America's Unholy Ghosts - Joel Edward Goza
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) Most people know the quote “the life of man is nasty, brutish and short.” This is from Leviathan where he takes such a dark view of human beings and the chaos they generate that he argues for a totalitarian tyranny to keep us from endless war. One of the instruments this tyrant finds useful is religion - “that feare of things invisible.” Goza also says that Hobbes, an Enlightenment thinker, turned to reason as the way forward, for individuals to basically handle ordering society like one would solve a geometry problem. However, like religion before, this new religion of reason falls into the same trap of having these flights of reason with a mind trapped looking into the mirror … looking at the rich white man staring back, probably wearing a powdered wig. “White wealthy elites started to embody the ‘is-ness’ of rational humanity.’ Truly and tragically, there was “monstrous savagery that the aristocratic style masked.”
The other problem is that this turn to make everything mathematical rationality creates what Goza calls a reduction of “economics to a moral-free math. He then quotes from Between the World And Me by Ta-nehisi Coates, the book is addressed to his son, “You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.” Hobbes also begins writing the rulebook for slavery stating that “The master of the servant, is master of all he hath [the servant] and may exact the use [whether] his goods, labour, and his children… the master, if he [servant] refuse, [can] kill him or cast him into bonds…”
Goza also explains that it is with Hobbes you start to see the reduced religion, religion as a tool, religion as a formula for control. Hobbes writes “All that is NECESSARY to Salvation is contained in two Vertues, Faith in Christ, and Obedience to Laws.” Goza comments “Hobbe’s formula was nothing less than prophetic for an American Christianity that eventually trimmed Scripture’s vision of salvation down to John 3:16 (‘that anyone who believes in him shalt be saved’) and Christian political responsibility down to Romans 13 (‘Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities’).
Hobbe's also lays out how the tyrant (remember a tyrant is the best leader because the people, the Leviathan, are so in need of control) can keep power by using the tool of fear. “Anxiety produces the need for security, and the need for security inspires the embrace of tyranny.”
John Locke (1632-1704) lays the groundwork for Jefferson's Declaration of Independenc. He writes: “Society of men [exists] only for the procuring, preserving, and advancing of their own civil interests … life, liberty … and the possession of outward things, such as money, lands, houses.” He continues theorizing that “not only is property why we begin society, but ‘the chief end of civil society … is the preservation of property.” So you see, Locke removes himself from Hobbes dark need for a tyrant an replaces it with many little tyrants, the wealthy and aristocrats who primarily need government for protection of their stuff. Goza comments that what the aristocratic want is “a Leviathan to serve them … a small government with a big military.”
Goza also argues that Locke “sells his system through the rhetoric of equality … requiring making the aristocracy look like meritocracy.” Goza talks briefly about inheritance and the way that “wealth becomes more removed from labor with each and every passing generation.” I like to say that in our system capital follows capital. Of course there is prudence and wise bets, etc. but in general, if you want to have lots of money and rapidly increase it, best to start with lots of money in our system. Being a hard-working chef in the back will never catch up with the restaurant owner who likes to bring his friends around all hours of the day.
Goza says it goes further than observation, because remember this is a sell, got to make one thing look like another so we will all keep buying it. “Despite the veneer of the Protestant work ethic, Locke’s scheme places labor and wealth on disparate train tracks … the rich create a rhetoric that demonizes the entitlement of the poor without realizing the irony that it is not the poor that are haunted by issues of entitlement but the wealthy.”
The other things Goza points out is that Locke set the stage for reducing Christianity and the Bible to formulas. We saw that in Hobbes, but Locke takes it further. Remember Jefferson’s chopped up New Testament? This is the precursor. He writes a treatise called The Reasonableness of Christianity and another A Letter Concerning Toleration where he says “The only business of the Church is the salvation of souls; and it no way concerns the commonwealth, or any member of it.” Yep, here is separation of church and state, laid out for Jefferson and others to enshrine in their own thoughts and letters.
Goza doesn’t get into the discussion around pluralism and the good arguments for separation of church and state because he is after what Locke and his followers are doing to Chrisitanity. He says in this move, Locke is trading the prophetic tradition or what the epistle James says is “true religion”, that is “visit the orphan and widow in their affliction” for “its opposite--sentimentality.” Goza has a chart on Prophetic vs. Modern religion. Prophetic has true religion meeting government at property but judging and even acting against the government or in spite of the government to help defend the afflicted. Modern religion has true religion equals things of heaven, property is not a meeting point, but a dividing line and below is the government which is for “the preservation of property.”
Lockes trick, according to Goza, is to convince people that the bible is a-political before it is investigated, to “train Christians not to see the political ramifications of Scripture.” And its perfect, because stripping it down to piety and purity it “harmonizes with the moral calculus of the aristocratic elite. No room for social justices left.”
And then there was slavery. Locke also wrote about slavery. So if you orient your entire philosophy around property, then who do you think goes to the bottom of your list? Women, yes. Children, well depends on if they had wealthy parents, if they did, then they would one day be wealthy and so would need all kind of soft things and freedom and education. But, poor kids? “Children of the poor above ‘the age of three’ were to be gathered into workhouses and, like their parents, they were to be ‘soundly whipped’ if their enthusiasm for work failed to meet the expectations of the overseers. ‘By this means the mother will be eased of a great part of her trouble in looking after and providing for them a home, and so be at the more liberty to work.”
And even beneath this treatment was that of slaves. "Slaves, who being captives taken in a just war [see how he throws justice into his argument for slavery?], are by the right of nature subjected to the absolute domination and arbitrary power of their masters. … These men having, as I say, forfeited their lives, and with it their liberties, and lost their estates; and being in the state of slavery, not capable of any property, cannot in that state be considered as any part of civil society; the chief end whereof is the preservation of property.” Then he even has the audacity to write “having by his own fault [referring to the slaves] forfeited his own life, by some act that deserves death; he [the master] may delay to take it, and make use of him to his own service, and does him no injury by it.”
Adam Smith (1723-1790) is famous as the “Father of Capitalism” but in his time he was a philosopher, specifically a moral philosopher. His two most famous writings were The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments. His chapter and thought is interesting because he offers severe critique to Hobbes and Locke as well as our current popular view of capitalism.
According to Goza, Adam Smith ”believed that the philosophical fantasies of Hobbes and Locke threatened to bring back the dark ages by recreating the broken political and economic systems that worked for the wealthiest folk and stuck it to the rest of us.” Smith saw his Wealth of Nations as a “very violent attack … upon the whole commercial system.” (this is quoted from one of Smith’s letters). Smith disagreed with building society around self-interest (Hobbes) or property (Locke) but “bound together by the agreeable bands of love and affection.”
Against Locke’s view directly, from Wealth of Nations “Civil government so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.” And in another place “All for ourselves and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.”
Smith divides working society up into the landowners who live by rent, the laborers who live by wages and the makers/employers who live by profit. The latter can be shorthanded with Merchant Class. Smith warns to watch out for them .. “The proposal of any new law … which comes from this order ought always to be listened to with great precaution… It comes from an order of men … who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.”
Adam Smith also taught against slavery. Goza summarizes his argument “In a slave society, rather than wealth promoting industry, wealth leads to the purchase of more slaves. As slavery expands, slaves begin displacing the working poor throughout the economy. If slavery is first and foremost a war against slaves, it is secondarily an act of war against the working poor …”
Goza concludes the book by explaining that to have proper perspective of Martin Luther King, Jr. we really need to see him alongside Einstein and Copernicus, people who lead us in a complete paradigm shift. He quotes King: “Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion awaiting burial.”
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