That great product of the Enlightenment, Georg Wilhelm Hegel, first noticed the difference between
being and
becoming.
Being is a state that exists in primordial forms of nature, and through its antithesis
nothing, evolves into
becoming. Philosophers prior to Hegel - from Aristotle to Kant - had ascribed a static quality to being - what is, is. Hegel allowed us to understand that what is, develops into a higher order of existence.
If you wanted to be really generous to George W. Bush, you could describe him as an Aristotelian, though he probably deserves this attribute without any intellectual effort on his own behalf. Aristotle defined being as equal to being - in his philosophy, development was a separate concept that was not integral to being.
George Bush has defined a single human embryo as a human being - it exists in the same dimension as all other human beings, with all their inherent rights (but apparently with no responsibilities). It has no chance for development because it already exists, fully developed, at least in all the moral dimensions that characterize adult humans.
There is no room in this philosophy for Hegel's advancements, if indeed Bush or his supporters would consider anything out of the Enlightenment as an advancement. There is no thought that a human embryo at the cellular level, visible only microscopically, might be something that is becoming a human being. Bush cannot allow the grayness that is often the result of Enlightenment thinking, with its emphasis on reason rather than doctrinaire certitude as an answer to life's problems.
The fight against the Enlightenment being waged by the Bush administration is well documented, and can be traced to a number of specific religious documents that fundamentalist, evangelical, and Pentecostal religions in the U.S. have issued in recent years against "secular humanism". This fight is being most prominently waged against science, which is the bedrock of U.S. industrial and economic strength. The religious right somehow expects it can denigrate and ridicule science yet enjoy the material benefits of its advances. The stem cell debate is a perfect example of the collision between religious dogma and scientific advancement. The religious right, and the Bush administration would rather have doctrinaire purity, based on tortured moral arguments, than the benefits stem cell research would provide to actual human beings.
The Enlightenment is not only the foundation of existing U.S. scientific, technological and material progress, it is the intellectual core of its Constitution. It should be no surprise, then, that the Bush administration is aggressively attacking Constitutional fundamentals, such as the principle of checks and balances, especially when they come into conflict with executive power.
How did a major political party in the U.S. come to abandon the Enlightenment? Is this strictly a U.S. phenomenon?
I would posit that a significant influence on this attack on the Enlightenment was Adolf Hitler. Hitler's philosophy of Aryan racial supremacy, dolled up in scientific guises, led ultimately to the Holocaust. The Holocaust is the transcendental political, philosophical, and moral tragedy of the 20th century. The industrialized mass extermination of millions of humans, foremost among them the Jews, is beyond rational comprehension, and constitutes an evil that no Enlightenment philosopher could have anticipated.
How do you prevent such evil? How do you fulfill the Jewish promise of "Never again"? Vigilance against anti-Semitism seems one approach, but for those institutions which were caught insufficiently prepared to oppose Hitler and the Nazis, vigilance must be combined with aggressive response to the slightest outbreak of such virulence.
The Republican Party in World War II was caught flat-footed by Hitler. The party had been the proponents of isolationism prior to the war, and stood by offering quiet support to Roosevelt and the Democrats when it came time to fighting Hitler. To compensate for this failure, the Republicans became the party of excessive patriotism and eager use of military power to ward off actual or perceived aggressors. The war was barely over before the Republicans began accusing Roosevelt of betraying the Eastern Europeans in the Yalta accords, and they began looking for traitors in the White House who helped perpetrate this "disaster".
In attempting to appear tougher than the Democrats on national defense, the Republicans soon found a political opportunity in uncovering devious internal plots to undermine U.S. security. Alger Hiss became the poster boy for a series of traitors unearthed by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, and soon questions were being asked about "Who lost China"? Fifty long years of seeking out domestic enemies have brought the Republican Party to its current state, where Democrats, liberals, and millions of other Americans are accused of treason for daring to oppose Bush's war in Iraq.
Rational discussion cannot be undertaken with traitors; they must be bashed over the head with baseball bats, as Ann Coulter recommends. There is no room for debate or compromise with traitors; bipartisanship is only a form of date rape, in Grover Norquist's words. The Republican world - and this is not just Bush's world - is one of black and white only. There is only good and evil, right and wrong, "for us or against us."
In purging themselves of isolation and vacillation in the face of foreign threats, the Republicans have gone to an opposite extreme, wherein they become in their own right a threat to America's traditions of political compromise and constitutional safeguards of individual liberty.
Where does the stem cell research debate fit into this construct? In this area, as with abortion politics, the Republicans have borrowed heavily from yet another institution on the wrong side of the fight against Hitler - the Catholic Church. For all of its professed quiet, behind-the-scenes efforts to save the Jews, the Catholic Church stands condemned for its acquiescence to Hitler's pogroms. The German church, essentially a Bavarian institution, was filled with priests who publicly endorsed Nazism. More damningly, the Church's long history of anti-Semitism, erupting directly from the gospel of St. Matthew, was one of the principal cultural bases from which Nazism could flourish.
How was the Church to rectify these failings and regain moral authority after World War II? The answer was to move to an extreme position on the moral sanctity of human life. The Church desired to be more pure and holy on this issue than had ever been the case. No human life was to be devalued in any way - for racial reasons in particular. No sick or elderly individual was to be sacrificed to expediency through euthanasia, a practice used by the Nazis in the most base form of moral perversion.
Pope Paul VI, in his encyclical Humanae Vitae, promulgated the doctrine that no form of contraception could be used to interfere with the creation of human life. From this position came the doctrine that abortion in any form was to be forbidden, since human life was deemed to begin at conception. This doctrine naturally lead to opposition to in-vitro fertilization and stem cell research.
Catholic doctrine on these issues has had profound global resonance and has proven to be especially congenial to fundamentalist Protestant sects in the U.S. seeking to reverse the ungodly march of secular humanism. The religious right in the U.S. has adopted entirely the arguments of the Catholic Church on these matters, and this synchronization of theology has found its way to the White House, dependent as it is on the religious right vote.
Hence we have come full circle: a Republican Party already anxious to overcome its failure to confront Nazism, finds itself in congruence with a religious movement that adopts the sanctity of human life in any form whatever as its atonement for centuries of anti-Semitism.
Which leaves us with the Jews themselves, suffering from what might be described as a severe case of Hitler's Revenge. What Jew could not have sublimated the following lessons from the Holocaust: a) whatever progress against anti-Semitism may appear to exist, in the end anti-Semitism will never be eradicated from the world; b) all the surface adornments of civilization, such as laws and personal liberties enshrined in Enlightenment documents such as the U.S. Constitution, are meaningless in the face of anti-Semitic behaviors; c) no one will come to the defense of the Jews when they are subject to oppression or even genocide; d) the Jews must therefore depend only on themselves for their survival; e) the State of Israel is a refuge for Jews because it is a Jewish state, not simply a nation state; and f) in the face of even the slightest irruption of anti-Semitism, Jews and the State of Israel must respond quickly, overwhelmingly, and lethally if necessary.
And this is even more to the point: any non-Jew, if they put themselves in the place of a Jew or in the stewardship role of the State of Israel, must concede the righteousness of Jewish thinking and psychology which has resulted from the Holocaust. This rationale is especially prevalent in the U.S. and Europe, since it was in the West that anti-Semitism arose and flourished. The West has allowed every manner of humiliation and oppression to be inflicted on the Palestinians by the Israelis, because in an inchoate manner the West understands fully the Israeli psychology resulting from the Holocaust. These concessions to Israel occur even when Israel's actions have no rational basis whatever.
That Israel's reaction to the Hezbollah and Hamas provocations is not rational should be evident. Bombing military and economic targets in Lebanon is not likely to enhance the government of Lebanon's ability to rein in Hezbollah, since Israel itself was unable to accomplish this during more than 20 years of occupation of southern Lebanon. Despite the West's best efforts to find rational explanations for Israel's behavior, such as a desire to set Lebanese Christians and Sunni Muslims against the Shiites to destroy Hezbollah's influence, the fact is that Israel's behavior is entirely emotional and stems from deep, underlying psychological premises of how the world works, premises taught them from the bitter lessons of the Holocaust.
On the same day that Israel has killed scores of Lebanese civilians from the south up to the Bekaa Valley, George Bush has signed his first-ever veto. These are not at all unrelated events. They have a commonality that runs back sixty years to one of mankind's greatest, most unspeakable horrors - the Holocaust.
This is a horror that will take centuries for mankind to digest and comprehend. Until then, we seem condemned to live out its consequences, all of them the result of feeble institutional or national attempts to compensate for incomprehensible evil.