Author: George F. Smith
Publication: Capitalism Magazine
Date: January 25, 2002
URL: http://www.capitalismmagazine.com/2002/january/gs_allah.htm
How do you get young Middle Eastern
men to fly a jet full of Americans into the side of a skyscraper? You tell
them their creator will love them for it and reward them beyond their wildest
dreams. But they have to believe in such a creator first.
To instill this belief you educate
them from a very young age. You tell them things like: in death, the true
believer lives. In life, the true believer, when directed by god, kills
unbelievers. In both death and life, a true believer's happiness is fulfilled
by a grateful and all-powerful god. You keep these thoughts alive by training
them to pray five times a day.
To make sure they don't stray you
give them a book of Absolute Truth and provide interpretation along with
it. Since all men by nature desire to know, as Aristotle claimed, a book
with all the answers will be a lifelong treasure.
Of course, when Aristotle wrote
those words in ancient Greece he had something a bit different in mind.
He sought to understand the world we live in through reason -- the practice
of non-contradictory identification. Reality, for Aristotle, was the here
and now, not some otherworldly realm ruled by a moral dictator. Aristotle's
corpus became a kind of unmoved mover in itself, setting in motion a chain
of events that, in later centuries, freed men from intellectual prohibitions
and eventually sparked the American Revolution.
But we narrowly missed disaster.
His most important works were lost for centuries, and only rediscovered
when, ironically, the followers of Mohammed came upon them during a military
campaign in Syria.
The Lights Go Out
In the years following Aristotle's
death in 322 B. C., the independent Greek city-states fell victim to Rome's
imperium. By 146 B.C. Greece had become a Roman province and was eventually
rolled up into the Empire.
When the small city-state was sovereign,
men generally had the feeling of being able to work out their own fate.
But "in a large-scale organization like the Empire," philosophy historian
W. T. Jones notes, "it was obvious one did not control one's own destiny."
People became passive and withdrawn. Over time, their focus shifted from
this life to the one they believed would follow.
Mystery cults flourished in ancient
Rome, one of them forming the seeds of Christianity. How different were
Jesus and Aristotle? Aristotle's focus was man, his tool reason; Jesus'
focus was god, his tool revelation. Aristotle saw man as a responsible
adult, Jesus saw him as a child. The good life for Aristotle was realizing
one's potential; for Jesus, it was pleasing god. Aristotle spoke of the
importance of courage, a virtue about which Jesus had nothing to say. For
Aristotle pride was the greatest virtue, while Jesus taught it was a grievous
sin. (To be precise, Aristotle encouraged "proper pride," a mean between
"empty vanity" and "undue humility.")
When the Empire collapsed in 410,
only Aristotle's early works survived, and those in poor translation. Philosophers
in the centuries that followed became little more than religious scholars
who studied and debated fine points of scripture, always fearful of straying
outside the bounds of orthodoxy under threat of eternal damnation.
Early Christians believed the end
of the world was imminent and thus focused their efforts on their relationship
with god. As the centuries passed and the sun still shined, and as men
gradually rebuilt culture and civilization, an interest in the things of
this world began to grow. The thinkers of this era asked: how do you resolve
the conflicting claims of faith and reason? A fortuitous discovery provided
a possible answer.
Aristotle's Return
During the 12th century Arabic armies
swept into Syria and other parts of Asia Minor, a predominantly Greek culture
emanating from the conquests of Alexander the Great. There they found the
works of the Classical philosophers, which they translated from Syriac
or Hebraic into Arabic and took with them as they continued their march
into North Africa and Spain.
As the Christians arrived in Spain,
especially in Toledo, the two cultures met, and Christian scholars began
translating the Arabic works into Latin to make them accessible to the
West. Included were Aristotle's Physics, Metaphysics, and De Anima -- three
major treatises.
"Men began to feel the temper of
Aristotle's mind," Jones writes. "Here was a method radically different
from the authoritarian debates of earlier medieval scholarship. It was
sensationally empirical compared with anything the West then knew."
Borrowing Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas,
generally regarded as the era's greatest intellect, attempted to reconcile
faith and reason, dressing Christian dogma in the respectability of rational
argument. Duns Scotus, in trying to improve Thomas, ended up achieving
what he wanted to avoid: the further isolation of faith from reason. William
of Occam, whose famous razor still guides scientific thought ("What can
be explained on fewer principles is explained needlessly by more"), completed
the separation of faith and reason and released Aristotle's thought unencumbered
by religion into a world starving for knowledge.
Many commentators play down Aristotle's
role in leading the West into the Renaissance, but in fact the assimilation
of his thoughts was a watershed in mankind's history. In stark contrast
to Christian doctrine of the Middle Ages, Aristotle did not believe in
a personal god, he did not threaten man (in the name of love) with eternal
torture for disagreeing with him, he did not see people as "crooked, sordid,
bespotted, and ulcerous," as Augustine and his followers did. Though his
philosophy was incomplete and not without flaws, Aristotle became man's
liberator, showing him how to use reason to live the best possible life.
Both East and West held the "bomb"
of Aristotle's philosophy, but only in the West did it detonate. While
Arabic culture flourished in many fields, Greek learning never found a
secure institutional home under Islam. For true believers, nothing is more
important than salvation. Fundamentalists came to rule Islamic society
and have never lost their grip.
In revolutionary America, when Aristotle's
ethics were dominant politically, we had the moral courage to fight for
our independence. As Christian ethics intervened in the years that followed,
our freedom bowed out to the welfare state and a suicidal foreign policy.
Mix a repudiation of Western values
on one side with a proud display of such on the other, and getting fundamentalists
to fly planes into our heart is surprisingly easy.
If only the Arabs had still embraced
Aristotle as we did, what kind of world would we have today?
References:
http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.2.ii..html
- Nicomachean Ethics, Book II
W. T. Jones, Classical Mind (History
of Western Philosophy), Vol. I, (Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., New
York, 1952)
-- George Smith lives in Atlanta
where he is busy writing screenplays and articles on liberty. In addition
to parenting, he enjoys staying fit, tomato gardening, and making the occasional
"killer sandwich."