Prior to 1978 you can't even find the word 'diversity' in the vast output of recorded verbiage that the United States produces every year. The fox does not accept at face value diversity's praise from people who, whether naïve or venal, are always cross-culturally ignorant.
"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."
— Archilochus, 680 BC – ca. 645 BC
***
Several readers have asked that I clarify further the applications of the fox–hedgehog difference. A reader is inquiring why Shakespeare is the one and Nietzsche the other. I was going to answer that, but, luckily, Ogin, my fox companion (never call a fox "pet,") deigned to stay in this morning. "You fool," she says, "never go poaching in a field that a much bigger and – I hope this is thick enough for you — quicker and smarter animal practically owns." So, in deference to Sir Isaiah and to my furry friend, I shall pass. But other readers have asked why "Celebrate diversity" is like a hedgehog and “Live and let live” is like a fox. I have to honor the warranty on my own Berlin-derivative product.
Let's start with "Celebrate diversity." What is it? Where did it come from? Except in Sears ads, the Neiman Marcus catalogue, or trade papers of the breakfast cereal industry, prior to 1978 you can't even find the word 'diversity' in the vast output of recorded verbiage that the United States produces every year. Then, a guilt-pockmarked liberal non-sequitur is spun by Justice Lewis Powell as an assertion in the Bakke case, putting racial 'diversity' in an ameliorative link to 'university admissions.' A spore that nobody saw at the time, a few years later it would grow into a fungus of official racism that spread across the land under government protection in the country that once sacrificed 3% of its population in a war to end official racism.
What with immigrants from 150 countries streaming in by plane, boat, over and under the fence, soon enough some anonymous 'politruk' (look it up, it's worth it), probably in the education industry, coins a slogan: 'Celebrate Diversity.' And here we are, with the social fabric turned cheap linen from the stout canvas it used to be.
'Celebrate diversity' hangs on a single-thread, untested hypothesis by a utopian moron who assures you, "Trust me; it'll turn out for the best." Assuming that racial diversity, per se, merits celebration, is a mental fart of the enthusiastic ignoramus. Has he tested the proposition over diverse historical periods, with a mix of diverse races, before urging us to pop the corks and launch the confetti? Has he looked at what racial, ethnic, or religious diversity has done to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Congo, Czechoslovakia, France, Mexico, Netherlands, Nigeria, the Soviet Union, the Roman Empire, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Zimbabwe . . . well, there are many more, but you get the point. 'Celebrate diversity' is a classic hedgehog, begging for mugging by reality.
Now, is there a way to approach this the way a fox would? Ogin suggests that I try this for measure: 'Celebrate unity in diversity.' Still a slogan, but more nuanced, in that it links two contrapositives and implies, by inference from the empirical past of this nation, that a third, praiseworthy value will arise from that coupling.
Alas, it's lacking. The celebratory exhortation is obvious tinfoil passed off as a silver ducat. It is not recognized by reality. What you gonna do when the Somali cabbie has just noticed the wine bottle in your shopping bag; start singing Kumbaya, hoping that he will join you a cappella instead of coming to a screeching halt?
We can tweak it some more, to come up with E pluribus unum. So much better, isn't it? E pluribus unum appears to be a single-idea motto, and therefore a hedgehog. But thinking like a fox means being wary, not being close-minded. The fox perceives that in 1776, when the new nation adopted E pluribus unum as its motto, it was a prince of hedgehogs: three words that might as well have sprung from the divine providence that surely guided the entire endeavor.
Consider the ethnic and religious diversity in 1776 America. Not counting the blacks and the Indians (and they were not counted), it was not easy to create a unity of English Anglicans from Virginia, English Catholic recusants from Maryland, English Quakers from Pennsylvania, English Puritans from the coast, Ulster-Scots from the hills, Jacobite Scots from the mountains, Lutheran German tradesmen, Dutch Protestant businessmen, and the odd Swiss Calvinist theologian or Spanish-French-Jewish tailor or trader. Landed gentry, penniless 2nd sons of baronets, exiled colonels, artisans, farmers, indentured servants, religious zealots, plebes, runaways, and adventurers. E pluribus unum was a fitting, noble goal for a new people and a new federation of states that, before, used to consider themselves apart and not necessarily sharing a common destiny.
But is it still viable in 2007, after two decades of AIMDS and four decades of tectonic shifts in the demographic composition of these United States? Is there some hard-to-see common 1776 denominator in the above itemized demographic that's missing in 2007?
Ogin insists that I offer the caveat, without testing the reader's tolerance for further exegesis, that AIMDS is something I stapled of the words Autoimmune Multicultural Disease Syndrome. After all, what is not difficult to see is that we have been resolutely dissolving the cultural glue and dismantling the grids that bound all those disparate 18th, 19th and even mid-20th century Americans together. We are now made of hundreds more dissonant ingredients, some of them destabilizing and tearing the fabric from within, all with the misplaced blessing or malignant indifference of the ruling elites.
E pluribus unum has suffered such abuses since 1965 that it's a wobbly ghost of its former, splendid, prince hedgehog self. We are in a shifting bog now, with multiple paths, blind turns and sinkholes. These are vulpine times.
We have a hardly integrated - after 350 years perhaps by now unabsorbable — black minority mired in social dysfunction, antagonism and rejection of those in its elite who want to be one with the rest of us. We take in about 2.5 million immigrants per year, legal and illegal. We are on the threshold of 40 million legal immigrants and up to 20 million illegal ones from as many countries as the world map can take colored pushpins. We have millions of people who will read the last sentence as a racial slur: evidence of the eternal evil that lies in whitey's heart. We have a vast education industry that has taught these people to think this way. We have voting ballots in Tagalog and driving tests in Amharic, and welfare information brochures in Soomaali, and it takes twice as long now to listen to your bank's phone gatekeeper, because you have to go through the Spanish to get to the English.
Ah, the joys of Mexican grade school Spanish, the blessings of Spanglish! I am just a fleck of foreign flotsam flung onto these favored shores, but I have a fast friend whose family, on both sides, came on the Mayflower. He was a public school janitor, and a good one and happy at his job. He lost his job because he didn't speak Mexican. An illegal alien got his job. And now he is losing his small town, too, as nothing unites his kind and the alien boors and thugs who surround him and his wife and daughters.
A fox must look at all relative pronouncements from the White House, Congress, and Mainstream Mass Media with deep suspicion. All too often, having been enticed with official promises of the freshest tofu fried this morning in virgin safflower oil, she delivered her part of the bargain, but then found diced Boob Bait for Bubba in her bowl. Fool me twice, shame on me.
Now, she is pawing the ground where our elites have planted the hallelujah billboard for the Religion of Peace and for Muslim immigration. We have between 2 and 6 million Muslim immigrants, depending on whom you ask. Before 1970 there were hardly any. Many of them have seized the economic opportunities that America offers. But the nagging question that animates the fox's whiskers, and that the stilted solons who stitched the 1965 Immigration Act should have asked but didn't, is this:
In the 1350 years of Islam, with hundreds of relevant cases that one may call upon, there is no record of Muslims living in peace with members of any other religion, ever. The diversity politruks are fond of citing the "golden age" in Andalusia, but even this single alleged exception to the rule is a myth. It is one more dubious hypothesis, the Lewis Powell gambit, reworked into an assertion by the clueless elites shaping our collective destiny.
The fox wants to run the length and the width of this meadow, nose to the ground, before pronouncing it safe for frolics and celebrations. She will not accept at face value diversity's praise from people who, whether naïve or venal, are always cross-culturally ignorant. Likewise, she will bare her fangs at the smoothest-talking Trojan Horse deconstructing his own civilization brick-by-brick after having spent time at the feet of Noam Chomsky.
Asked about Andalusia, Ogin insists that I eschew White House press releases and the papers of academics bought with oil money. She suggests I read instead Hugh Fitzgerald, Bat Yeor, Andrew Bostom, and several others whom one has to seek out, because they are not welcome in the halls of power.
I do get some ideas on my own, without the help of a conceited fox. Recalling the international news of the last 12 months, I note that almost every single violent conflict in the world, from Thailand to France, from China to Somalia, from the Philippines to Holland, from Algeria to Londonistan, Kashmir to Copenhagen, involves and was started by, Muslims. And there is this.
Is America the lucky exception? Nobody knows, but history will tell. Muslim immigrants in America are a considerably more benign presence than their counterparts in Europe are. But in the future? After all, 2nd and 3rd generation middle class British Muslims flock to the madrassas of Pakistan and the IED workshops of the Fertile Crescent.
The fox insists that we never mistake the improbable for the impossible. A negative outcome may be improbable with respect to the continuous immigration to America of millions of Muslims from all over the world. But our leaders have been acting as though it's impossible, despite strong comparative longitudinal and vertical evidence to the contrary.
We have taken a gamble, perhaps a huge one, but our elites are crowing as though it's a slam-dunk. Is there any public debate going on as to why we have taken the gamble, what are the odds, and what is the payoff?
The fox has a plea: If you do not understand words like taqiyya, jihad, dhimmi, or Aztlan, please leave Immigration alone, Senator. If the link between Gavrilo Princip, ethnic diversity, and World War I is not clear to you, take a sabbatical. Go somewhere and read books, until you are able to understand that you are playing with social nitro here, not US Chamber of Commerce bonbons or Democratic Party popcorn. But first, build a wall and a moat and a wall, and shut down the whole racket, airtight, for the duration of your education.
And you, Madam Justice, if you have not read everything Charles Murray ever wrote about the links between IQ and educability, you have no business using American universities as a test for your malinformed theories of demographic engineering. Whether in absolute or relative numbers, America's international competitors graduate many times the number of engineers and scientists we do. Respectful of the reality of life, and of global competition, they don't cook their universities' admission process for the sake of racial lunacy. We can't compete in the global economy, Judge, with millions of Americans who should be high-earning precision lathe operators, but instead graduate with B.A.s in racial, gender, or class grievance studies to better shake down the rest of us. If you don't know all this, Judge, please retire to a quiet place where you can do no harm.
There is such a thing as too much of a good thing. America used to be bland porridge enhanced with a little salt and spice. But now, including 2nd generation nonabsorbables (e.g. 90,000 in Latino criminal gangs in Los Angeles alone), perhaps 30% of the porridge is spice. If we keep pouring the hot sauce in, soon the whole will be toxic curdle.
In this reality, “Live and let live” ("LALL") is the best one can do. But the fox can't leave LALL alone, or else the hara-kiri hedgehog crowd will highjack it, stuff it into a small box crafted by that famous fashion firm, Sharpton, Koz, Kucinich & Friends, and drop all of us in that box down the cliff, as always. Already, community bonds of trust have weakened; strange and alien customs proliferate across the land; a babble of languages, lifestyles, moral codes, cultural practices, even national allegiances, swirls about. From animal sacrifice to forced cousin marriage to forced clitorectomy to tribal gangs, this is the Tower of Babel. Only one wide common denominator remains: the dream of spending big gobs of money – earned or confiscated from those who earn, borrowed, or stolen.
One would do well to let others live their lives the way they deem fit, as long as it fits within the law. But the fox sees a post-9/11 reality in which Muslim jihadis and Aztec reconquistadores remain citizens of high standing, and our ruling elites fawn on CAIR, and MECHA. And the judicial and political games are being rigged day-by-day to work on behalf of the centrifugal groups. The expression "fits within the law" increasingly depicts a game of croquet with the Queen and Alice, and scurrying hedgehogs for balls, twisting flamingos for mallets, and Michael Moore for referee.
So the fox must run "Live and Let Live" through her fox filter, before pronouncing it safe for our times. The fox filter is always to be deployed when survival is at stake, personal or national.
Speaking foreign languages is great. But not at work, unless you are a CIA counterintelligence operative; and not loudly in public, unless you are a Telemundo live soccer commentator screaming Goooooolllllll!!! into the hot mike.
Learning foreign languages is most important, and should be encouraged. But teaching K-12 subjects to the Third World-born in their native languages at great public cost is a demented hedgehog who should be rocking on his heels in a closed ward instead of posing as the messiah of education.
Bestowing on immigrants the privilege of voting is a noble endeavor, but not in 23 languages. How can people be allowed to vote who don't know the language of the land, therefore its issues? They can vote only per directions from the smarmiest paisano demagogues who steer them in their native languages to such candidates for office as will procure the greatest piles of goodies looted from the American taxpayer's pocketbook. That's not what voting or "Live and Let Live" should be. Besides, asks the fox, why are there citizens who don't read English, when an English proficiency test is part of the citizenship process?
What consenting adults do in the bedroom is nobody else's business. That's a sensible LALL. But raising a new generation of children on gay-skewed textbooks taught by NAMBLA teachers fond of Roger Mapplethorpe bullwhips with Billy's two married moms behind a phalanx of ACLU lawyers is not a good recipe for the survival of a vital people.
Much else that's turning the daily lives of Americans into a bizarre and jarring circus can be subjected to the same fox scrutiny. Judging and repulsing everything that's different is death by stagnation and gangrene. But judging and repulsing nothing is death by toxin and decomposition. And such must be the ultimate fate of the polity that follows the sappy, single-value "nonjudgmental" way in which the modern liberal practices "Live and Let Live."
LALL is fox-friendly. It is so wide that you can read it, among others, the Marquis de Sade way, the John Paul II way, and the Taoist Zen master way. Complete nihilism, Rabbi Hillel, Jesus or Ikkyū, though there is no Muhammad way to read it, our fools' attempts notwithstanding. Why settle for the narrow and postmodern deconstructive interpretation, when it leads to self-extinction?
The fox can navigate this thicket because, unlike the know-one-thing hedgehog, she approaches a target from three, five or eight directions at once. She knows North with her stomach, which is the seat of the vital life energy the Chinese call chi and the Japanese ki. "The proposition nation," Ogin sums up for the day, "will end up like the proposition woman: used by many, loved by none." She sits here, mocking me gently, for it has taken me long hours and a length of words to write down what's written into her DNA in her sleep.
taksei@gol.com
Read more articles by Takuan Seiyo
Great article. The reference to ESL is particularly interesting because it is the great job creator in the mis-education kingdom. Never mind that it is a failure it sounds good and caring. That same mis-education kingdom have no understanding that not all students are created equal rather some are more equal than others (sorry George Orwell) because they actually have an IQ high enough to provide them with the ability to read and write.
We appear to be intent on cultural if not actual suicide and one of the major root causes is an education system focused in trivia like women's studies and other college majors that lead to NCO (no civilian occupation). God (oops a word that is not PC) forbid that anyone should have to take math or science or that a student be told that they have a great future as a plumber. I remember teaching an economics class where students were moaning about the rate charged by skilled tradesmen…I then queried the class (adults all in a 300 level economics class) how many were suggesting to their children that they learn a skilled trade? Response, no surprise = 0.
The hedgehog barbeque is about to begin and it brings all of us down.
Comment by Mickey G | May 9, 2007
"There are countries where hyping race and ethnicity has led to slaughters in the streets, but you cannot name a country where it has led to greater harmony." - Thomas Sowell
Comment by sedonaman | May 9, 2007
The subtlety of fox or hedgehog reasoning is beyond me, but this author’s ideas and examples should resonate with many conservatives. Perhaps a better metaphorical tool than foxes would have been a social science version of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Under this metaphor, the ideas born in the Enlightenment several centuries ago have run their course and forced our society into a state of entropy. Intelligent order is breaking down in predictable ways.
Employing a different metaphor, “diversity”, as currently understood and used in social dynamics, may be merely a symptom of an underlying intellectual disease that was spawned well before the American revolution and has attacked various organs of the body public in turn, leaving the patient in a weakened state and near death. The patient refuses to acknowledge his body’s deterioration in various areas and stubbornly clings to the hope the disease is actually the cure for problems that ailed him in the past. Ironically, the patient, in this case, believes he is actually improving and, in fact, “never felt better in my life.”
In this author’s examples, I saw my home town of Detroit as a microcosm of diversity politics as practiced in America and, viewed dispassionately from my present home in Northern California, it mimicked and often led the country’s development of “victimhood” politics.
Today, Detroit is finally acknowledging the catastrophic loss of their great automotive based economy to the Japanese. And, predictably, the cure is to keep doing the same things and hoping the outcome will be different next time. Detroiters have been and currently are in denial that diversity is a prime cause of their present problems and refuse to admit their problems were mostly self-inflicted.
Historically, Detroit is a city and geographical region of immigrants. Early Protestant settlers, originally from the East Coast regions, gradually left their small Michigan farms for higher paying manufacturing jobs in the city. Starting around 1900, immigrants from Eastern and Northern Europe poured in and continued to come for several more decades. Many of these immigrants were Catholic which contributed to the political problems that surfaced later. Black American sharecroppers and day laborers migrated up from the Deep South for jobs in the defense industry during WWII. Tall, lanky hillbillies drifted in from Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia looking for a semi-rural life in the outlying Detroit suburbs and jobs in the auto plants. The ‘50s and ‘60s saw Detroit as the true melting pot society that liberals find so glorious and a living legacy of the Enlightenment vision of the ideal society.
But the late ‘60s saw Detroit coming apart under the weight of diversity – in July 1967 a devastating race riot hit the city with over 40 deaths, the highest death count in any of the urban riots of that era. Diversity politics was the response to the social tensions spawned by diversity. Victimhood was conferred on some Detroiters based on race, but also based on class envy.
Not only did Blacks resent whites, the hourly union workforce resented the salaried management group. The Catholic descendents of the European immigrants, led by a clergy that embraced the political goals of the Democrats, offered the Enlightenment ideas of brotherhood and economic equality as the only conceivable solution to social tensions. As with all liberal Enlightenment proposals, the Catholics meant well and sincerely believed they were acting in accordance with the tenets of their faith as actualized in their political worldview.
And the fault was not solely with Catholics, many Detroit Protestants and Jews also embraced liberal concepts of victimhood, but Catholics formed a major political group in metro Detroit at that time and had a commanding voice in the ensuing political solutions. The politics of victimhood spawned increased resentment among the various ethnic and racial groups and the war was fought out in the auto factories among other venues.
Historically, the automotive plants had paid high wages and an unskilled, automotive worker in the ‘60s had an hourly wage three times the national average. But the work performed didn’t justify the hourly wage and many of the workers possessed little education and had difficulty passing a simple IQ test administered by the auto manufacturers. The Big 3 used these simple tests copied from the U.S. Army to weed out the hopelessly stupid among prospective employees – they never expected or wanted a highly educated workforce. The assembly line work was mindless, repetitive, exhaustive labor in noisy, depressing factories and deeply resented by the workers, but the hourly wage was too high to pass up and unreasonable resentment smoldered throughout the various plants and warehouses. The front line management employees in their white shirts and the highly paid senior managers in their company furnished limousines were the visible targets of this resentment.
The unions took advantage of this resentment to press contract demands without any concern for the health of the business or the long term effect on the industry. One of the Big 3 automakers would be targeted for a crippling nationwide strike and then the same contract terms offered to the other automakers to avoid strikes at their plants. Senior managers in the Big 3 gave in to the demands too often with a self-serving view to quarterly earnings rather than strategic goals.
In the ‘60s, these problems came together in a perfect storm and the atmosphere in the factories resembled that of today’s prisons. Factions formed among the workers divided along racial and ethnic lines. Drug and alcohol use was common, absenteeism even more common and the work ethic was a joke – the union protected your job and you did as little as possible. The pressure was on line foremen for hourly production quotas and sub-standard parts were often passed on for use in final assembly. Some workers even sabotaged the cars in various ways as an outlet for the constant, seething anger. The quality of Detroit built cars deteriorated noticeably and with increasing speed.
Rather than bringing the workers, the unions and management together in mutual self-interest, diversity politics drove the wedge deeper still. Detroit is a Democrat’s town and the Detroit Free Press is the Democrat’s mouthpiece. The constant political message was “unfairness”, “racism” “economic inequality” etc., etc.. When the poor quality cars turned out by Detroit created a furious backlash among American consumers, there was nothing that could be done – the political wedge that separated Detroiters was driven too deep to reverse.
While this was happening the Japanese car makers were coming into their own. Apologists claim that gas prices and emission standards killed American cars, but the truth is that abysmally poor quality was the primary reason. The Japanese didn’t enjoy diversity in their domestic workforce and contrary to “diversity ideology” this proved a unique advantage over their American rivals. Their workers formed natural, cooperative teams, actually cared about their jobs and their employer’s welfare, and were educated at least enough to add considerable value to improvements in manufacturing techniques. The superior quality of their cars was obvious by the mid ‘70s, although the range of their product line was not attracting Americans as it does now.
Today, the Japanese have completely conquered the Americans; they own the sedan market, the mini-van market, the compact market, the luxury market and have made serious inroads on the SUV market. Light trucks will be their next victory. What’s left for the Big 3 automakers and Detroit (and Flint, Midland, Saginaw and Toledo)? Even the fantastic loyalty Detroiters once had for their domestic cars has evaporated and Japanese and German cars sell very well in Detroit. Whatever the Japanese leave untouched the Koreans are targeting and the Chinese will be entering the market within a few years with their own offerings.
Detroit claims it has learned its lesson and quality is improving, but not fast enough. Only deep discounts sells American cars, but K-Mart pricing isn’t much help to long term growth or market recapture. Once the Big 3 go down for the final count, the Japanese will be free to raise prices to recoup competitive losses.
For Detroiters, the loss of the automotive industry has meant the loss of other industries as well. Taxes are high and the costs and restrictions on business make southeastern Michigan unattractive; non-automotive factories are closing as well and jobs are fast disappearing. What have Detroiters learned from this politically? Nothing of value – the Democrats are as entrenched as ever and new welfare schemes are being proposed. Did diversity and its related politics live up to its early promises and bring the good life to all Detroiters? Well, you can get a great price on a used RV in Detroit and you can bet someone’s vacation home on a beautiful Michigan lake is going for a song. At least the unemployed are now a diverse group.
Detroit has the largest Muslim population in the United States, mostly in the border suburb of Dearborn, but this disaster can’t be blamed on the Muslims – the inheritors of the great Enlightenment ideals, the Catholics, Protestants and Jews didn’t need or want their help in killing the golden goose.
Comment by Pat Skurka | May 11, 2007
Pat Skurka:
As a former government supervisor, I cannot tell you how many times I was forced to endure the line, "Diversity is the source of our wealth."
Comment by sedonaman | May 11, 2007
Thank you all for the insightful comments. Sedonaman's observations struck a chord, because I am struggling with the same issues in my daily life. For instance, whereas Sedonaman has escaped from the social dysfunction of Detroit to Northern California, I have left Northern California (about which I've written elsewhere) after 30 years of living there, because I could no longer bear that the ideas destroying Detroit were emanating from my town and neighborhood.
As to foxes, bear with me for a while. I am not dealing with zoology here, but with Zen. Western intelligent order is breaking down not because of some fault in our reasoning, but because of the disruption and suspension of our personal and collective survival instincts that, in turn, has given rise to the self-destructive reasoning. The fox is a metaphor for the path of instinctive wisdom, free from the mind pollution that washes over us from practically all contemporary Western societal institutions.
We are operating in a universe of binary values, e.g. Racism or NoRacism, Privilege or Equality. We have decided that NoRacism and Equality are the good values, and are doing everything to tear down and suppress their converses. But reality is not binary. It works by fuzzy logic – which predictably, the Japanese have bought, in the realm of engineering, from its American inventor after he found no buyers here. The fox will bring some fuzzy logic into the issues we ponder here.
Indeed, our mainstream religious denominations have failed us in coping with social reality, but it's complicated and space does not permit here. For a great example, google Brussels + churches + Muslim asylum and find out how Catholic churches in the capital of Belgium (and the EU) have turned themselves into sanctuary zones for illegal Muslim immigrants, some of them open jihadis. These church-dwelling Muslims turn parts of the churches into mosques, and make no bones about converting the whole thing —by which I mean Belgium - into a dominion of mosques as soon as they can. Still, the viral Catholic dhimmis persist in their delusions. Another relevant topic here is Liberlism-as-religion, which is what it is for most American Jews.
We can learn a lot from the Japanese and the Chinese, not only about how to make good quality products but also how not to destroy ourselves with binary notions. To this end, I intend to keep the fox busy for quite a while.
Comment by Takuan Seiyo | May 11, 2007
Takuan Seiyo:
I enjoyed your explanation of intuitive reasoning, fuzzy logic and how the fox sees reality – I think I see (somewhat dimly on my part) where your thoughts are leading and believe we, in the West, need to better understand these concepts.
Most Westerners have little knowledge or understanding of Zen, we’re products of the Enlightenment and the great Judeo-Christian belief in the continuous upward progress of modern civilization. For my part, I support the thoughts and writings of an Australian philosopher, the late David Stove. Stove was a critic and satirist of the Enlightenment and its legacy – he saw the problem as a lack of metes and bounds on the ideas. In other words, the ideas of the Enlightenment provided no inherent method for setting limits on how far society should carry the concepts into reality or how seriously to take the ideas. In the end, the ideas become more real than reality itself.
As each succeeding generation was taught the ideals and concepts born from the Enlightenment, the intellectuals created a fantasy world where the ideas always worked and worked well – if a little was good, then more was even better. For an example of this, our criminal justice concept that a person is innocent until proven guilty was a reaction to a previous era where the courts operated in an arbitrary fashion; wealth and position could determine guilt or innocence. Religion, ethnic origins and race could point to guilt without regard to facts or evidence.
Assumed innocence was a very understandable reaction to past abuses, but the idea was just that, an idea. Often, the individuals charged with crimes were in fact guilty and at other times were, in fact, innocent. The concept of always innocent until proven guilty was an abstraction that grew into a foundational principle and was joined with the concept that all citizens regardless of race, ethnic origin or religion should be treated equally before the law. Over the ensuing centuries, each generation learned the ideas and foundational principles and tried to improve on them.
Today, these over-developed foundational principles and ideas create absurd situations where the innocent remain always innocent despite obvious evidence of guilt. The courts once again operate in an arbitrary fashion which takes no notice of common sense or the concept of protecting society from individuals determined to commit crimes. Allegiance to the concept overrides all other considerations.
We have learned that the law isn’t intended only to protect society from criminals; it’s also intended to protect us from ourselves. Therefore, for example, we’ve abandoned torture to induce confessions, the police can’t execute a child molester on the spot and the courts can no longer meet out harsh sentences like lopping off a thief’s arm. We try very hard not to become as hard and ruthless as the worst criminals we send to prisons.
But, where do we draw the lines between fairness and absurdity? The foundational principles of the Enlightenment provide no advice, no limits on how far we carry the idea. Do we put ourselves in physical danger to prove our loyalty to and love for an abstraction? Do we ignore common sense to free an individual whom we know preys on the most vulnerable and innocent among us – and for the trivial reason that the criminal’s confession was thrown out due to a technical irregularity?
As you said, with us it’s always binary or linear logic. It’s either Justice or Injustice for example, without a means or even a desire to see all the various shades of gray. Perhaps Zen (which I don’t understand) is saying we can never develop such abilities; we’ll never logically determine how to protect ourselves from those who love intellectual abstractions for their own sake and value them above the welfare of others. Perhaps Zen says it’s absurd to try or think we can ever know anything with absolute certainty.
Comment by Pat Skurka | May 14, 2007