"O Tempora O Mores!" Oh Please!

"O tempora o mores!" is a quote from Cicero (106-43 BC), the boring old gasbag who somehow became the single most well-respected writer in Latin and has remained that way for thousands of years. It translates to "Oh, the times! Oh, the customs!" and it means, basically: "Oh, how our civilization has fallen from what it once was!" Or, to put it another way: "Let's make Rome great again!" It has been a very popular saying from Cicero's time down to ours because there has never been a shortage of boring old farts complaining about these kids these days with their hair and their clothes and pining for the supposedly good old days.

I don't deny that Cicero was an effective politician, I just don't find him to be a very effective writer. Put it this way: I think Sallust's accounts of Cicero's actions are much better-written and more edifying than Cicero's own accounts of himself, and I think it's a real shame that dozens of times more of Cicero's writing has survived than Sallust's.

I realize that I'm in an extreme minority position with my dislike of Cicero the writer. I realize this, and I'm trying to keep an open mind about it. If I'm completely wrong about Cicero, it wouldn't be the first time someone had stubbornly clung to a completely-wrong position about something for a long time. (Not that that's any excuse.)

It has often been said that the study of human history is a study of horrors, and to a great extent this is true: history records a great number of wars, famines, plagues, murders, deceptions, betrayals, a great deal of cruelty, cowardice, stupidity -- a whole lot of Very Bad Things. That has been said, and to a very great extent it is true. It may seem strange when I say that studying all of these things can be very encouraging, but that is also true, if it leads one to the realization that, however bad things are at the present, they were in earlier times even worse. In other words, progress is being made.

Progress is a fairly new concept in human thought, barely a couple of centuries old. Cicero was hardly unusually in ancient times in his belief that civilization had sharply declined from a glorious past. A few centuries ago, some people started to notice that things changed, and that some changes were good. Then, what with world wars and genocides, many people found the idea of progress ridiculous. It may be that it is, ironically, mostly confined to circles of capitalists who are making things worse for humanity, what with pollution, global warming, mass extinctions of plant and animal species, the continuous struggle to squeeze more and more out of poor people, etc, etc. It may seem downright quaint that I am both a Leftist and optimistic.

But look at some historical evidence. Yes, exploitation is still with us -- but slavery is almost gone, and social support has grown greatly over the past two centuries, even in the US where so many people are terrified of the word "socialism," not realizing that all it means is a lot of things they're in favor of. Yes, pollution and global warming are very bad -- but the use of petroleum can be reduced to almost none, any time we decide to convert to solar/wind/tidal/geothermal/etc. We have the technology. We can make us better than we was. Call me quaint if you want to, but what should we call people who call themselves Progressives but who have great difficulty seeing progress? Historically illiterate, perhaps.

We must keep in mind that the study of history can distort things greatly if it is poorly done. And there are all sorts of ways in which it can be poorly done. One of these is to fail to grasp the selectivity of history. Vincent Van Gogh's painting are well-liked today. During his own lifetime, only a few of them were sold, and not for very much money. Not nearly enough to to make a living for a single person for the years in which Van Gogh did nothing but paint.

Everybody knows that much. What is probably a little less well--established in people's minds today is the art which was popular and which sold for high prices during those same years when Van Gogh was failing to sell his, and which has been forgotten in the meantime.

The physics of Einstein and Planck and Bohr and Heisenberg is well-known today. Alfred O'Rahilly (1884-1969) is much less well-known today, but this contemporary of Einstein was one of the most highly-respected theoretical physicists of their day. He became the the President of University College Cork in 1943. And he completely rejected Einstein's theory of relativity, championing instead the theories of Walther Ritz (1878-1909), of whom you've probably also never heard. O'Rahilly also believed that the theory of evolution did not apply to humans. And he and Ritz have been forgotten, along with a great many other scientists of their time who rejected the ideas either of Einstein or of Darwin or both.

We know that the academic authorities of Bruno's time opposed him sharply -- do you know any of those influential people's names? How about the names of the academics who made life difficult for Galileo? Or those who ran the University of Glasgow and refused to approve Hume's appointment to a professorship there?

Lincoln's speeches are still printed and read. Stephen Douglas' -- much less so.

Who today knows the names of the people on the Pulitzer prize board of directors who overturned the unanimous choice of the fiction panel who in 1974 had decided to award the Pulitzer in fiction to Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow? Were they the same ones who, 2 years later, approved the awarding of the Pulitzer to Humboldt's Gift, the one and only novel of Saul Bellow's which savagely and hilariously mocks the Pulitzers? (Bellow, as editor of the journal The Noble Savage, was one of Pynchon's first publishers, printing an excerpt from his novel-then-in-progress V in 1961 under the title "Under the Rose." Is it a complete coincidence that Von Humboldt Fleischer appeared in print dissing the Pulitzers so soon after the Pulitzers had dissed Pynchon?)

The passage of time sifts things. And so, many of the more senseless and horrid aspects of the past are forgotten. And so fools call the past "the good old days."

(Yes, I'm aware that my opinion of the quality of Cicero's writing combined with the stupendous endurance of his popularity as a writer completely contradicts the rest of this post. I'm aware of that. There are exceptions to rules.)

The Academics Haven't Convinced Me That Jesus Existed. With Very Few Exceptions, They Haven't Convinced Me That They've Really Begun To Investigate The Matter

Here we go again, round and round and round, getting all worked up, getting nowhere. Isn't it all just perfectly dreadful.

Historicists, people who believe that Jesus of Nazareth existed, including many atheists who don't believe any of the New Testament stories of supernatural things, often correctly point out that the great majority of academics are historicists. And they often correctly point out that most of the mythicists, the people who have doubts about Jesus' existence, are amateurs, and often do a spectacularly poor job of making the case that it's less than certain that Jesus existed. To be clear: mythicists don't merely doubt the supernatural stories about Jesus. They (we) are not convinced that those stories are even based on a real person, named Jesus, who came from Nazareth. We figure: so much of the New Testament is clearly legend, the existence of Jesus might be just one more legendary detail -- a rather small detail when one considers the proportional of legend in the New Testament.

I agree that there are a lot of zany mythicists. I've criticized some of them so harshly in this blog that some of them, apparently having stopped reading before the end of one post or another, have assumed that I am an historicist, or even a very devout Christian. So, for the billionth time and the 2nd time in this post: I'm an atheist and I'm not convinced that Jesus existed.

Yes, I've criticized some mythicists very harshly. I've also pointed out that the fact that some of them argue the mythicist case very poorly says nothing at all about the soundness or unsoundness of the case itself, the soundness or unsoundness of the position: it is not certain that Jesus existed.

There must be a term in formal logic for this sort of fallacy: the fact that A argues the case for 1 poorly does not say anything about the soundness or unsoundness of 1. Whatever logicians would call this fallacy, it's the primary argument of the historians.

Surprisingly, historicists who are also academic specialists in Biblical studies very often assert that the evidence for Jesus' existence is more extensive and solid than the evidence for the existence of Socrates or Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great. Surprisingly, because it's so obviously wrong: we have writings from 3 of Socrates' contemporaries, compared to 0 for Jesus. Besides Caesar's own writings we have those of his contemporaries Cicero and Sallust. We have likenesses of Socrates and Caesar and Alexander in the form of sculptures which were obviously based on real people. We know what each of them looked like. Not so with Jesus. And in the case of Caesar and Alexander there's the little detail of them having been the leaders of huge armies and huge states, which means that huge numbers of people would have had to have been silent about them being fictional.

And you know what? Just like the historicists pointing out unsound mythicist arguments doesn't prove that Jesus existed, my pointing out unsound historicist arguments doesn't prove he didn't exist. Far and wide here, no one is proving anything one way or another about whether Jesus existed.

Still, the fact that the academic consensus that Jesus existed is so solid impresses many people. And the consensus shouldn't just be dismissed. However, it is not quite proper to compare mythicists, people who challenge that consensus, to global warming deniers and Holocaust deniers, people who oppose the consensus of climatologists and historians of the 20th century respectively, as Bart Ehrman has done, because Biblical studies is not exactly the same as climatology and 20th century history. Biblical studies is problematic, as scholars say when they suspect that some nonsense may be afoot, screwing up the work of serious people. Biblical studies is not always distinguishable from theology: sometimes a person whom everyone would think of as a Biblical scholar has diplomas which say that his or specialty is theology, and sometimes a theologian has diplomas which say that he or she is a Biblical scholar. There is a certain amount of overlap.

And theology is certainly not at all like 20th century history or climatology. It simply isn't, and if you want to insist that it is, I have nothing to say to you about it. Instead, I'm trying to communicate with serious people here.

Christians theologians are the people who made the Dark Ages dark, who wiped out pagan religions, who tortured and killed fellow Christians for not being the proper sort of Christians and not believing the correct things about the way the world was. They imprisoned Roger Bacon, over academic differences. They killed people for saying that they believed Copernicus' theories. They threatened to torture Galileo, and kept him under house arrest for the last several years of his life. All over academic differences. They condemned Darwin's theories when they were new, although by that time, the mid-19th century, they were no longer allowed to torture and kill the people who disagreed with them. They were slow to come around concerning 20th- and 21stcentury physics. They're still interfering with stem-cell research.

I'm not claiming that present-day theologians want to torture and kill people who disagree with them. (Not all of them.) I also don't deny that, although they're very opposed to even discussing the question of whether or not Jesus existed, most of them presently do acknowledge that Adam and Eve and Noah and Abraham are mythical figures. Most of them. Many have even stopped arguing altogether for the existence of Moses.

But they haven't led the way in academic consensus, they've never been cutting edge and they're still not.

That's the theologians, though. Not the Biblical scholars, the very ones who have dismantled our belief in the literal truth of the earlier stories in the Bible, the very ones who've shown us that Bible, supposedly the inalterable word of God, has indeed gone through some revisions over the course of centuries.

Except that you can't always tell who's one and who's the other, who's a theologian and who's a Biblical scholar, and who's partly both. Except that sometimes it seems that the theology still corrupts almost every single scholar in the field. Times such as when people try to discuss Jesus' historicity, and the scholars almost all insist that that already has been thoroughly studied, and that Jesus' historicity has been solidly proven. And even more so when many of them go even farther than that and needlessly insult people for thinking that there could be any doubt, for merely wanting to discuss the question. I get a really unpleasant sense of being in the presence of traditionally-Christian, Medieval attitudes at such times.

Nobody's proven anything here. The academics haven't proven that Jesus existed. Not to me, anyway. Not yet. I certainly haven't proven that Jesus was made up by St Paul or someone else. But maybe, just possibly, I've gotten one or two people to begin to wonder whether the academic Biblical scholars sometimes cease to behave like 21st-century academics in fields like meteorology or chemistry or 20th-century history or physics or Classical studies or math, and begin to get a little Medieval, when the question of the Historical Jesus is brought up.