Friday, April 28, 2017
LIES LOVE COMPANY
Many people these days are saying
that we now live in a culture of lies, particularly in politics. What people
have not paid attention to is that there has been a culture of lies in academia
for generations. I don’t know if the
academic habit of lying, especially about history, has helped to give birth to
our political climate. I suspect there is a relationship—rarely is anything
born on its own out of spontaneous combustion—but whether there is or not, it’s
worth looking at what has long been a practice in the academic world.
The primary goal for too many
scholars is to promote an ideology or worldview, regardless of what the facts
tell us. Preconceived ideas are deemed to matter more than evidence. There are
lies of omission and lies of commission. The key point is to distort the
historical record so that only one untruthful point of view is allowed.
The reason I am so sure about
this and have become so frightened by it is that I recently looked back over
what I have discovered over the past 20 years, since I started to explore
historical subjects, and it has shocked me that even in my relatively briefly
time at this, I have found five major historical figures about whom academics
are less than truthful. I could put the word ‘historical’ in front of each of
the following names, but I will use it only for the first two: the historical,
Jewish Jesus, the historical Charles Darwin, John Locke, Thomas Malthus, and
William Tyndale.
What is significant is that it is
impossible to confine the lies to just these people. In order to maintain the misconceptions
scholars promote about these individuals, the lies have to spread beyond them
to other parts of their culture. Lies need more lies to back them up. We fail to remember so much and we need that failure, in order to substantiate even one lousy little
lie. I will give a very short explanation for each of the ones I have named.
The fundamental construct, as one
scholar has called it, of historical Jesus scholars is that Jesus was
surrounded by Jewish enemies who were ultimately responsible for his
demise. But the real Jesus was more in
harmony with his fellow Jews, including Jewish leaders, than in opposition.
What disputes did exist between them was not lethal. It was just normal Jewish
disagreement for the time. Jesus was part of the Pharisaic world of the fight
for constitutional government. The Torah
was their Constitution.
That was their world and Romans
had nothing to do with it. For most
Jews, the Romans were irrelevant. Certainly, no Jewish leader would have
cooperated with Rome to get rid of a Jewish troublemaker. They would have been
far more likely to try to save his life from a Roman execution. But in order for scholars to
maintain their myths about the complete uniqueness of Jesus (this Rabbi Joshua
to his fellow Jews), scholars have to tell lies about ancient Jewish culture
and falsely make it appear that Jewish leaders would cooperate with Rome. Lies
about Jesus spread into lies about the entire culture (e.g., exaggerating the
importance of the Temple in Jewish life and downplaying the role of
constitutional government).
Charles Darwin, we are often told
by a majority of writers, was a great humanitarian and infused his love of
humanity into his science of evolution. But the historical Charles Darwin was a
very limited humanitarian. He opposed legal slavery primarily because of its
cruelties, but he never championed political and economic equality. He believed
in a hierarchy of life, a system of groups subordinate to groups, as he often
put it. The result for him was that evolution created superior and inferior
groups. The same evils practiced towards slaves (like the breakup of slave
families), he could tolerate when done to Native peoples, whom he regarded as
inferior.
As far as I know, Darwin did not
oppose de facto slavery, as other
humanitarians did, and he expressed his full support for colonialism even in
its genocidal tendencies, which he presented as natural. Others opposed the
genocide and often equated colonialism with slavery, but not Darwin. To
maintain their fictional Darwin, scholars have to erase the genuine
humanitarians of his time. They also have to erase the holistic evolutionists
who preceded Darwin and were far more humane in their pursuit of science than
he was. Lies are never self-limiting. They multiply.
John Locke is frequently made out
to be one of the founders of British imperialism. Supposedly, he was an
advocate of the idea that British superiority in agriculture and other forms of
productivity gave them license to appropriate all Indigenous land because the
British could put it to better use. No one pays attention to what the real John
Locke actually wrote. His concern was to put limits on property ownership. Even a just war, Locke said, could never
validate a country taking all the land from the defeated enemy, leaving the
women and children to starve. For Locke, everyone in the world, not just the
British, had a fundamental right to inherit their father’s goods, including
land. Nothing, not even a war, could take that right away.
And if land was unjustly taken,
future descendants had a right to demand their land back and keep demanding it until they got the land back. But no one pays attention to these most important
points in Locke’s thinking. Scholars need an intellectual foundation to justify
imperialism’s greed to take everything from Native peoples and so they have
invented such a foundation in Locke.
I will be very brief about the
last two figures, Thomas Malthus and William Tyndale. Malthus is said to have
been an enemy of the poor and, as one writer recently put it, an apologist for greed.
He may have been harsh about the poor, but to call him an apologist for greed
is beyond the pale. Even his harshness towards the poor is overblown. The real
Malthus was concerned that both extreme wealth and extreme poverty were bad for
society. He criticized Adam Smith for paying too much attention to the wealthy
and not enough to the poor. What Malthus thought was particularly bad was that
we were creating a society in which the wealthy were getting wealthier and were
leaving the working poor behind. The poor got very little benefit from
so-called economic advances. Malthus was very critical of this and we have
failed to pay attention.
William Tyndale usually gets some
credit for making an English translation of the Bible, but his accomplishment
is most often underrated. He did not just make a translation, he made the
translation, the one that every good translation since has relied on. Scholars
will praise the King James translation to the skies and they will offer
quotations from it. What they don’t tell you is that in 4 out of 5 cases (or
possibly slightly higher), those quotations from the King James are pure Tyndale, verbatim
Tyndale. Tyndale has not been entirely suppressed in historical studies, but he
is definitely minimized by so many writers. The original translators’ introduction to
the King James Bible acknowledged that theirs was not a completely new translation, but
followed previous translations. If I recall, they claimed to have made a good
translation better, but they had hardly done that for most of it, as they had
merely followed Tyndale almost 90% of the time.
It is hard to get scholars to set
the record straight for any of these histories. They have a preconceived agenda
to promote and they don’t need any evidence to justify it. This culture of
lying has been around for a very long time and appears not to be
self-correcting. It seems even impervious to other-correcting.
© 2017 Leon Zitzer
