Today's History Lesson

A gloss on history ends w/ this:

The point of this gloss on history is that all of modern, post-Enlightenment history has primarily been driven by demands for political and economic justice. The difference between pre-Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment struggle has been that the human search for justice and equality was, in the religious civilization of the past, focused on virtue and its reward in heaven. After religion was undermined by the Enlightenment, human plans, doctrines, ideologies and struggles for justice were necessarily confined to temporal lifetime.

If there were no God, as the philosophers of the Enlightenment insisted, then human and social justice had to be sought in this world, and the rulers, aristocrats, the rich and privileged, who stood between ordinary people and justice, had to be destroyed. The aristocrats, held responsible for the dynastic and imperialist wars of the period, and finally for the Great War itself in 1914-1918, had to be swept away.

That was what the French and other European revolutions were about. It is what socialism and then communism were about, initially in their idealistic and utopian versions, and then in their bloodthirsty and nihilistic versions in Leninist Russia, in “National Socialist” Germany, then in Spain and even in impoverished and exploited China. People resorted to violence under leaders thrown up from the working and middle classes.

They were all, of course, idealistic and ideological when they began. This is what brings me back to Washington in July 2011. Congressional Republicans and the Obama Democrats are locked in the most extreme conflict over social justice and the equality of citizens that the nation probably has experienced since the Civil War. They are at the same time mindlessly committed to what amounts to a kind of racial and religious war of America with Muslim civilization. They seem ignorant, or indifferent, to what such irresponsibility has led to in the past.

Visit William Pfaff’s website for more on his latest book, “The Irony of Manifest Destiny: The Tragedy of America’s Foreign Policy” (Walker & Co., $25), at www.williampfaff.com.
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