this, that and The Other

The other day at the office my suitemate David and I got to talking, as we often do. Somehow conversation drifted to Max Weber and his distinction between the this-worldly soteriology (theory of salvation) of Jews and the other-worldly version of Christianity. Weber, he told me, basically had it was all wrong, that his worldview was overimbued with Protestantism, and that at some low level it had laid the ground for Nazism -- to dramatically oversimplify, because of the implication that Judaism wasn't in some sense a true religion like Christianity. I had never thought of it that way, I still don't agree entirely, but I totally hear where he's coming from and can see how it would get spun that way in the wrong hands.

He was reminded of some debate that had been spurred by in the course of a reading he and a friend have been doing of the book of Isaiah, wherein there is debate about how Moses received the laws. Did he go up to heaven? Did God come down to earth? Each solution is problematic, theologically. It occurred to me -- and I interjected -- that the whole concept of the Trinity (Father -- Son -- Holy Ghost) was cooked up to resolved this problem, and later I recalled that for the most part the ecumenical councils that were held in Nicaea, Ephesus, etc. from the 4th thru the 8th century pretty much revolved around heresies around this issue, esp. Arianism. Which is not to say that I think the Christians nailed it, they were just thinking through the same issue in their own way.

Then this morning I was reading something in a section of the Journal that had been languishing on the dining room table about the restoration of some 14th century church doors in Florence. The article discussed where the doors fit in to the early Renaissance evolution of the depiction of humans and reality, during which the high degree of abstraction and flatness of styles inherited from Byzantium gave way to greater realism and individuality. It occurred to me that this evolution, the rise of the concept of hereness and individuality, to some extent forms an extension and is of a piece with the debate about the Divine and the Terrestrial, God and Man. And, to go a step further, the One and the Many, and we must give props to Nietzsche for driving home the point that the pre-Socratics really did frame out most of the basic questions.

Nor should I be surprised with any of this thinking, because in a sense it forms an extension of decades of thinking about culture -- admittedly mostly western culture -- to which I've been privy since discovering my parents' old copy of Kenneth Clark's Civilization to reading Erich Auerbach's Mimesis and Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel in college and grad school. Plus tons of other stuff.

It is all decidedly in the realm of Dead White Men. And yet there is a lot of good and important thinking that was done and thought through and which forms the basis of much that is good and valuable in today's thinking and scholarship. Yet I'm sure all of these guys have been more or less shredded in recent decades for their role in positing and subtending structural racism/sexism/etc. I'm not even going to bother looking.

People forget how much of human history has been a struggle to survive. When you are struggling to survive, the question of what is mine vs yours, who is in vs. who is out, has a different resonance. Life expectancy in the US was half of what it is today in 1880. The story of civilization is multithreaded, but in large part it is the story of optimizing the distinction between mine and yours, allocating scarce resources sensibly and thereby raising more and more people up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. As a group humanity has made a lot of progress on many fronts since World War II due to a lot of things, including the Green Revolution, Deng Xiaopeng and Narasimha Rao/Manmohan Singh and the opening of China and India, Gandhi/King et al., Bretton Woods, the internet, multilateral agreement to the primacy of diplomacy over war, etc. Coronavirus has thrown sand into the works and kicked a bunch of people a step or two back down Maslow's pyramid. We need to get organized to bring them back up, but we need to recognize how complicated the task is and not just be yelling at each other.