Clearly, it's the wrong time of the lunar year to raise questions of potential heresy, but during the recent two-day toot-fest, I found myself wondering why the world has made so little religious progress over the past (select your own imponderably long epoch here). I can email myself over my telephone, and apparently we also have the technology that enables the beste mentschen to camera-video government witnesses right in the courtroom, to facilitate their decapitation whenever convenient.
And yet, for some reason, people still suck. I don't mean just our Mohammedan cousins that have somehow confused mental PMS with the divine will of Al-Lah. I mean, well, me. When I was a mere tad (lisp fully intact, scalp fully visible), there was a kindly old fellow named Mr. Klein at the neighborhood house of worship. Mr. Klein had, at some earlier point in time, suffered a stroke, leaving his gait and speech significantly impaired. I have few memories of the man, but what stands out is the fact that as a matter of course, my friends and I took to mocking him.
This isn't a diatribe against how cruel children can be - I have a chubby nine-year-old, and I'm reminded of this all too often. It's not a screed against any particular branch of what we lovingly call the frumme velt - we happened to be fairly right-wing, but I don't see its unique elements as contributing to our obtuseness. (Well, this example of obtuseness, anyhoo.)
Kellner makes a good case for progress, and by golly, we know much more about how the world works than ever before. We prob'ly learn more about stuff (including people) than earlier generations picked up in a generation.
And yet, when it comes to actually making people better (or is that better people? Or is better people too reminiscent of eugenics?), we got nothing. What the hey?
- Moishe Potemkin, in an insufferably maudlin mood
Posted by MoisheP at October 6, 2005 09:49 PM | TrackBackGreat post. So true.
Posted by: peninah at October 7, 2005 10:11 AMI keep telling my self the system's not broken, it's just being done wrong.
Posted by: Greg at October 7, 2005 02:38 PMYour comment assumes an unconstrained view of human nature, holding that human misbehavior is a fault of incomplete knowledge or poor social engineering, which can be cured by teachers, technicians and bureaucrats. A constrained view would hold that such behavior is likely congenital and an integral part of many people's personalities, and that the area for their improvement is actually quite small.
Cf. A Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell and Ayn Rand Contra Human Nature by Greg Nyquist.
Posted by: Alan at October 7, 2005 04:24 PMand that's without even talking about the nazis' appearance in the modern age. or rwanda. or even just new orleans.
hannah arendt definitely got it right. evil is banal, and as a species, we will never get better. there's another, more hip book, called "the selfish gene," which explains how even altruism is just another manifestation of self-interest.
so you're right: progress will never be measured by kindness nor will progress make us kinder.
Posted by: SuburbanInternational at October 9, 2005 09:23 AMAlan -
I suppose you're correct - on some level I'm Platonic. (Heck, during high school my life was far more platonic than I would have preferred.) But if we can identify the causes of cancer and autism (and I know we're not there yet), then perhaps other congenital defects are also reparable. Of course, then we're replace Goethe-ian introspection for surgery, which would obviate most religiosity post haste.
Sub -
Everyone does Nazis. No-one does Mr. Klein. Also, one of the things that Hirsch used to pound on Maimonides about was the fact that he ignored society to focus on individual shleimut. But maybe individuals are all we have. (I'll ignore the near-automatic tendency to pick an individual other than myself to perfect.)
- Moishe P.
Posted by: Moishe Potemkin at October 9, 2005 02:15 PMI'll submit that our lives are all a lot better thanks to scientific advancements in this area that now comes in swallowable form. As much as I am personally averse to such a thing, I can't help but acknowledge that it fits with my theology.
I'm guessing that at the time it was instituted, the hope or even the idea that science would ever be able to do those kinds of things was incomprensible, or too far off to wait for. The incidental suffering required some sort of interim solution.
That's actually quite heretical.
Posted by: Greg at October 10, 2005 10:34 AMActually, on second thought, even if we come up with an operation to allieve dopieness, there's still other things we need to deal with that religion can handle. I suppose that if you look at religion as essentially libertarian in nature, you are bound to focus on the alleiviation of suffering/injustice as the end goal of the system (as I actually have been doing for the past few months). But maybe thats not really what the base motivation is, and so, even if we can make better people in the eugenic or operative sense, there's still something that is missing that religion fills. Whatever that is...Man's inclusion in and yet seperation from Nature, or our finitude, or whatever...
Of course, we could just chop the bits of brain out that make us care about those things also...
Whatever.
Posted by: Greg at October 10, 2005 10:39 AM