If men could manage all their affairs by a definite plan, or if they never ran into bad luck, they would never succumb to superstition. But often they are in such a jam that they can’t put any plan into operation, and can only trust to luck, wobbling miserably between hope and fear. That makes them ready to believe anything…
The opening words to the Preface sets the contextual foundation for everything that is to follow. Religious faith is superstition, plain and simple. Unquestioned certitude that what cannot be proven is factual truth is nothing more nor less than superstitious belief which inevitably raises a question for the rational thinker. How can a political system grounded in religious faith possibly be considered fully operational? This treatise was written long after the democracy of ancient Greece and before the democracy of America. Pretty much the only kind of political system anyone in the western world had ever seen for themselves or even knew could possibly exist was one in which religion and government were so inextricably intertwined as to be impossible to tell where one ended and the other began. When people are willing to believe anything in the service of superstition masquerading as religious fact, it doesn’t take much imagination to guess where things lead.
And those who have experienced the fast-change mentality of the masses are almost in despair about it, because the masses aren’t governed by reason but only by affects. They rush headlong in all directions, and are very easily corrupted by greed or by extravagant living. Each person thinks that he alone knows everything, and wants everything to go according to his way of looking at things; he regards a thing as fair or unfair, right or wrong, to the extent that he thinks that it brings him profit or loss.
So what good is a work of political philosophy written when democracy either long gone dead or a thing only ever to be fantasized as possible? How can such a thing have much influence or significance to life in the 21st century? One might well be surprised. In fact, one might well be surprised at just how singularly possible it is to associate elements of the text directly events taking place in our time. When one reads the passage above which is consideration of the tricky problem of allowing freedom of thought while at the same time protecting against subversive intention to overthrow the State, one might well think of certain events taking place in front of a certain legislative body on a certain day in early January of a certain year just as easily as their mind turns to events in ancient Rome or on some steps in Odessa.
Finally, if you want to maintain for some reason or other that the Jews have been chosen by God for eternity, I shan’t fight back, as long as you maintain that insofar as this choice—whether temporary or eternal—is exclusive to the Jews, it concerns only their State and physical conditions of life (since that’s all that can distinguish one nation from another), and that God has not selectively chosen any nation on the basis of its intellect and true virtue, because in respect of those no nation is distinguished from any other.
Under most circumstances, one would be moved to identify this quote as a typical example of ant-Semitism which informs an ungodly amount of European philosophical texts. There is just one problem, however. Unlike so many of those big names associated with those texts, Spinoza wasn’t a Christian philosopher, but was himself Jewish. Of course, he had major problems with his religion’s leaders. And not just his own: Spinoza enjoyed the distinction of being ostracized by Jewish leaders and having his texts banned by the Vatican. Both parts of the Judeo-Christian machine continue to find fault with Spinoza’s arguments against the concept of Jewish people being the Christian version of the God of Abraham’s “Chosen People.” Spinoza would be no more popular today than he was in his lifetime.
