The Egyptian Priest of Rules

This is a continuation of a lecture in Theory on Monday, September 25, 2000, at CSUDH. Tina Juen, a CSUDH student had asked about religion: "Do we really need to go there, jeanne. Religion is so personal." Yes, I still think we must go there, because positivism, our belief that science could give us all the ultimate answers and truth, ignored the extent to which morality and love are a part of our humanity. We need to recapture that understanding.

In this essay, I want to share with you a New York Times Magazine article of February 4, 2001, Jeffrey Rosen's "In Lieu of Manners," and an excerpt from Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.

The New York Times Article is included in the series of essays on respect at "In Lieu of Manners. In that piece Jeffrey Rosen talks about the extent to which we have become legalistic even in our interpersonal relationships. He traces this back to one of Alexis de Tocqueville's warnings that laws designed to "eradicate special privileges and to prevent those in power from favoring some citizens over others, . . . would run the risk of creating despotism of a different sort, administered by lawyers and politicians who acted not like 'tyrants but rather schoolmasters.' . . . These rules might be so arcane, [de Tocqueville] feared that citizens would eventually stop trying to understand or resist them, and increasingly large aspects of social and political life would be overseen by the American lawyer, 'the lone interpreter of an occult science,' who would resemble an Egyptian priest."

I would like to point out here the extent to which "eradicating privilege" is caught up in the broader peacemaking issues of racism and genocide. For a theoretical perspective on the broader picture, I turn to Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust Alfred A. Knopf, 1996, especially the letter of Pastor Walter Hochstadter, admonishing the German's that they cannot embrace a Christian, non-criminal anitsemitism. Compare this to the impossibility of a Christian, non-criminal racism today:

"We live in an age which is raging throughout with mad ideas and demons, no less than the Middle Ages. Our allegedly "enlightened" age, instead of indulging in an orgy of crazed witch-hunting, feasts itself in an orgy of maniacal Jew-hatred. Today the Jew-hating madness, which had already raged frightfully in the Middle Ages, has entered upon its acute stage. This, the church, the community of Jesus Christ, must acknowledge. If she does not do it, then she will have failed, just as she had failed thn, furing the time of the witch-hunts. today, the blood of millions of sllaughtered Jews, of men, women, and children, cries to heaven. The Church is not permitted to be silent. She is not permitted to say that the settlement of the Jewish Problem is a matter for the state, the right to perform this function having been granted to it by Romans 13. The Church is also not permitted to say that in our time just punishment is being carried out upon the Jews for their sins . . . . There is no such thing as a moderate Christian antisemitism. Even when it is set forth seemingly convincingly by means of reasonable arguments (say, national ones) or even with scientific (read pseudo-scientific) arguments. The witch craze also was once scientifically justified by leading authorities of the theological, legal, and medical faculties. The battle against Jewry proceeds from the same muddy source from which the witch craze proceeded. Contemporary mankind has not overcome its proclivity to look for a 'scapegoat." Therefore it searches for all kinds of guilty parties---the Jews, the Freemasons and supra-state powers. This is the background of the hymns of hate of our time.

. . . Who gives us the right to lay the blame solely on the Jews? A Christian is forbidden to do this. A Christian is not allowed to be an antisemite, and he is not allowed to be a moderate antisemite. The objection that, without the [defensive] reaction of "moderate" antisemitism, the Jewification of the life of the Volk [Verjudung des Volkslebens] would become a horrible danger originates from an unbelieving and purely secular outlook, which Christians ought to overcome.

. . . The Church ought to live of love. Woe to her if she does not do that! Woe to her if by her silence and by all sorts of dubious excuses she becomes jointly guilty of the world's outbursts of hatred! Woe to her if she adopts words and slogans that originate in the sphere of hatred . . ."

At p. 431 ff., from Pastor Walter Hochstadter's letter.

Goldhagen's explanation for the churches' behavior in failing to oppose forcefully Nazi antisemitism brings us closer to an understanding of structural violence, forgiveness, and loving than we are wont to choose.

The Structural Violence of Rules (definition)

Structural violence is violence without specific intent to harm another. The violence emanates from the rigidity of categorization and rules which force humans to fit into limitations inappropriate to their skills and needs. Goldhagen suggests that the churches did not support the violence to Jews, for that would have been counter to their own tenets and beliefs. But they did agree that there was a "problem with the Jews," and wanted essentially to just "make the Jews, and the attendant problems" go away. Since they wished to have this "problem," which came down largely to disagreement over what was and was not "ultimate truth," and over the sharing of scarce resources, go away without any violence to those who consumed resources they wanted, they did not assume the guilt of what actually did happen to the Jews. They neither wanted nor condoned the horrific results. They wanted "a moderate Christian antisemitism." Here is Goldhagen's explanation:

"The churches welcomed the Nazis' ascendancy to power, for they were deeply conservative institutions which, like most other German conservative bodies and associations, expected the Nazis to deliver Germany from what they deemed to have been the spiritual and political mire that was the Weimar Republic, with its libertine culture, democratic "disorder," its powerful Socialist and Communist parties which preached atheism and which threatened to rob the churches of their power and influence. The churches expected that the Nazis would establish an authoritarian regime that would reclaim the wrongly dishonored virtues of unquestioning obedience and submission to authority, restore the cultivation of traditional moral values, and enforce adherence to them.
At p. 435: in Goldhagen.

In other words, even though there were disturbing issues with the Nazis, it seemed that perhaps their program for dealing with the "Jew problem" would mean that the nation would be a Christian one, under the authority of the churches, who could then reinforce "good" behavior. Alas, things are rarely so simple. But one can see how, superficially, those frustrated by "bad" behavior and limited resources might want to believe that there were such simple solutions.

Empowering Rigidity

Disempowering Forgiveness

Disempowering Humility

Discussion Questions

1. Look at the argument that Goldhagen uses to explain the churches' position with antisemitism:
   • The smothering and loss of virtues and values Loose morals, rebellion against traditional authority, flaunting of churches' rules seen as destroying power of church to impose "good". Assumption here that the churches KNEW the "truth" of what it was, the "good."
   • Elimination of Jews would result in Christianity as "the" religion.
   • The Christian church could then enforce virtue and morality and obedience to church rules. That is, if one thought that the mere existence of the Jews could have interfered in any way with the Christian church's enforcement of its own rules amongst its own believers.

   As you can see, this argument pretty much depends on the assumption that without Jews, Germans would be a peaceful, Christian, family virtues group, with none of the problems of violence, greed, dissension that plague the typical society. Pretty far-fetched assumption, isn't it?

   Now substitute for Jews: gangs, Blacks, Latinos, Koreans, Chinese, workers, students, whatever.

   Would Hochstadter's admonitions to the churches still apply?
   Would this help to explain that oppression is to be feared at any level of the hierarchy?

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