``...So, perhaps I'd agree in this sense, that capitalism and religion is functionally similar. But in the extremes, I can't say that this is the case. The 'extreme' religious adherent doesn't believe with words alone, they believe through their actions without an enunciation... Is there a parallel for this, a kind of capitalist fundamentalism?..''
Ken -------
I don't want to make too big a point of it. Just at the belief level, the imaginary level. I mean one problem they both share is imagining any alternative to their dominant belief systems. We are told endlessly that there is no alternative to the fetching greed and crushing humiliation of capital, and everyone nods, yeah, it sucks, but what else is there? On the other hand, in the extreme case, with a little luck, some money to begin with, and a fanatical conviction of the ways of capital, I think belief through action without enunciation, might work pretty well to propel the true asshole into unimagined levels of wealth and power. I mean the big difference between capital and religious fundamentalism is the former actually does reward convictions, provided there is some capital to start with. Oh, well.
There was a big demonstration in SF last weekend that probably wasn't reported. I didn't go because it was held on Saturday and I work Saturdays. According to my econ buddy who went late it had about five to six thousand people in the Mission marching and carrying on in the local style of pageantry. From tonight's news, it looks like another in SF, smaller, but present.
Getting back to books. I got a copy of the Qur'an and started that, and then realized I should have started with the OT. Sounds ridiculous, but I've never actually sat down and read it. I was taught from it and passages were always used as introductions to the endless sermons I had to listen to. But all that is different from just reading it.
So here is an amusing problem. I discovered there has been some kind of revisionist move afoot for decades to re-write the bible. I found one new translation after another and they all read like shit. It seems to me there was a whole wave of these bogus bibles put out sometime after the Sixties---their popularity is testified to by their ubiquitous presence in used books stores. I finally found a copy of the Cambridge, King James version complete with the Apocrypha. This is the one I remember. So I bought it for nine bucks. It had never been opened. Inside I found a publishers ad card and a packing slip dated 7/8/57, marked as an examination copy. So the book had been sent as a promotion for a text. The ad card is titled, The Bible as Literature.
Yesterday morning of course with the US attack launched, it makes strangely appropriate reading. I am at chp 26, just after Jacob made his brother Esau hand over his birthright for food. Nice. I probably should be reading the Qur'an, but I realized I couldn't really quite follow it without having done the time on the OT.
At the moment I am looking around for a manageable version of the Talmud and have just figured out that probably what I am looking for is the Mishnah with just early commentaries, the Babylonian Talmud, a very early version. It seems the Venice version was already something like fifteen volumes---busy critters, these arcane scribblers. So I am trying to figure out what is the basic minimum. From a very limited search it seems to come down to The Living Talmud, trans, Goldin J., New American Library, (1957)---better suggestions, anyone?
Just by realizing that the Talmud is now something in the range of twenty some odd volumes, means something interesting to me. I had a similar problem looking into Islam. The best reference work I could find is the Encyclopedia of Islam in some twenty plus volumes. There is another interesting problem going on here too. A lot of the lengthy commentaries on the Qur'an are not translated, or at least I haven't found many.
Without actually seeing either one--the Talmud or the commentaries of the Qur'an, I am guessing that both of these are vast legal works that give laws and interpretations for everything from preparing food to going to war---in other words the rules for constructing an entire social life. This explains to me how you arrive at a non-secular concept of state.
I was talking to a state supreme court clerk Friday about this problem of the division between secular and religious laws and he said that in his studies in commonwealth law, the church in the the English system controlled what we now consider under family law. In other words it was mostly concerned with domestic life, rather than public life. Wasn't this division what was behind Henry VIII's battle with Rome and Thomas Beckette? I don't know, except to vaguely remember something along these lines. Since Peter B. was Stanley Mosk's clerk, and Mosk died a couple of months ago, he is moving over to the administrative system that manages oversight of state judges and the court system.
I am swimming here in a morass of ignorance. But here is a rough outline. During the middle ages and into the beginning of the renaissance all these communities (christian, jewish, muslim) were primarily under religious laws of their own particular traditions. But as independent state secular authorities began to re-established a secular legal system in the late Gothic, these were expanded downward into the masses and began to confront religious laws of ordinary domestic life. In a sense, these moves would begin to define not just the division between secular and divine authority, but also the division between public and private.
One of the interesting things I picked up on my searches is that when the Venetian Doge lead the Fourth crusade and captured Constantinople (1204) among the booty were much larger collections of Plato and Aristotle than were previously known. But more important in this context, was the recapture of the Justinian Codes. These end up being studied not in Venice, but Bologna. The importance here is that the basic concept of a secular state and a secular legal system is made available through re-institution of Roman law. Meanwhile, as secular legal authority begins to be re-established, Jewish communities must have become more isolated, ghettoized. I am guessing, but I suspect formal ghettos per se were a legal invention created as secular legal authority begins to expand. The example here is the establishment of the ghetto of Venice in 1500s just about the time of the Bomberg Talmud printing. Why? Is this a complete coincidence? So, since I have no idea and have to guess, then I guess that the Jewish section of the city might have been turned formally into a legal ghetto partly as a consequence of a demand for self-rule under Jewish law. This would have made some kind of sense if Venice and other quasi-independent cities were in the process of re-adopting secular Roman law under an otherwise Christian dominated civil authority.
Well in any event, with these legal compendiums of conduct in Jewish and Muslim communities the entire idea of a religious state makes some sense. But this leaves the question of how to establish a Christian equivalent, above and beyond the relatively simple homolies of a medieval parish system. England never adopted the Roman or Justinian codes, since they had their own tradition of common law. Here I have to stop because I simply have no idea at all how this was worked out in England. Again my suspicion is that the oft celebrated religious freedom theoretically sought by the American colonialists was simply the freedom to establish their own authoritarian Protestant religious state. So the only tradition here would have been the early colonial statues. These could provide something for the rightwing Christian fanatics to use to found a religious state. But see, they lack any religious legal tradition of depth to use for this purpose. The ironic thing is, since they are so thoroughly antisemitic and racist, they don't realize most of what they should be looking at is in either the Jewish or Muslim traditions, or the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox systems.
Various news stories from the Muslim world have often cited Islamic law as the justification for all sorts of things. While obviously I don't buy it, it certainly makes a whole lot more sense to me now after spending the weekend thinking about these various legal traditions in history. I ordered the above cited version of the Talmud and the Qur'an with selected commentaries, so I'll see what these look like.
Chuck Grimes