Episode #033 - Transcript

Thank you for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday, and I hope you love the show.

For us to truly understand who Baruch de Spinoza was, we need to put ourselves in his shoes a little bit. One thing that’s really easy to do when you’re trying to learn stuff about history is to just look at these people as though they’re some guy that you just met, some guy that you met at the mall on Saturday. See, I feel like we learn things about people, we experience their personality, and then we judge them on it. Look, I was guilty of this for a long time myself. Sometimes we don’t fully consider the fact that these people, really in some cases, might as well be from another planet than us. What frame of reference do we have when looking at somebody like Spinoza?

Like, when you look at primitive man, at least when you look at primitive man when you wonder what it must have been like to live as hunter-gatherer back then, at least we can look at modern hunter-gatherers, right? We still have remnants of them: Papua New Guinea, the Kalahari Bushmen, people like that. We coexist with hunter-gatherers. But there is nowhere on earth today that can mimic the sort of political or religious uncertainty that pervades this time period we’re talking about. And on that same note, there aren’t many places that can mimic the sort of ruthless, gruesome acts that were being committed in the name of these competing interests.

And it’s entirely complicated because there’s so much going on in the world at this time at such a rapid pace. There isn’t just one war going on. This time period can’t be characterized by something as simple as saying, you know, two religious viewpoints were butting heads for a while, or faith and reason were butting heads at this time. This intellectual war spread across the entire continent of Europe, and there were dozens of battles taking place simultaneously in this Sharknado of change that was happening. It was crazy!

This rapid change, though, is what makes this one of the most fascinating points in history to me. It really is impossible to list or describe all of the different areas that were experiencing change. And look, even if it was, I wouldn’t do it here. It’s not what this show is about. But what I can do is talk about one of these scenes that took place during Spinoza’s life that illustrates the sort of world that he would have found himself living in. This event that I’m about to describe crushed Spinoza. And it can give us some insight into how he was forced to act during his lifetime. It’ll all make sense soon. This is the story of Johan De Witt.

So, one of these battles that was going on in this larger intellectual warzone had to do with government. We’ve talked about little pieces of it before. I mean, this show is going to eventually become a lot of political discussion because it’s indicative of the time period. Things like, what is the role of government in a civilized society? How should the government implement its strategy? How coercive is it justified in being to meet its goals? Lots of questions like that. And just like in modern times where there are fights going on between special interest groups, and one special interest group may hire a lobbyist to try to influence legislation, or they might start an organization that’s dedicated to pushing forward their agenda—just like that, specific political special interest groups back in the time of Spinoza organized in a very similar way.

Not everybody wanted their government to be a republic, which was becoming an increasingly popular thing around there at the time. One of these political special interest groups was called Orangeism. Now, at first glance, Orangeism sounds pretty good. I mean, what’s wrong with oranges, really? What do you got against oranges? Well, it had nothing to do with the fruit. They were supporters of what was known as the House of Orange-Nassau. And it’s essentially just a big group of people that wanted a monarchist form of government whose sole purpose—the sole purpose of the group—was to oppose the other big political group at the time who was trying to erect a republic. The fanaticism of these people, you guys—the idea of a mob of people organizing together and willing to conspire and lie and commit terrible acts of violence against someone just for not agreeing with them about something—it’s mind-numbing to think about.

Johan De Witt was the recently deposed leader of that pro-republic political group at the time. And he was seen by some as one of the most brilliant political minds in the world. And by others he was seen as an enormous threat. See, there was this wave of change going throughout Europe. But just like many points in history where there are changes going on of this magnitude, what inevitably happens is that not everybody wants to change. No matter how bad things used to be, there were people during those bad times that highly benefited from the way it used to be. And those people usually fight pretty hard to keep things the same. They’re going to rally people. They’re going to organize. They’re going to do whatever they have to do to return things back to normal, to the place where they benefitted from it.

So, on August the 20th, 1672, they did what they had to do. The story goes that Johan De Witt was visiting his brother in prison who was being held on a charge of attempted murder. And it’s almost unanimously seen as false. But the important part is that there was a mob of people working on behalf of the House of Orange who were waiting for him when he exited the prison with his brother. There are stories of how the ringleader of this mob told the guard that was supposed to be guarding the area that two farmers were stealing stuff over in this region and that he needed to go check it out to make sure that they weren’t. But really, he was just doing it to get him out of the area so that Johan De Witt had zero chance of survival.

What happened next is one of the most horrific scenes you’ll ever read about. “The miscreants, all of them, emboldened by Johan’s fall wanted to fire his gun at him, or strike him with blows of the sledgehammer, or stab him with a knife or swords, each one wanted to draw a drop of blood from the fallen hero, and tear off a shred from his garments. Then, after having mangled, and torn, and completely stripped the two brothers, the mob dragged their naked and bloody bodies to an extemporized gibbet, where amateur executioners hung them up by the feet. Then came the most dastardly scoundrels of all, who not having dared to strike the living flesh, cut the dead in pieces, and then went about the town selling small slices of the bodies of John and Cornelius at ten sous a piece.”

This mob of people first beat and stabbed them to death. Then they stripped them down naked, hung their bodies upside down by their feet, and cut them into pieces, and then sold them around the town, sold the pieces of their body around the town. There are other accounts that you can read where they cut out their hearts, and they either ate the hearts—it’s not entirely clear what they did with the hearts—but once they cut them out, they either ate them or they put them on display at one of the ringleader’s houses on his mantle like souvenir baseballs that he caught at a baseball game. This is horrific stuff.

But let’s keep this in perspective. They did all of this stuff simply because they didn’t agree with someone. This is something that we should talk about when thinking about this time period. There are a lot of people that I’ve read that oversimplify what causes gruesome violence like this to occur. They’ll say stuff like, religion should be abolished because look at all the terrible atrocities that have been committed in the name of religion: 9/11, the Crusades, the bloodshed of the Reformation.

But what these people fail to realize is that religion is not the problem. I mean, look at this example that we’re talking about with Johan De Witt. This guy was torn apart and eaten by a mob of people for a political cause, not a religious cause. Should we abolish all forms of government because of that? Dictators have invaded countries and killed millions of people in the name of some nationalistic sentiment. You know, “We did this for the good of America.” Just like it’s possible to have a country that doesn’t commit genocide in the name of nationalism, it’s possible to have a religion that doesn’t subjugate, enslave, or kill people in the name of religion.

There’s an Indian religion that has its origins way back in the 7th century B.C. It’s called Jainism. Now, if you’re a follower of Jainism, you live by a strict principle of non-violence towards all living creatures. That’s the central tenant of the religion. That’s the ultimate good. If you’re a follower of Jainism, then you promote complete equality among all living things, and you would never even think of mobbing together and disemboweling someone, let alone flying a plane into a building in the name of Jainism.

Now, my point is not to find an exception to a rule and say that people are wrong. That’s not the point of this. My point is, if it’s possible to have a religion like Jainism—and by the way, many other religions that don’t have violent extremists attached to them—if it’s possible for those to exist, then maybe there’s something that underlies religion that’s the real problem. Maybe religion isn’t the problem. Maybe that thing, whatever it is, can also be found in all of these other things that people commit atrocities in the name of like the Orangeists from the story that we just told or the people that commit violence in the name of their country.

Maybe the real problem is man’s ability to attach themselves to a tribe and marginalize other groups of people that don’t agree with them. And if you’re someone that truly wants the violence to stop and not someone that just has an axe to grind with religion, I think you can see that abolishing religion doesn’t solve the problem. It just delays it. And we can see this in the example of Johan De Witt.

Spinoza, when he heard the news, he was absolutely devastated when it happened. Leibniz—he is the third of the great continental rationalists. You remember: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz. Leibniz was a contemporary and a friend of Spinoza. And he writes later about Spinoza telling him about the day when the mob attacked them. He describes it here, “I spent several hours with Spinoza after dinner. He said to me that on the day of the massacres of the De Witts, he wanted to go out at night and post a placard near the side of the massacres reading ‘Ultimi Barborum.’ But his host locked the house to keep him from going out, for he would be exposed to being torn to pieces.”

So, Spinoza was so angry at these people, so mad at them for massacring what he called reason itself that he painted what amounted to a giant piece of poster board and wanted to post it at the murder site calling the mob the most ruthless barbarians imaginable. And the only reason he didn’t do it is because his landlord locked him in his house and wouldn’t let him out because he didn’t want him to get killed doing it. That landlord may be the sole reason I’m recording this episode right now. It’s crazy to think about.

But this story—this story really encapsulates the character of Spinoza throughout his entire life: dedicated to reason, strong, stood by his beliefs no matter the cost; living in a world full of people who were not his intellectual equal—you know, there were groups of people willing to commit terrible acts of violence against people that only disagreed with them—and Spinoza had beliefs that disagreed with almost everybody. But more than that, Spinoza embodies what this whole time period was about. I mean, the way he made his living was by grinding lenses for microscopes and telescopes. That’s how he made his living throughout his life. It would eventually kill him, as we’ll talk about later. But there is no job that is more Scientific Revolution-y than that. If you were making a movie about someone from the Scientific Revolution and this occupation was lens-grinder, the writers of that movie would tell you no, no, that’s not believable at all. It’s too over the top. You’re trying too hard to make this guy Scientific Revolution. Stop.

Spinoza grew up Jewish. He was a proud, card-carrying member of a community of Portuguese Jews living in Amsterdam at the time. And then at the age of 22 his father died, and things changed for Spinoza. For a long time he kept his opinions quiet because he didn’t want to embarrass his dad. But now that he was dead, all bets are off. Couple that with the fact that he was living during the time of the Spanish Inquisition, which really created a pretty interesting and complex situation for you if you were either Jewish or a member of any Jewish community’s religious authority. I mean, above all else, they wanted to keep Spinoza quiet. That was the main goal.

See, Spinoza had this long upbringing. This would be about the equivalent of going to Catholic school in modern times. He talks about it being this long, monotonous slog through the Jewish religious texts and the Old Testament. And what eventually happens is, Spinoza thinks the story is a little bit childish. He’s not buying it. He said that this God that’s portrayed in the Old Testament—how can anybody honestly believe that this is true? And if it is true, is this the God that you really want to exist under? No. To Spinoza, God is nothing like this.

What, what some guys wrote about in this really old book that you guys are all following? Spinoza thought that whoever wrote the Torah really wasn’t a bad person. They understandably had no idea about science or cosmology as they did in his time. So, let’s not pretend like they did. He said that these miracles that are written about are most likely just natural events that were misunderstood by humans and then recorded to be supernatural acts to give credence to the set of behaviors that are attached to them.

He laughs about the fact that, how could God ever be relegated to a human form? You know, very reminiscent of Maimonides, and they’re both Jewish thinkers. So there’s no doubt he read him. You know, God didn’t say, “Let there be light.” He doesn’t have a larynx; he doesn’t have vocal cords. He can’t say anything. He doesn’t have a hand that reaches down and touches you in your life. No, God is much, much more than that to Spinoza. God is an infinite being that could never be described in these sorts of human terms.

Now, we’re going to do a whole episode on Spinoza’s God because it’s an incredibly fascinating and useful worldview. But the significance of this right now is that with views like this, he obviously wasn’t fitting into his community very well, especially one that has the Spanish Inquisition going on. And they’d love it if he would just keep his mouth shut. You know, he’s saying all this stuff, and the authority at the Synagogue would just say, “Just, come on, Spinoza. Keep it down a bit, please. Just don’t say anything.” But he wasn’t going to keep it down anymore.

Spinoza was a man of his convictions. That’s what I love about him. They wanted him to be quiet so badly that in his 20s they offered him 1,000 florins a month to just not make his opinions known about stuff, just to stay quiet. Now, just for some perspective, most people were living back then off of about 2,500 florins a year. So, 1,000 florins a month is similar to being paid like a 6-figure salary in today’s world just to keep your mouth shut. Spinoza turned it down. No, instead what he decided to do is send the Jewish authorities a comprehensive, mathematical, structured outline of all of his views, what they were, and how they are, in his opinion, irrefutable because they are as self-evident as the mathematical truth that a triangle has 3 angles that equal 180 degrees. They were that irrefutable.

He left them with no choice. In July of 1656, they did this completely ridiculous ritual where they blow the great horn. They’re all holding candles in a circle, and they put the candles out one by one. And then they literally tried to curse him. Like, they read this really cryptically worded, scary-sounding passage that hereby banished Spinoza from his community in Amsterdam. Nobody is allowed to help him. Nobody is allowed to talk to him. He is a marked person who is just not part of their group anymore.

What followed for Spinoza was a life of mostly solitude. Some people say that there were stretches where you wouldn’t even see him for three months. People write about that. He himself tells stories about being in solitude. He said he used to sit around and collect spiders and then pit them against each other in the ring and have them fight each other. He talks about collecting flies and then putting one inside of a spider’s web and just watching it try to struggle to get away and the spider eating it. And he would just laugh maniacally watching this fly get devoured. I mean, if Spinoza lived today, he could just watch animal planet. He wouldn’t have to be all weird about it. But it’s interesting to think about how lonely it must have felt to be so intelligent, surrounded by people that mostly can’t relate to you. What do you do with your time?

But he tried his hardest. He wasn’t a complete recluse. He did write a lot of letters throughout his life. And one of the most famous and one of the most illuminating of Spinoza and the way that he thought about things is one with an old friend of his named Albert Burgh. See, before Spinoza was excommunicated, he was really good friends with this guy Albert. But eventually they went their separate ways—Spinoza to a life of solitude, and Albert became a Christian. Well, eventually, Albert gets word through the grapevine about how godless and terrible Spinoza’s views on existence were. And he takes it upon himself to send him a letter. He claims to be doing the Lord’s work, and he’s trying to get him to become a Christian. He’s trying to convince him.

He spends a lot of the letter attacking Spinoza’s views and giving the best argument he can for why Christianity is the best choice and why Spinoza should really abandon this rootless, selfish existence and join the Church of Rome like he did. Now, I’m going to read an excerpt from the letter, and just put yourself in Spinoza’s shoes as he’s reading this. I mean, just listen to the arrogance in this guy. Just imagine getting a letter from what used to be your best friend, and now they’re condemning you and making you feel as though you’re inferior to them with every sentence.

Alright, here’s what Albert’s letter closes with: “I have written this letter to you with intentions truly Christian; first, in order to show the love I bear to you, though you are a heathen; secondly, in order to beg you not to persist in converting others.

“I therefore will thus conclude: God is willing to snatch your soul from eternal damnation, if you allow him. Do not doubt that the Master, who has called you so often through others, is now calling you for the last time through me, who having obtained grace from the ineffable mercy of God Himself, beg the same for you in my whole heart. Do not deny me. For if you do not now give ear to God who calls you, the wrath of the Lord will be kindled against you, and there is a danger of your being abandoned by His infinite mercy, and becoming a wretched victim of the Divine Justice which consumes all things in wrath. Such a fate may Almighty God avert for the greater glory of his name, and for the salvation of your soul, also for a salutary example for the imitation of your most unfortunate and idolatrous followers, through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, Who with the Eternal Father liveth and reigneth in the Unity of the Holy Spirit, God for all Eternity. Amen.”

So, like I said before, we can all imagine how insulted Spinoza must have felt, especially if we consider that he sees all of these religions as ultimately being the same thing. And even one that was crammed into his head throughout his youth—even that wasn’t good enough for him. Listening to this old friend tell him how lucky he is that God is gracing him with one last chance to accept the narrative, listening to him end the letter like he’s ending a Sunday Mass or something—God for all Eternity. Amen—this must have made Spinoza crazy, really. So, Spinoza replies back to Albert. And he both categorically destroys all of the arguments that Albert lays out in his letter—there’s a lot before that where he argues for Christianity—and he does it while mixing in sarcasm that’s still funny 400 years later.

This is the first thing that he says back to him. This is the first part of his reply to Albert. He says, “That which I could scarcely believe when told me by others, I learn at last from your own letter; not only have you been made a member of the Romish Church, but you’ve become a very keen champion of the same, and have already learnt wantonly to insult and rail against your opponents….

“Yet you seem to wish to employ reason, and ask me, ‘How I know that my philosophy is the best among all that have ever been taught in the world, or are being taught, or will ever be taught?’ a question I have a greater right to ask you; for I do not presume that I have found the best philosophy, I know that I understand the true philosophy. If you ask in what way I know it, I answer: In the same way as you know that three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles: that this is sufficient, will be denied by no one whose brain is sound, and who does not go dreaming of evil spirits inspiring us with false ideas like the true. For the truth is the index of itself and what is false.

“But you; who presume that you have at last found the best religion, or rather the best men, on whom you have pinned your credulity, you, ‘who know that they are the best among all who have taught, do now teach, or shall in the future with other religions. Have you examined all religions, ancient as well as modern, taught here and in India and everywhere throughout the world? And, if you have dually examined them, how do you know that you have chosen the best’ since you can give no reason for the faith that is in you? But you will say, that you acquiesce in the inward testimony of the Spirit of God, while the rest of us mankind are ensnared and deceived by the prince of evil spirits. But all those outside of the pale of the Church of Rome can with equal right proclaim of their own creed what you proclaim of yours.”

Reading this letter from a guy that lived in the 1600s, I mean, it’s just incredible to me. Spinoza was an unquestionable genius. I would highly recommend reading these letters. They’re not very long. If you got a couple minutes, it’s a good read. I’ll have them on the website this week. I’ll post links to them on the episode page. But just so that we can get a little more insight into the human being that was Baruch de Spinoza, let’s talk about one of the arguments that Albert gives him citing the legitimacy of Christianity over all the other religions. He gives several. This is the one that Spinoza thinks has the most merit.

So, Albert says that the reason why Christianity is better than all the other religions to him is that it spread faster than any other religion. And it was spread at that rate by a bunch of uneducated Hebrews. Now, the point that Albert’s making is that the success of something like that can’t just be sophistry or wordplay. The spread of Christianity can’t be summed up by some charismatic priest that’s a little bit smarter than everybody, standing up there and just outwitting them and using his charisma to spread the religion. There must be some divine backing to this one. That’s Albert’s point.

Spinoza responds to this here: “If, therefore, you had rightly judged, you would have seen that only your third point tells in favor of the Christians, namely, that unlearned and common men should have been able to convert nearly the whole world to a belief in Christ. But this reason militates not only for the Romish Church, but for all those who profess in the name of Christ.

“But assume that all the reasons you bring forward tell in favor solely of the Romish Church. Do you think that you can thereby prove mathematically the authority of that Church? As the case is far otherwise, why do you wish me to believe that my demonstrations are inspired by the prince of evil spirits, while your own are inspired by God, especially as I see, and as your letter clearly shows, that you have been led to become a devotee of this church not by your love of God, but by your fear of hell, the single cause of superstition? Is this your humility, that you trust nothing to yourself, but everything to others, who are condemned by many of their fellow men? Do you set it down to pride and arrogance, that I employ reason and acquiesce in this true Word of God, which is in the mind and can never be depraved or corrupted? Cast away this deadly superstition, acknowledge the reason which God has given you, and follow that, unless you will be numbered with the brutes.”

So, if there’s something we can take from this episode aside from diving into the intellect and person that was Spinoza, what we should take from this is that the world Spinoza was living in, the world of the Scientific Revolution we’ve been talking about, was both a welcoming place to new ideas and a potentially very dangerous place for new ideas. The fact that just holding different opinions than somebody could have you ripped limb from limb or cut into pieces and sold around town in small chunks—that dynamic is ultimately what forced Spinoza to never release his principal work called Ethics.

He died in 1677. A lot of people say it was a lung condition from inhaling all the glass from grinding lenses all those years. In that very same year in 1677, his friends released the Ethics after he was dead. Now, you may be wondering, why do I care about some random dude from the 1600s and his interpretation of what God is? Well, let me leave you today with a question. If a belief in the Christian or Jewish God justifies a certain set of behaviors, what set of behaviors would Spinoza’s God justify? If we as humans are not all individual, unique snowflakes with a God that knows our first name and cares about us, what are we? What does that make us? And what does that mean about how we should act on this mortal coil?

Thank you for listening. I’ll talk to you next time.