Exceptional Exceptionalism

American Exceptionalism has been a topic of Presidential campaign speeches and debates recently. Candidate Mitt Romney says he believes in Exceptionalism. Candidate Barack Obama seems to prefer the term "indispensable," which is a more diplomatic term.

The United States of America is hardly the first nation to think that it is exceptional: that it is blessed by God above all other nations, and that therefore it can do no wrong. Famously the Jews, in the ancient nations of Israel and Judah, made the same claim. That did not prevent them from being enslaved in Babylon. A few centuries later the Romans kicked them out of Jerusalem. Those remaining in Palestine mostly converted to Islam by 700 A.D.

Americans have done a lot better than the Jews, so far. Our founding fathers preferred to see us as a future Roman empire, only with as a Republic. By 1776 generations of Euro-Americans and African-Americans had died in this "new" continent. The survivors were a healthy, aggressive, rapidly breeding lot that eventually got us to where we are today.

The problem with Exceptionalism is that it glosses over real causes and effects. If America is exceptional, why? Could we lose our exceptional status?

Education, in the most general sense of preferring knowledge to ignorance, was a key generator of the wealth of this nation. Many of the founding fathers were highly educated men, and among other things they saw to the founding or expansion of a number of colleges and lower schools. Federal lands were set aside specifically to finance schools in the new territories to the west. Free public schooling became a foundation of both our democracy and our economy. By the 1850's Americans were among the world's best educated people. Between 1850 and 1910 American inventors, educators, and scientists joined with workers and businessmen to create the first economy that was not powered mainly by human sweat.

In the 1990's however, the U.S. education system began slipping into a steep decline. Can America remain exceptional if it has a sub-par education system?

Look at other nations that thought they were exceptional if you want to learn a thing or two. The prior most exceptional nation before the U.S. clawed its way to the top during the aftermath of World War II was Great Britain, aka England or the British Empire.

The Brits were sure they were favored by God. Their soldiers and bullets made the idea hard to argue with. The Sun never set on the British Empire. Until it did.

A promoter of American Exceptionalism might want to ask: how did the Brits loose their exceptional status? Idiots may think a capricious God just decided to punish the Brits for some slight, but policy makers should look for real world causes.

The main obvious difference between the British Empire and the global dominance of the United States was that the Brits ruled over people through colonies, while the U.S. has largely maintained a business empire in which we depend on puppet governments to rule our "allied" nations.

You might argue that God, or macroeconomics, favors the American System over the more old-fashioned British Imperialism. But I think you would be wrong. The baton was not passed from the British to the Americans because we perfected "soft" imperialism.

America took over the British Empire, and it was a well-planned maneuver, executed over decades. We did it with what can only be called exquisite timing. We encouraged the European great nations to fight each other, and we even encouraged the Japanese and Chinese to fight each other. [As my dad, a former Marine Corps intelligence officer, liked to say: "Let's you and him fight."]

In both World War I and World War II the U.S. lent money to the belligerent nations so they could buy U.S. goods (including weapons). Then when they were weakened and indebted to us we chose a side (the Brits in both wars), went in, and with the loss of relatively few men became leaders of the victory camp. More importantly, our economy was strengthened by each war, while those of the other nations were weakened.

In particular, in World War II the Germans destroyed British and Russian factories. The British destroyed German factories. The Japanese destroyed Chinese factories, and the U.S. destroyed Japanese factories (and helped destroy German factories).

At the end of World War II, we had the factories. We had mines, and we had a vast agricultural system. We also had the atomic bomb. We did not need God on our side. We just needed the British Empire to close up shop. After India and Pakistan became independent in 1947, we really just had to use our economic power to mop up. We also mopped up most of the colonies that had belonged to the Netherlands and France, and we sent Douglas MacArthur to play God in Japan.

The Communists tried to ruin it for us, and ran some nice nationalist revolutions here and there, and even defeated America's military might in Vietnam. But America's empire gave us so much economic muscle that the Soviets just ran themselves into the ground. They sought world dominion, but could not even conquer Afghanistan. Their economy choked on their vast military machine.

The dark reality is that you have to work hard to be exceptional. It isn't a gift from the gods. If you have years of drought, your agricultural output will not be exceptional. If you teach Genesis instead of Evolution in the schools, your engineers and scientists will not be exceptional. If you don't have air superiority, your armies will not be exceptional.

And if China or Germany has more and better factories than the United States, then like the British Empire and the Dutch Empire (and Ottoman Empire and French Empire, and Spanish Empire) before us, the larger our military is, the less exceptional we will become.

Personally, I am looking forward to a Return to Normalcy.

Jesus, Dagon and Mitt Romney

Now is one of those rare times when people are interested in talking not just about religion, but about how religions arise in the first place. In particular people are talking about the Mormons, as represented by their largest denomination, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Mormon men believe that they can become Gods, and so for Mitt Romney the White House is just a stepping stone to ruling, as a God, his own planet. At the same time Mitt and the Mormons want protective coloring, the acceptance that theirs is a legitimate religion within the broad Christian spectrum.

The Christians themselves went through that process within the Roman Empire. That empire was already in intellectual decline by the time Jesus is believed to have been born. The Greeks of three to four hundred years earlier, or at least their intellectual class, was cultivating science and philosophy, trying to distinguish those from religious mythology. Religion, however, is a useful tool for rulers. Julius Caesar, who died in 44 B.C., had been declared a living God, a sign of both his power and his need to prop up his power with superstition.

In Palestine in that (post-Caesar) era the Romans ruled over a fragmented, multi-ethnic, multi-religious culture. Although the Jews had been a leading tribe in the area for over a thousand years, even before the Romans came they still had large numbers of non-Jews residing in the area. Recall that the Romans took over Judea in 63 B.C., and that the Jewish state had rarely been independent, but had been previously part of the Egyptian, Assyrian, and Macedonian/Seleucid empires.

Given that Egyptians, Canaanites of various sorts, Jews (who had their own various sects), Greeks, and various Arab tribes all mingled in the area of Palestine around the time of Jesus and the formation of the original Christian movement, it should not be surprising that, whatever Jesus himself believed or taught, the early Christians had many possible sources of influence. The crucial differences between early Christianity and the Jewish beliefs of that era was the promise of personal resurrection, or immortality, based on the belief that Jesus was not just the Messiah, but was a god, or the Son of God.

This actually just brought the Christian religion into conformity with the dominant pagan religions of that era, all of which worshipped resurrected gods: the Egyptian Osiris, the Greek gods Hercules and Dionysus, and several resurrection cults closer to home, with god-names varying by ethnic group. Anthropologists generally agree that resurrected gods are associated with agricultural societies that made a ritual of the harvest of grain and its resurrection from seeds each spring.

Possibly the main historical event of the early Christian Church, other than the life and death of its founder, was the Destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D./C.E. If the earliest Christians were divided as to whether Jesus had been a Jewish Messiah or a Canaanite resurrected god, that destruction of the Jewish state, which would not be resurrected for 1900 years, settled the question. Whatever Jesus was, he was not the Messiah who would make Judah an independent state again.

The New Testament is self-disproving: it has one clear prophecy made by Jesus (Matthew 24:34): "This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled." The generation did pass, and nothing was fulfilled. To survive Christianity needed a belief system and a structure that could perpetuate itself without divine intervention. The Christians never took over the old Jewish kingdom, but they did eventually take over the Roman Empire.

Which brings us to fish. There is no plant or animal more closely associated with Jesus Christ and the early Christians than fish. Fish are everywhere in the New Testament. Jesus's favorite recruits as Apostles are fishermen. One of his most important miracles is the multiplication of fishes. Early Christians used the fish symbol more than they used the cross. Jesus also displayed the powers of a sea god by calming the seas and walking on water.

That points to Dagon (which has many spelling variations), who the Jews believed was a fish god. He was also a resurrected god, probably originally a grain god who became associated with fishing later. The Jews claimed they destroyed him with the Ark of the Covenant, but more likely that is just a symbol of a period of successful ethnic cleansing (I do not mean to pick on the Jews here. Back then ethnic cleansing was an almost universal human practice).

This raises an important question: was Jesus really Jewish, and it so, how so?

How many of the Twelve Apostles were fishermen? It is hard to say because the list of Apostle names differs somewhat in each of the four gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) [See Apostles for tables]. Only Simon Peter and his brother Andrew are specifically identified as fishermen from Bethsaida in Galilee, and Philip is also from Bethsaida. James and John abandon their nets to follow Jesus, so that would be at least five out of twelve. The prior occupations of most of the other apostles are not mentioned. The apostles were supposed to have been Jews, but were just as likely to have Greek names.

Jesus himself is "of Nazareth." Nazareth was nowhere. It was, at best, a town so small that the Jews did not include it in maps or lists of town names during Jesus's era. Nazareth was about halfway between the southern tip of the Sea of Galilee and the Mediterranean coast. A thousand years before Jesus it had been occupied by the Jewish tribe of Zebulun, but that was one of the Lost Tribes of Israel.

Even if Jesus was a Jew, some his neighbors probably were not. They were Palestinians of some ancient tribe, and Dagon was one of their gods. Jesus grew up north of the areas controlled by Samaritans, who thought the Jews of Jerusalem were innovators who brought back a false version of the old religion when they returned from the Babylonian Exile. In Jesus's time the Samaritans and Jews hated each other, the Jews having destroyed the Samaritans temple in 110 B.C.

The Jewish rebellion against Rome that started in 66 A.D. was not the wholesale rising of a united people against a foreign oppressor. Only a few Jewish cities, notably Jerusalem, actually fought the Romans. Many Jews were expelled by the Romans, though many remained. Most of the inhabitants of the area would later convert to Islam, including the ancient Jewish villagers. Christianity arose in this chaotic context and fragmented deeply. The Apostle Paul was self-appointed. His version of Christianity conflicted, by his own admission, with version of the Jewish Christian leaders in Jerusalem. It also conflicted with the many other self-appointed preachers who brought the idea of communal living and tithing to support ministers to whoever would pitch in. By 100 A.D. the original Christians were probably all or mostly dead and the fight for the intellectual property, the magic formula for converting pagans to cash cows, was full on.

It's all very fishy. I like the Dagon Hypothesis. If Jesus was a non-Jewish or semi-Jewish Palestinian who tried to convert the Jews to Dagon's ways, it all almost makes some sense.