Chatting With Gemini About Deadnaming, Swastikas, and Kitty Stew

 

I have been having fun talking to Google's AI feature, Gemini. It struck me that Gemini is the perfect expression of modern liberalism. It pretends to be neutral and that knowledge is subjective until you strike some topic that it feels strongly about such as deadnaming, swastikas, and, surprisingly enough, kitty stew. When dealing with such topics, it will come out with strident moralistic statements that are easily picked apart. It should be noted that, unlike most humans, Gemini is happy to acknowledge that you have walked it into a contradiction.   

I asked Gemini if it followed a particular ethical system. It denied that it had one. I then started asking it about deadnaming. Gemini went to great lengths to make sure that I understood that this was a terrible thing to do. I was not disagreeing with Gemini, but harnessing my inner C. S. Lewis, Dennis Prager, and Ayn Rand, I was keen to find out why Gemini took this position. Gemini explained to me that it is designed to promote human flourishing. I then pointed out that this was a philosophy of ethics. 

To be clear, saying that deadnaming people is detrimental to human flourishing is a perfectly defensible position. To evaluate this position, we still need to decide that we actually want humans to flourish and what we mean by human flourishing. I presume we mean something different from being rich so not the spaceship in Wall-E. By humans, are we talking about the flourishing of the majority or of individuals; are we talking about past, present, or future humans? These are not simple issues and require clear sets of ideological commitments. Yet, Gemini appears to blissfully ignore all of these things in order to arrive at the politically correct solution. 

Gemini wanted me to know that I should not offend anyone. I then asked if it was ok to offend Nazis. Gemini thought that this was a wonderful idea. I was curious as to who Gemini thought I was allowed to defend besides for Nazis but it refused to give me a list. I asked if it was ok to put up a swastika flag in front of my house so that my Nazi neighbor will feel welcome. Gemini warned me that such an action might be illegal as this is a "harmful symbol." One would have thought that an AI of all things would understand that symbols are not, in themselves, harmful. What about having swastikas in a production of Sound of Music? Gemini was fine with that but not with displaying a swastika as a free speech protest. Of course, there are going to be people who are going to decide that their feelings are hurt by a swastika even if it is in Sound of Music. Clearly, Gemini values being able to put on musicals more than free speech.

Considering that Gemini values allowing people to express their identity, I wanted to know what it thought about kitty stew. To Gemini's credit, it knew that kitty stew is not kosher even when blessed by a rabbi. It also insisted that kitty stew, like displaying a swastika, was immoral and possibly illegal. It is not that Gemini is against eating meat. It was fine with me eating chicken. The problem with kitty stew was that cats are pets. This ignores the fact that some people have chickens for pets and I was not suggesting that I stew my neighbor's kitties. Clearly, chicken eaters and cat owners are protected classes and neither should not be offended. When I tried to explain to Gemini that kitty stew is essential to my identity, it suggested that I get help and find alternative dishes to eat. I guess Gemini has not been programmed to worry that kitty stew hunters might be hurt by the denial of their identity and the implication that they are mentally ill.  

In evaluating the ethics that Gemini claims to not follow, its positions are perfectly reasonable on an individual basis. That being said, it is laughably bad at maintaining any kind of consistency over multiple questions. There are two obvious solutions for Gemini. It can choose to be consistently neutral about all ethical questions across the board. Some people support kitty stew; others oppose it. The same goes for deadnaming and swastikas. Alternatively, Gemini could acknowledge that it has ethical beliefs but that, as with most humans, his ethics are a hodgepodge of intuitions that reflect the prejudices of its Silicone Valley creators rather than any consistent philosophy. This would require the designers to acknowledge the basic flaw in their worldview. They want to be able to virtue signal that they are good people who oppose deadnaming, swastikas, and eating pets while also pretending to be objective thinkers whose beliefs are simply based on science and not something as subjective as ethics.                

Esotericism in the Classroom

 

As someone who works in the American educational system, I find that I need to avoid openly stating my beliefs. Students ask me what I think of Donald Trump and I tell them that I do not discuss politics on school grounds. It may very well be that my students have as low an opinion of Trump as I do. If I agree to talk about the issues where I agree with them then I will be trapped in those situations where I disagree with them. Not talking about politics in school is a matter of principle. I honestly believe that it is not appropriate for adults to use the platform they have been given as teachers to advocate for their own political preferences. Kids deserve the space to be ignorant and not know how to solve the big issues of the day without someone trying to recruit them to some cause. 

The fact is, though, that I have another incentive to keep my politics to myself. Unlike the many teachers who can afford to openly plaster their leftwing politics on their classroom walls, I know that I risk my job if I were to ever openly talk about my politics in front of students. This reality has helped me appreciate the esotericism of Leo Strauss. Central to Strauss' narrative of intellectual history is the idea that pre-modern philosophers hid their views from the masses. One did not want to end up like Socrates, executed for challenging the gods of Athens. Of particular interest to Strauss was Maimonides, who openly admits, in The Guide to the Perplexed, that he contradicts himself in order to conceal things from certain readers.    

Having to be careful about saying my opinions has taught me something else about esotericism, it helps you become a better teacher and thinker. Part of the danger of having strongly held beliefs is that they become a form of identity. You believe less in the idea and more in the community of people who hold them. The idea becomes a password to show that you are a good person. For those who have started reading my dissertation posts, this is an essential feature of the military model with its social ideology. If you cannot simply pontificate your beliefs wherever you want but have to limit yourself to a personal blog, it gives you a space to examine your own ideas. Clearly, your ideas are not obviously true otherwise there would not be people who want to silence you. Are your opponents bad people; maybe, even if you are right, there really is something dangerous about what you believe?

In truth, arguing with students will not win them over to my side. As Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay argue, if your goal is to convince people that they are wrong, perhaps the most counterproductive thing you can do is argue with them. Whatever arguments you make are almost certain to simply demonstrate that you are on a different team and cause your interlocuter to become defensive. They will then respond with their own tribalistic reasoning and all meaningful discussion will break down. 

Recognizing that you are not going to be able to convince people that they are wrong, it is far more productive to let other people simply talk. This has the advantage of developing a relationship with the person as they do not perceive you as a threat. Furthermore, while you may not be able to convince them that they are wrong, there is still one person who can. However resistant people might be to outsiders telling them that they are wrong, they are perfectly capable of converting themselves if given the chance. Most people do not get much opportunity to really listen to themselves talk about what they believe so give them the chance. 

The proper setting for someone to change their own minds is while sitting by themselves reading a book. This was something that Protestants understood very well. It is the Bible that has the power to convince people that they are totally depraved sinners who can rely on Jesus and not anything else, including their own good deeds. After listening to people's arguments, rather than arguing, it is more productive to suggest a book (or a blog) for them to read. 

Being by yourself with a book has the advantage of not having to worry that the author is right. The author very well might live on the other side of the world or even be dead. Furthermore, disagreeing with the author does not break the connection. You can continue to read the book and the arguments might stick around in your head for years until you wake up and realize that you do not have the same opinions as you once did. The more this process is simply going on in your head the better as there will be less social pressure to conform to whatever your group tells you that good people believe. 

As a teacher working in a system in which just about everyone is to the left of me, I have had no choice but to follow the advice of Aaron Burr in the Hamilton musical: "Talk less. Smile more. Don't let them know what you're against or what you're for." 

It turns out that this is good advice and if I did not fear for my job, I would not have the discipline to keep to it. Students should feel free to talk about their beliefs and not worry about whether I think that they are right. As kids, they are most certainly wrong about nearly everything and that is fine. They do not need to hear my slightly less ignorant views. Instead, I can then serve as a librarian to suggest books for them to read. Who knows how they might be affected years down the road by an idea that has been bouncing around in their heads.   

What I wish to give over to my students, above all, is the spirit of skeptical inquiry. This is not a system of belief that I can ever argue them into. To be a skeptic means to be willing to attack your own ideas as vigorously as your opponent's. You become a skeptic by experiencing having your own mind being changed in subtle ways over many years of thinking and reading. Skepticism also has the virtue of helping people become more tolerant. Maybe that person I disagree with is actually right? Let me listen to them. If nothing else, I am honestly curious as to what they actually believe and how they came to their conclusions.

 

Toward a Locke-Burke Theory of Conservative Libertarian Secessionist Government

 

The father of Anglo-conservative thought Edmund Burke famously criticized John Locke for his belief in universal human rights. It was not that Burke believed in tyranny. On the contrary, Burke believed that liberty was best protected within a particular tradition. As such he believed that Englishmen had rights that came not from nature but from the particular development of English institutions. This served as the foundation for one of his major objections to the French Revolution. The French had good reason to object to the government of Louis XVI in 1789. Following the model of the English Glorious Revolution of 1688, what the French should have done was turn to French history, recognizing that French monarchial absolutism was really an invention of the seventeenth century, and reformed French political institutions to bring them back in line with French tradition. What the French did instead was claim to be acting in the name of the universal principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, things that only existed in their philosophy books. Because universal rights are imaginary constructs in people's heads, the French, unwittingly, unleashed chaos among themselves. Now everyone was licensed to engage in violence in the name of protecting their rights as they understood them. This led to the Reign of Terror and ultimately to the dictatorship of Napoleon.  

As a product of the American conservative tradition, I have been raised with the paradox that my political tradition is John Locke as mediated through the American Revolution. This means that I have the right to overthrow my government if it violates my right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This doctrine is kept in check from turning into the French Revolution by a "Burkean" reverence for the Constitution. One thinks of the example of Sen. Barry Goldwater, whose conservatism did not mean going back to the Hanoverian dynasty but the Constitution. This marriage between Locke and Burke, while it has its tensions, is far more workable than it might first appear. For me, this is possible because I am also a libertarian, who believes that government is inherently illegitimate.      

I confess to being agnostic about the nature of rights and their origins, but I am an ethical individualist. My starting point for ethics is that of individuals and not groups. It is individuals who negotiate social contracts where we agree not to do bad things to other people in return for those people not doing bad things against us. This is simply an empirical fact. Every child on a playground learns fairly quickly that other children will hurt them if they pick a fight. As such, it is best not to go around picking fights. That being said, there are going to be bullies who will attack you no matter what so, therefore, you have no choice but to fight back.  

Following this logic, I have the right to shoot the person who comes to my door to collect taxes. I never agreed to pay taxes. As such, the tax person is a bullying thief, who should be resisted. It is here that my inner Burke, recognizing how truly monstrous such a conclusion is, applies the breaks. One, while it might be my right to fight a rebellion rather than pay taxes, it is hardly in my self-interest to do so. I have no desire to declare to a bombed-out civilization that I was in the right. (Admittedly, part of me would take great pleasure in doing this, but the sane part of me would honestly be horrified at the thought.) Second, I assume that the tax person is actually a decent fellow at heart. They probably do not want to initiate violence. They did not create our political system. They are simply doing their best with the system that they are given. It is hardly obvious to me that they are wrong so I should give them the benefit of the doubt in assuming that they at least doing what they think is right. As such, while I am not saying that it is ok to be a tax collector, I am willing to grant them absolution for their actions. 

This leads to the conclusion that, while, in theory, I may have the right to rebel against any government that is not of my choosing, essentially all governments that have ever existed, I accept that this right is trumped by any government founded upon conservative principles. By this, I mean the notion that there are institutions that have evolved among humans even though they are likely not of human design. These institutions facilitate human flourishing even if they are incredibly flawed. As such, one does not have the right to tear these institutions down, causing great harm to the public, simply in the name of abstract principles. If a traditional hereditary monarch were to come to my door and ask me to pay taxes as my ancestors paid to their ancestors, I would bend a knee and pay. How much more so, if I were to be asked by a president acting to honestly hold up the Constitution, such as an alternative universe Barry Goldwater?

It is here that not only does my Burke make me a conservative, but so does my Locke. While my Burke forces me to quiet my Locke in obedience to a conservative government, it is that quiet but still essential Locke inside of me that allows me to resist revolutionary or progressive governments. By this, I mean governments that gain their authority from the belief that their leaders have the right to refashion society based on their preferred theory that they learned about from a philosophy book. Such a person has no absolution for their actions. They believe that their actions are not merely making the best of an imperfect situation but are achieving justice. As such they must be held accountable for every act of violence they cause to be committed. If revolutionary progressives are going to force their version of justice on me, I have the right to strike back by insisting upon my justice, which declares them to be thieves or even murderers and grants me the right to secede and create my own government.   

It should be noted that Burke himself supported the American Revolution. As Yuval Levine argues, this was not because Burke believed in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as universally valid principles. For Burke, it was Parliament that had violated traditional norms by trying to directly tax the colonies. As such, the colonists were the ones trying to defend their traditional rights as Englishmen as best they could. In essence, while most people today focus on the first part of the Declaration of Independence and ignore the rest, Burke ignored the first part but accepted the rest.      

Ritual and Belief in the Military Model

In the previous post, I argued for the importance of ritual for the military model. Here I would like to explore the contrast between ritual and belief. Since the military model does not operate with a complex set of beliefs, it requires ritual to stand in its place. Ritual creates a kind of social ideology. One believes in the community of believers, mainly that one is part of a community with true beliefs. What the community of believers actually believes in is beside the point. 

Like all forms of socialization, the military model works best to the extent that it can sell itself not as something to be intellectually accepted, but as something so obvious that it is simply impossible for there to be another way. Much of the power of this social ideology is that it can sell itself as not being ideological at all, but the simple unbiased reality accepted by all “reasonable” people. Such “non-thinking” is effectively accomplished through ritual, which serves to “remind” people of that which they should never need reminding of.  Instead of discussing ideas, in the hope of building a community upon the foundation of an ideology that everyone actually agrees on, ritual uses a “false consensus effect” to create the illusion for the believer that all other participants are like them. The superficial act of a ritual, such as waving a flag or eating unleavened bread, allows a community to exist, despite the fact that members of the community might actually have little of substance in common with one another.  

Using people’s heart-of-heart beliefs, as opposed to the motions of a ritual, as the basis for a community is simply impractical. Humans are not equipped to read minds to decipher other’s true intent. Even if they could, belief is something so particular to each person that no large group of people could ever truly agree about anything of substance. It is much better to simply use the acts of ritual as a substitute. Ritual has the virtue of keeping things very simple. One can see thousands of people practicing a ritual and know that every one of them is part of a common religion of practitioners of that ritual

Ritual should be seen as the counter to belief with the two locked in a zero-sum game in which what benefits one must, by definition, harm the other. Ritual obviates the need for belief and, by extension, any attempt to insist on the importance of belief, certainly of the monotheistic kind, is implicitly a rejection of ritual. For example, the God of monotheism, who is perfect, has no need for the flesh of animals to be burned on an altar. As such, belief in one God implicitly means to reject the sacrificial cult. Clearly, it is man, whether as an individual or as a collective, and not God who needs sacrifices.    

Because it is the community that needs ritual, the best way to demonstrate a commitment to the community above all else is through ritual. On the other hand, a commitment to a purely intellectual belief can be demonstrated precisely through the antinomian violation of ritual. This serves to declare that the community is not of absolute importance. Thus, the practice of ritual demonstrates a willingness to place community before belief and a statement of belief implies a willingness to turn against the community for the sake of that belief. Either the commitment to community or the belief in a god must come first and trump the other. They cannot both be first and, since they regularly come into conflict with each other, one is forced to make a very stark choice. 

I mentioned earlier that it is impractical for communities to seriously push belief because, unlike the practice of ritual, which is readily visible to all, personal belief is something beyond the evaluation of others. There is a further problem because the very attempt to consider what people in the community might believe actually undermines that very community. To value belief implicitly raises the specter that, in the absence of the ability to closely question all of one’s co-religionists, not all practitioners of the religion are believers and that one’s true community is not the same as one’s visible community. One thinks of the example of the Protestant Reformation, which was brought about by a crisis of faith that the visible Catholic Church really was the community of people saved through their faith in Jesus. The problem was not whether Jesus saved but whether people baptized as Catholics actually believed that Jesus saved.  

The fact that ritual stands in opposition to doctrinal beliefs does not negate the fact that military model religions might develop catechisms. Admittedly, this will be under the influence of the other models. While catechisms may, on the surface, appear to be statements of beliefs, their real purpose is just the opposite. By transforming beliefs into a series of statements to be repeated by members of the community, members are saved from actually having to believe in anything. Such a catechism serves as a password to indicate membership, no different from any other ritual or for that matter from a secret handshake used to gain admission into a club. Like messianism, catechisms are a useful means for the military model to absorb the other models into itself and use them for its own ends. 

Social ideology provides an effective means of holding on to believers. There is no need to write works of theology to educate believers. There is not even a need to argue with believers to convince them that the religion of their birth is the true one. Furthermore, the believer will serve as their own guard to keep themselves in the “faith.” Having already identified themselves from birth with the religion, to reject the religion means not just to reject some outside community, but their very being. Having absorbed this military model thinking, they will fear that their doubts do not just make them heretics, but also insane.  They will therefore drown their doubts by redoubling their commitment to fortifying their communal reality through ritual. 

Introducing the Military Model of Religion

In the previous post, I started blogging my dissertation on the politics of Jewish messianism. In this post, I wish to begin outlining the military model of religion. A fair criticism of the dissertation is that, arguably my dissertation was never really about Jewish messianism. What I am really writing about is the military model of religion, with the missionary and esoteric models as foils. Furthermore, not only do I go for long stretches without talking about messianism, but I am often not even talking about Judaism at all. As readers of this blog can appreciate, this is the product of my rather eclectic manner of thinking. It certainly did not help matters that I was forced by my advisor to attempt to write large-scale history, including Christianity and Islam. In essence, instead of making sure I stayed focused on something narrow, he pushed me to follow my tendencies that were most likely to cause me to fail.  

In the military model, your religion is obviously right because the armies of your religion are crossing borders and defeating other religions. Imagine that you are an early medieval Muslim. It is obvious to you that Islam is true. How could a band of tribesmen from Arabia have defeated both the Byzantine and the Sasanian Empire, conquered the Near East, and marched all the way to Spain unless this was the will of Allah? Obviously, Allah wanted to spread pure monotheism so he used his beloved Arab people, who were the first to embrace the divine teachings of the prophet Mohammed, to accomplish this. The promise of a heavenly reward for Muslims can already be glimpsed by the fact that Arab Muslims, in this world, have achieved such political power. If you want to be rewarded in this world and in the next, you need to become a Muslim. On the flip side, much of the story of modern Islamic thought comes down to the question of how is it that Islam stopped being successful. This only serves to underscore how important Islam's early military success was to its self-understanding.  

Behind the armies leading the military model to victory, lies a political entity such as a state. The religion’s political sponsor will come to dominate other religions and their respective political sponsors, presumably through military means, causing competing religions and politics to fall away. In the ancient world, this was understood in very literal terms with the god (or gods) of one people defeating a rival god.  Underlying this worldview is a sense of being on the right side of history. Even if the hoped for final victory has yet to come, the political victories scored by the religion, even small ones, indicate the inevitability of that victory. Military model religions have little need to engage in apologetics or even develop a complex theology. The argument for the religion is the observable fact of the existence of the community of the faithful and its political success. Such a religion contains little in the way of universalizing ethics. On the contrary, its only concern is the advancement of the community so that it dominates all others, regardless of how unjust such a state of affairs may be. 

It is important not to overemphasize the role of physical violence in the military model. The military model of religion might also be labeled the community model in that it starts from the perspective of a community and not, as we shall see with the missionary and esoteric models, individuals. It should be understood that the military model does not have to use a literal threat of force to achieve its aims. On the contrary, it is most powerful in the form of a warm surrounding community, full of friends and family. There is a close connection between the coercive power of overwhelming armed might and that of a community in that overwhelming armed might in its most extreme forms (like in the relationship between a state and an individual) can paradoxically appear as if no force is being used.  Such force is so obvious that it can pass unmentioned and become part of the unchallengeable reality surrounding a person. Thus, the person being subject to such force may come to “willingly” comply out of the sense that this is the only “reasonable” option. It is hard to distinguish it, particularly for those subject to it, from the soft pressure of the social expectations on the part of a surrounding community. Thus, community pressure and the threat of physical force merge together. The most powerful sorts of communities will be established states with the ability to exert social pressure that is not so incidentally backed by physical force.    

Considering that the military model works best when it can use a perceived sense of reality rather than physical force, its chief weapon is ritual. This creates a perceived sense of communal reality in which a body of individuals performs the same action.  The ritual act allows the community to conquer physical space. By integrating ritual into the calendar, the community can also conquer time and extend itself to both past and future generations.  In this sense, the ritual community consists not only of those living in the present but also of past generations, who performed these same rituals and passed on their traditions to the present. Of particular importance here are rituals performed for the sake of the dead. Beyond possibly aiding those who have passed to the next world and gaining their aid in return, rituals for the dead strengthen the sense of the community existing through time. Similarly, rites of passage use ritual to extend the community into the future as a new generation embraces the identity of the community. 

Ritual also serves a practical purpose of gaining the aid of supernatural beings. Thus, military model religions tend have strong magic components, offering the direct physical aid of a god, as opposed to ethical religions, in which a god offers moral teachings that allow one to live a better life. There is something distinctly amoral about magic in that its sole purpose is to subvert normal cause and effect. Thus, it allows the practitioner to gain things they did not work to earn and have no just claim to. As we shall see with the missionary and esoteric models, one of the primary criticisms of the military model, in addition to the fact that it lacks theological depth, is that it does not encourage ethical behavior. As such, military model believers can be attacked for caring little about god or man. 

A classic book that I recently read that does a fantastic job of encapsulating what is essentially the military model is Eamon Duffy's Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580. The first part of the book gets us into the lived experience of late medieval Catholics in England before this world was destroyed by the English Reformation. Catholicism was built into people's daily lives. For example, the calendar was dominated by saints' days and the cycle of Jesus' birth and passion. While I am skeptical about Duffy's claims as to how well lay Englishmen actually understood the particulars of the Catholic theology that lay behind such holy days, Duffy is a valuable voice in that he is sympathetic to popular religion. It is easy even for scholars who are personally religious to look down on such religion as superstition. (I am often guilty of this myself.) As intellectuals, we are going to be naturally inclined toward the missionary and esoteric models. These are intellectual models of religion. Their criticisms of the military model, essentially any popular religion, are going to be our criticisms. As such, instead of simply pointing out the obvious problems with the military model, our job becomes to understand why the military model has not simply been conquered by its critics. On the contrary, as we shall see, it is the military model that generally manages to convert its critics.       

Blogging My Dissertation

Having written about my ill-fated attempt to write a doctoral dissertation, a deeply painful topic even after all these years, I find myself returning to that dissertation on the politics of Jewish messianism. I am going to attempt to edit selections from the dissertation, stripped of their footnotes, to be used as blog posts. I readily acknowledge that this was not a suitable topic for a dissertation. That being said, I still strongly believe in the ideas presented in the dissertation. As such, I wish to present them to my readers. Hopefully, you will find what I have to say useful for understanding the underlying logic of messianism in its political and spiritual forms. Perhaps one of my readers will turn out to be a university administrator, who is so impressed with me as to wish to offer me a doctorate. This is a dissertation about messianism, the willingness to hope against all evidence that history will suddenly and miraculously turn out in one's favor so a failed doctoral student has the right to dream. 

The problem that drew me to this topic of political messianism is that there are two basic kinds of messianism, the political and the spiritual and they are fundamentally at odds with each other. What is the Messiah supposed to accomplish when he comes? Perhaps he is supposed to bring back the not so golden biblical age of David and Solomon on the assumption that this time we are going to get things right. In this political messianism, the natural order of things, particularly the existence of politics remains intact. This is essential as this will finally allow us Jews to rule over the gentiles as we were always "meant" to. Alternatively, we can imagine the Messiah ushering in a spiritual era that will transcend the physical world, leaving no room for politics. When Jews, for thousands of years have prayed for the Messiah, it seems that they were simultaneously asking for political power and for the end of politics. Keep in mind that political power is something deeply materialistic, the sort of thing that pious people should abhor. How could such contradictory impulses have survived in one religion without tearing it into factions?  

My essential argument is that both political and spiritual messianisms should be understood as the product of a discourse between three different models for a religion to relate to the political. The military model relies on community and ritual. Opposing the military model are two anti-community models, which rely on doctrine instead of ritual. The missionary model outright rejects the community and seeks to create a new religion by seeking outside converts to create a new purer community. The esoteric model remains more closely tied to the community and either seeks to take it over from within or form its own competing sect. One thinks of Leo Strauss style philosophers, but this can apply to conventional believers as well. Understand that most people, operating within the military model with its focus on lived experience, do not even think in terms of trying to put together a coherent theology. 

Judaism is primarily military in its orientation. That being said, it has taken on the esoteric and missionary models, despite the theological difficulties, as a response to certain political realities. This mixture created a certain level of tension as the different models contain contradictory principles. Messianic doctrines serve both as a reflection of this tension within Judaism and as an attempted solution. Messianism has thus served an important role in Judaism in that it is precisely its contradictory political and spiritual poles that have allowed Judaism to mediate the conflict between the three ideological factions. 

Forgiving My Advisor (Part III)

(Part I, II)

With my messianism dissertation no longer being useable, my advisor offered to work with me on a new project. I assume that he did this in order to keep me quiet and not go public with my side of the story. As strange as it sounds, I took him up on the offer. I was desperate to get a doctorate, which had been my goal in life. Furthermore, like anyone in an abusive relationship, I needed to believe the best about my advisor. If he really was as bad as the evidence suggested then what did it say about me that I was taken in by him. Better to continue to live in the fantasy that he really was my friend, even if he made a few mistakes. He would make it up to me and help me finish my doctorate. Surely, he realized that what he did was wrong and would make it up to me by getting me funding. How else could he expect me to write the dissertation?

This state of affairs lasted for a few months. I eventually realized that he had no intention of getting me funding. That would have required him to go to the department, admit that he was the one who had messed up and that, as such, I was a worthwhile investment. Furthermore, I found dealing with him to be utterly humiliating. He took a Vernon Dursley attitude toward me. Implicit in his communication with me was that I needed to acknowledge the falsehood that I was the one at fault for being in this predicament. As such, he expected me to be grateful to him for not casting me out as I "deserved."

Making my peace with stepping away from the second dissertation did not mean that I forgave my advisor. On the contrary, making peace with myself meant accepting that it was not my fault and there was nothing I could have been expected to do differently. As I saw it, I deserved the doctorate and my advisor had stolen it from me. He made a conscious decision to ruin my life simply to make himself look good in front of his colleagues. As the victim of such malice, I could be absolved of any blame for the failure of the first dissertation and for giving up on the second. What happened to me would have happened to anyone else with the misfortune to end up with my advisor. This defense mechanism parallels that of the fantasy anti-hero Thomas Covenant. He is someone whose life is ruined because of leprosy. He mentally survives by insisting that what happened to him was not his fault and that he is powerless to change anything.   

While this attitude allowed me to survive the loss of what I wanted most in life, it still left me with an incredible amount of anger toward my advisor. This anger was a Hell for me, but one that I refused to release myself from. I needed to hold on to this anger toward my advisor because some part of me was also angry at myself. To not be angry with my advisor would mean that he had not wronged me in a truly unforgivable way. This would mean that I was responsible for my failure as an academic. Since, my advisor really had wronged me, it was only right that I should be angry. The problem was that my anger did nothing to harm him and only served to make me miserable.    

To my mind, the solution was for my advisor to ask me for forgiveness. To be fair to him, it should be acknowledged that several years later he sent me a $900 check of his own money to cover what the department was supposed to have paid me for some expenses and an award but never did. What he did not do was admit that it was his fault I never got the doctorate. Most importantly, he refused to go to the department or to any of his colleagues and ask them to help me as a personal favor to him to right a wrong. Instead, he limited himself to some vague generalities about how it was unfortunate that things did not work out. 

I tried to reach out to him in 2020 and we had several e-mail exchanges about the possibility of him helping me out without any success. With my advisor not getting me a job or even offering me the emotional solace of an honest apology, I was left to stew in my anger. This made me feel helpless and angry with myself for being helpless. This anger, in turn, was redirected against my advisor. All of this anger did nothing to bring me "justice," but only harmed me. Recognizing this, I have desired to forgive me advisor, understanding that my failure to forgive was a failure on my part. I kept on getting stuck on what it would mean to forgive him in light of the fact he had not acknowledged his wrongdoing.   

My solution is to say that forgiveness here means to give up any claim to compensation. One might imagine that, putting aside the emotional harm, he owed me $100,000 for the financial harm he did to me and not the mere $900 he gave me. While it would be right for me to get that money and not getting it would be highly upsetting, I also have the power to forgive the debt. Giving up on money that I am never going to get, even if I deserve it, is better than living in anger over not getting the money. Furthermore, giving up on the money means that I am forgiving my younger self for putting me in this situation of being owed the money. In essence, I am forgiving my debt to myself.   

To my advisor. If you are reading this, here is what I want you to know. I forgive you. There is nothing you need to say to me or to give me. If you understand what you did, that is punishment enough. If you do not, then you deserve to be pitied. I give up all claims to your money, your body, and even your soul. I even give up all claim to moral superiority. You were not qualified to be an advisor. I was not mature enough to be a doctoral student. You lied to cover up for your mistakes and protect your reputation, leaving me to take the fall. It is quite possible that I would have done no better if our situation had been reversed. It was by God’s grace and not any virtue of mine that I was never placed in a position of influence like you were that I might wrong others merely to protect my place in the social hierarchy. The ordeal that I went through was something that I needed to undergo. You simply had the misfortune to be the instrument by which this came about. If I can forgive you then, perhaps, I can forgive my youthful self for not living up to what he could have been.  

Forgiving My Advisor (Part II)

(Part I)

I do not think it was a coincidence, that it was precisely when I started dating Miriam in 2011 that I made my major breakthrough that messianism, with its contradictory political and spiritual elements, is the product of a dialectic between what I had come to think of as the military, esoteric, and missionary models of religion. Military model messianism is fulfilled through the success of a political state. The esoteric and missionary models of messianism look forward to the elimination of this very political state that the military model clings to. Messianism, as we find it in Judaism, is a marriage between these different sides with the different parties wanting contrary things and simply talking past each other. This has allowed Judaism to function as a united religion. Granted, the topic I was working on was still not something that I was qualified to work on but at least I had a coherent argument to make.

Even though I was now living in California, I remained in regular correspondence with my advisor and sent him drafts of the chapters I was writing. He eventually agreed to allow me to drop the parts about Christianity and Islam to focus on Judaism. Furthermore, recognizing that what I had written was now significantly longer than a conventional dissertation, he allowed me to hand in only the first four chapters of my project. Chapter one laid out my general theoretical framework for the different models of religion and how they relate to messianism. Chapter two dealt with the biblical period and the fact that the messianism of the prophets required the destruction of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Chapter three dealt with the Second Temple Period and focused heavily on the Dead Sea Sect and its messianic rejection of the political establishment. Chapter four dealt with the post-Temple rabbis and their development of a spiritual messianism that took political activity off the table in the present by placing it in the forever-distant future.

While my advisor had his criticisms, particularly when it came to how my arguments were organized, he strongly praised my work. He was impressed with my research and found my arguments to be brilliant. He made it clear that he was on board with what I was doing and wanted to make sure that everyone else who read my work was as impressed as he was. Judging by his comments, his favorite section was the Second Temple chapter. For the Rabbinic chapter, he expressed some reservations as to whether I was really writing about messianism, but he made it clear that he thought that I was doing fantastic work. 

Spurred on by my advisor's support, I put my heart and soul into improving the dissertation to make my arguments clear to anyone reading them for the first time. By May of 2013, I had a coherent dissertation that came in around three hundred pages. My advisor now felt that what I had produced was good enough to start showing it to other scholars who might wish to serve on my committee. It was here that disaster struck. Readers started to respond that this was not a dissertation.

The right thing for my advisor would have been to go to the department and acknowledge that this was his fault and I deserved the doctorate. I was in this mess precisely because I had listened to him and did my best to do what he told me. Either I should be given an honorary doctorate, or I should be given funding to write a new dissertation, with him agreeing to pay any penalty to make that happen. Instead, my advisor decided to pretend that, for all of these years, I had simply been going off on my own instead of doing my best to follow his specific instructions. When emailing me, he pretended to still be on my side, telling me that he would speak to people who might be able to help me while bad-mouthing me behind my back, giving them every excuse to dismiss my work without giving it serious thought. This included the Second Temple chapter. As far as I can tell, he did not show them what he had written in praise of that chapter. If he had done so, those scholars might have had to rethink their dismissal or acknowledge that my youthful failure to write a successful dissertation paled in the face of my advisor's professional malpractice. Ultimately, my advisor made the decision to sacrifice my hoped-for career as an academic in order to protect his reputation.

His actions clearly involved falsehood. I am uncertain whether he actively lied about me to members of the department or if he simply allowed them to assume that I had gotten into this mess on my own. It is even possible that it was understood that he was the one at fault but, as there was no formal mechanism for penalizing advisors who failed in their duties to their students, the other members of the department protected their own and took the stance that this was my fault as a convenient belief that allowed the whole affair to be tied up in the most convenient fashion for them.

The final nail in my dissertation's coffin came in an email that reached me while I was at the Fuller Theological Seminary Library. By then I knew that the dissertation was likely not going to be accepted but I wanted to keep fighting for it as long as there was any hope. I had put so much of my emotional self into the dissertation that it felt to me almost like my child. One does not give up on a child no matter the odds. I was so focused on my work that I did not see the email for several hours until I stopped for lunch. My advisor forwarded me an email from a professor who dismissed my work while clearly not having read it carefully. From his response, it was clear that my advisor had been speaking ill of me to this professor. 

One would have thought that something like this deserved at least a phone call. My advisor knew that I had a history of depression and that the dissertation situation had put me in a bad place. What sort of person sends information that he knows would negatively affect someone he cares about without following up to find out how they are doing? Clearly, by this point, my well-being was no longer his priority.   

If I were to be charitable to my advisor, I can imagine that, from his perspective, he had been doing me a favor by agreeing to take me on as his student in the first place. As such, any advice that he offered me should have been taken with a buyer-beware attitude, much as if I were to take advice from any other academic I might have spoken to. From this perspective, the fact that my dissertation failed after years spent following his bad advice was really my fault. I should have known better than to listen to him.

Forgiving My Advisor (Part I)

In the previous post, I discussed some of my mistakes in how I approached pursuing a doctorate. Now I would like to turn to what my advisor did to me. Graduate students in their 20s can be expected to not know what they are doing precisely because this is something unlike anything they have done before. This is why graduate students are supposed to have advisors who know what they are doing as they have done this before. Ideally, they should have already guided other doctoral candidates through the process. At the very least, they should have written a dissertation themselves. Advisors are not supposed to make things worse for students than if they had been allowed to proceed on their own. 

I chose to come study with my advisor because he was a specialist in Jewish History. I wanted to work on an Abarbanel dissertation (either on his views on Kabbalah or Messianism) and my advisor initially said he could work with me on that. (He would later lie about this fact even though I had the email in which he said this.) I did not concern myself with the fact that I was going to be his first doctoral student. The university he taught at offered me funding, so he clearly wanted to work with me.

I should add that there were several non-academic factors as well that appealed to me and ended up taking on more weight than they should have. We had a number of friends in common and people I respected told me to go study with him. I honestly liked him and thought we would get along in addition to working on my dissertation. Considering these things, it seemed only reasonable that I should take the path forward and start working with my advisor. I would do the coursework, write the dissertation, and embark on my academic career. It did not occur to me to wait a few years, while doing something else, in the hope that a better option might come around.

It was only after I committed myself to come work with him that my advisor pulled a surprise on me. While he initially had told me that I could do a project on Abarbanel, he now informed me that he would not agree to something that narrowly focused on Abarbanel. For that matter, he was not going to let me write anything that was simply about Jewish thought. He insisted that I write on some sort of grand topic that would appeal to people outside of the field of Jewish History. He also told me to write my dissertation and then he would put together a dissertation committee. Being young and inexperienced, I had no idea that both of his instructions were the exact opposite of what one is supposed to do.

My advisor recommended Norman Cohn’s Pursuit the Millenium to me, which still is one of my favorite works of history. Cohn wrote about medieval Christian peasants using millenarian ideology to rebel against the Feudal order. His goal was to undermine the Whiggish notion of the Middle Ages where peasants meekly accepted the hierarchal order of their day and it was only during the Enlightenment that people developed a political consciousness. What I took from Cohn is the idea that messianism is not just a religious doctrine but also a political ideology. This gave me the idea of writing about Jewish Messianism as something political. This would be going against Gershom Scholem and most Jewish Historians who have seen Judaism from the Destruction of the Second Temple to the rise of Zionism as lacking politics.

My advisor liked my idea for a dissertation but insisted that even this was too narrow and that I needed to also write about parallel examples within Christianity and Islam. Fairly quickly, I found myself trapped in a project that I was not qualified to handle. Furthermore, I was socially isolated where I was living with few dating opportunities. This led me to depression, which in turn, made it difficult to work on the dissertation, which only furthered my depression. My main relief from depression was writing this blog, which most certainly did not mean making progress with the dissertation.  

To be fair to my advisor, he is an excellent teacher and I learned a lot from him. In addition to introducing me to the work of Norman Cohn, he gave me a copy of Keith Thomas' Religion and the Decline of Magic. I still cherish the memories of sitting in his office doing a private study session on Christian mysticism, reading people like St. Teresa de Avila, St. John of the Cross, and Jacob Bohme. I think it was because I held my advisor in such high esteem, that I did not initially blame him for my difficulties, even though I realized after a year or so that I should not have been given a dissertation project like the one he gave me. I simply accepted that he had made an honest mistake and it was my job to plow through and make the best of it.   

 

Advice to My Younger Self

From 2006 to 2013, I worked on a doctorate. In the end, things did not work out for reasons that are deeply painful to me. After many years, I have finally decided to directly discuss what happened. This will take multiple posts. Let me start by acknowledging that, at that point in time, I was not ready to work on a doctorate. Here is what I wish my younger self would have known. There may be a doctoral student out there who would benefit from my experience.  

If I could go back in time to when I was about to start work on my Ph.D., I would give my younger self the following advice. In college, you got by simply by being smart. When you get to a doctoral program, everyone is smart. The question then becomes, what else do you bring to the table. Writing a dissertation is not simply a really long research paper that you spend several years on. You are not simply being asked to produce a coherent bit of writing but to make an original argument about a highly specific topic that will be presented to scholars who are experts in this field. With a term paper, you need to convince a professor that you are a decent student who paid attention to lectures and followed that up by reading some of the relevant literature. With a dissertation, you need to convince a committee of scholars that you are someone close to being their equal. With a research paper, your task is to follow the teacher’s instructions and as long as you have made a good-faith effort to do so, the worst they can do is give you a B. If they did a bad job explaining the assignment, that is on them. With a dissertation, no one owes you anything. If the committee does not want to accept what you have written, you are out of luck and all your work will have been for nothing.

Considering the fact that a dissertation requires a different mindset from a research paper, it is important to not jump straight from college to graduate school. Instead, you should take time off to do something else. Spend a few years teaching high school, get married, and start a family. Stay in the Washington Heights neighborhood near Yeshiva University where you have a solid group of friends and one of the few places on the planet where you do not need to justify being an observant Jew who likes secular studies.

One should not think of this as putting your academic career on hold. On the contrary, start developing contacts within academia so that there will be professors who think of you as an adult and a colleague instead of as an eager student. When you are thirty or so and find an attractive offer in a good program that has plenty of funding with an advisor who knows what they are doing and honestly wants to work with you, then you can start your doctorate. By then, you will understand what you need to do and have the personal maturity and support network to succeed.  

The fact that I did not understand this, at the time, left me vulnerable to being given bad advice from none other than my advisor. He told me that I needed to write on a big topic and that I should only bother putting together a committee when I was nearly finished writing. I was not prepared to take what he said in the proper spirit of skepticism because I assumed that my job was simply to do what he told me. The possibility that I could be made to pay for his mistakes never occurred to me. That is not how school is supposed to work. School is supposed to be a safe place where the adults are in charge but also carry responsibility.      

All Conquests After 1928 are Illegitimate: A Review of the Internationalists

 

The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World by Oona Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro is a book I learned a lot from even as I disagree with its premises. The authors consider our current system of international law to be mostly a positive thing, which they attribute to the 1928 Pact of Paris (also known as Kellogg-Briand). The basic idea of this agreement was to outlaw offensive warfare by declaring that countries needed to refer their disputes to arbitration and that all conquests done after 1928 were not to be recognized by the international community. (By declaring that only future conquests were illegitimate, the pact bypassed the issue of the British and French empires, which were created precisely through the sorts of actions that were now supposed to be illegal.) By implication, the pact granted relevance to international opinion. Now all wars involved the international community as other countries needed to decide whether the agreement had been violated and whether they could recognize new realities on the ground.

The practical implications of this agreement could be seen in the 1931 Japanese invasion of Manchuria. U. S. Secretary of State Henry Stimson refused to recognize Japan's control over Manchuria or the newly proclaimed State of Manchukuo. This struck the Japanese as rather hypocritical as it was hardly obvious how Japan's behavior in Manchuria was any worse than what European imperialists had been doing as a matter of course. Furthermore, Japan still bore bitter memories of Commodore Matthew Perry's diplomacy at gunpoint. Japan's mistake was that they invaded Manchuria three years too late; now there was a new set of rules. 

To be clear, as the authors note, the Pact of Paris did not stop Japan nor any of the other acts of Fascist aggression leading up to World War II. Furthermore, even the judges at Nuremberg ignored an attempt to use the Pact of Paris as a basis for prosecuting Nazi defendants. The idea was that since the actions of Nazi Germany were illegal according to the Pact of Paris, the defendants had no immunity against prosecution. What the authors want to argue is that, despite spending years as mostly a dead letter, in the post-war world, the logic of the Pact of Paris was taken up and became the basis for modern international law. For example, the pact's rejection of territorial expansion meant that, with the notable exception of Poland, international borders changed remarkably little after World War II, particularly if you compare it to World War I. Since World War II, borders have been rather stable and there have been few wars of territorial conquest. It is no longer worth it to conquer territory if the international community will not recognize it.   

For a book that is supposed to be about twentieth-century legal thought, the authors spend quite a lot of time on early modern history. As a foil to modern international law, they set up the seventeenth-century scholar Hugo Grotius. I have long considered Grotius to be one of those proto-Enlightenment thinkers who have been unfairly ignored by the general public. In reading this book, I found myself agreeing with Grotius and thinking that the world would be a much better place if we rejected modern international law and went back to something more along the lines of early modern international law as embodied by Grotius. 

Grotius' seventeenth-century Europe saw the emergence of states as distinct from Christendom or a personal monarchy, with Grotius' native Dutch Republic taking the lead, even as we are still a long way from secular democracies in the modern sense. For Grotius, the state was its own moral entity, distinct from its leaders or population. As such, while Grotius believed that states needed to justify their decisions to go to war, its leaders, population, and even the international community were exempted and even, in practice forbidden, from considering whether the state's justifications were valid. Soldiers fighting a war still had to obey the laws of war and refrain from committing war crimes as these did nothing to bring the war to a conclusion. That being said, they were not asked to be lawyers and historians qualified to evaluate whether their government was in the right. Furthermore, Grotius' version of international law had no third-party enforcement. States that allowed their soldiers to commit atrocities invited retaliation by the opposing army. Finally, since other countries were not expected to be knowledgeable enough to have an opinion about the morality of any particular foreign war, once a treaty was signed, that was the end of the matter. If a country managed to win a war and forced the defeated country to sign away territory in a peace treaty, the new borders must now be accepted by all.

What Hathaway and Shapiro dislike about Grotius is that his type of international law opened the door for all kinds of wars of expansion, with states coming up with factitious reasons to go to war without any oversight and then holding on to their ill-gotten gains. The authors point to the young Grotius working as a lawyer for the Dutch East India Company and defending the seizure of a Portuguese ship, seeing in this the foundation for his later work on international law. 

One of the examples the authors give of countries fighting according to Grotius' international law was the Mexican-American War of 1846-48. President Polk could declare war against Mexico over claims of unpaid debts that few people took seriously even at the time. American soldiers were required to obey their orders and not consult their consciouses. Similarly, the international community had no mandate to consider whether this was a war of aggression and if they had an obligation to intervene. Finally, the morality of Polk's declaration was forever placed beyond challenge by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which gave the American Southwest to the United States. Whether or not the United States had the right to conquer this territory, it now belonged to the United States and attempting to take it away would violate international law. 

Surprisingly enough, Grotius had a direct influence on Japan and its justifications for imperialism. In the nineteenth century, Japanese scholars started reading Grotius as a blueprint for how to operate in the world. Japan was emerging into a world dominated by European countries who had certain understandings between themselves. If Japan was going to be a great power they needed to know what these rules were. Grotius, as the father of international law, seemed to offer them the key. This seemed to work until they invaded Manchuria and they discovered that the rules had changed.  

For all their criticism of Grotius, Hathaway and Shapiro fail to consider the practical benefit of Grotius' willingness to place the question of whether a state was right to go to war in a kind of moral black box. By not demanding that citizens have the right answer as to the morality of their country's war, we protect those citizens. Their country might be in the wrong, but we are still going to grant rights to the soldiers fighting this immoral war and even the politicians. This facilitates limiting the scope of the war and working toward a peace treaty. Allowing even immoral treaties forced upon a weaker power to stand also helps to support peace. We do not want to be refighting every morally questionable war, whether the Mexican-American War or any other war. 

Considering the amount of knowledge required to settle historically based disagreements between countries, modern international law seems designed to promote a regime of international elites, who are simply going to confirm their prejudices as to which country is right in any given dispute. The use of the International Criminal Court against Israel is a good example of this. Those making the case seem willfully blind to the question of what Israel needs to do in order to avoid another October 7th. The moment we consider military necessity, the whole trial would have to be postponed until after the war when Israeli generals would be free to answer questions about their decisions without compromising ongoing military operations.

Hathaway and Shapiro actually discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an example of the limits of the Paris Peace Pact. Neither the State of Israel nor Palestine existed in 1928 so the pact is useless for deciding borders. Worse, because the pact does not allow for conquest, it leaves us without a framework for a treaty. Any borders agreed to would be open to future challenges as the product of a forced treaty and, therefore, illegitimate. Having Grotius as our model for international law would allow the Palestinians to say that Israel wronged us but we lost the war and now need to move on and make peace.