of 1916. Indeed it is often described as the The Poets Revolution as three of the men who signed the Proclamation in 1916, Pearse, MacDonagh, and Plunkett, were published poets, while many other participants were also writers of plays, songs and ballads. The leader of the Irish Citizens Army, James Connolly wrote:

Our masters all a godly crew,Whose hearts throb for the poor,Their sympathies assure us, too,If our demands were fewer.Most generous souls! But please observe,What they enjoy from birthIs all we ever had the nerveTo ask, that is, the earth.

The leaders of the Irish revolution were generally a young, artistic group of revolutionaries and their executions by the British colonists sent shock waves throughout Ireland leading to the War of Independence (1919-1921) and the Civil War (19221923).

Photo of James Connolly, c. 1900

Later in the 1920s and 1930s a more politically conscious working class poetry developed. In the United States the combination of influences from the Soviet Union and the Great Depression led to the growth of many new leftist political and social discourses. Milton Cohen summarised the aesthetic, stylistic, and political concerns being debated at the time. He noted that poets were expected to:

(1) View human conflict from a social perspective (as opposed to personal, psychological, or universal) and see society in terms of economic classes.(2) Portray these classes in conflict (as Marx described them): workers versus bosses, sharecroppers versus landowners, tenants versus landlords, have-nots versus haves.(3) Develop a working-class consciousness, that is, identify with the oppressed class in these conflicts, rather than maintaining objective detachment.(4) Present a hopeful outcome to encourage working-class readers. Other outcomes are defeatist, pessimistic, or confused.(5) Write simply and straightforwardly, without the aesthetic complexities of formalism.(6) Above all, politicize the reader. Revolutionary literature is a weapon in the class struggle and should consciously incite its readers if not to direct action then to a new attitude toward life, to recognize his role in the class struggle.

These proscriptions ran straight in the face of every tenet of Modernist poetry which emphasised the personal imagination, culture, emotions, and memories of the poet. Major poets of the radical movement in the United States include Langston Hughes (19021967), Kenneth Fearing (19021961), Edwin Rolfe (1925-1954), Horace Gregory (18981982), and Mike Gold (18941967).

Post colonial poetry v postmodernism The bitter taste of liberty

As the United States suffered under the heightened political repression of McCarthyism in the 1950s the mantle of radical culture moved to the countries who wrestled themselves out of British colonial stranglehold in the form of postcolonial literature. The English language was imposed in many colonised countries yet came to be the language of radical anti-colonial poets during the liberation struggles and afterwards in the independence era. African poets, for example, were able to use poetry to communicate to the world not only their despairs and hopes, the enthusiasm and empathy, the thrill of joy and the stab of pain but also a nations history as it moved from freedom to slavery, from slavery to revolution, from revolution to independence and from independence to tasks of reconstruction which further involve situations of failure and disillusion.

David Diops poem Africa weighs up past and present political complexities:

Africa, my AfricaAfrica of proud warriors in ancestral savannahs .Is this you, this back that is bentThis back that breaks under the weight of humiliationThis back trembling with red scarsAnd saying yes to the whip under the midday sun..That is Africa your AfricaThat grows again patiently obstinatelyAnd its fruit gradually acquiresThe bitter taste of liberty.

The development of the postcolonial in the South paralleled the development of the postmodern in the West. However, the philosophical bases of postmodernism would not sit easily with the practical contingencies of newly achieved nationhood. Postmodernism rejected the grand narratives and ideologies of modernism, and like modernism, called into question Enlightenment rationality itself. The tendencies of postmodernism towards self-referentiality, epistemological and moral relativism, pluralism, and irreverence would make it an uncomfortable bedfellow with the socialist and revolutionary nationalist exigencies of the newly decolonised. As the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiongo notes:

Literature does not grow or develop in a vacuum; it is given impetus, shape, direction and even area of concern by the social, political and economic forces in a particular society. The relationship between creative literature and other forces cannot be ignored especially in Africa, where modern literature has grown against the gory background of European imperialism and its changing manifestations: slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism. Our culture over the last hundred years has developed against the same stunting, dwarfing background.

In a way the radical political changes wrought by anti-colonial struggles kept the culture tied down and anchored to the values and aspirations of the masses. Postcolonial ideology was relevant to society in a way that postmodernism was not. It could be argued that postmodernism actively sought to remove itself from political relevance by decrying grand narratives and elevating relativism.

Radical poetry today? only injustice and no resistance?

Until relatively recently it seemed that the sentiments of Bertolt Brechts (1898-1956) poem To Posterity had become almost universally true in the 21st century:

For we went, changing our country more often than our shoes.In the class war, despairingWhen there was only injustice and no resistance.

However, there has been a sea change in attitude with people demonstrating on the streets in many cities globally in only one year: the Yellow Vests in France (October/November, 2018), Sudanese Revolution (19 December, 2018), Haiti Mass Protests (7 February, 2018), Algeria: Revolution of Smiles (6 February, 2019), Gaza economic protests (since Mar, 2019), Iraq: Tishreen Revolution (1 October, 2019), Puerto Rico: Telegramgate (8 July 2019), Ecuador Protests (3 October, 2019), Bolivian protests (since Oct, 2019), Chile Protests (14 October, 2019), Lebanon Protests (7-18 October, 2019).

Protests in Plaza Baquedano, downtown Santiago

The eruption of protest and violence in Chile started with students demonstrating against the proposal to raise the subway fares. This was unexpected as Sofa del Valle noted:

Economists have long called Chiles economy the miracle of Latin America, where GDP per capita has noticeably grown from $2,500 in 1990 to $15,346 in 2017. However, these numbers hide a fundamental problem: they do not account for inequality. Chiles late poet Nicanor Parra said it best: There are two pieces of bread. You eat two. I eat none. Average consumption: one bread per person.

She also states that the people themselves are starting to participate in political activity with the proliferation of cabildos ciudadanos, or self-organized participatory meetings of citizens that have gathered to discuss problems and solutions for the country we dream to be.

This has led to the connection between the masses and poetry, similar to Chartist times, being restored to Chile. According to Vera Polycarpou, the people on the streets are singing the songs of Victor Jara, listening to symphonic music in the squares, making street theatre and reciting the poems of Pablo Neruda, declaring that it will not tolerate military rule, repression and injustice again.

Pablo Neruda (19041973) was a Nobel Prize winning Chilean poet-diplomat who wrote in a variety of styles, including surrealist poems, historical epics, overtly political manifestos, a prose autobiography, and passionate love poems from a very young age. Neruda was living in Madrid at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War (1936 to 1939) and with some friends had formed the Alliance of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals bringing popular theater to the people, plays from Cervantes to Lorca. The assassination of the Spanish poet Federico Garca Lorca (18981936), a friend of his, a month into the war had a profound affect on Neruda. According to Mark Eisner:

Beyond the horror of a friends assassination, Lorcas death represented something more: Lorca was the embodiment of poetry; it was as if the Fascists had assassinated poetry itself. Neruda had reached a moment from which there was no turning back. His poetry had to shift outwardly; it had to act. No more melancholic verse, love poems dotted with red poppies, or metaphysical writing, all of which ignored the realities of rising Fascism. Bold, repeated words and clear, vivid images now served his purpose: to convey his pounding heart and to communicate the realities he was experiencing in a way that could be understood immediately by a wide audience.

This shift away from Romanticism can be seen clearly in Nerudas poem I Explain Some Things:

You will ask why his poetrydoesnt speak to us of dreams, of the leaves,of the great volcanoes of his native land?

Come and see the blood in the streets,come and seethe blood in the streets,come and see the bloodin the streets!

The demonstrations in Chile have also seen the return of the cacerolazo or casserole a form of popular protest used globally consisting of people making noise by banging pots, pans, and other utensils at demonstrations. The Chilean rapper Ana Tijoux brought out a song about this form of protest, called Cacerolazo (on YouTube) where she raps about cacerolazos as a form of massive protest in defiance of police and military violence describing them as [w]ooden spoons against your shooting:

Vivita, guachita, Chile despiertaCuchara de palo frente a tus balazosY al toque de queda, cacerolazo!No somos aliengenas ni extraterrestresNo cachai na, es el pueblo rebeldeSacamos las ollas y nos mataronA los asesinos cacerolazo!

(Vivita, guachita, Chile wake upWooden spoon in front of your bulletsAnd at the curfew, cacerolazo!We are not aliens or extraterrestrialsDont shit, its the rebel peopleWe took out the pots and they killed usTo the killers cacerolazo!)

Conclusion

The Chartists may not have had the access to the internet or video production of Ana Tijoux but their newspapers achieved large distributions and sales, spreading a similar culture of revolt and opposition. Since the time of Alexander Pope, poetry has played an important part in the struggle for change and social justice and the potential for poetry to consolidate peoples feelings, aspirations and desires has remained strong. The decision by poets, themselves, to participate and apply their art to the issues at hand has reinforced and inspired people the world over.

All images in this article are from Wikimedia Commons

This article was posted on Saturday, November 16th, 2019 at 9:24am and is filed under Africa, Age of Enlightenment, Chile, Ireland, Medievalism, Postmodernism, Realism, Revolutionaries, Romanticism, Social Justice, Social Realism.

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Poetry and Political Struggle: The Dialectics of Rhyme - Dissident Voice

Heresy is not so much a lie as an infected, inflamed, and cancerous truth. It takes one or two things out of the Tradition and then, like a metastasizing cancer attacking healthy tissue, attacks all the rest of the Catholic faith. Chesterton, writing nearly a century ago, describes the process:

Now, it was just here that, for me, the business began to be odd and interesting. For, looking back on older religious crises, I seem to see a certain coincidence, or rather, a set of things too coincident to be called a coincidence After all, when I come to think of it, all the other revolts against the Church, before the Revolution and especially since the Reformation, had told the same strange story. Every great heretic had always exhibit three remarkable characteristics in combination. First, he picked out some mystical idea from the Churchs bundle or balance of mystical ideas. Second, he used that one mystical idea against all the other mystical ideas. Third (and most singular), he seems generally to have had no notion that his own favourite mystical idea was a mystical idea, at least in the sense of a mysterious or dubious or dogmatic idea. With a queer uncanny innocence, he seems always to have taken this one thing for granted. He assumed it to be unassailable, even when he was using it to assail all sorts of similar things. The most popular and obvious example is the Bible. To an impartial pagan or sceptical observer, it must always seem the strangest story in the world; that men rushing in to wreck a temple, overturning the altar and driving out the priest, found there certain sacred volumes inscribed Psalms or Gospels; and (instead of throwing them on the fire with the rest) began to use them as infallible oracles rebuking all the other arrangements. If the sacred high altar was all wrong, why were the secondary sacred documents necessarily all right? If the priest had faked his Sacraments, why could he not have faked his Scriptures? Yet it was long before it even occurred to those who brandished this one piece of Church furniture to break up all the other Church furniture that anybody could be so profane as to examine this one fragment of furniture itself. People were quite surprised, and in some parts of the world are still surprised, that anybody should dare to do so.

Again, the Calvinists took the Catholic idea of the absolute knowledge and power of God; and treated it as a rocky irreducible truism so solid that anything could be built on it, however crushing or cruel. They were so confident in their logic, and its one first principle of predestination, that they tortured the intellect and imagination with dreadful deductions about God, that seemed to turn Him into a demon. But it never seems to have struck them that somebody might suddenly say that he did not believe in the demon. They were quite surprised when people called infidels here and there began to say it. They had assumed the Divine foreknowledge as so fixed, that it must, if necessary, fulfil itself by destroying the Divine mercy. They never thought anybody would deny the knowledge exactly as they denied the mercy. Then came Wesley and the reaction against Calvinism; and Evangelicals seized on the very Catholic idea that mankind has a sense of sin; and they wandered about offering everybody release from his mysterious burden of sin. It is a proverb, and almost a joke, that they address a stranger in the street and offer to relax his secret agony of sin. But it seldom seemed to strike them, until much later, that the man in the street might possibly answer that he did not want to be saved from sin, any more than from spotted fever or St. Vituss Dance; because these things were not in fact causing him any suffering at all. They, in their turn, were quite surprised when the result of Rousseau and the revolutionary optimism began to express itself in men claiming a purely human happiness and dignity; a contentment with the comradeship of their kind; ending with the happy yawp of Whitman that he would not lie awake and weep for his sins.

Now the plain truth is that Shelley and Whitman and the revolutionary optimists were themselves doing exactly the same thing all over again. They also, though less consciously because of the chaos of their times, had really taken out of the old Catholic tradition one particular transcendental idea; the idea that there is a spiritual dignity in man as man, and a universal duty to love men as men. And they acted in exactly the same extraordinary fashion as their prototypes, the Wesleyans and the Calvinists. They took it for granted that this spiritual idea was absolutely self-evident like the sun and moon; that nobody could ever destroy that, though in the name of it they destroyed everything else. They perpetually hammered away at their human divinity and human dignity, and inevitable love for all human beings; as if these things were naked natural facts. And now they are quite surprised when new and restless realists suddenly explode, and begin to say that a pork-butcher with red whiskers and a wart on his nose does not strike them as particularly divine or dignified, that they are not conscious of the smallest sincere impulse to love him, that they could not love him if they tried, or that they do not recognize any particular obligation to try.

It might appear that the process has come to an end, and that there is nothing more for the naked realist to shed. But it is not so; and the process can still go on. There are still traditional charities to which men cling. There are still traditional charities for them to fling away when they find they are only traditional. Everybody must have noticed in the most modern writers the survival of a rather painful sort of pity. They no longer honour all men, like St. Paul and the other mystical democrats. It would hardly be too much to say that they despise all men; often (to do them justice) including themselves. But they do in a manner pity all men, and particularly those that are pitiable; by this time they extend the feeling almost disproportionately to the other animals. This compassion for men is also tainted with its historical connection with Christian charity; and even in the case of animals, with the example of many Christian saints. There is nothing to show that a new revulsion from such sentimental religions will not free men even from the obligation of pitying the pain of the world. Not only Nietzsche, but many Neo-Pagans working on his lines, have suggested such hardness as a higher intellectual purity. And having read many modern poems about the Man of the Future, made of steel and illumined with nothing warmer than green fire, I have no difficulty in imagining a literature that should pride itself on a merciless and metallic detachment. Then, perhaps, it might be faintly conjectured that the last of the Christian virtues had died. But so long as they lived they were Christian.

Because heresy is always based on a truth, it (like cancer) can evade the immune system for a long time even in its most demented forms. And the higher and better the truth is, the harder it is to root out the heresy, for the heretic can always point an accusing finger at the sane person and say, You are an enemy of Truth and Goodness! if the sane one dares to suggest the heretics One Sacred Truth must be taken with other truths.

This is why the archetypal heresy is Arianism. It took the absolute truest and best thing in all of eternityGod the Father himselfand weaponized him against the other two Persons of the Trinity. Heresy is a kind of madness, not in the sense of raving hallucination, but in Chestertons sense of a sort of barren hyper-rationalism about a single monomaniac idea:

Every one who has had the misfortune to talk with people in the heart or on the edge of mental disorder, knows that their most sinister quality is a horrible clarity of detail; a connecting of one thing with another in a map more elaborate than a maze. If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

The madmans explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory. Or, to speak more strictly, the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable; this may be observed specially in the two or three commonest kinds of madness. If a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators; which is exactly what conspirators would do. His explanation covers the facts as much as yours. Or if a man says that he is the rightful King of England, it is no complete answer to say that the existing authorities call him mad; for if he were King of England that might be the wisest thing for the existing authorities to do. Or if a man says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity; for the world denied Christs.

Nevertheless he is wrong. But if we attempt to trace his error in exact terms, we shall not find it quite so easy as we had supposed. Perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it is to say this: that his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large. In the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large. A bullet is quite as round as the world, but it is not the world. There is such a thing as a narrow universality; there is such a thing as a small and cramped eternity; you may see it in many modern religions. Now, speaking quite externally and empirically, we may say that the strongest and most unmistakable mark of madness is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction. The lunatics theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way.

The animating monomaniac idea driving the MAGA/Bolsonaro Catholics is the sanctity of unborn human life. And it has led them to become the biggest enemies of the Churchand of human lifein the Church. Of which more tomorrow.

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Amazon Synod: The Reactionary as Chesterton's Madman - Patheos