The Evil of Knowledge

To the Sanhedrin, Christ was the serpent in the garden, as was every heretic to every other religion that promises paradise in exchange for submission to a "god," a religion, and authority, as well as acceptance and conformity to old  "beliefs" and ways of thinking.

Knowledge, especially new knowledge and new perspectives,  has thus always been greeted by those devoted religiously to a veneration of past ideas, as a heresy of liberalism that threatens to destroy the garden of society that rests so precariously upon the willingness of people not to question or rock the boat; and always by those who, from Socrates to Jesus, challenge the old gods through a new way of thinking. And this is just as true today as it has been with every generation and in every epoch.

Religions and nations alike, then, have built their reputations by enshrining this willingness as the mark of divinity, built as it were on the fear that radical new ideas would sink society into chaos were it not for conservatism's ability to keep the chastity of our ideas under lock and key. And by doing so, they have succeeded in casting knowledge itself as the serpent that threatens to destroy the stability of the status quo through the apple of its insights and new ideas. 

This is why John Stuart Mill once described Conservatives as "the stupid party," because Conservatives seem to only oppose all innovations and to reject all novel ideas. In fact, it has  been said that "it is probably true that the most prosperous, most self satisfied, and least curious members of any society have direct incentives to be conservatives," even though capitalism and technology have only accelerated change in everything from ideas to atoms, and from genes to our concepts of "god."

Conservatism, in this respect, champions an economic religion that has created more change in the world than anything else in human history - and perhaps no where so much as in the world of ideas - while simultaneously championing a monotheistic religion that has often sought only to preserve old "beliefs," traditions, and ways of thinking,  that are continually undermined by such changes and the new discoveries such changes so often produce.

Fredrich Nietzsche captured the problem with such a blind devotion to old "beliefs" when he wrote,  “The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.”

To hold to such beliefs in the face of any scientific evidence that suggests it could be wrong, not only demonstrates how often facts are thought to be wholly irrelevant to discerning Christian versions of "truth,"  but it also illustrates how Christians prefer to shift the burden of having to learn how to think in terms of something new, to simply learning how to find ever more clever ways of defending their devotion to only thinking in terms of the old.

Liberals who flatly reject such a perspective, however, fail to appreciate the real virtue that such thinking can produce. Such thinking has, for example, to some great degree or other, contributed directly to the stability of governments in both the UK and America, with the former having not suffered from the wars for power that toppled monarchies across Europe at the beginning of the 20th century, in over 300 years, and the latter in over 200. 

But what the Conservative ignores, or worse even devoutly denies, is that both Christianity and free market Capitalism were once both seen as "radical" and liberal ideas, especially to those who were just as "conservative" about their paganism, their empire driven economies, and general ways of thinking, as both Christians and Conservatives have become today. 

This is why the persecution of Christians in Rome started not with emperors, but with mobs of citizens, who blamed the problems in their society on the anti-patriotism of Christians who they accused of being "atheists" for picking one god and rejecting the others, and for their refusal to worship the gods of Rome in the same way Socrates had refused to worship the gods of Greece. And like the "conservative" mobs of Rome who treated Christians much like many Christians in America treat Muslims or atheist today, Conservatives blame America's social problems on the Collin Kaepernicks of the world (rather than an undeniably racist war on drugs) while the most conservative Christians in America blame liberals, homosexuals, and especially atheists for angering God by snake charming the devil.    

 

Knowledge, in this respect, has always been a light of hope for those seeking to free themselves from the bondage of other people's ignorance, and the serpent to those who are convinced they posses the power and authority of an "infallible truth" already.