COMMENT POSTED TO AN EDITORIAL IN THE GUARDIAN
The Guardian view on
the power of heresy
An idea whose time has
come: Over the holiday season the Guardian is examining themes that have
emerged to give shape to 2018. Today we look at the humanity of departing from
dogma
"... he [Martin
Luther] made “heretic” into a term of moral approval'
I can't agree with that.
Indeed, long after the Reformation, people were being burned
and tortured for heresy, the Reformation itself being the cause.
Indeed, "heresy" in one form or another keeps
rearing its ugly head.
These days it is usually a form of secular heresy, but the
basic mechanism is the same, the basic hate is the same, the basic ignorance
and superstition are the same.
The intensity of the anti-communist crusade in the United
States almost cannot be imagined unless you lived through it, as I did as a boy
and as a young man.
It left deep scars, just as did the Protestant Reformation.
And it has been echoed or repeated time and again in one
form or another.
The crashing waves of Islamophobia and anti-migrant
attitudes have done a lot of damage. In the United States, whose horrible wars
in the Middle East are the root cause of both, these waves can be felt pounding
all the way up to the White House.
We have also a close-to-lunatic form of Russo-phobia which
has taken hold, full of threats, ignorance, and hatreds.
Russia has become everything Cold warriors of the 1960s
could have wished, a country doing business with anyone and open for investment
with a highly rational approach to affairs, yet the zealots have somehow
managed to turn it into a terrible new kind of heretic. The most rational major
leader on the planet is literally portrayed in our press and by our politicians
as a devil.
Please note, that in this newspaper, too, this Russian
heresy is much repeated. As is Islamophobia in various forms. Over and over. We
also had months of echoes of American 1950s McCarthyism around imagined
heretical anti-Semitism in Corbyn’s Labour Party.
I regard it as a form of hubris to say what the author of
this piece has said. The truth is that the human condition remains largely
unchanged, and that certainly includes forms of heresy and prejudice and fear.
As Jesus said of the poor, these you have with you always.
We are little more than apes, albeit ones with larger
brains, but those larger brains give us the capacity not just to attack a
neighboring tribe but to decimate the planet, as the United States is busy at
doing this very Christmas day in many lands.
And people who describe our situation as I do are,
undoubtedly, counted as heretics by those in power and the legions who believe
what they are given to read daily.
