Our Idols Have Feet of Clay

King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon had a dream. “The king ordered the magicians, exorcists, sorcerers, and Chaldeans to be summoned in order to tell the king what he had dreamed.” Nebuchadnezzar was a true sceptic and required the interpreter to tell what the dream was before he made an interpretation. The Chaldeans engaged in obfuscation in an attempt to garner enough information to do a cold reading, but the king was having none of it. Daniel had a vision before he was summoned to the king, and when he was brought to the king, Daniel related the dream and the interpretation:
The head of the statue was of fine gold; its breasts and arms were
of silver; its belly and thighs, of bronze; its legs were of iron, and its
feet part iron and part clay. As you looked on, a stone was hewn out,
not by hands, and struck the statue on its feet of iron and clay and
crushed them. All at once, the iron, clay, bronze, silver, and gold
were crushed, and became like chaff on the threshing floors of
summer; a wind carried them off until no trace of them was left.
I do not want to consider Daniel’s interpretation, rather I want to consider the common phrase used today, ‘feet of clay’, how it is used and suggest it is an erroneous gloss. People often say, “All of our idols have feet of clay”, meaning we all have flaws, we should not get too disappointed when our heroes fail us, etc. However, in Daniel’s story, it was not only the feet of clay that were destroyed, but the entire idol, gold, silver, bronze, iron, and clay all became “like chaff” carried off by the wind “until no trace of them was left.”

According to Daniel’s telling, the idol was destroyed entirely without any trace left. People today do not usually want their idols destroyed completely, but want to assuage their disappointment in a person with a phrase, but this meaning has drifted from the original story. This illustration of semantic drift shows something about the development of human thinking. Along with semantic drift, there is also misprision through linguistic interpretation as Macintyre points out, “there is no precise English equivalent for the Greek word dikaiosune, usually translated justice.” Hall and Ames deal with the problem in translating Confucius: “the most accurate picture of Confucius can be obtained if we reject the possibility of such a reconstruction and instead attempt to change lenses and sharpen our focus in such a manner that we enhance our vision of Confucius from the perspective of the present.”As languages drift and develop, not considering the Tower of Babel, humans are able to add technical sophistication to their communication, e.g., Hegel’s thesis/antithesis/synthesis as a technical development of Heraclitus 46, and, also, convoluted errors are added to our thinking, e.g., pick any conspiracy theory. Technical sophistication, misprision and convoluted errors characterize the development of civilized language and thinking, but it might be hubris to believe that modern humans can think better than our prehistoric ancestors.

We should reconsider this metaphor of the idol and consider that our idols are provoking us to think, not telling us what to think, since our language and perspective are different, even from contemporaries using our native language. Our idols, in whatever genre, should provoke us to thought without dogma and erroneous semantic drift, or fetishes, or dreams of Arcadia or Utopia. I think humans evolved to see existence as a surd and all of our idols are attempts to square the irrational , but, like Nebuchadnezzar’s dream idol, they will all end like chaff on the threshing floor and be dispersed by the wind as idol replaces idol and our knowledge moves asymptotically toward the nature of reality. Humans depend on intersubjectivity as confirmation of our perception of reality.

In a private conversation, Roger Ames tried to dissuade me of the notion of finding parallels between western thinking and the “classical Chinese mind.” I fully understand his point, but, as Confucius said, “By nature we are alike, by practice we have become far apart.” I think there is an atavism in our nature as modern humans that ties us to all cultures and time periods. Our prehistorical ancestors had thinking capacity equal to ours, maybe greater than ours, and this can be seen in prehistoric cave art created by intellectual masters.

Propositions:
1. As we progress, our idols are destroyed and replaced, e.g., Ptolemy/Copernicus.
2. Improved instrumentation allows us to verify our perceptions and correct our thinking. Aristarchus saw a heliocentric universe before Ptolemaic geocentric universe was replaced by Copernicus’ heliocentric universe.
3. History can be an idol to be destroyed as in the case of Pythagoras and his theorem, which was known in other cultures long before Pythagoras. Also the victor usually wipes out the history of the vanquished.
4. Our historical idols did not spring up by the prowess of their own genius, but stood on the shoulders of giants as Newton said.
4. We should be conservative in accepting changes, but remember the priests have always had a vested interest in maintaining status quo.