Spinoza's problem, then and now (1st comment)

The trouble with young people is that their synapses haven't completely grown together and they lack real-world experience. But without them, there's no hope that the world will ever change.

The young and brilliant (albeit unpragmatic) philosopher Baruch Spinoza was not yet 24 when, in 1656, he was summoned to account for the unorthodox ideas he was spreading among his fellow Jews and Christians alike in the relatively enlightened Dutch capital of Amsterdam. His crime was his insistence on thinking for himself about the nature of God, people and the natural world, a process that necessarily required him to bounce his not-fully-developed ideas off other people.

"We must ponder and speak what we have pondered," he explains in David Ives's riveting dramatization of Spinoza's trial, "or what's speech for?"

To his elders, Spinoza's inquiries came at a most inconvenient time in the history of the Jews, not to mention the history of their host, the Dutch Republic. The Sephardic Jews of Spain and Portugal, having been banished in 1492, were subsequently granted refuge in Amsterdam on one condition: Don't stir up the goyim.

Between Christians and Jews

After centuries of persecution, this struck most of Spinoza's fellow Amsterdam Jews as a reasonable bargain. But Spinoza, having been endowed by his creator with a brain, couldn't help expressing what was passing through it— perfectly logical notions like, "The only difference between Christians and Jews is the superstition to which they subscribe."

The Dutch Republic, for its part, valued the presence of Jews for their access to global trade and their legendary skills as financial middlemen— skills that, of course, European Jews had developed after being barred from owning land or merchandise. As the Bishop of Speyer— a priest who apparently doubled as a civic booster— observed when he invited Jews there in 1084, "The glory of our town would be augmented a thousandfold if I were to bring Jews to it."

But the Dutch Republic was itself a fragile affair in a world that hadn't known a stable democracy since ancient Athens. If only the Jews could foster commerce without disturbing Christianity, went the thinking, the Dutch Republic could stabilize itself so that some future Spinoza could formulate his ideas there with alacrity. As for Spinoza himself— well, wrong time, wrong place.

The Welcomat's offense

But of course there has never been a convenient time or place to disturb the status quo, as I've learned through my own experience as editor of three modern experiments in free speech.

When I first became editor of the weekly Welcomat in Philadelphia in 1981, we published many freewheeling submissions about religion and sex that some readers found offensive. Several local religious leaders, much like the civic authorities and the rabbi in New Jerusalem, lectured me that my experiment would best be conducted elsewhere: Such unfettered debate, they said, would surely shatter the delicate fabric of a multicultural community like Philadelphia.

I remember responding: If people can't exchange ideas freely in 20th-Century Philadelphia, where can they exchange them?

Spinoza belonged to a long line of heretics stretching through Luther and Jesus all the way back to Socrates and Abraham, none of whose ideas were welcomed by their respective communities, and all of whom delivered essentially the same revolutionary message: "The way things are is not the way things have to be."

Essence of liberty

The refreshing thing about Spinoza— brilliantly captured in New Jerusalem— was his willingness to express ideas that he hadn't fully thought out yet. When challenged, at his trial, to explain fallacies in his logic, he replies ingenuously, "I'm still working out some of the details." Try to imagine such a response from Moses, Jesus, Muhammad or Luther. Yet Spinoza's formulation is the essence of liberty and democracy: the notion that no one possesses the whole truth but all of us should seek it, and therefore all of us should respect and listen to each other.

For allegedly infecting Amsterdam with his undeveloped ideas, Spinoza was excommunicated and banished by the Jewish community he had made so nervous, lest they be banished by the Dutch Republic that he had made so nervous. Today, of course, we can be grateful that Spinoza chose excommunication over silence: His perceptions as to how the control of human passions would lead to virtue and happiness provided the groundwork for the modern democratic form of governance that's finally gaining traction across the globe in our own time.

Rabbi Kaplan's "'funeral'

Lest we grow too smug about our modern liberal tolerance, let me point out that my childhood rabbi— Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of the Reconstructionist branch of Judaism— was also excommunicated and given a funeral in absentia for questioning the existence of a supernatural God. This exercise in orthodoxy occurred not in 17th-Century Amsterdam but on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in 1945. Over the next 60 years Kaplan changed his mind about many things, but that was the point: to seek the truth through constant reconstruction of one's thoughts, as opposed to clinging to fixed beliefs.

Come to think of it, barely a year ago, in this very column, I expressed some not-fully-thought-out ideas about rape. Many readers responded in what ultimately became a valuable exchange. But on the other hand, a global Internet campaign generated 30,000 letters— that is, more people than normally visit BSR in a month— demanding my dismissal for my wrongful thoughts.

Banned from the premises

Nobody excommunicated me, to be sure. But at least one respondent posted my address on the Internet and urged that I be pushed from the roof of a 20-story building. Two ostensibly experimental Philadelphia theater companies, Flashpoint Theatre and Brat Productions, banned me from their premises.

"Plays can express all kinds of ideas," explained Madi DiStefano of Brat, "but a journalist should do homework before making naive assumptions about why rapists rape and giving dangerous advice to readers."

Are you listening, Baruch? If only you'd gone into the theater instead of philosophy, nobody would have objected to you. Well, maybe two experimental theaters in Philadelphia would have objected. But let us be grateful to Lantern Theater for reviving and sustaining an intellectual feast like New Jerusalem. Here, at least, is one theater company willing to honor in practice some of the more elusive theories of free speech: the right to be wrong, the right to listen to voices of one's own choosing, and freedom for the thought that we hate.♦


To read a review of New Jerusalem by Robert Zaller, click here.
To read a review of New Jerusalem by Steve Cohen, click here.
To read a review of New Jerusalem by Marshall A. Ledger, click here.
To read responses, click here and here.
To read anther commentary on Spinoza and New Jerusalem by Carol Rocamora, click here.
To read a related commentary by Steve Cohen, click here.