The Most Horrible Crimes

There are some historical ironies that I just find entertaining. The artificiality of the juxtaposition of civilization and barbarity is becoming more and more apparent to me as my time on this planet stretches out. It’s almost laughable; really, it is laughable. To be completely honest, it’s been laughable since the beginning of the Enlightenment.

You see, Voltaire has a rather entertaining quote that I think captures the situation most profoundly. In 1776 (yet another mild irony), in his Dictionnaire Philosophique, he makes what I’m sure he thinks is a terribly witty suggestion. In what I can only characterize as an act of incredible historical hubris, he declares the following as an incontrovertible precept:

Notice that the most superstitious ages have always been those of the most horrible crimes… The superstitious man is ruled by fanatics and he becomes one himself. On the whole, the less superstition, the less fanaticism, and the less fanaticism, the fewer miseries.

On the face of it, that might very well be true – but not the way that our dear François-Marie might think it is. You see, for the first time in a very long while – if not for the first time ever – an historical age looked back on what had come before and judged it to be wholly without merit. We’re not talking about finding fault with past times, or being able to see where our ancestors could have done a better job…The admonition of the day was to read nothing that was written before A.D. 1500. As if everything in human history that had come before was not just outmoded or wrong, but completely irrelevant. From this point forward, the Enlightenment declared, Man will guide himself by the twin lights of Reason and Science. The previous ages’ moral compass, religion, was dismissed as “superstition.” That’s what Voltaire thought.

The irony, of course, is that under the glorious reign of Reason and Science, there was ushered in generations of unparalleled brutality – brutality that claimed justification from supposed “Science,” and which flung Reason about like it was a talisman that would make everything better, if only a given class of people were annihilated. Don’t forget that a harlot was enshrined in Notre Dame de Paris as the “goddess Reason” during the height of the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. Not superstitious at all.

Modernity is far more blatant about it’s superstitions, though. Psychic hotlines, horoscopes, astrology (lamest. thing. ever.) – sometimes it makes me wonder if we’ve really moved so far away from the days when alchemy was a legitimate scientific discipline. Nor are we free from Voltaire’s indictment regarding horrible crimes. It would be a cop-out to mention the West’s fixation with abortion and euthanasia as if they were the only real examples, either. The Nazis had an occult streak that has given fodder to popular culture that may last for generations.

Speaking of things we have in common with the Nazis, this from The Blue Boar: There was something else high on Adolf’s hate list to keep Jews and eating meat company…smoking. You heard that right – in addition to being a vegetarian (and that other thing we know him so well for), Hitler was a vehement anti-smoker.

Now, I have made my position on who I think is worse between us and the Nazis crystal clear in the past, and I stick by that claim. It just makes me more justified in saying that when we can’t even measure up to the parts of the Reich that were independently cool. They had crazy, over-produced rallys, and we’re going to be putting Obama’s weekly radio addresses on YouTube. Hitler was up front about his opinions, while we have a media obsessed with pretending that their 1% difference between division and unity is somehow meaningful and not flaming bias. Say what you will about Goering’s vices, you always knew where his allegiances lay; we have a long list of politicians who are getting to have and eat a cake that should have excommunicated them categorically long, long ago.

Bottom line: I like my evil honest. And I like its mitts off my tobacco. At least then I know it’s not ultimate evil.