In Search of the People (Part II)

(Part I)

The problem for classical Marxists was that workers in the West proved not to be particularly revolutionary at all. They were easily bought off with modest progressive reforms such as shorter hours and better working conditions. They did not suffer alienation in the sense that the very idea of being under the authority of a capitalist did not bother them as long as that capitalist could provide them with ever greater prosperity.

One solution to this problem was Fascism. While we tend to think of Fascism as a right-wing movement, it is important to keep in mind that Mussolini started as a socialist. He then made the perfectly reasonable assumption that he could make socialism palatable in a country like Italy by embracing nationalism and using it to show that the Italian people, as Italians, really did have a revolutionary consciousness. This then led to the acceptance of the Catholic Church as part of the consciousness of the Italian People and even of the bourgeoise, who willingly embraced state control once it was made clear to them that, as Italians, they were not being placed as the villains and their property was not going to be expropriated. (It should be noted that the early Mussolini was not particularly anti-Semitic. Jews had been Italians since the Roman Empire so they were welcomed into the Fascist Party.) From this perspective, it should come as no surprise that Mousellini maintained a high degree of acceptability within leftist circles during his early years. He offered a plausible model for achieving socialist aims by avoiding conflict with the right.  

Marxism's only success in the early twentieth century was Russia, a country that was still transitioning out of an absolute monarchy and still trying to figure out the Industrial Revolution. On top of this, the Czar had managed to bring the entire country to ruin through his disastrous involvement in World War I. So the Bolsheviks managed to seize power by promising basic land reforms to improve the lot of citizens. In the 1920s, it was still plausible to imagine that Marxism would allow the Soviet Union to leapfrog the West and give workers more of the cars and electric appliances that Western workers were beginning to take for granted.

The problem for the Soviet Union was that it was unable to deliver on these economic promises. Furthermore, even trying to outproduce the West in consumer goods would betray the revolution. A worker with a truly revolutionary consciousness would rather labor under the worst horrors of the nineteenth-century factory system as long as it was an agent of the party who was his boss than to enjoy the blessings of Western capitalism if it meant being subjected to a capitalist boss. As such, one had to conclude that the vast majority of Soviet citizens were counterrevolutionaries. Even the seemingly loyal Soviet citizens who honestly believed that the Communist Party could deliver the full abundance of consumer goods had already betrayed the revolution in their hearts. They demonstrated that they did not believe in Communism as a matter of principle. If tomorrow they could be convinced that capitalism could offer more benefits, they would gladly betray the revolution and replace it with capitalism. (Note that this is what essentially happened to the Soviet Union in 1991.)   

This Soviet dilemma explains the Stalinist terror of the 1930s. The attempt to collectivize farms was a failure and led to the deaths of millions, mainly in Ukraine. If you are a good Communist, the explanation for this was that the Ukrainian Kulaks were greedy and sabotaged the plan so they deserved to die. Furthermore, now that we have established that the move toward actual socialism cannot happen unless the population truly develops a socialist consciousness, something most of them lack, the only solution is to declare war on the non-socialist masses in the name of the People. It should be emphasized that, under Stalin, to be guilty of treason, did not require malicious intent. Everyone, particularly those born before 1917, was, by definition, a traitor in spirit. How could it be otherwise if you were born into a capitalist world and instinctually thought in terms of personal benefit? The mark of a traitor was, upon being accused of treason, to deny guilt. Such a person demonstrated that they lacked the proper socialist mindset and still thought in terms of individual actions instead of accepting that they cannot be anything but guilty. The mark of a true socialist believer was to confess and accept any punishment in the hope that this will lead the next generation to develop the necessary socialist consciousness.

Mid and late twentieth-century leftist revolutionaries faced a dilemma. As knowledge of Stalinist atrocities became more widespread, it became harder to openly defend the Soviet Union as any kind of ideal. (This was distinct from taking money from the Soviet Union and working for Soviet interests during the Cold War.) At the same time, Western economic successes made it less likely that urban workers would be willing to risk their unions, pension plans, and welfare benefits on some revolution. As such, leftist revolutionary thought developed along two streams that looked to different groups of discontented individuals to serve as revolutionary classes. These were third-world peasants and members of minority groups in the West.

While classical Marxism had rejected the peasant as a revolutionary class, in the twentieth century they came to be reevaluated. Peasants had the advantage of never being seduced by a capitalist consciousness of individual striving and still maintained a group ethos. Furthermore, while peasants maintained traditional beliefs, outside of Europe and the United States, these were not Orthodox Christian beliefs. Even in Latin America, the Christianity on the ground could assumed to be far enough from Orthodox Christianity that such beliefs could be held up as manifestations of a revolutionary consciousness.

Much as religion suddenly became acceptable when taken out of its Western context, so did nationalism. For example, the nationalism of the North Vietnamese was acceptable as it manifested itself as opposition to imperial powers such as the French and later the Americans. As such, the North Vietnamese demonstrated a revolutionary consciousness and could be counted as a manifestation of the People. Obviously, nationalist movements that were not hostile to the West such as in Poland or Zionism remained illegitimate. Their existence demonstrated that Poles and Israelis lacked a revolutionary consciousness and did not count as part of the People.   

This embrace of nationalism and even religion, despite the fact that these were the things that were supposed to mark someone as a Fascist, eventually led Western leftists to embrace the Arab cause. This started by accepting Arab nationalists such as Nassar but then eventually came to include Islamic fundamentalists such as Khomeini in Iran. From this perspective, the Palestinians became the ultimate “oppressed people.” They combined Arab nationalism with Islam and struggled against Western "Imperialism" by opposing the State of Israel. The destruction and its replacement with Palestine would be the elimination of the Jewish false consciousness of itself as a people and allow for the manifestation of the true Peoplehood of the Palestinians.  

Ground Rules for a Discourse With Me

 

In an earlier post, I explored why I felt I had an easier time reading conservative Christians than woke leftists. The practical implication of this is that I recognize that I struggle to engage people on the left. I am open to the possibility that this is a failure on my part that I need to rectify. Readers should feel free to offer book recommendations or to attempt to engage me in dialogue. For a fruitful conversation to happen, I suspect that there are going to need to be ground rules. 

1. People on the mainstream right today are not responsible for racism: 

We can still acknowledge that there are real problems today facing various minority communities and, recognizing the historical sources of these problems as well as a need for Americans to come together, there may be a need for government solutions; this may even include direct reparation payments. That being said, the very act of reaching out to conservatives to help in solving the problem means that you are not blaming them for racism. This would apply even if we are mainly asking conservatives to write a check. Even asking conservatives for money is distinct from trying to punish conservatives by making them pay. With punishment, there is no dialogue, just a demand and a threat of what might happen if that demand is not met. 

2. There will be no tearing down of present-day systems: 

We may acknowledge that the political and social systems we have inherited contain deeply problematic elements that need to be reformed. Furthermore, an important aspect of how we teach history should be an open and honest exploration of the skeletons in our collective closet. That being said, it should be acknowledged that any attempt to completely tear these systems down is likely to bring about extreme bloodshed and what is likely to arise will be more authoritarian than anything we have today. It may still be possible to argue that those people unfairly victimized by the system should be compensated in order that they do not harm the rest of society by turning toward revolution.  

3. As a general principle, capitalism/free markets should be acknowledged as superior to government action on both moral and practical grounds: 

There can still be room for government action under specific circumstances such as providing public goods or compensating people for past iniquities. That being said, there is going to be no unwritten constitution where the government is deemed as "people coming together" and markets as mere greed. Government must be acknowledged as a literal act of physical violence, leaving us with the question only of how much can we minimize its use without causing the collapse of civilization.   

4. There must be red lines on the left:

Historically, as Jordan Peterson has argued, the mainstream right has understood that there were lines, mainly Nazism/racism, that should not be crossed. This has not been the case with the left. Consider the example of Che Guevera. It is not socially acceptable, within polite society, to wear a Himmler t-shirt; how is it ok to wear a Che Guevara shirt? Underlying such social rules is a double standard regarding Communism. Communists get a pass for their ideals and are not held responsible for the millions of deaths they have caused. The fact that Nazis also were idealists gets ignored. We can talk about where to draw these lines to the left, just as we can talk about where the right needs to draw its lines, but such lines must still exist.    

For a meaningful dialogue to happen, I need to believe that you are not planning to kill me. As such, I need to feel confident that you are not going to demand something that I must refuse even at the risk of my life. The reality is that there are going to be people (such as Nazis and Communists) that I am unlikely to be able to live with and having me live in the same country as them is likely to lead to Hobbesian Civil War. I do wish to be able to live with others, even those I disagree with, and to do so I am willing to make compromises but compromise needs to be a two-way street.   

Joseph's Adventures in Communism and College

Previously, I talked about my great-grandfather, Rabbi Moshe Eliezer Shapiro, and the late Prof. Louis Feldman of blessed memory as examples of antifragile Judaism, people who created Jewish lives for themselves under unplanned circumstances. In the world of antifragility, what looks good on a day-to-day basis is not necessarily what will work in the long run because what makes such systems look good is precisely what can bring it down in a once-in-a-generation disaster. I would like to return to this issue of antifragility and its implications for Judaism.

Critical to Jewish survival has been its ability to adapt to situations to which our faith, as envisioned by previous generations, was not designed to handle. The most extreme example of this was the rabbis after the destruction of the Second Temple, who reimagined Judaism without its central sacrificial cult and without the majority of the biblical commandments. This requires us to rethink who the heroes of Jewish history are from those who lived ideal religious lives under ideal circumstances to those who lived non-ideal lives precisely because their circumstances made such ideals impossible. 

The biblical Isaac is someone held up by the rabbis as a person who was able to live his life in Israel in purity without sin. As Rashi teaches, Jacob wanted to live that life but God sent him the calamity of Joseph. Joseph lived his life in Egypt as a slave, a prisoner, and finally as viceroy. Joseph had to carry on for all those years under the assumption that he had been cast out by his brothers and that there was no future for him as part of the Children of Israel. It is Joseph who not only physically saved his family but also made it possible for Israel to spiritually survive 210 years in Egypt. It is not for nothing that, every Friday night, Jews bless their sons to be like Joseph's children, Menashe and Ephraim, who grew up in the court of Egypt. Similarly, we have the later models of Daniel and Esther in the courts of Babylon and Persia, cut off from Israel and with no hope of being able to return. In Esther's case, she even intermarried.

Let us be clear as to what the challenge is here. Ignore the strawman argument that Egypt or Persia (or America) is different. This is easily countered by "we, the faithful, do not change." This strawman argument, though, covers an alternative utterly devasting attack of not that the world has changed but that you have changed. The moment a person wakes up and sees themselves as different and irreparably cut-off from their former selves with no hope of returning, then casting off one's former beliefs and practices becomes natural. One realizes that the hard act of changing has already happened and now it is only a matter of accepting the reality of the situation. In fact, the very tenacity that one held on beforehand, insisting that the new circumstances did not matter, will come to work in favor of giving in as it will make the break, once it happens, that much more obvious.  

Imagine trying to train a twentieth-century version of Joseph. It is the year 1900 and your newborn student lives in Czarist Russia. You have him until he is seventeen. In 1917 the Bolsheviks are going to take over and put an end to open Jewish observance. Your Joseph will have to live out his life without the support of a Jewish community and his observance will be compromised at best. What can you give him that will allow him to maintain a Jewish identity in his own mind and pass it along to his own Menashe and Ephraim to the extent that when he dies in 1991, with the fall of the Soviet Union, it will be as a Jew surrounded by a Jewish family?

The members of my family who came closest to living out this story were my maternal great-grandparents, Yitzchok Isaac and Feigy Schwartz. (Note that both my father’s father and my mother’s grandfather were named Yitzchok Isaac.) They survived the Holocaust only to go back home to a Soviet-controlled Hungary where they raised three daughters. As a teenager, my grandmother took advantage of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution to flee to the United States because there weren't any good Jewish men to marry. My great-grandfather passed away when I was a kid. I only knew him as an old man sitting in a dark corner of my grandmother's house, who did not speak English. Frankly, he scared me. (I confessed this as an adult to my father and he laughed telling me that I had no idea what a kind man he was.) If I could talk to him now, I would want to ask him how he found it in himself to raise a Jewish family with no Jewish community to rely upon and offer hope for a future.  

The 20th century gave us Communism, the Holocaust, and ultimately the destruction of Eastern European Jewish life. Jews in 1900 could not have prepared for this but, at the end of the day, all of their efforts to build up Judaism that were not centered around the United States and Israel were going to be little better than futile. I have no idea what this century will bring. That being said, is it not unreasonable, for those in the United States to construct an educational system on the assumption (whether or not you are Haredi and oppose college on principle) that students are going to go college for four years without meaningful Jewish support. You have kids from the age of 5 until they are 18. What can you teach that will allow a student to go to college and, regardless of the compromises that they might make there, they will have a Jewish identity that will persevere to the extent that they will seek to rejoin the Jewish community afterward and raise a Jewish family? Anything that is not clearly focused on this goal needs to be cast aside as a waste of time and a distraction.  

Whether we are dealing with the extremes of Communism and the Holocaust or the mundane challenges of college, I assume that a successful pedagogical strategy will try to build a strong Jewish identity backed by theology and a deep emotional attachment to Judaism. Jewish identity here means a knowledge of ritual practice as well as a sense of Jewish history. Theology means having open and honest discussions about God and not simply assuming that kids believe in God just because they are ritually observant. Developing an emotional attachment to Judaism means getting away from threats of hellfire and, instead, making sure that Jewish practice is both joyful and meaningful. This is not to be confused with being fun and entertaining as that will have little staying power. A Passover Seder is not very entertaining but it can be effective if conducted by adults who understand what the Seder is about and are not simply going through the motions. Discussions about identity and theology should best be conducted over a Shabbos cholent or during shabbatons/summer camp along with plenty of singing. 

Take away a Jewish community and a person with a strong Jewish identity will continue as a Jew because, at a fundamental level, they see Judaism as essential to who they are and not merely a culture they grew up in or a set of practices they used to follow. To abandon Judaism would become unthinkable as almost a form of suicide. For all intents and purposes, it would be a different person living that non-Jewish lifestyle. A strong identity can allow a person a continuous sense of self that is not broken by anything that happens on the outside. Defending a Jewish identity requires a theology in the sense that our Joseph should be able to answer the Wicked Son's question of "what is this service to you." Having a theology is useful precisely when there is no community to give meaning to your identity. One thinks of the example of Maimonides, who lived for several years as a Muslim and developed the first list of Jewish doctrines. You could have a person living their entire lives without ever being able to practice Judaism. They are still Jewish because they are able to believe certain things even if it is only in their heads. Finally, all the arguments in the world are not going to keep an intelligent person Jewish if they do not already love Judaism. If a person sees Judaism as a burden to be carried in the hope of getting into heaven, a college campus will provide plenty of intellectual justifications for discarding that burden.  

If we accept this model of Jewish education then it raises some difficult questions about Haredi education. Frankly, Talmud, at least how it is conventionally taught, becomes a kind of "spork," in theory good for a lot of things but fails to do any one thing particularly well and is better replaced by alternatives. For example, there are better ways to teach halakha. It is even more difficult to use Talmud to teach theology. Talmud, with its jumping across generations, lacks a clear narrative in contrast to the Bible. The Talmud's strongest selling point would be that it can build Jewish identity by allowing students to develop a sense that they are a continuation of the rabbis with their discussions. Note, though, that while this form of Jewish identity, is well suited for people operating within a Yeshiva system, it is likely to crack precisely when that community is no more. Our Joseph, whether in college or under Communism, is not going to be a rabbi. That option is closed. If our Joseph is to remain Jewish it will be precisely because his sense of himself as a Jew transcends his being a rabbi. 

I readily acknowledge that the Haredi system is better at producing Jewishly knowledgable and fervent kids than the Modern Orthodox schools. Clearly, if the question was keeping kids religious tomorrow, Haredim would win easily. But the lesson of antifragility is that you have to prepare for the extreme. Breaking Haredi kids should be relatively easy. There is no need to argue with them. Take away their tzitzit and yarmulkas; clip their peyos and let them see themselves in the mirror. No need to force them to eat non-kosher, just let them feed themselves from a dining room not designed for kosher eating and make their own compromises. The fact that these compromises may be quite defensible will not change the fact that they are compromises. Once you create a break with their past selves, the rest should follow easily. 

Remember that Haredi kids have not been trained to imagine themselves living outside a Haredi community. On the contrary, they have been conditioned to make that imaginative leap impossible. Thus, the moment you take them away from their community, they will likely see themselves as different people. This is not the case with Modern Orthodox kids, who have identities distinct from their Judaism. This might make them less fervent and more likely to abandon the faith on a day-to-day basis. It also might allow them a stronger sense of continuity even under difficult circumstances. As long as mental continuity exists then Jewish identity stands a fighting chance. 

Where Do We Go From Here? Let Us Make Government Equal Violence Again

Libertarians are a small minority in this country, without much particular influence. For all the complaints about the Koch brothers, we do not control academia. Our influence over Hollywood is so non-existent that we cannot even get a decent Atlas Shrugged filmed made. Assuming that this status quo is unlikely to change in our lifetime, our only chance of having some limited say over public policy is through an alliance with either liberals or conservatives (At this point, I am uncertain which is a better option so all can I do is urge libertarians to be charitable to whatever path other libertarians pursue, recognizing that there really are no good options.) Regardless of whether libertarians should be on the left or the right, I would hope that what unites us and what we should never lose track of is the desire to make it clear that government is a literal act of violence.

As we approach the one-hundredth anniversary of the Versailles Treaty, it is useful to note that the end of World War I marked a critical turning point in a moral revolution almost as important as the Enlightenment's turn to equality as a moral principle. World War I was made possible because people, as it was the norm throughout history, looked to war as something noble. Millions of men marched to war in 1914 on the logic that the worst that could happen was that they would die and be remembered as heroes. Most likely, the war would be over by Christmas and they would be able to go home to show off a minor injury that would mark them forever as "real men." It is important to keep in mind that women were fully culpable in pushing this logic on men by shaming them into fighting. Such a state of affairs was not something unique to 1914. It goes all the way back to at least the Iliad.

Perhaps, the finest summation of such war apologetics can be found in Shakespeare's Henry V.




Critical for understanding the play is the fact that Shakespeare does not ask us to care about medieval dynastic politics. It is irrelevant whether Henry V has a legitimate claim to the throne of France. There is no pretense that fighting for Henry will make the world safe for hereditary monarchy through the female line (the official issue at stake in the Hundred Years War). What Henry offers his men is the opportunity to be part of his "band of brothers," to be remembered as such heroes that someone would write a play about them nearly two centuries later. (This is a good example of the "post-modern" side to Shakespeare where he regularly gives his characters a certain awareness that they are actors in a play.)

This view of war as an opportunity to win personal glory died in the mud of the Western Trenches. World War II could still be fought for the ideologies of Fascism, Communism, and Democracy, but no more could intellectually series people think of war as a principled good in itself. What is critical to understand here is not that 20th-century man abandoned war nor is it likely that peace will come to the world in the 21st century (even as we continue to enjoy the long peace of no war between major powers since World War II). What can no longer be seriously contemplated, even as superhero action movies remain popular, is any discussion of war that omits the obvious fact that war involves murder and the fact that it might be carried out by men in uniform following orders from their superiors does nothing to change that. Wars may continue to be fought as inescapable tragedies, but there is no escaping their morally problematic nature.

In practice, this means that in debating war, opponents of war start with the moral high ground. For example, with the Iraq War, the Bush administration could not even simply argue that Saddam Hussein was a bad guy and that the United States was legally justified in removing him, let alone that they were offering young Americans the opportunity to take part in a "glorious" adventure. They needed to argue that Saddam presented a clear and present danger to the world through his possession of weapons of mass destruction. The fact that these accusations turned out to be false fatally compromised the moral position of the United States in occupying Iraq.

The success of anti-war movements in making war morally problematic offers us a model for what libertarians might achieve in the 21st century. Even if we cannot stop the expansion of government let alone eliminate it, we can still make government morally problematic.

My model for this is the Road to Serfdom, in which Friedrich Hayek directly connected the romanticization of war as the county coming together for a single cause to the argument for continuing that same military logic in peacetime with a government-run economy. It stands to the credit of Hayek that conservatives developed a guilty conscious regarding government (distinct from actually cutting government spending). This was a valid justification for allying with conservatives in the past and it may continue to be so in the future. Clearly, this is not the case with the wider society. On the contrary, when people, particularly on the left, talk about government, there is a tendency to see it in terms of "everyone coming together for the common good." By contrast, markets are seen as manifestations of greed. This gives government action the moral high ground.

We can criticize government policies and we will win some major victories. Hardcore Marxism went down with the Cold War. Even the Chinese Communist Party accepts market control over much of the economy. Democratic Socialists like Bernie Sanders are not revolutionaries trying to nationalize everything. On the contrary, they largely accept the current status quo. That being said, such victories often seem hallow as we cannot escape the sense that our opponents are simply rearming, waiting for their chance to make their next big push. The reason for this is that the horrors of Communism did not discredit government in the same sense that the horrors of Nazism discredited racism. (Try claiming to be a "Democratic Nazi.") From this perspective, Communism stands as a "noble" experiment, its failures a lesson for future attempts to bring about the brotherhood of man. By contrast, those who oppose Communism on principle, stand convicted of being so selfish as to oppose human brotherhood.

My modest goal for libertarianism is to simply make it impossible, within mainstream society, to talk about government programs without acknowledging that violence is being advocated. Today, we can take it for granted that defenders of the military are not going to be able to ignore the fact that war inevitably leads to atrocities while denouncing their opponents as cowards who hate their country. Similarly, we can push the debate to a point in which defenders of government programs are not able to simply portray themselves as humanitarians and their opponents as greedy corporate shills. On the contrary, it is we who oppose government who are the true humanitarians. We are the ones who do not wish to use violence.

You wish to have public education and universal health care? Fine, just as long as you are willing to admit that you believe that it is right and laudable to murder children if that is the only way to get people to pay for these programs. We libertarians may still lose the debate if we cannot offer a better alternative, but if we lose we will still be able to hold our heads up high and claim the moral high ground as the humanitarians who dared to dream of a world without violence. If we can do that, who knows, maybe the next generation will be able to come up with a plan that really does make government services unnecessary. 

Am I an Islamic Extremist?

Ben Shapiro uses a collection of polled responses to questions by Muslims to offer hard numbers on the percentage of Muslims, who are extremists. While I do see radical Islam as a major threat and, for example, am willing to support the Dresden-style bombing of Gaza and the invasion of Saudi Arabia to remove the house of Saud, Shapiro harms his case by using a standard for extremism that is ridiculously elastic.

Consider some of the questions posed: Can terrorism, honor killings or attacks on civilians ever be justified? Do you wish Sharia be the law of your country? If you answer yes to any of these questions, you are an extremist. By this standard, I am an extremist. Ben Shapiro and most of you are also likely extremists. Notice the key word "ever." Any person with minimal training in philosophy should easily be able to construct a hypothetical scenario in which just about anything would be justified. For example, as a matter of general policy, I would consider myself an opponent of slavery. That being said, I can easily imagine scenarios involving rescuing people from concentration camps in which slavery could be justified. For that matter, I am willing to defend the right of consenting adults to enter into slave contracts. Obviously, these cases do not apply to the vast majority of real slaves, who have lived throughout history. Thus, I certainly do not support any actual slave systems. Actual slaves are the victims of injustice. That being said, I have been accused of being an advocate of slavery when I have tried to point out these important nuances. Do I support honor killings? Praised be the husband and father, who hacks his wife and daughter to pieces upon finding out that they are traitors to liberty, plotting to bring Communist or Nazi governments to power. Do I support terrorist attacks on civilians? Communism and Nazism are ideologies that reject the social contract distinction between military and civilian. Thus, an intellectually honest opponent must be willing to subject even civilian supporters of these ideologies to total Hobbesian warfare. Do I support Sharia? I perfectly understand how decent Muslims would wish to live under their religion and dream about a day when all of their countrymen freely agree to the same. Note that the question said nothing about the use of violence to impose that law upon others. I wish to live under halakha and hope that one day the United States will allow me to secede and form my own "Jewish State."

There are much better questions that could have been asked to see if someone is an Islamic extremist. In this day and age, do you support carrying out attacks against civilians on American soil? Would you agree to recognize Israel as a Jewish State and make peace with it, if it allowed Palestinians to form their own state and offered compensation to refugees? Do you support the death penalty, as practical and not just symbolic law, to be used against converts from Islam? I assume that the number of Muslims, who would answer yes to these questions will be frightening. Furthermore, I recognize that there are specific Islamic groups that should be placed in the same category as Communists and Nazis with the same bloody implications. That being said, this is a threat that is simply too important to exaggerate.

Religious Narrative: Medieval Catholicism, Communism and Islam

One of the surprises of the modern world has been the continued persistence of organized religion. Despite several centuries of Enlightenment criticism, religion remains a powerful force within society. Certainly, within the United States, the vast majority of the population subscribes at least formally to some religion. I would argue that much of this is the result of the inability of secularism to present overarching narratives. Make whatever criticism you want about religions, they tend to be quite good at formulating narratives that allow people to make sense of their lives and all the various parts of their universe. This is important not just for regular people living their social lives, but for intellectuals and in a sense especially for them; it is the people who live in the realm of ideas who need things to click together in a larger whole.

I will start by giving an example from what may be the most intellectually successful religious narrative in history, medieval Catholicism. Take the view of a Catholic living in say 1491; he benefited from living in a world that made sense in ways that we can hardly relate to. In this medieval world, we have Aristotle to explain the natural world. This Aristotelian universe, with its prime mover and essences and accidents, fits neatly with Church teaching, solving the conflict between faith and reason. This system also has political implications. We are in a hierarchical universe were everything from plants, animals and people up to the planets, angels and God have their place in a natural order. Therefore it is only reasonable that human affairs should mirror this reality with a king, nobles, the Church, peasants, men and women each having their place. How does one explain and give meaning to suffering, whether the threat of Islam, schisms in the Church, war, political chaos or simply having to bury a wife and child? Mankind fell to Original Sin, giving Satan power over the Earth. That being said, there is reason to hope; Christ died for our sins so we can go to heaven. If the world looks like it is falling apart we can still look forward to the imminent coming of the apocalypse and the final judgment.

Say what you want about this medieval Catholicism; call it unscientific, anti-democracy, sexist and anti-Semitic. Yes, over the next few centuries, this worldview was rocked by numerous intellectual, and political shifts so that, even if there are still Catholics today, that particular creature the medieval Catholic is now extinct. All this may be true, but medieval Catholicism was an internally consistent system and fit well into the known facts of the world at that time. I would add that this system also proved quite attractive to Jews, particularly those in Spain. (Here is a dirty little secret about pre-modern Judaism. The majority of people who left did so freely out of a desire to assimilate and not due to force or persecution.)   

In the history of modern secularism, there has been only one movement to produce a narrative that could compete with organized religion and that was Communism. Try to look at the world, this time from the perspective of a Russian Jew in 1891. Traditional Judaism does not have much to offer, but to be poor, get killed in a pogrom and wait for the Messiah. Now here is Communism. It may not offer a personal God and an afterlife, but instead, it offers the forces of history to guide us and promise us a better world. Faith versus reason? Science has refuted religion, but Communism is the logical extension of evolution applied to human affairs. How should we order our political and social systems? Communism replaces superstition and religious dogma with scientific rationalism, allowing us to create a just system where everyone is equal. How do you explain and offer meaning to human suffering? The problems of this world are the products by the class oppression by the aristocracy and bourgeois. This, though, simply serves to highlight the iniquities of the present systems and hasten the imminent coming of the people's revolution which will create a paradise on Earth in which everyone will work together for the common good and there will be no prejudice nor anti-Semitism.

Again, one can make all sorts of intellectual arguments against this Communist worldview. Ultimately it was undone by the Soviet Union itself, whose blood-soaked history is a better refutation of Communism than anything else. This should not obscure the power of the Communist narrative in its time. Say what you want about Karl Marx, but he has to be viewed as one of the greatest thinkers of all time simply in terms of his ability to craft a system of thought that allows you to discuss not just politics, but history, art and science as one coherent whole. We in the United States fail to appreciate the Communist appeal largely because it failed to ever gain much traction here, but the Communists nearly did win. Forget about the Cold War. After World War I and in the wake the Russian Revolution Communists, without question, had both the intellectual and moral high ground. With that, they nearly took the entire European continent without a single shot being fired. As for Jews, they walked away from traditional Judaism in mass to follow this Communist dream. (See Clarissa for a further discussion about the religious dimensions of Communism.)

Where does this leave our modern world? Try seeing things from the view of an Arab in 1991. Communism, which was a tremendous secularizing force in the Arab, has come crashing down with the fall of the Soviet Union so now what? Well, there is Islam, not the watered down variety, but a "purified" form from its original source in Saudi Arabia. What is wrong with the world and how do we fix it? The West has dominated us politically, first through direct imperialism and later through the dictators they support and corrupted us culturally through secularism. Only Islam can unite the Arab peoples so they can take back what is rightfully theirs. As for science, we Arabs invented science before it was stolen from us by the West.

This narrative may lack the comprehensive elegance of either medieval Catholicism or nineteenth century Communism but, for those with no better narrative options, this will likely do. I cannot say that fundamentalist Islam will likely prove a spiritual threat to Judaism but, as a physical threat, it certainly is a match to either of the other narratives.        

Ayn Rand as Inverse Marxism

Over on Newsweek, Jonathan Chait attacks Rep. Paul Ryan for "waging war on the weak" with his budget plan and for his allegiance to the philosophy of Ayn Rand. As Chait summarizes Rand:

[She] was a kind of politicized L. Ron Hubbard—a novelist-philosopher who inspired a cult of acolytes who deem her the greatest human being who ever lived. The enduring heart of Rand’s totalistic philosophy was Marxism flipped upside down. Rand viewed the capitalists, not the workers, as the producers of all wealth, and the workers, not the capitalists, as useless parasites.

John Galt, the protagonist of her iconic novel Atlas Shrugged, expressed Rand’s inverted Marxism: “The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time. The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all of their brains.”

The misinterpretation of Rand here is astonishing. I bring it up less out of a desire to defend Rand, but as an example of the unfair treatment liberals usually hand libertarians, throwing out nonsensical arguments designed to ignore the very real objections that libertarians have in reverse.

Workers are not the villains in Rand's novels. Those tend to be politicians, union bosses, public intellectuals, and "capitalists," who desire government handouts. In fact, for Rand, there is no worker vs. capitalist conflict in the first place. The conflict is between people who produce, whether the janitor sweeping the floor for dollars an hour or the visionary businessman with his millions, and those who do not produce and feel their lack of actual production gives them some sort of moral right to take from the producers in the name of some "public good." Finally, this entire comparison with Marx ignores the very simple fact that Rand's entire philosophy was built around the rejection of violence and coercion as opposed to Marx who was an apostle of violent revolution and coercive State action. This is not hair splitting when you consider the fact that the Marxist support for violence directly led to Communist governments killing millions of their own people. Until someone can come up with a plausible scenario in which an Objectivist government could plot the deaths of millions of people, any comparison of Rand and Marx must be rendered libel.

Chait's attacks on Rand demonstrate a number of liberal blind spots, allowing him to stand in judgment on the morals of libertarians while at the same not being able to even understand how a libertarian might see him as morally objectionable. Chait is clearly unable to think outside of the framework of class conflict. If someone is pro-capitalism then they must be anti-worker. The very possibility that someone might think that Chait is the villain for not even producing useful ideas and attempting to take other people's money is never raised. This leads us to the biggest liberal moral blind spot. Chait is incapable of conceiving that someone could morally object to government taking money and see it as a form of coercion.

I may have my objections to Ayn Rand's moral philosophy, particularly as she applied it to her own life, but she did not support violence or attempt to coerce money from others. This alone made her far more moral than any liberal on the planet (or conservative for that matter), who allows the government to coercively take money from people.        

In Support of Public Schools Teaching Intelligent Design and Other Nonsense III

Baruch Pelta, in his second post, gets nasty, accusing me of putting up a "destabilizing lie meant to pull emotional strings." Yes, I have the nerve to compare his mode of dealing with opponents to that of Haredim in that, while intellectually he may understand that people disagree with him, at a psychological level he fails to internalize this. This gets him stuck on the fact that he is "objectively" correct. (Note that I did not accuse him of being a Nazi, which is what I would have done if I were trying to simply score polemical points.) One should not think ill of Baruch; this is a problem that afflicts most people. Being a true liberal, one who respects all beliefs and refuses to use any physically coercive measures, even against those he disagrees with, to force people to go against those beliefs, requires years of disciplined critical thinking. It is something I still strive to work on in myself.

 A useful exercise is to think in terms of x and y instead of actual ideas. X and y are both ideas held by people living in society. In order to get x and y supporters to not force their beliefs on the other, they need to be promised that the other side, in turn, will not try to force their beliefs on them. Now x might be evolution and y creationism, but that is irrelevant in face of the more abstract x and y social contract model we agree to serve. Thinking in abstract terms allows you to get around the psychological hang-ups we all have about the beliefs that seem to us to be obviously true.

Working as an intellectual historian also helps. For example, I have been spending much of my time these few months trying to understand Sabbatianism. It is not my place to judge those who believed that Sabbatai Sevi was the Messiah. If it seems absurd to me then I have to work all the harder as seeing Sabbatai as they might have and put myself in a frame of mind in which accepting Sabbatai as the Messiah can become reasonable. This is done by immersing oneself in the words of Sabbatians themselves and their worldview.

In terms of actual arguments, Baruch challenges my larger definition of religion, pointing out that the Constitution specifically refers to religion and not to ideas in general. Fair enough, but I would point out that, in the eighteenth century, the only examples of large-scale organized ideological groups, the kind that might have the power to overthrow the government in hopes of being able to force their beliefs on others, were religions. Keep in mind that the main "religious" concern of the Founding Fathers was to not have Catholics and Protestants repeating Europe's religion wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries on American soil. I assume that they would have adjusted their terms if they were writing only several decades later and saw the Communist Party. At the end of the day, it does not make sense to have one set of rules for the Catholic Church and another for the Communist Party. Baruch, are you suggesting that the beliefs of Communists are outside of the first amendment? Richard Dawkins, of all people, has essentially made my argument that religion should not be treated any differently from any other belief. I agree with Dawkins that being a Quaker should not offer you special conscientious objector status not available to people who are pacifists on simple intellectual grounds.
 

Dulce et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori

In my conversation with Dr. David Friedman, the main point I have been stressing is that part of what allows a government to function is that it is perceived as having inherent authority. I can choose on a casual whim to be a consumer of Nike or Reebok sneakers. I do not sit around thinking whether or not I feel like submitting to the authority of the United States government. In this spirit, I thought it worthwhile to share with you a quote from Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.

Dying for one's country, which usually one does not choose, assumes a moral grandeur which dying for the Labour Party, the American Medical Association, or perhaps even Amnesty International cannot rival, for these are all bodies one can join or leave at easy will. Dying for the revolution also draws its grandeur from the degree to which it is felt to be something pure. (If people imagined the proletariat merely as a group in hot pursuit of refrigerators, holidays, or power, how far would they, including members of the proletariat, be willing to die for it?) Ironically enough, it may be that to the extent that Marxist interpretations of history are felt (rather than intellected) as representations of ineluctable necessity, they also acquire an aura of purity and disinterestedness. (Pg. 144.)

Rev. James Lawson and the True Meaning of Pacifism

During the Korean War, Rev. James Lawson, a future Civil Rights leader, went to prison as a "conscientious objector" rather than serve. As someone involved in the clergy, he could have protected himself, but instead chose not to, in itself an act of protest. He argued, and in this I agree with him, that it was wrong to exempt clergymen or those studying for the job from the draft and that it was simply a means to buy off established religions by protecting their people. I certainly admire much of what Rev. Lawson would later do for the Civil Rights movement and, in practice, support non-violent tactics when dealing with private individuals protesting social and government ills. That being said we need to consider the true meaning of pacifism as a consistent ideology when practiced by the likes of Rev. Lawson.

First off, let us consider the very act of being a "conscientious objector" to the Korean War. Rev. Lawson took it upon himself to stand in the way of the United States government's efforts to protect South Korea from being overrun by the forces of Communist North Korea and China. If Rev. Lawson would have had his way with the United States government, South Korea would not be one of the leading technological innovators in the world today as well as a source for millions of new converts to various denominations of Christianity; he would have sentenced millions of people in South Korea to, like those in North Korea, starve to death in the world's largest maximum-security prison. Who knows to what extent people like Rev. Lawson bear a share of the blame for the millions of people still sentenced today to a living death in North Korea. (I do not know how someone sleeps with that on their conscience.) More importantly, by opposing a relatively justifiable war, out of an innate opposition to all war, Rev. Lawson had backed out of his covenantal obligations as a citizen. He grew up accepting the benefits of the United States government, a war-making institution but refused to follow through on his obligations when this war-making institution followed through with its foundational purpose and went to war. (Obviously, as a black man living in segregationist America, Rev. Lawson did not enjoy the full rights he deserved. As such it would have been justifiable for him to not serve until the United States lived up to its obligations to him and all blacks.) Rev. Lawson was not just expressing his opinion or even practicing civil disobedience against a law he found unjust. He was not just objecting to our involvement in Korea. He was challenging the very legitimacy of the United States government. What are governments if not an institution authorized to use violence? As such, Rev. Lawson was guilty of a passive, relatively harmless, but still quite real form of treason. I would not go so far as to have him executed, but it was certainly reasonable for him to do hard-time in prison.


While in prison, Rev. Lawson found himself threatened by the inmates and faced with the prospect of being raped. Realizing that he was not even safe in his own cell, he prepared to defend himself with a chair. This put him in a dilemma; how could he, someone who went to prison in order to avoid engaging in violence, justify using violence even to save himself from being raped.


It was at that point Lawson had one of his numinous experiences. It was as if he heard a voice explaining everything to him. Everything which had been so difficult suddenly became clear. The voice told him that he was not there of his own volition or because he had done something wrong. He had not sinned; if anything he was he was there because he had been sinned against. The voice explained his dilemma to him. "If something terrible happens to you, it's not you causing it, and what happens is not your fault. What happens would be outside your control. You are responsible for only one thing – above all you must not violate your own conscience. If something terrible happens it is because of them, not because of you. It is not about personal choice. That makes it one more thing you have to endure in order to be true to Him. It is part of the test He set out for you." When Jim Lawson heard that voice, his fear fell from him. He would not resort to physical violence to protect himself. He would endure. He prepared himself for the worst. (David Halberstam, The Children pg. 46-47.)

 In the end, nothing happened to Rev. Lawson. It is believed that one of the prisoners he befriended put the word out that Lawson was not to be touched.

One wonders what advice Rev. Lawson would have given if it had been his daughter threatened with rape. "Daughter, do not fight these men, not even with a can of mace. When these men corner you and you have nowhere to run, just submit to them and let them do what they will." Maybe Rev. Lawson could stand by his daughter's side while this is going on and read her the passages in Augustine's City of God where he argues that it is not an evil for a woman to be raped; as long as she is unwilling her soul remains undefiled and, as such it is irrelevant what happens to the body.

Loving your neighbor as you love yourself means that in order to love other people you have to start by loving yourself. As a child of God and a creature of reason, you have value. As such you are obligated to protect yourself even if it means turning to violence. Once you are obligated to value yourself, you are also obligated to value and protect every innocent person even if it means turning to violence.

Their OTDs Were Better Than Our OTDs: Rabbi Dovid Schwartz Responds

Rabbi Dovid Schwartz offers a response to Michael Makovi:


As I indicated, what most troubled me about your letter was that while it was quick to defend the secular Zionists and such (which is remarkable - I do sincerely thank you), nevertheless, it was quick to condemn the contemporary OTDs and such.



I beg your pardon.  I did not "condemn" anyone.  But as politically incorrect as this may be neither do I shy away from being judgmental.  The Torah enjoins us to judge favorably, not to suspend judgment entirely.  What I wrote, and what I believe, is that not only was the religiosity of the observant Jews of the interbellum period superior to the religiosity of contemporary Jews but that the IRRELIGIOSITY of the NON-observant Jews of the interbellum period was "superior" to the irreligiosity of their contemporary counterparts.  On a absolute dispassionate, non-empathic level any Jew with Torah -fidelity ought to "condemn" Torah infidels as we presume that a just and compassionate G-d does not visit insurmountable nisyonos on anyone.  A tough test is a compliment from G-d.  But I am neither dispassionate, without empathy nor "holier-than-thou".  I stand in awe of the BTs I work with and who have done a remarkably better job of the hand that HaShem dealt them than I have with done with the one that He dealt me. 



Nor do I presume that I would have stayed "on the derech" if confronted with the tests of interbellum irreligious (Please re-read the letter.  This is its denouement) or even with molestation or some of the severer tests that confronts contemporary OTDs.  I was merely voicing a Tom Brokaw-like opinion about what I consider to be the "Greatest [Jewish] Generation". In comparing, on a pan-societal level, yesteryears irreligious with today's OTDs I voted in favor of the former.  Does this equate to a "condemnation" of the latter?  Not IMO.  I'd ask you to be slower to judgment in your condemning me for imagined condemnations.



You admit the "broken school system", and you admit that the school systems are unable to impart true religiosity unless they include 8+ years of kollel. Shouldn't this set off alarms in your head? Perhaps the OTDs are responding to these failures of the school system?



No doubt many are. Others are responding to lousy parenting, sibling rivalries or a myriad of other "failures". Those alarms were set off in my head long ago or I could never have written what I wrote... least of all to the editor if the Yated. I am all for Yeshiva and Bais Yaakov school reform but people of good conscience can agree to disagree on what reforms are needed and how best to implement them.  I am not for throwing out the baby with the bathwater and a total revamping of the system from the ground up.  For our time and place there is much that IS good and holy in the current educational system.



Again, on a case by case personal level I was not blaming any particular OTD for their jettisoning of Torah-study and observance.  Nor am I ready to make any case by case condemnations of particular schools, teachers and/or parents. A myriad of factors result in pushing youngsters OTD some from the realm of yedeeyah and others from the realm of bekheera.  That said,  on a generational,  pan-societal level I opine that the (failed) tests that conspired to push the 1920-30s Bundist OTD were more daunting than those that pushed and continue to push the 1990s- 2010 Yeshiva or Bais Yaakov dropout OTD.  Especially in instances when abuse and molestation are absent. I am neither statistician nor (professional) sociologist.  And while it may be true that 75% or more of abused/ molested students go OTD I'm not convinced that 75% of those OTD did so because they were abused and/or molested.  A system that demands too much of some, too little of others has too few extra-curriculars and invariably tries jamming square pegs into round holes is a helluva rough row to hoe.  But again IMO it hardly compares with dealing with grinding poverty, genocidal anti-Semitism, educational and professional state-sanctioned apartheid and discrimination and come-hither sweeping intellectual ferment movements and parties which were the testes of the interbellum OTDs.



I know more about the Modern Orthodox community than the Haredi one, so it is difficult for me to speak of the Haredi one except as an outsider looking in, but what I see, from where I stand, is that the Haredi community forces an outdated and obsolete worldview on its students.


Talk about sweeping self-congratulatory condemnations!  For now I have lost my ta'am in further responses.  As a product of that community and its School Systems I fear that anything else that I write will be greeted with the dismissive contempt reserved for those who are out-of-touch and mired in a medieval mentality.  Explain to me why further responses will NOT be utter exercises in futility?

 

Articles of Interest (AJS, Georgia, Conversos, Brooks, Catholic Anglicans, Female Male Novelists)

I was not able to attend the recent AJS conference in Los Angeles. Thankfully Menachem Mendel and Drew Kaplan both posted on it. A pity we could not get something more extensive. This just goes to show that someone needs to fly me out to the next conference so I can blog on it properly.

My uncle, Rabbi Dovid Landesman, has Georgia on his mind over at Cross Currents as he talks about his recent trip to the Former Soviet Union and meeting Jews who have returned to Judaism after seventy years of Communism.

The Jews of the Former Soviet Union may be the modern day conversos, but Sandee Brawarsky gets to meet up with some modern old time conversos from Mallorca Spain, returning to Judaism after five hundred years.

For plain old converts to Judaism, Jennifer Medina writes in the New York Times about converts to Judaism and Christmas. The article features Aliza Hausman of Jewminicana, who criticizes the article for its mistakes.

David Brooks once again offers a principled conservative defense of the Obama administration, this time on their failure to foresee the recent attempted terrorist attack. To expect the government to be able to stop all terrorist attacks means that we have to invest more and more in expanding government programs. Conservatives who believe that government is imperfect, and should be limited, need to be careful what they say about this administration.

George Will discusses the recent offer by the Catholic Church to allow Anglicans to join while maintaining their particular traditions. Back in Elizabethan England you could still be Catholic as long as you did not attend a Catholic mass and recognized Queen Elizabeth I as the head of the Church of England. So now can you be an Anglican Catholic who holds on to the old traditions of believing that the Pope is the anti-Christ, trying to destroy the true English Church, the right to burn papist "spies" (Jesuits) and celebrate the Oxford martyrs?

Julianna Baggott advises women who wish to succeed as novelists to be men or at least write like them. Good thing I am a man writing about an eleven-year-old man with guns, blood, medieval surgery and Talmudic dialectics to boot.

Unpolemical Narratives

RVA responded to my previous post with a long comment that I believe deserves a posting in its own right:

I find both of your following contentions persuasive, that – a) History should be taught from an unpolemical stance and that we should try to understand historical events from the perspectives, rationales, and narratives which individuals in that era would view the world; and b) that we inevitably transform history into a narrative with identifiable heroes and villains.

I find attractive your theory that history should be taught from an unpolemical perspective (inasmuch as possible) because we need to equip children with analytical and critical thinking skills, rather than imposing values upon them (i.e. capitalism is good and inevitable, democracy is without flaws, etc.). Values are which are 'learned' and 'understood' are much more powerful, durable, and influential than those which are imposed upon us. It is essential that we teach our youth the ability to understand both sides of an argument, rather than pushing them to become ideologues who lack the ability and skills to analyze the effects and implications of their beliefs. It is better to teach children why communism/Nazism/fascism is attractive, and then have them internalize that perspective, which will allow them to understand why Germany voted in the Nazis, or why Lenin became a Marxist; because it will then allow students to learn the lesson that ideologies which may be attractive in theory may turn out to be dangerous in practice, or that good ideas which gain popular traction can become corrupted and perverted by leaders who succumb to the temptations of power. We often try to "otherize" the Nazis and Communists; but instead we should seek to understand that they were human and that their decisions were driven by human instincts; rather than dehumanize them, we should try to understand what aspects of human nature led to their misguided decisions and results, which can only be done by internalizing their perspectives, so that we can learn and comprehend the lessons to be learned from the history of the 20th century. Students who lack the skills to internalize the perspectives from past historical eras will be more prone to be misguided by demagogues and ideologues because they will lack the tools and skills to withstand the imposition of social and political narratives which they encounter.

I am also very intrigued by your theory that history is often turned into a narrative with identifiable with heroes and villains. I would go further and speculate that humans have an intrinsic need, desire, and addiction for narratives; that our species inevitably tries to make sense of all external stimuli, and that our common vehicle of understanding an incomprehensible universe is to turn empirical reality into narratives, into stories which cater to our desire for a) intrigue, b) triumph of good, c) finality & resolution, and d) meaning to our existence.

In this sense, the two doctrines are in conflict: First, that we should unpolemicize history; Second, that humans inevitability tend to "narrativize" history to fit our cultural and societal values. You write, "We wish to find that hero who took on the forces of darkness and forever changed the world for the better. We want it so badly that we will write him into history, running over any inconvenient facts in the process." This seems persuasive. But given that premise, I must ask you whether it is really possible for historians to write histories which are unpolemical? Even if historians are capable of writing unpolemical histories, will they have enough traction to become persuasive to other historians, or even to the general public? Does the structure and composition of History departments at American universities allow the writing of unpolemical histories? Is it possible to teach a course which doesn't implicitly assign valuations to historical events or historical figures? Is it inevitable that historians "narrativize" history? Are there societal benefits to the polemical teaching of history which outweigh an unpolemical approach? Are there benefits to making history into a narrative?

I could not have said this better myself. As historians, when we try to explain why Nazism and Communism may have been attractive to reasonable, rational and moral people we are not defending Nazism and Communism. Quite the contrary, we are trying to stop these ideologies from ever reentering the world stage. If all I understand about Nazism was that it was intolerant than I will not be able to recognize it when it comes to tempt me in real life with its offer of national unity, pride, order and the advancement of civilization. I would also point out that this applies to religion. Religious groups often make the mistake of thinking that they can shut their children away from the outside world and create straw-man images. This works up until the moment that the child comes in contact with the real outside world and realizes that his parents and teachers have misled him. In my experience there is not a more powerful way to convince a person to abandon his previous beliefs than to allow him to realize that the authority structure which he has followed has been less than honest with him even about some small issue. If my parents and teachers will lie to me about one thing what else might they have lied to me about?

As to the issue of the importance of writing non-polemical history and our need to write narrative, yes there is a conflict. We are fighting against a deeply rooted part of our nature. To make matter all the worse, we are up against the desires of a society that does not have historical interests at heart. Textbooks are passed through committees made up of non-historians who wish to use history to lobby for their own group interest. It is for this reason that I refuse to teach out of a formal textbook. Writing non-polemical history is not going to be easily accomplished if at all. This is one of the reasons why we need professional historians, who have spent years immersing themselves not just in historical documents, but in historical reasoning as well. Some gentlemen scholar writing history in his spare time as a hobby is just not going to cut it; it will get us Gibbon.

 I do believe that it is at least theoretically possible to transcend our human biases and write non-polemical history. The first thing is that history is about a method and not a narrative. As long as we are simply using the historical method to analyze texts we get around the issue of narrative and do not have to worry about bias and polemics. The second thing is that when we do eventually come to write narrative, which we must in the end, we can avoid the standard narratives. Instead of talking about conflicts with heroes and villains we can talk about evolving processes that have arisen between contesting sides. In this, Hegel was onto something, though I would not accept his attempt to enforce meta-narratives over all of history. Even if the two sides may never have been able to reconcile in life, the historian understands both sides and therefore makes a sort of peace between them.

If you are interested in the topic of historical narratives I would recommend you read Hayden White's Metahistory.

My Problem with Terry Eagleton

One of the newest entries into the debate over the New Atheism of Richard Dawkins is Terry Eagleton’s Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate. Eagleton is on the “God” side of this debate and his book is an attack on Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, dubbed by Eagleton as Ditchkins, in particular. Considering the highly polemical nature of this debate Eagleton has certainly received many supportive and hostile reviews. Two very useful examples of this are Stanley Fish in support and PZ Myers in opposition. Fish's glowing review of Eagleton is particularly interesting as Eagleton takes a swipe at him twice in this very book. I find the book to be well written and at times, when defending the beauty of faith, Eagleton comes almost to the level of C. S. Lewis. I must, in the end though, side with Myers in opposing this book, even if it is for very different reasons.

While most of the attention regarding Eagleton has been about the reason and faith parts of the book, Eagleton’s real focus is on revolution. For Eagleton, as unapologetic Marxist, revolution here means the defeat of global Capitalism. Dawkins and the New Atheist movement like the religious fundamentalists, they love to mock, are products of late Capitalism and its failure of values. The solution for Eagleton lies in abandoning the simple economic calculus of Capitalism and embracing Marxism. It is Marxism that offers the necessary grounding in values to stand against economic inequality and imperialism.

Despite my opposition to Communism, I actually enjoyed this part of the book as well. I see no problem in reconciling religion in general and Christianity in particular with Marxism. Any person of faith who can reconcile his faith with evolution should have little difficulty making his peace with Marxism. I can even admire Eagleton for his subversiveness in wrapping a Marxist polemic between the cover of a theist book. Ordinary passive believers looking for confirmation in their faith are going to be in for a rude surprise. I find his case for Marxism remarkably eloquent and persuasive after a fashion. One of the beauties of being a free-marketer is that I am able absorb the strong points of every other economic ideology. For example, yes I have a problem with CEOs making millions while ordinary workers struggle to get by. I think companies would, in general, be far better off being run by their workers and for their workers. The free-market offers the opportunity for such a proletarian takeover without a drop of blood being shed. (The fact that our government has stepped in to bail out corporate America from a financial mess of their own creation offends me as much as the most ardent Marxist.)

My problem with Eagleton is that his hostility toward Capitalism leads him into an anti-West rant where he blames the United States in particular for pretty much all of the problems in the Third World. Eagleton dances around the issue but in the end, for all intents and purposes, he blames September 11 on the United States since, from his perspective, the United States created the problem of Islamic terrorism. Eagleton may be a bit more subtle than Ward Churchill but that just makes him all the more dangerous. Eagleton is smart enough to know that his case cannot stand critical scrutiny yet continues to try implying it on the sly.

As with many on the radical left, Eagleton’s anti-West sentiments quickly lead him to attacking Israel as the fist of the West’s oppression. Eagleton waxes nostalgically about President Nasser of Egypt. According to Eagleton:

Nasserism, once the dominant secular-nationalist, authoritarian-socialist current in the Arab world, was effectively destroyed by the Western-backed 1967 Israeli victory over Egypt. The Islamism that arouse in the wake of that defeat arraigned Nasser for his failure to lead the Arab forces to victory over Israel. The political balance within the Arab would shifted accordingly, away from a discredited Nasserism to the monarchical, pro-Western Wahhabi fundamentalists of Saudi Arabia. What a secular politics could apparently not accomplish, a fanatically religious one could achieve instead (pg. 106).

So great tragic turning point in history was when the Mein Kampf loving dictator of Egypt failed to destroy its democratic neighbor and massacre its Jewish population.

Considering that Eagleton has no problem with apologizing for Nasser’s atrocities, one might hope he would show Israel the same courtesy. Israel is blamed for perpetuating a massacre on the Jordanians in 1971. Eagleton point blank argues that “without the vast concentration camp known as the Gaza Strip, it is not at all out of the question that the Twin Towers would still be standing" (pg. 107). While the first concentration camps were created by the British during the Boar War, in modern parlance a concentration camp means something very specific. So by using this word, Eagleton can mean only one of three things. He could be a Holocaust denier, who believes that the camps were about as bad as the Palestinian situation. He could be an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist, who believes, without evidence, that Israel has murdered millions of Palestinians. Or he could just be a plain liar, seeking to malign Israel and Jews for his own ideological gain.

Eagleton is a textbook example of Dennis Prager’s observation that hatred of the United States and anti-Semitism seem to follow similar lines of reasoning and have common origins. In the end one must view Faith, Reason and Revolution as an attempt to pass off anti-Israel propaganda and plain anti-Semitism under the guise of a bestselling book on religion. The fact that this is only a passing issue in the book makes it all the more dangerous. If Eagleton had been forthright about his agenda this book would never have sold. He is not really interesting in defending Christianity or any form of theism. His real interest is to push for Marxism, an ideology grounded in hatred of the West and of Israel.

History 112: World War II

1. The Soviet Union seems to be largely ignored and get away with all that they did during WWII in the end being one of the allies defeating Germany and keeping largely what they had won. Despite the fact that this led to the Cold War between the US and USSR, overall it seems as if the USSR got away with a lot because Germany was once again set as the major instigator of the conflicts. So, I guess the question is why that is?

Once the Soviet Union was attacked it became our good ally. Watch the Frank Capra films “Why We Fight World War II.” These were American propaganda films made for the army during the war. Soviet atrocities are completely ignored. Capra even ignores the existence of Ribbentrop-Molotov. You will hear nothing about how the Soviets were co-conspirators in this.


2. In the text it mentions a friendship pact between Hitler and Stalin. I was slightly confused by this section having never learned this throughout my schooling. So did USSR have concentration camps that they sent Polish people too? Did USSR invade countries also before the war started?

Yes the Soviet Union had concentration camps. They were called Gulags. Yes the Soviet Union engaged in genocidal activities to destroy the cultures of subjugated peoples like the Poles and the Ukrainians. The Soviet Union engaged in acts of aggression, just like the Nazis, against nations such as Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland and Romania. Unlike the Nazis, Soviet oppression did not end with 1945. It continued all the way up to the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989. The fact that your teacher did not see fit to pass this information on to you means that either you were not paying attention or that your teacher was some liberal with an ideological interest in ignoring Communist crimes. This is different from Nazi crimes which have the implicit lesson on the inherent evils of Fascism. Some people have a problem with unapologetically saying that Communism is an inherent evil.


3. American children learn about the atrocities of the Holocaust at an early age. Yet some may never learn about the genocide in the Ukraine we discussed last week. I was wondering if in other places, this is reversed. Do we learn more about the Holocaust because it was more terrible or because we have a large and powerful Jewish population? I find it bothersome that so many other instances of genocide, both past and current, remain largely unknown among the general American population. I'd like to know how you feel about this subject, especially since you are Jewish and you are more closely tied to these events than me.

“The Jewish lobby” plays a major role in putting the Holocaust front and center in American culture. I do not see anything sinister in this. There are many Jews in positions of cultural influence and they use it to their advantage. It helps if you can have Steven Spielberg to make movies for you. I am sure the Armenians and the Ukrainians would love to have him. That being said there is something special about the Holocaust. This was not a case of millions of people dying due to extreme government negligence nor is this a case of a breakdown in government order with armed soldiers or mobs going out of control and massacring people. The Holocaust happened because some very smart people in suits, ties and with college degrees sat down and planned it. They wished to annihilate a specific group of people and, armed with the full resources of a modern state, they pursued that goal with remarkable efficiency.


4. Davies said "The Poles thought that their task was to hold off the German advance for fifteen days until the French crossed the German frontier in the West; in fact, they faced the impossible task of holding off both the Wehrmacht and the Red Army on their own. The French launched no offensive; the British limited their assistance to dropping leaflets over Berlin," (1000-1001). Davies doesn't really go into any further detail about this, but has any other historian explored this? Was it another instance of miscommunication--as was seen in WWI with the telegraph system? Or can the British and French be partially blamed for the devastation that engulfed Poland? It seems like perhaps England and France's disregard for their Polish ally has been buried underneath their eventual victory. Why didn't they help Poland as the Polish were expecting?

Neither the British nor the French were prepared for any serious military action. This was one of the reasons why Hitler decided to make his move against Poland in September of 1939 instead of waiting. There was a French “invasion” which I am familiar with from reading William Shirer. He was an American correspondent, who worked in Germany into the war. He reports how the French made a big deal about their actions. He then went and talked to some of his contacts in the German army and find out in great detail how little the French were doing. Shirer would later go on to write the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.


5. Wouldn't it have been obvious to the German's that turning against the Soviet Union was a bad idea? I mean, it caused them to be land locked between enemies on the East and West, plus the Soviet Union, from what we read, seemed to be a world power. Why didn't Germany try to formulate a peaceful position with the Soviet Union?

You have to keep in mind that Germany was at war with England and it was a reasonable assumption that the United States would eventually come into the war on the side of England. You have to admit that there is a certain logic to trying to take out the Soviet Union while the situation in the West was still relatively quiet. This plan almost succeeded; the Soviet army was almost completely annihilated in a matter of months. You would be hard pressed to find a country that ever suffered a military disaster like what the Soviet Union did. You are not going to find a country that ever managed to come back from such a disaster.


6. This questions isn't really about the reading but over the weekend I watched the movie "Valkyrie." I was just curious to know how historically accurate the movie is? Also I am curious to know if you think the plan to overthrow Hitler ever had a good chance of success?

I have not seen the movie so I will refrain from commenting on it. The case of Valkyrie is a good litmus test as to ones views on the power of individuals. Let us imagine that everything had gone according to plan and the bomb had eliminated Hitler. Now what? The German staff officers, who planned this, put a lot of thought into how to get Hitler and they planned that part well. It failed for reasons outside of their control. They made an utter mess out of trying to seize power in the hours after the bomb went off. That was the important part, not their ability to assassinate one man. I imagine that if Hitler had died in the blast then Goebbels, Himmler and Goering would have stepped in and the Third Reich would have continued.


7. Do you believe Germany planted spies within the French/British governments?

It is not a question if they did or did not. We know for a fact that the Nazis did. The British counter-intelligence services were quite effective, though, in capturing German spies and forcing them to pass on false intelligence.


8. How did Switzerland manage to maintain its neutrality during WW2?

The official reason, at the times, was that Switzerland possessed a well trained army and an advantageous defensive position. What we now know is that the Swiss government was actively cooperating with Hitler. They helped launder gold plundered by the Nazis, some of it even from the teeth of dead concentration camp inmates.