Saman Mohammadi
The Excavator
September 20, 2011
"Recovery is a re-gaining---regaining of a clear view." - J. R. R. TolkienIn a previous article I referred to a new Enlightenment in the West, and the end of a dark age of propaganda and misinformation about global politics. My thoughts about this huge shift in American and Western culture are very loose and I don't have a firm opinion about the change that we are going through during this period in history. I don't like planting flags and defending inflexible positions. I like planting seeds in the mind. I'm interested in dialogue and learning. So I was happy that my article was criticized by the staff writers at the website, "The Daily Bell," who have written on the general theme of cultural rebirth and a new renaissance on numerous occasions, and from a more informative position than I have.
In their article called, "Is It a New Enlightenment Yet?," they ask that I should "reconsider," my, "use of 'Enlightenment' to describe what is going on today." Instead, I should use the labels, "Reformation" or "Renaissance."
I like this disagreement over words and language because it is a reminder to me that I should always keep in mind the fact that words bring up powerful emotions and can stir confusion very easily. One of my beliefs is that most of our problems, whether about public denial about 9/11 truth or the global economic crisis, arise from a failure of communication. The writer Stuart Chase taught me this truth.
Culture is filled with a great deal of misunderstanding and poisoned by the misuse of labels. We don't have to look to the past to find examples because there are so many examples to point to in the current age. 9/11 truth tellers are misunderstood as crazy and mislabeled as conspiracy theorists. And so are all kinds of people who go against the current. Dave Chappelle said in his interview on the The Actors Studio that it is dismissive to call someone crazy, and that is wisdom that all of us have to learn.
Labels are very dangerous things that have the power to obstruct thought, deform human beings and create needless divisions in society. One of my new favorite lines is, "God save us from labels," by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Imagine how freer our culture and our countries would be if labels like "conspiracy theorist" didn't exist. But using labels to marginalize critics is nothing new. If there wasn't an art of rhetoric there would be no art of war.
I mindlessly use labels and ideas sometimes, like when I referred to a Second Enlightenment, as you have too most likely. Since there is a history behind every label and idea, it is good to begin there - at the base, not on the roof. That's why it is so important to know your history. It gives you grounding.
Over the past few weeks I've been reading a lot of books about the origins of the Renaissance, and one of the illuminating passages that I've come across is by James Bruce Ross and Mary Martin McLaughlin, who write in their introduction to "The Portable Renaissance Reader":
"Even among those who have studied them more objectively, the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries have provoked sharp disagreement. Some have sought in their complexity a unified meaning, or a common mainspring that set in motion the processes of change in every area. To others, these changes seem to have produced only diversity, a melange of movements and a galaxy of "divided and distinguished worlds." Testifying to the efforts of many explorers to mark trails through the forest of these centuries with conveniently labeled signposts are the three familiar abstractions, Renaissance, Reformation, and Counter Reformation. But even these labels are disputable; a good many people, for example, prefer "Protestant Revolt" to "Reformation," and others reject both the name and the idea of a "Renaissance." The signposts themselves have sometimes loomed so large that they have obscured the lines of connection between religious and cultural movements, which were not only contemporaneous but closely related. And they have often obstructed a wider view of this age, a view that would embrace the plains and foothills as well as the peaks of its landscape.I don't know if what the West is going through right now can be called a rebirth. All I know is that a birth is coming because an era has died. It is probably a new birth and not a rebirth. But is that a good thing?
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Long regarded as a cultural movement--the revival of arts, letters, and learning that they described--the Renaissance is, as a historical period, the creation of nineteenth-century historians. In its classic portrayal, Jacob Burckhardt's brilliant essay, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, certain figures and facets of Italian culture from Dante to Michelangelo are drawn in sharp perspective, while others are shadowy or not apparent.
"My starting point," Burckhardt said, "has to be a vision," and, though he called it the "Renaissance," what he saw was "the first mighty surging of a new age." Its characteristics--a new kind of state, a "work of art," a new type of individual, the self-aware and many-sided personality, a new culture molded by the recovery of the ancient past and the "discovery of the world and of man," a society marked by immorality and religious indifference--are displayed in a carefully constructed mosaic. For all its high qualities, it is the idealized portrait of an age, glowing with worldly individualism and novelty, but static and foreshortened in time and space.
Its creator himself warned his readers that "in the wide ocean upon which we venture the ways and directions are many," and that the same studies which had served for his work might easily lead to essentially different conclusions. But his picture was so appealing, and his techniques so useful, that, extended to other areas of Europe, they shaped the modern conception of the Renaissance. Through the catchwords of textbooks and the colorful cliches of romances, his insights have filtered down in the common notion of a "golden age" populated by glamorous figures somewhat larger than life. Only in this century have numerous critics inquired whether the vision of Burckhardt and his followers was perhaps an optical illusion.
The controversy they have touched off is ironically sketched by one of its participants in a dialogue between a Dreamer who sees the Renaissance as a glorious world, splendid in purple and gold, and a Questioner who voices the objections of more critical scholars. Beholding "the rise of individualism, the awakening of a desire for beauty, the triumph of worldly pleasure and the joy of life," the Dreamer sees in his reverie a procession of painters and poets like Michelangelo and Ariosto, Durer and Ronsard, even catching sight of St. Francis of Assisi and Jan van Eyck. The Questioner, laughing, challenges this Renaissance, declaring that it does not stand firm in time or space, in content or meaning, that it is too vague, too incomplete, and haphazard." (Pg. 2-4).
We need to be self-conscious about this historic change that we're all experiencing. I don't know if the project of the Renaissance was a self-conscious one. I've read some of the letters of Kepler and Erasmus and they possessed self-awareness about their work and ideas. We should at least be as open as them, and use the Internet to lay open our thoughts, fears, ideas, hopes, questions, and dreams.
It does not matter what your views are about the state of the world, we all can agree that our world is falling apart and that we are entering uncharted territory. It is during times like these when a culture must look to its past for inspiration and guidance.
There are many heroes, sages and geniuses in Western culture who have illuminated the historical path to individual freedom. I'm talking about George Washington, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Giordano Bruno, John Milton, and the list goes on and on. Names can be taken from every country in the West and from every field; literature, politics, medicine, science, technology, religion. We must recall them now and put them in our memories because we need to remember their examples as the struggle for freedom against the authoritarian financial oligarchy comes to a head.
Everybody is familiar with the demons and tyrants of the West. I don't want to discuss that part of the West. I want to read about and learn from the angels of the West.
I think the fruits of Western Civilization are larger than those of any other civilization. But those fruits have rotted over the years because of a lack of education about what made the West great, and a lack of commitment to preserving the sacred knowledge that has been gathered by Western minds.
Freedom from the government and organized religion is the West's sweetest fruit, but in this century it is being discarded and replaced with a poisonous fruit that was not grown in the open air of culture, but rather inside the dark halls of power whose gatekeepers include plutocratic private banks, totalitarian technocrats, and fascist corporations. Their poisonous fruit is an authoritarian and private world government, which is the antithesis of what America and the West stands for.
What the West needs now is freedom from the unaccountable monopolistic banks and fascist corporations. But the preservation of individual liberty is not possible without remembering what kind of cultural soil generated the original fruit.
In the book, "Northrop Frye in conversation," by David Cayley, Canadian literary theorist Northrop Frye said that a society without a clear sense of its own history and a memory of its past cultural accomplishments is senile. Frye's words:
I think that forgetting the Bible is on a par with forgetting the rest of our cultural heritage. I've always, of course, maintained that when you lose your memory you become senile, and that's just as true of a society as it is of an individual. (David Cayley. 1992. Northrop Frye in Conversation. Anansi Press. Pg. 195).Frye also said that a society that does not worship God is bound to worship something else in its place - the State, or a man. In Germany it was Hitler. In Russia it was the State. In Iran it is both a man and a State.
The writers at The Daily Bell write:
The freer a society, the more apt it is, perhaps, to have a religious nature and to substitute the rule of God (a god or gods) for the rule of man. History shows us this over and over.I agree that the belief in God and the moral law of the universe is connected to a culture's belief in individual freedom and personal responsibility. People who worship the State and trust its every word are mentally and spiritually lost. When they commit atrocities their excuse is, "I was just following orders." They talk as if they're not independent human beings with a free will and a duty to recognize good from evil.
When a person has a greater loyalty to God and to his own Self than his government or country then that person is on the right path. Such a person is way more likely to flourish in a free society with a free market of ideas than in a society in which the State is God and human beings are robots, or even worse, rats.
