The Pharisaical tradition is ancient and worldwide. It goes from
the high priests of the Hebrew temple, who showed their piety by
their asceticism, and showed they were better than other people by
their refusal to eat rich foods or certain meats or display worldly
wealth, to the very similar Parsees (spellings vary) in the Far
East, to Aztec priests in the then unknown Western hemisphere. The
common denominator, continued to this very day, is that a class of
persons seeks to show that they are morally superior to others by
dressing modestly, eating abstemiously, and displaying a general
hair shirt kind of self-denial.
This group was particularly loathed by Jesus Christ, whose
contempt and rage at Pharisees and all like them shines through in
the Gospels, especially Luke. In one very famous story, Jesus tells
that a publican (loosely, a bartender) is more likely to enter into
the Kingdom of Heaven than is a Pharisee. Indeed, through the
Gospels, the very word “pharisee” has come to mean a
“self-righteous hypocrite,” in the words of the Encyclopedia
Britannica article on Jesus.
The Pharisees, and the way that Jesus thought about them, come
vividly to mind these days thanks to a new Pharisaical group of
Jews and Christians who have started an astonishing campaign to
discourage Americans from burning gasoline or having large cars,
especially SUV’s. Having large cars and burning gasoline, says this
group, is anti-God and anti-Christ because having large cars is
sybaritic and because the pollution and traffic jams somehow hurt
poor people more than rich people.
This kind of analysis and preaching is as perfect an example of
Pharisaical thinking as I can imagine. And to think that this group
is claiming the authority of its ancient enemy, Christ, to preach
its self-righteous ways is head spinning stuff.
But it gets worse. Are the anti-big-car people telling us that
we should all have small cars? If so, are they so ignorant of
statistics, mechanics, and physics that they do not know that small
cars are dramatically less safe in collisions than big cars? Just
what do they think happens to one’s children in a tiny little
Toyota when it collides with a bus as compared with what happens
when your kids are in a Cadillac Escalade SUV? Just what do they
think would happen to their own holy selves if they were in a small
car that (perhaps while the driver is going into a trance of
communion with the Almighty while on the Hollywood Freeway)
collides with a cement abutment?
Is it not a wholesome act to provide as much protection as
possible for one’s family as they go through their day? Is it not
an unethical act to sacrifice your kids’ safety on the altar of,
well, politically correct self-righteousness? What is holy about
sacrificing your kids’ safety for an immeasurably tiny benefit in
air quality in Bombay or Kunming? And also by the way, what if you
just have a lot of kids and need a big car? Or is that also a
religiously evil act in today’s anti-child Pharisaical class?
And by the way, why are these ads about large cars and air
quality appearing in magazines and newspapers in the United States?
This is where we have strict air pollution standards for cars and
trucks. This is where we have strict emission laws for factories
and utilities. What is this group doing about the polluters in
India and Pakistan and China who have produced the noxious “brown
cloud” that occupies much of Asia and whose effluence reaches and
destroys American forests and lungs as pollution and acid rain?
Shouldn’t they really be going after people who burn totally
unscrubbed coal, i.e., Chinese and Indians, instead of the
housewife with her catalytic converter and state of the art
anti-pollution equipment on her Pontiac Aztec?
Are the Pharisees, by the way, going after the hippies with
their wood-burning furnaces, who produce microparticles that are
deadly for lungs? Or is this Pharisaical professional courtesy? And
also by the way, where is my dear and devoted pal, Norman Lear, and
his People for the American Way on this? Where is PAW’s boss, the
personally charming Ralph Neas? Isn’t this campaign an infringement
on the rights of Americans not to have political and economic
decisions motivated by Scripture or religious compulsion? How is
this different from a conservative saying the Bible compels a
balanced budget? And if it isn’t, why isn’t PAW all over the
campaign? Is it because one group of Pharisees likes to give
another some professional courtesy? (By the way, Paul, the great
epistle writer, started as a Pharisee. He changed, interestingly,
after an accident on the freeway to Damascus.)
Let’s be fair about this: Of course, everyone wants clean air.
Of course everyone wants to depend less on Saudi oil. And of course
we all want freedom of speech. But Pharisaical simple-mindedness
and self-righteousness only get you so far, and the most blatant
kind of Bible thumping to prove one’s holiness is insulting to the
kind of people who consider real facts, real physics, real science,
real children and real lives. Boris Pasternak, a better poet than
he is given credit for by some, summed it up well, without any help
from me: “I am alone: all drowns in the Pharisees’ hypocrisy. / To
live your life is not as simple as to cross a field.”
Or as showing your immaculate self-righteousness by exposing
innocents to sudden death on the 405 San Diego Freeway.
