Title: Fanaticism: Flight from Fallibility. (Perspectives on Fanaticism)
Abstract: H.J. Perkinson * OUR DEBT to fanaticism is great. The unity of our present culture, the depth and breadth of our civilization, we owe in great part to those fanatics who preceded us. Had neither the Greeks nor the Romans thought themselves superior to others who were different, had they not tried to impose their ideas, their institutions, their ways, on others -- how evanescent Greco-Roman culture might have been! Had the early Jews and Christians tolerated and accepted their rival religions, our Judeo-Christian heritage might have faded and dissolved into the myriad of sects and cults of the times. And what about the Protestant reformers? And the men of the Enlightenment? And the Marxists? Suppose all these had not dogmatically committed themselves to their causes? Without fanatics to uphold and advance them, these causes might have little effect on us today. Throughout Western history (and Eastern history, too) many, many true believers have labored long and hard to educate, or to convert, others to their beliefs ... and if this did not work, they frequently exterminated them. History, then, does reveal human predilection toward fanaticism. (1) And when we took at the twentieth century -- whether Nazi Germany, or the Soviet Union, or Maoist China, or Northern Ireland -- we see that this predilection has not abated. what can we trace this predilection? What are the roots of fanaticism? There is, I think, something about human nature that propels toward fanaticism. Sartre has written: To be human means to reach towards being This is, Sartre adds, passion, since man can never be God. (2) Now it is true that man can never be God, yet -- in light of the history of man's attempts to attain perfection -- I wonder how useless this passion is. Might not this passion be the driving force of human improvement, the spring of social reconstruction? Like God, man is creator: he creates his knowledge, he creates his societies -- he creates theories, institutions, works of art. Man creates world, universe, that he inhabits. But, unlike God, man is fallible. Recall: the beginning God created the heaven and the earth ... And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very All that God has made is perfect. But all that man makes is imperfect, inadequate: man's knowledge is not perfectly true, his behavior is not absolutely good, his societies not the best possible. Man is not omniscient, nor omnipotent. What he creates is always improvable. Thus man is able to tend, continually, toward perfection. That he actually does this is manifest both in the fact that we human beings do try to overcome or eliminate the contradictions contained in our ideas, and in the fact that we do try to overcome or eliminate the adverse consequences (at least for ourselves, and sometimes for others) of our own behavior. When we eliminate the contradictions in our knowledge we diminish its falsity content: we move closer to truth. When we eliminate the adverse consequences of our behavior by modifying that behavior, we improve our own behavior: we move closer to the good. It was Giambattista Vico who first noted that human beings are fallible creators who continually seek truth and goodness -- who do tend toward (but never attain) the infinite perfection of God. Vico defined man as a finite being able to know and to will, who tends toward the (3) And Charles Darwin supplied theory that explains how man does tend toward the infinite. (4) According to Darwin's theory of natural selection, the environment criticizes -- via liquidation of the organism -- those offspring that are inadequate. Those that survive grow and create new offspring which are subject to the same critical selectivity of the environment. In this way the species evolve, according to Darwin. So it is with what man creates: man's society, his knowledge. …
Publication Year: 2002
Publication Date: 2002-06-22
Language: en
Type: article
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