Artöm Mazurchak: posts tagged religion

Jean Jacques Rousseau “The Social Contract or the Principles of Political Right”

Mon, 01 Apr 2024 07:00:00 +0200

What’s the social contract and how does it help a person discover true freedom? What does someone give up by signing on? Why does a person need others? What does a well-functioning state look like, and who are the key players in it?

Biography

Rousseau was born in Geneva in 1712 and died near Paris in 1778. His father was a watchmaker, but his mother died in childbirth, so an uncle and aunt brought him up. Dad passed on a love of reading. From ten to twelve he lived with a priest, where he picked up Latin and studied Scripture. At sixteen he set off to wander and, over the next sixteen years, tried on lots of jobs: private tutor, footman, secretary, while reading and diving into music theory. He fell for Madame de Warens, an older and better-educated woman who left a deep mark on him, teaching him to write and speak in the polished language of high society.

Of all the jobs he tried, music mattered most to him. He even wrote an opera that was staged in Paris and the king of France offered him a pension for it. Rousseau refused because he believed in democracy. In the end, he made his living by copying sheet music.

After moving to Paris, he got to know the city’s elite and built relationships with them. Later, he fell out with them. Rousseau was a hard person to deal with as he argued with everyone.

Rousseau’s work falls into three periods.
1. Early period. In 1749 he entered an essay contest run by the French Academy of Sciences: “Has the revival of science and the arts improved morals?” He set nature against civilization and said that staying close to nature keeps our behavior genuine.

Most thinkers then believed the Enlightenment made people better, but Rousseau argued that science and art only corrupt us and pull us away from happiness.

His other key text from this era, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755), insists that inequality is man-made, born with private property.

2. Middle period (1756–1762). Rousseau left Paris for the countryside and there wrote The Social Contract. The French Parliament promptly banned it. We’ll dig into that book next.

3. Late period (1762–1778). Hounded for his ideas, Rousseau fled to Switzerland, then England and finally slipped back into France in 1768. During these years he grew convinced he was being persecuted and saw conspiracies everywhere. Even so, he managed to publish a music dictionary and wrote an operatic melodrama.

In his works, Rousseau reflects on nature and on how our perception grows. He argues that this growth should first and foremost cultivate feelings of compassion and mercy.

Rousseau’s ideas had a strong pull on later figures in history and culture. Mussolini, for instance, leaned on Rousseau’s distorted belief that people should get back to nature, while cities drive them toward vice. Tolstoy idolized Rousseau. And the only portrait that hung in Kant’s study was of Rousseau.

People aren’t enemies to each other in their natural state. Their relationships stay peaceful, because war breaks out only over property.

People team up to survive, they enter a social contract when the upside of living together beats the risk of going it alone. When people band together, they save more than their lives, they keep their freedom, too. They trade natural freedom for civil freedom, the kind that’s protected by laws. When you’re on your own, freedom is fragile as the strong can snatch whatever they want. The social contract locks that freedom in place. Now it’s not just you defending it, the whole power of society has your back. With the social contract, you don’t give anything up, you only gain.

There are two kinds of unity: association and aggregation. Aggregations are communities kept together by force, they’re false forms of unity. Associations are communities of the true sovereign, revealed when a common will appears. When people enter the social contract, they hand over all their rights. Because everyone gives up their will completely, equality comes into being at the same moment. The general will of the people was later picked up by the fascists, but they twisted it, claiming that unity is set by the party.

Anyone in modern society is caught between defending the state and hanging on to their property and life. As citizens, we’re told to volunteer for war, but as people we know: “the dead own nothing.”

For Rousseau, the sovereign is made up of its citizens. Anyone who hasn’t entered the social contract and hasn’t become a citizen is a foreigner. Property begins with land, so sovereignty has to be tied to a specific territory. The constitution is the sovereign’s manifestation.

No state can exist without a government. The government’s main job is to carry out the people’s will. That gives the state three key actors: the sovereign, the people and the government. What sets the government apart from the sovereign is that the government is bound by law. The sovereign, in turn, makes the laws.

Rousseau says sovereignty can be carried out in three ways: monarchy, democracy and aristocracy. He also draws a line between strong and weak governments. A strong government follows the sovereign’s will and to do that it has to stay small, leaving no room to twist the sovereign’s laws or slip in personal interests.

Political art is the skill of spotting what truly carries weight and what doesn’t, what’s only formal and what’s substantive. Rousseau draws a line between law and political law. Political law is what you get when people act not by the written code but by who’s influential, handing out penalties to match. When political law takes over from regular law, it signals a weak government that can’t do its main job.

There are two sides to sovereignty. First is the sovereign’s direct power, the right to make laws. Second is the sovereign handing some of that power to the government. Monarchy works better for large states, because as the government grows, there’s more room for different readings of the laws.

For mid-size states, Rousseau says aristocracy works best, because its leaders are chosen. Elections clear the way for the most capable people.

Democracy works best in small countries because you can bring everyone together. In Rome, for instance, about 400,000 citizens could meet and serve as the sovereign. The form of government people choose depends not just on territory, but also on their habit of obeying the law, their education, how their work is organized and their consumption habits.

The sovereign’s decrees are sacred – above every other law. When the state is born, each person is born again as a citizen once the social contract takes effect. From then, Rousseau sees religion as a political tool, a way to legitimize authority and train people for civic life.

Rousseau identifies four kinds of religion:

Personal religion: rituals, ceremonies, baptism.
Polytheism: each nation has its own god, because each nation has its own sovereignty.
Pantheon religion: Rome is the model: believe in whomever you want, just obey the law.
4.Christianity, which Rousseau sees as the worst for a sovereign. A Christian’s true homeland is in heaven, so winning or losing a battle hardly matters – keeping the covenant does. A Christian ends up either an enemy of the state or a citizen who does his duty half-heartedly. To save the nation, Rousseau says, Christianity must first be scrapped. For any Christian, the spirit comes first and the real homeland is above.

Selected quotes

According to Rousseau, Russians will never become truly civilized. Here’s how he explains it:
Russians will never be genuinely civilized because civilization reached them too soon. Peter had a talent for copying others but lacked real genius, the kind that creates something out of nothing. Some of what he did was good, most of it missed the mark. He saw his people were rough, but he didn’t understand that they weren’t ready for the rules of civil society. He tried to enlighten and improve them all at once, when they still needed time to get used to its demands. He set out to turn them into Germans and Englishmen before first making them Russians. By convincing his subjects they already were what they weren’t, he kept them from ever becoming what they could be.

Even in wartime, a just ruler may seize what belongs to the enemy nation as a whole, yet still respect private citizens and their property. He upholds the same rights on which his own authority rests.

On the Social Contract: when each person hands himself over to the whole community, he isn’t surrendering to any single individual. Because every member gets the same rights over everyone else that they grant in return, each person wins back the equivalent of what he gives up and gains extra power to protect what he keeps. In the social contract, you give up your natural freedom, the limitless right to grab whatever tempts you, but you gain civil freedom and the legal right to everything you own.

Alongside the benefits a person gains in the civil state, we can add moral freedom – the one thing that makes you truly your own master. Living by mere impulse is slavery, living by a law you set for yourself is freedom.

The original agreement doesn’t wipe out natural equality, instead, it replaces the physical inequalities nature gave us with equality as persons and equality before the law. People may differ in strength or talent, but through the agreement and by right – they all become equals.

About tyrants

Tyrants always create or choose times of chaos – moments when society is gripped by fear, to push through harmful laws that people would never accept during calmer days. Picking that exact moment to make their move is one of the clearest signs that separates the work of a real lawmaker from the actions of a dictator.

Their personal goal is always to keep the people weak, suffering and unable to resist. Sure, if you imagine the citizens staying completely obedient forever, then the ruler would actually benefit from having a powerful nation, because that strength, being his own, would make him intimidating to neighbors.

In the end, despotism doesn’t rule to make people happy, it ruins them just to keep them under control.

The moment someone starts saying “Why should I care?” about what’s happening in their country, you can be sure that country is dead.

About sovereignty and Christianity

Since the Social Contract makes all citizens equal, everyone gets to have a say in what everyone else should do, but nobody can ask someone else to do something they wouldn’t do themselves. It’s exactly this right, crucial for giving life and energy to the political body, that the sovereign grants to the ruler when setting up the government.

Christianity teaches nothing but slavery and submission. Its spirit is so perfect for tyranny that tyrants can’t help but take advantage of it. True Christians are made to be slaves, they already know it and it barely bothers them. To them, this short life just isn’t worth much.

Baruch Spinoza’s “Theological-Political Treatise”

Sun, 24 Mar 2024 15:03:00 +0200

How our modern scientific worldview sprouted from Scripture. The government’s core mission. Why religion and politics need to stay in separate lanes. Why it’s crucial to know the world an author lived in before you dive into their work. How to actually read the Bible.

Social context.

The Treatise’s core goal is to split theology from politics and rein in religion’s sway over public life.

In 1665, Johan de Witt, an influential statesman who championed the interests of the merchant-industrial bourgeoisie, invited Spinoza to write a new text. Spinoza put aside work on his major book Ethics to take on the project. He spent the next five years writing and in 1670 the book was released anonymously.

Back then, the Netherlands had only recently won its freedom from Spain. Spirits were high and the government backed religious tolerance. That atmosphere pulled in plenty of thinkers, including René Descartes.

The Netherlands was a political battleground at the time. On one side, you had the merchant and industrial elite led by Johan de Witt. On the other, the Stadtholder faction driven by religious ideology and in charge of the military. And just to make things even messier, there was also a war going on with England. De Witt, worried the Stadtholders might gain too much power, kept military funding on a tight leash.

Johan de Witt had a clear goal when he commissioned Spinoza’s work – to weaken the power of the Stadtholders by dialing down religion’s grip on politics. Spinoza believed that letting religious doctrine guide the government wasn’t good for society as a whole. In his writing, he ran with that idea and laid out arguments that still shape how modern states are built today.

But in the end, Johan de Witt lost the political battle. He was brutally murdered, burned alive. As for the book, even though it was published anonymously, people quickly connected it to Spinoza and it was promptly banned.

God = Nature = Reason = Science

In the first part of his treatise, Spinoza challenges the idea of the Bible as a reliable source of knowledge. He argued that to truly understand Scripture, you need to know the context in which it was written: Jewish history, rhetoric, linguistics to grasp the real meaning behind the words and metaphors and natural science to tell the difference between actual miracles and natural phenomena.

The treatise was written to explore the relationship between democracy and religion and it marked the beginning of the Radical Enlightenment. Everything that came before it was more like enlightened conservatism.

Spinoza didn’t see nature as just matter, he also meant the laws of substance or God, the infinite being. In his view, God’s power is natural and inseparable from the workings of nature itself. That means nature’s power is both divine and infinite. And that’s where he draws a powerful connection: God = Nature = Reason = Science.

Human beings are part of nature. It’s important to distinguish between the general laws of nature and what’s unique to human nature. Spinoza points to one core human right – the right to preserve oneself. And for that purpose, he says, it’s fair to use whatever means are available.

To survive, people need each other. That’s why communities form, by coming together, they amplify their strength. Reason shows itself in our ability to build that collective power while still living in peace.

In the first part of the treatise, Spinoza argues that miracles don’t exist, what we call miracles are just the opinions of prophets. Religion and divine revelations have nothing to do with nature or truth. To Spinoza, the Bible is basically the core ideological text of the old regime.

Spinoza saw the Bible as a tool for keeping people in line, something made for the general public, who don’t have a strong sense of rational morality. It works by stirring up the imagination and emotions, using fear and promises to leave a strong impression and set the rules for the crowd.

How the rise of science was already written into Scripture

The Jewish state was a theocracy, where divine law and civil law matched. По Спинозе, божественный закон попадает в писания через откровения. Spinoza believed divine law entered Scripture through revelation and that God created the conditions that allowed the Jewish state to emerge. But here’s the interesting twist: in that same sense, any nation can be seen as “chosen,” just like the Jews, because the right conditions also came together for other nations to form.

In the Jewish state civil law turns into religious duty, making the entire nation function like a monastic order. Even everyday actions, like milking a cow, take on a religious meaning.

Spinoza believed that a theocratic state built on theology sees “others” as enemies of God, simply because they worship different gods. In his view, the Jewish state was the most unnatural form of government on earth. By relying so much on religion to hold it together, the state ends up weakening itself.

Theocracy is dangerous because it is closed for different opinions or new ideas.Different interpretations of sacred texts open the door to speculation and internal conflict, which often leads to civil war. To get past that kind of mess, Spinoza says we need science. It gives us a more stable and reliable way to build a society.

According to Spinoza, Scripture came into being as a natural part of Jewish history. The Jewish people were once enslaved by the Egyptians, an external force that controlled them. God might feel like “one of us,” but in a theocracy, he still ends up acting like a ruler. When religion runs the government, it creates a deep conflict inside society, a struggle between belief and freedom. Spinoza says the only way to fix that is through science and reason. That’s what helps humanity grow and become what it’s truly capable of.

To prevent conflict in theocratic states, Spinoza suggests separating religion from government and protecting freedom of speech. The only opinion he thinks should be limited is the calls to ban freedom of speech. The state should be a tool for freedom,built on laws, strengthened through unity and designed to let reason shine.

Conclusion: It’s kind of amazing to realize that science and almost all modern ways of thinking actually grew out of a religious worldview. I used to think science gave us an independent, “objective” picture of the world, something that let us see the true nature of things.

Selected Quotes

On Prophets

Here’s how I’ll wrap it up: prophecy never made prophets any more knowledgeable. They stuck to their own biased views. So when it comes to abstract or speculative stuff, we’re under no obligation to believe them.

But there’s nothing blasphemous in what we’re saying as Solomon, Isaiah, Jesus and the rest may have been prophets, but they were still human. And like any human, it’s fair to assume that nothing truly human was foreign to them.

So, all of this clearly shows what we set out to prove: that God shaped revelations to fit the understanding and personal views of the prophets. Which means prophets might not have known things related to pure reason or abstract thinking. They even disagreed with each other on those topics. That’s why it’s simply wrong to look to the prophets for knowledge about nature or the deeper workings of the spirit.

On the calling of the Jews and whether prophecy was unique to them

True happiness and fulfillment come from wisdom and understanding the truth, not from being wiser than others or from others lacking that truth. That kind of comparison doesn’t add even the slightest bit to a person’s actual wisdom, which is where real happiness lies.

By “God’s guidance” (Dei directio), I mean the fixed and unchanging order of nature, the natural chain (concatenatio) of cause and effect. As we’ve said before, the universal laws of nature that govern and determine everything are nothing other than God’s eternal decrees. These contain eternal truth and necessity. So whether we say that things happen according to the laws of nature or by God’s will and direction, we’re really saying the same thing.

Everything we truly want in life basically comes down to three things: understanding the world through its first causes, gaining control over our emotions or developing a habit of virtue and finally, living a calm, peaceful life in good physical health.

On divine law

So, since a law is nothing more than a way of life that people set for themselves or others in order to reach a certain goal, I think it makes sense to divide law into two kinds: human and divine. By human law, I mean a way of living that’s meant to keep the state running and preserve social order. Divine law, on the other hand, is about something higher, reaching true knowledge of God and learning to love Him.

The more we understand the natural world, the greater and more complete our knowledge of God becomes. The deeper we explore nature, the more fully we come to know God’s true essence.

So, we conclude that God is described as a lawmaker or ruler only because of how the masses think and because of the limits of human understanding. In reality, God acts and governs everything solely out of the necessity of His own nature and perfection.

Why religious rituals were created and why we believe in stories from the past
Laws in any country should be designed in a way that motivates people not through fear, but through hope for something good that they deeply desire. That way, people are more likely to do their part willingly.

So, if something ever happened in nature that went against its universal laws, it would also go against reason and against the very nature of God. Anyone claiming that God breaks the laws of nature is basically saying God goes against His own nature. And honestly, nothing could be more absurd.

I’ve already shown that Scripture doesn’t explain things by looking at their direct causes. Instead, it tells stories in a way that’s most likely to inspire reverence, especially among the masses. That’s why it often speaks about God and other matters in very vague or imprecise terms. Its goal isn’t to convince the mind, but to move and captivate the imagination.

On interpreting Scripture

Scripture doesn’t define the things it talks about, just like nature doesn’t either.

If you’re reading a book filled with strange or hard-to-understand ideas and you don’t know who wrote it, when it was written or why – it’s pretty much impossible to figure out what it really means. Without that context, there’s no way to know what the author intended or could’ve meant. But once you do know those things, your thinking gets a lot clearer. You’re less likely to project your own assumptions onto the text and more likely to focus on what the author actually meant, what they were trying to say based on their time, their situation and their audience.

I honestly can’t get over how some people see such deep, hidden mysteries in Scripture that, supposedly, no human language could ever explain them. And then they go and stuff religion with so much philosophy that the church ends up looking more like a university lecture hall and faith starts to feel more like a science or worse, just endless debate.

Here’s the thing: if someone lives a good life, then even if they don’t agree with others on doctrine, they’re still a true believer. But if their actions are bad, then no matter how much they say the right things, they’re not really a believer at all.

Faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.

Like we said, reason belongs to the realm of truth and wisdom, while theology belongs to the realm of devotion and obedience.

Those who run the state always try to make even their shady actions look legit. They want the public to believe they acted fairly. And it’s pretty easy for them to pull that off when they control how the law is interpreted.

Back then, even just moving your homeland was seen as shameful, because worshiping God, which they were always obligated to do, was only allowed in their own land. That land alone was considered holy, any other place was seen as unclean and defiled.