The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (3 page)

Now, hold on, I mean that in a fairly literal way. Let me explain.

The notion that the center is a place of privilege and esteem has a very long pedigree, with a somewhat anti-Catholic bias. For instance, you may have heard that Galileo dealt the Western, Christian mind a devastating blow when he confirmed that Copernicus was right. The Earth revolves around the Sun and the Sun is at the center of the solar system (i.e., heliocentrism). John Bargh, a scientist at Yale, says in David Brooks’s
The Social Animal
that Galileo “removed the Earth from its privileged position at the center of the universe.” The
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
tells us that the “[d]ethronement of Earth from the center of the universe caused profound shock.” The less reliable but more relied upon Wikipedia agrees: “[T]he transition between these two theories met much resistance, not only from the Catholic Church, which was reluctant to accept
a theory not placing God’s creation at the center of the universe, but also from those who saw geocentrism as a fact that could not be subverted by a new, weakly justified theory.” Get that? The Church opposed heliocentrism because it couldn’t handle man’s “dethronement” from the center of the universe; meanwhile, other, more sensible, opponents objected because they thought the science was weak. Inconceivable that the Church might have thought the science was weak, too.

This history has it exactly backward. The Church did not consider the “center of the universe” to be a place of privilege. That is a modern conceit. Before Copernicus the consensus among Western scientists and theologians was, in accordance with Aristotle, that the Earth was either at, or was, the anal aperture of the universe, literally.

In 1486, Giovanni Pico, a leading philosopher of the Italian Renaissance, penned his
Oration on the Dignity of Man
, commonly referred to as the manifesto of the Italian Renaissance. In it he observed that the Earth resided in “the excremetary and filthy parts of the lower world.” Two centuries earlier, Thomas Aquinas concluded that “in the universe, the earth—that all the spheres encircle and that, as for place, lies in the center—is the most material and coarsest of all bodies.” In Dante’s
Inferno
, the lowest pit of Hell is at the exact center of the planet, which historian Dennis R. Danielson describes as the “dead center of the whole universe.”
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Pre-Copernican cosmology, in short, didn’t see the center of the universe as a place of privilege and esteem but as a lowly, dirty, filthy place. Think of it this way: The modern mind thinks in latitudes, left and right, forward and backward. The medieval mind saw things in terms of up and down. Aristotle observed that the heavier and coarser things tended to accumulate at the bottom, or center. As in the human body, the bowels and viscera are at the center. As you move up you reach the noble organ, the heart. And the mind resides at the top. The celestial heavens and stars were
above
. Humanity was
below
, in the coarse center. This was not simply or solely a Christian view. Moses Maimonides, the greatest of medieval Jewish philosophers, insisted that “in the case of the Universe… the nearer the parts are to the center, the greater is their turbidness, their solidity, their inertness, their dimness and darkness, because they are further away from the loftiest element, from the source of light and brightness.”

Dennis R. Danielson, who has tracked the history of this myth, suggests that it begins with the seventeenth-century dramatist Cyrano de Bergerac. He claimed that pre-Copernican geocentrism was a testament to “the insupportable arrogance of Mankinde, which fancies, [
sic
] that Nature was only created to serve it.” In 1686, the French writer Bernard le Bouvier de Fontenelle hailed Copernicus for taking the Earth and throwing it “out of the center of the World.” According to de Fontenelle, Copernicus sought to “abate the Vanity of men who had thrust themselves into the chief place of the Universe.”
⁴

It took a long time to make a scientifically persuasive case that the Earth isn’t the center of the universe and that it revolves around the Sun. If you can’t sympathize with that, please stop referring to the rising and setting of the sun across our sky, since we are the ones moving, not it. The theological reason men stuck with the old scientific paradigm had nothing to do with arrogance and everything to do with humility.

And there’s the rub. The real arrogance here is on the part of those who see the past as populated with unsophisticated bumpkins, as if ignorance of scientific truth is the same thing as stupidity. But if in fifty years it’s discovered that there’s life on Mars, does that mean future generations can look at us today and legitimately say, “Look at those idiots, they didn’t even know there was life on Mars”?

We find the same sort of bias in glib assertions about “flat-earthism.” We’ve all heard about how Columbus proved to the skeptics that the world was round (the basis for one of my favorite Bugs Bunny cartoons). It’s not true, as we will see in a moment. But first of all, is it really so crazy that people five hundred or a thousand years ago might have thought the world was flat? Really? Cut some slack for the people who lived without powerful telescopes, satellites, and the rest for at least considering this a somewhat open question. Anyway, it’s simply not true that medieval Christianity taught that the world is flat. This myth, like many others discussed later in this book, stems from the biases of Protestant historians in the nineteenth century, who were eager to paint the Catholic Church as a giant wet blanket on scientific and human progress (see
Chapter 21
, The Catholic Church). Hence the myth that the Church tortured and imprisoned Galileo for his confirmation of Copernicus’s findings. There’s a legitimate question of whether he was in a jail cell for
three days—or not at all. But he certainly wasn’t tortured. More important, the people who most ardently clamored for the Church to silence and punish Galileo were his jealous, lesser, scientific colleagues, not the theologians. When Galileo’s heretical
Starry Messenger
was released, the Vatican threw a huge book party for him.
⁵

“The principal truth to be drawn from the Galileo story is less dramatic than is the myth,” Robert Nisbet wrote in his 1983 masterpiece
Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary
,

but far more in accord with the emotions and institutional conditions that prevail today much as they did in the sixteenth century. Rivalry, jealousy, and vindictiveness from other scientists and philosophers were Galileo’s lot, and they are not infrequently the lot of unorthodox minds in modern times. Anyone who believes that inquisitions went out with the triumph of secularism over religion has not paid attention to the records of foundations, federal research agencies, professional societies, and academic institutions and departments.
⁶

In a similar vein, the legend that Giordorno Bruno was the “first martyr to science” is a myth as well. Bruno met with quite an ugly end, but it was not because of his scientific work; it was because he was an unrepentant theological heretic who denied the virgin birth and thought Jesus was a clever magician. Neither Galileo nor Bruno nor any scientists were punished for what they believed about astronomy.
⁷

Often, what we think are the facts of the past are in reality simply reflections of what we want to believe about the present.

Hindsight Is 20/20

How often do we hear people say we must “get on the right side of history,” as if they know their own history? “When they say it, what do people mean?” asks my
National Review
colleague Jay Nordlinger.

They may mean “my side,” or “the good side,” or “the side that posterity will smile on.” People may be alluding to the ultimate triumph of liberal democracy. Or they may be alluding to the ultimate triumph of socialism, or a stricter form of collectivism. For generations, the Left has
assumed that history marches with them: Get out of the way, or be crushed.

The phrase has what British historian Robert Conquest calls a “Marxist twang.” The Marxists believed that history was predictable and unidirectional, so of course there must be a right side and a wrong side to it. The candle makers were on the wrong side, the lightbulb makers the right side. But history doesn’t work like that. There were times when it was obvious that technology aided tyrants and there have been times—much like our own—when it seemed equally obvious that technology must liberate the individual. The truth is, it must do neither. As Richard Pipes tells Nordlinger, “The whole notion is nonsensical.” To which Nordlinger adds, “History does not have sides, although historians do.”
⁸

Marxism surely contributed to the idea that there’s a right side to history, but the chief culprit is the arrogance of the present (Marxism, one could say, is a subspecies of this arrogance). We look back on the past and see it as prologue to our moment in time. History becomes a movie for which we know the ending and we think the characters of yesteryear are fools for not seeing it, too. Like the idiot teenager who declares, “I’ll search the attic” in a horror movie, we marvel at the stupidity of earlier generations.

This assumption that the past is stupid and the present is wise too often binds the modern mind. It is a form of “Whiggish” history that assumes time proceeds in a steady, recognizable forward progression. Hence the nonsensical phrase “hindsight is 20/20.” No it’s not. Indeed, it’s hard to think of a more untrue phrase casually flung about in intelligent conversation. If hindsight is 20/20, why do historians disagree about, well, just about everything after the date and place of an event? If we could see the past with perfect clarity, married couples wouldn’t argue about who started the argument. Shi’a and Sunni would never have split. Jews would all be Christians or Christians would all be something else. Everyone would agree on who was the greatest boxer who ever lived and that Yoko Ono broke up the Beatles. Economists would stop saying “on the other hand.”

The Whiggish assumption in contemporary politics that today must be better than yesterday, this year more advanced than last year, this century wiser than the one that preceded it is held most dogmatically by
so-called progressives. For them history is a vehicle with no reverse gear, and the engine that powers it is nothing more or less than the State. This is the hardened, metaphysical, dogmatic cliché that makes it possible for journalists to glibly describe any expansion of the government into our lives as a “step forward” or an “advancement” and any retrenchment of government as a step “backward.” A Republican proposal of market-based reform always amounts to “turning back the clock.” As discussed at length in a subsequent chapter, this is the core assumption behind the idea of the “living Constitution”—an idea that assumes with Hegelian orthodoxy that expansions of the State are the sine qua non of progress (see
Chapter 14
, Living Constitution).

One small example: During the recent debate over reforming Medicare, many liberals insisted that any backsliding amounted to a sacrilegious violation of a fundamental “covenant.” Writing in
The
New Republic
, Jonathan Cohn, a leading health care expert, quotes LBJ’s Medicare law signing statement:

“No longer will older Americans be denied the healing miracle of modern medicine,” Johnson said at the signing ceremony. “No longer will illness crush and destroy the savings that they have so carefully put away over a lifetime so that they might enjoy dignity in their later years.”

“Read those quotes carefully,” Cohn advises us, “because they spell out the covenant that Johnson made with the American people on that day: A promise that the elderly and (certain groups) of the poor would get comprehensive medical insurance, no matter what.”
⁹
Now I cannot and will not criticize Cohn for believing that the government should ensure that the truly needy and elderly receive medical care. That is an honorable, intellectually defensible position. Though I should at least mention that wanting the needy to receive health care does not necessarily require a vast expansion of the federal government. But my point isn’t to debate the means to a desirable end.

No, the reason why I find Cohn’s argument so useful is that it illustrates the progressive mind-set so perfectly. Cohn argues that LBJ made a covenant with the American people—a covenant is a sacred contract—to
ensure that the poor would henceforth and forever get comprehensive medical insurance. Here’s the problem: Presidents cannot bind future presidents, never mind future Congresses. Any law can be revisited, any presidential decree may be rescinded. One would hope that Cohn would recognize this fact given that his magazine routinely argues that not even the Constitution itself should be considered permanently binding and restrictive (which is to say it shouldn’t permanently bind or constrict progressives in ways they find inconvenient). What offends Cohn and his fellow progressives is the suggestion that any liberal victory once pocketed can ever be reversed. Laws and words have no binding power on future generations, but once Team Progressive puts points on the scoreboard, they can never come off. That is what is sacred, because
their
conception of history only goes in one direction.

This is the living, breathing heart of the progressive worldview. It is as ideological as any conviction can be. And that is fine. There is nothing wrong and a great deal that is right with having ideological convictions. What is offensive to logic, culturally pernicious, and, yes, infuriating to me is the claim that it is not an ideological tenet. Progressives lie to themselves and the world about this fact. They hide their ideological agenda within Trojan Horse clichés and smug assertions that they are simply pragmatists, fact finders, and empiricists who are clearheaded slaves to “what works.”

Consider one largely bipartisan example of what I am talking about: competitiveness. For decades American presidents, Republican and Democrat, have invoked competitiveness as an excuse to intervene in the private sector. Often competitiveness means the exact opposite: protecting industries or firms that cannot compete. In the name of competitiveness we subsidize car companies or solar power companies—or shield them through tariffs—while claiming it is vital to do so to stay competitive.