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.

 

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.      

Paulo Freire's Bank of Motte and Bailey

There is a type of Motte and Bailey argument where you offer a strawman version of the opposition that no serious person believes. Having presented a problem that does not really exist or at least has been greatly exaggerated, you then offer a solution that sounds innocent, mainly not to do the thing that no one is really doing anyway, but really is quite radical. Then, in true Motte and Bailey fashion, when called out as to what is really being argued for, you then retreat into the claim that you are only opposing the thing that no one actually supports anyway.

Paulo Freire is a good example of this. It is clear to me that the education teachers who had me read his work did not really understand him. In all fairness, Freire is not an easy author to understand. Reading a work like Pedagogy of the Oppressed, most readers are only going to come away grasping his opposition to the banking model of education where the teacher is seen as depositing knowledge into the heads of students who are rendered passive figures in this process.

To be clear, I am not saying that Freire is wrong on this issue. On the contrary, the problem with Freire’s position is that he is saying something that just about anyone who has ever taught has agreed with. While it should be acknowledged that teachers presumably have knowledge about material that students do not and that the job of a teacher is to convey some of that knowledge, no one seriously believes that this is all that goes into teaching. There is still the issue of how you convey that information and also the building of a personal relationship with students combined with incentives to offer the circumstances where students are likely to want to learn. This is all the more so in modern education where information is so readily and cheaply available. Every teacher needs to constantly ask themselves the question: what am I giving students that they cannot easily get through Google and YouTube?

Competent teaching is going to be a combination of giving over information as part of the formal hard education and the creation of systems to offer informal soft education. Reasonable people are going to fall along a spectrum. Different students will benefit from different teachers depending on their personalities and a variety of other factors.  

If all Freire was saying was that teachers should not try to simply stuff facts into their students’ heads, his work could be considered trite but innocuous. The problem is that Freire has a deeper agenda hidden in his rather dense prose. For Freire, the true purpose of a teacher is not to teach people practical skills like reading, enabling them to get jobs and function within a capitalist economy. In truth, teachers are not really supposed to teach anything. As Marxist revolutionaries, the teacher is supposed to go among the people and arouse their innate revolutionary spirit. That being said, what teachers are supposed to discover is that the students already possess the revolutionary spirit in contrast to the teacher who is tainted simply by the fact that they went through the capitalist education system. As such, there is a dialectic/contradiction in Freire’s work in which it would seem that the teacher is not even supposed to be teaching the students Marxism, but rather is supposed to be learning from the students, undermining the dichotomy of teachers and students.  

As I mentioned previously, I do not believe that even most education teachers, let alone teachers in training, understand Freire. I assume that a Straussian model is at work. A handful of activists have pushed Freire into the curriculum precisely because they understand his esoteric agenda. Most education professors agree to teach him because they only understand the exoteric mask. The teachers in training end up being corrupted by Freire but it is not because they understand even much of the exoteric material. This would require that they bother to do the assigned reading. They understand enough to recognize that knowledge of their field is not that important so they do not have to read much beyond the textbook. Thus Freire becomes a license for teachers to do what they were already inclined to do mainly to remain ignorant of what they are supposed to be teaching while imagining that they are somehow teaching higher critical thinking skills that transcend their field. 

What one should take away from this is that if you see someone raising a problem that does not really exist or is greatly exaggerated, pay close attention to their solution. You can count on the fact that they have no intention of solving the problem; why would someone bother to solve a non-existent problem? The solution is not going to really be not to do what no decent person is doing anyway but something fundamentally indefensible in the light of clear language.  

Who Gets to Be the Equity Box Czar?

In the previous post, I discussed the question of what might be considered equality. Here I would like to turn to the question of who gets to make that decision. 

The popular image of equity is of the child who gets the box to stand on to look over the fence and watch the game. I find it interesting that this image specifically looks at a situation where there is a clear problem and solution. The child cannot see over the fence to watch the game, so he needs to be given a box to stand on. Because of the simplicity of the situation, we do not need to concern ourselves with who is going to be the box czar. It would not be a problem if she were a vaccine-denying, transphobic MAGA Republican. She is being asked to do a simple job with clear parameters. If she steps out of line, it will be clear to the public, who can then remove her. Truth be told, the stakes are pretty low anyway so it would hardly be a catastrophe if she did abuse her position. As we move, though, from a simple situation, like giving kids boxes to see over a fence, to something complicated where neither the problems nor the solutions are obvious, the critical question becomes less what the problem or solution might be and, instead, becomes who is going to decide what the problem and solution even are.

Consider the example of education. In a school setting, there are going to be students who struggle for a variety of reasons. For some, the problem is that they have special needs that require support. Other students come from different backgrounds from the teacher and require a more culturally relevant education. Finally, there are going to be students whose problem is that they are brats who require a non-literal spanking so that they get with the program and not take up resources that rightfully should go to members of the first two groups. I readily admit that it is not always obvious which students belong in which category and what should be done with them. Part of the problem is that, on the surface, the different students might be engaged in violating the same rules and officially deserve the same punishment. Teachers are going to need to rely on their intuitions, less charitably known as prejudices.  

It is because I recognize that I am not qualified to stand in perfect judgment on this issue that I am mostly concerned with who is placed in the position to make this call. I would wish to make sure that whoever is in charge shares my fundamental values, specifically that the person has an identical scorecard as mine as to who is privileged and who is oppressed. The moment I begin to doubt this fact then all cooperation ends. For example, imagine that there were administrators who believed that Jews were privileged and that Muslims were victims. What if the administrator believed that if a Muslim student punched a Jewish student and the Jewish student responded by muttering a slur that the Muslim student should be acquitted as someone striking out against oppression while the Jewish student, as a privileged oppressor, should be charged with a hate crime. From my perspective, this would not be equity, it would be the vilest form of oppression, one that satanically robbed the legitimately oppressed not only of their physical right to protection but also of their moral authority as victims.   

When faced with the possibility that a system in charge of allocating funding and punishments might fall into the hands of my ideological opponents, I have no choice, but to support brute legalism. The people making the decision must be chained with clear rules that must be mechanically applied without room to maneuver. That is the only way to stop those who wish to use equity to oppress me with their version of justice. 

Slicing the Equality Cake

 

Legal equality, or something reasonably close to it, is a real possibility. There should be one set of laws that apply to rich and poor alike and regardless of skin color. Whether a person accused of murder is rich or poor, black or white, there should be the same legal process. I readily grant that such legal equality is far from actual equality. The O. J. Simpsons of the world will be able to buy themselves better lawyers and will stand a better chance of getting off. This makes economic equality sound rather attractive, recognizing that, as long as people are born with different amounts of wealth, society will never be equal in the ultimate sense. 

On the surface, economic equality sounds fairly simple. We live on a planet with resources. Every person should be given an equal amount. Equal should mean equal; nothing more and nothing less. In truth though, the simple-sounding socialist adage "to each according to their ability and to each according to their need" hides enormous complexity. Who decides what each person is capable of contributing to society and what resources each person can rightfully demand from society as their need? 

Consider the relatively simple example of dividing a cake for a classroom of students. On the surface, there does not seem to be a problem. You take the cake and divide it equally based on the number of students. Where things get interesting is when you consider that this is not the only way to divide the cake nor is it obvious that dividing the cake into equal portions is really the most equitable solution. 

Here are some other possibilities:

- The weight of the students 

-  Their parents' tax returns

- How much do they like cake

- Grades 

- Likelihood of contributing to the student's self-esteem 

- Belonging to a marginalized group

What makes this issue really tricky is that one can easily justify contradictory positions. Should students who weigh more get more cake because they require more to not feel hungry or should they get less cake to protect their health? 

Furthermore, the moment we claim to be distributing the cake fairly then the stakes are raised to an infinite degree. Obviously, it is not a big deal to not get one's "rightful" share of the cake and a student can forgive the teacher for not using a measuring tape (queue the Marvelous Midos Machine song) or for failing to achieve ultimate social consciousness. The moment that the teacher claims to be distributing the cake in an equitable fashion then to get less cake is a moral judgment on a person's ultimate value. Anyone who supported a different distribution of the cake must assume that either they were wrong and therefore they are unjust people or that the teacher was wrong and therefore an unjust person. From this perspective, we now have something worth complaining about. For that matter, we very well might have something worth killing for. One simply cannot allow injustice to triumph so utterly as to pretend to be justice. 

Recognizing that there can never be an equal solution and any attempt to do so risks Hobbesian warfare, the only practical solution is to acknowledge that, however the cake is distributed, it will not be fair in any ultimate sense. Every student will have a moral argument as to why they should have gotten more but agreeing to not push that argument is the price to have any cake in the first place.

If we are not capable of discovering an objectively just way to divide a cake among classmates, how ill-equipped must we be to handle the vastly more complex question of dividing the world's resources among eight billion people? With the stakes being literal life and death, we have even less reason that people will accept less than what they think is their fair share. Furthermore, our eight billion people have little in common with each other to facilitate compromise. Most of them have absorbed historical narratives that place themselves as the victims and every other group as oppressors. How can groups that mutually see themselves as victims and the other as oppressors ever reach an agreement? The only solution is to recognize that there can never be a just distribution.       

Passing a Loathsome Test: The Case Against the CalTPA

 

I have just completed my work on my California single-subject teaching preliminary credential. This allows me to teach middle or high school. (If you know of any schools in the Los Angeles area looking for a history teacher, feel free to contact me.) Work on this credential involved classes, four months of unpaid student teaching, and the completion of both cycles of the CalTPA (California Teaching Performance Assessment) exams. I passed both parts of the exam with plenty of wriggle room so I can say without accusation of sour grapes that the CalTPAs are models of how not to design an assessment. This is ironic as the CalTPA Cycle 2 exam is specifically about constructing assessments. 

The CalTPA exams consist of two parts (Cycle 1 and Cycle 2) and are meant to be taken during student teaching. They include large writing sections as well as videos of the perspective teacher in action in the classroom. (Yes, you need to get students to sign permission forms in order to film them.) Cycle 1 centers on a particular lesson that you teach and how you adapt that lesson with three focus students in mind. One student should have some sort of special need. A second should be an English learner, and a third should face some kind of challenge outside of school. (This could be, for example, an immigrant student or someone who is homeless.) Cycle 2 deals with a sequence of lessons and assessments. Furthermore, one is supposed to evaluate how students did on the exam and, based on the results, either offer an extension of the lesson or reteach some part. It should be emphasized that the CalTPAs are not something that you can simply complete in an afternoon. Each of them requires weeks of planning and writing. Together, they serve as the dominant assignment of the four months of student teaching. Furthermore, you have to wait at least three weeks between the time you submit until you get back your results. 

Each Cycle is graded based on a series of rubrics. (Cycle 1 has eight rubrics and Cycle 2 has nine.) Each rubric is graded on a scale of 1-5. To pass Cycle 1, one needs to score at least a 19 and to pass Cycle 2 one needs to score at least a 21. If you score a 1 on any two rubrics in a Cycle, you fail. In practice, the goal of each of the Cycles is to score a 3 on at least three of the rubrics, assuming you get 2s on everything else. Scoring a 4 or a 5 on a rubric requires a whole new level of work so it does not make sense to pursue it. Instead, one should focus on getting as many 3s as possible. (For Cycle 1, I got all 3s for a score of 24 and this was considered exceptionally good. For Cycle 2, I got seven 3s and two 2s for a score of 25.) 

There are a number of purposes for an assessment. A pre-assessment tells the teacher what students already know. This allows the teacher to modify the lesson to better cover what students are unfamiliar with. Furthermore, the teacher now has a baseline to compare future assessments and decide if students have actually learned anything. Next, there are assessments as learning, where students answer questions or practice doing the material as a means of gaining mastery. These usually have a strongly informal quality to them. Finally, there are formative assessments where students demonstrate what they have learned. A crucial concept underlying all three of these forms of assessment is that they are not about judging students. If anything, they are about seeing if the teacher has done their job and figuring out how they can improve. Furthermore, assessments are not supposed to be high-stakes affairs. There should be lots of assessments over the year. Students are going to do well on some and not so well on others. Everyone has the right to the occasional bad day without suffering serious consequences.    

In addition to these three kinds of assessments, we should acknowledge the existence of qualification assessments to sort out those with a particular ability from those who do not. By definition, such assessments do judge students and it is inevitable that they will be high stakes with actual consequences for failure. In the real world, we require such assessments. There is a place for the SAT, the AP, and even the CalTPA. That being said, when such assessments are employed the burden of proof should be on the testers to show that their assessment legitimately is about whether the student has mastered the material and is qualified for a particular position as opposed to merely being well suited to pass the test. For example, the flaws of the SAT and AP exams can be measured in terms of how they have inserted themselves into the curriculum and are being consciously taught.  

On the surface, the CalTPA exams test prospective teachers on material that is important for teaching. Teachers should be able to craft lessons and units with the needs of students in mind. Furthermore, assessments should be given as a means to generate useful data about what students are learning as opposed to teachers simply imagining that students have learned material because it was taught.    

The fundamental problem with the CalTPAs is that, because they contain such lengthy instructions and detailed rubrics, the tests, in practice, are not about how well prospective teachers understand lesson design and assessments but how carefully they have read and comprehended the CalTPA instructions and rubrics. It should be noted that many of the rubrics have a number of different parts and messing up even one of those parts will get you a lower score. This is the kind of assessment that a well-meaning and competent student teacher can easily fail simply because there was an honest misunderstanding on a few minor points. What makes this possibility frighteningly plausible is that about half of the rubrics on each of the Cycles center around the video clips that you send of your teaching. Did you demonstrate exactly what they were looking for? Even worse, did you get the students to show what was needed and to speak loud enough for the filming equipment to pick up? While lesson and assessment design is important for teaching, I do not want prospective teachers judged on their ability to film their classrooms. 

As you need to pass both exams to get a teaching credential, the stakes are high. This creates particular stress if, like me, you do student teaching in the winter semester. I ended up submitting my Cycle 2 exam at the beginning of May and then had to wait until June to get the results. If I had not passed on my first attempt, I would have needed to resubmit my material to try to pass in July, jeopardizing my chances of getting a job for the Fall.   

In truth, the CalTPA exams could easily be fixed. My solution would be to divide the test down to the individual rubrics and allow for the evidence used in the rubric (whether written or filmed) to be submitted one at a time. You would still need to score a 40 on all the rubrics together, but now the stakes and the stress would be lowered. As you finish gathering the evidence for each rubric, you submit it. If you get a 3, you are fine and should move on to submitting the next piece of evidence. If you do not get a 3 then you should either resubmit the evidence or simply make sure that you do better on the next rubric. By the time the final rubrics come around, the stronger students will have already passed and will not need to spend a month worrying.

With such a design, there will be much less reason to worry about having misunderstood something as such misunderstandings will be picked up quickly and rectified without serious consequences. This is how we handle major assignments in school. Students hand in drafts for particular parts of the assignments. This makes it practically impossible for a student acting in good faith to fail as problems will be picked up early on and fixed.   

E. D. Hirsch Jr.'s Cultural Literacy: A Secessionist Response

 

E. D. Hirsch Jr. is one of my favorite education theorists. I find that cultural literacy makes intuitive sense to me with its emphasis on things that children should know. While Hirsch often gets accused of trying to promote "white education," his goal has been to help children of color. If you live in a society founded upon European culture and you wish to function within it then you are going to need to know the things that members of the dominant culture take for granted. This does not mean that there is anything superior about European culture nor does it mean that American culture cannot or should not change to reflect the greater diversity of its people. One adapts to the world around oneself.  

Having a common set of cultural references functions in much the same way as language in allowing for a functional democratic country. A monarchy can function and even benefit from the fact that the peasants in different parts of the country speak different dialects and would not understand each other even if they were to meet. A democracy, on the other hand, needs a population capable of deliberation to at least come to the belief that they are one people with a mutually understood common good that all parties can be trusted to sacrifice themselves for. In practice, this requires that people have a common language that allows them to understand each other. 

In truth, it is not enough that people speak a common language; to avoid people simply speaking past each other, it is important that people also have a common set of cultural references. For example, being familiar with Star Wars to the point that you take being called "rebel scum" as a compliment, shows me that you have a deeply ingrained sense that it can be legitimate to oppose certain kinds of authority. This can serve as a useful foundation for political cooperation. From this perspective, it makes sense to teach Star Wars in school in much the same way that we teach Shakespeare. (Schools can even use Ian Doescher's Shakespearian adaptations of Star Wars.)     

Following Hirsch, I am skeptical of claims to be able to teach critical thinking as it is difficult to evaluate. If students are unable to say who the American Revolution was fought against, I am inclined to assume, barring evidence to the contrary, that they are incapable of coming up with coherent arguments in favor of democracy or monarchy. Furthermore, my cynical self suspects that the push by schools to teach critical thinking is a cover for their failure to actually teach. If schools can pretend that they are teaching critical thinking (and there is no easy to prove that they are not teaching it) then the fact that they objectively fail to teach basic facts about the American Revolution cannot be used to reach the obvious conclusion that the school is a waste of the students' time as well as the tax payers' money and should be dismantled.

Similarly, it is a dead end to try to teach reading in the abstract. Students can never become good readers in general but only good readers of specific subjects from which they have mastered the necessary vocabulary and references. To do this, students need to do extensive reading in those subjects. Along the way, they should be aided by teachers who are themselves well-read in the particular subject and understand the particular vocabulary and references that are necessary to make sense of the material.  

An area where I disagree with Hirsch is that Hirsch favors a highly centralized school system with a set curriculum that does not change from teacher to teacher and school to school. To be fair to Hirsch, he is not a libertarian and has no prior commitments to limiting government authority. Furthermore, there are practical reasons to support top-down curriculums. It simply is not workable to expect teachers to design their own curriculums that are going to effectively teach state standards. It is one thing if teachers are simply expected to offer courses on their eccentric selves (not necessarily a bad method of teaching) to allow them the liberty of teaching whatever they think is worthwhile. If we expect teachers to fulfill specific goals then they should be given PowerPoints, videos, and assignments to teach that information. 

From a social or political perspective, it makes sense to not only insist that teachers in the same school teach a common curriculum but that all schools in a city, state, or even country teach the same curriculum. If you want a unified society or country then students are going to need a common set of things that they can assume that everyone else knows as well such as the English language or Star Wars.

As a secessionist, I believe that the diverse people currently living in the United States would be better served if the country were to be divided. This would end the culture wars and allow everyone to live in a country designed to suit their particular tastes. As such, I believe in the importance of cultural literacy but it serves a different purpose for me. Instead of using cultural literacy as a normative claim that everyone should have a set of common cultural references to allow them to function as part of one country, I see cultural literacy in positive terms. Where should we draw the lines for the different "un-United States?" A useful place to start a discussion would be to privatize education and see what kinds of curricula different schools would create. Those schools that developed similar curricula based on similar cultural references should likely remain as part of the same country. Those populations that clearly have different cultural references to the extent that they would not want their children taught in the other group's school system should split up. 

It is obvious to me that the Hasidim of New Square or Kiryas Joel should be given their own country. One can see this simply from the fact that they want a different kind of school curriculum for their children based on making sure that these children grow up without cultural references like Star Wars. I am also willing to accept that people who want their children taught a 1619 Project or a Howard Zinn version of the American Revolution should also belong to a different country from me. All of this can be done peacefully and would actually help different groups live with each other. I can be perfectly tolerant of people with radically different political values from mine when they live in a different country. It is when we have to share a country that we are at risk of conflict.      

         

Are You a Fuehrerphobe?

 

As I mentioned in the previous post, you can win any debate if you are allowed to control the language used to describe things. Imagine that you had to debate a Nazi but the Nazi got to decide what the two of you had to call things during the debate. How well do you think you can do?

The Nazi gives the following opening: I believe in national democracy. The people express their will as a nation by gathering in stadiums to shout their adulation for the Fuehrer. This objectively proves that the Fuehrer embodies the collective will of the people. It is only through the Fuehrer that the people’s will can be expressed, allowing them to exist as a nation instead of a collection of squabbling individuals who will easily be conquered and enslaved by cosmopolitans, neoliberals, and Zionists. To oppose the Fuehrer is to oppress the people by robbing them of their voice and their ability to assert their nationhood.   

Essential to national democracy are the principles of freedom of speech and tolerance. The people have the right to express their will as embodied in the Fuehrer when he speaks the nation's truth. The nation is made up of many different kinds of individuals who, when left to their own devices, will inevitably disagree with each other over art, economics, and their non-Zionist religions. As the embodiment of the nation, the Fuehrer, through his person, resolves all contradictions among the people. This allows all members of the nation to tolerate each other, despite their surface disagreements, as they recognize that they have been made one through the Fuehrer.    

The elitist cosmopolitan neoliberal Zionist Fuehrerphobes seek to maintain their grip over the people and deny them their rights. They wish to replace the genuine democracy of the people with an Orwellian democracy with sham elections for politicians who do not embody the will of the people as only the Fuehrer can. National democracy is built on love for the people. Fuehrerphobes hate the Fuehrer because they hate the people. By trying to rob the people of their nationhood, they are essentially committing genocide. If you truly loved someone, you would respect them for who they genuinely are and not try to commit genocide against them.

Just as it is important not to be misled by the Orwellian democracy of the Fuehrerphobes, one should not fall for their Orwellian claims of tolerance. As we know from the Popper Paradox, it is not possible for a free society to tolerate people who reject tolerance and use the democratic process as a cover to impose tyranny. Since support for the Fuehrer is what makes someone part of the nation, Fuehrerphobes, who have separated themselves from the people in their attempt to overthrow democracy, cannot legally enjoy the rights of citizenship. They do not have the right to interfere in elections to fake the results to pretend that the Fuehrer does not have the full support of the people either by voting or by promoting fake news. 

It should be understood that underneath all of this rhetoric, lies a serious argument about the nature and purpose of democracy and liberty that liberals need to be able to effectively respond to. To understand Fascism, it is essential not to underestimate the lengths to which the common man will go to stick it to the liberal elitist intellectuals that he knows have nothing but contempt for him. That being said, liberals will never be in a position to storm this citadel unless they are first able to take the outer trench of language.

To add a further twist on this debate idea, imagine that you have a class of students raised on “national democracy.” These are genuinely good kids. They believe in freedom, tolerance, and social justice. They are eager to work for the greater good of the people by demonstrating their commitment to these principles to the administrators of elite schools. They like you but there is something a little off about you as you are different from every other teacher they have had. One day, a student asks you if you are a Fuehrerphobe. 

A hush immediately falls on the class. The students all know, with the surety that smoking is bad, that Fuehrerphobia is something simultaneously disgusting and absurd that should appeal to no reasonable person and yet is so deeply widespread in society that the Fuehrer is required to take emergency measures to protect the people against it. Fuehrerphobia is so dangerous because, unless you actively work to ally yourself with marginalized people and fill yourself with the Fuehrer's love, becoming an anti-Fuehrerphobe, it is inevitable that you will fall into Fuehrerphobic thinking. Most Fuehrerphobes do not even realize that they are Fuehrerphobes and will even deny the charge when accused. This is, of course, the ultimate proof of Fuehrerphobia.      

It would be useless to argue with these kids even if you were not threatened by secret police or with the loss of your job. National democracy honestly contains many noble ideals even as it serves to cover literal Nazism. These kids lack the language even for describing the Nazism that they are being raised with let alone for comprehending how someone might honestly be a Fuehrerphobe without being a hook-nosed villain trying to murder babies to use their blood for crackers. These kids need an alternative language where liberty, freedom, and rights have been restored to their classical liberal meanings. Alternatively, new terms for classical liberal concepts may need to be invented. 

Do You Support LGBTQ+ Rights?

 

I was recently asked by a student if I supported LGBTQ+ rights. I asked them what they meant by rights. It quickly became apparent that this student had not seriously considered what counts as a right and what it might be based upon. In essence, their belief in LGBTQ+ rights was the practical equivalent of being a sports fan. They were not asking me whether I agreed with their beliefs as they had no beliefs for me to agree or disagree with but merely if I cheered for their particular team. Their teachers had taught them that to be a good person, they needed to recite the credo "I support LGBTQ+ rights." For all intents and purposes, the students could recite something in Latin and it would be equally meaningful. To be clear, I do not question the intelligence or decency of this student. The fault is not with them but with the educational malpractice that they have been subjected to.   

What might it mean to support LGBTQ+ rights? One possible response is that LGBTQ+ people should be equal to heterosexual and cisgender people. This has a surface plausibility to it. LGBTQ+ people are human beings with rights who deserve to live with dignity just like everyone else. Now, what might this mean in practice? Consider that people with poor social skills, nose pickers, and MAGA Republicans are all human beings with rights who deserve to live with dignity. This certainly means that they have legal rights. If you are committed to civil liberties then there should be no moral difference between the police beating a confession out of someone with a pride flag or a MAGA flag. This is distinct from any kind of social right. In the real world, people are going to lose out on friendships and jobs for failing to follow all kinds of random social conventions that could never be defended simply on rational grounds. Furthermore, these social failings may be so subtle that neither party can even articulate the rule that has been violated. As someone on the autism spectrum, I am forced to reckon with this fact on a daily basis and pay a heavy price for it. Once we accept that society can penalize nose pickers, the burden of proof falls on anyone who objects to society penalizing anyone for violating a social convention. If people have the right to arbitrarily give nose pickers a look of disgust, they have the equal right to arbitrarily give a person in drag a look of disgust.    

I believe that LGBTQ+ people have the right to negative liberty. This means that the government should not cause physical harm to people it classifies as LGBTQ+. Such people should be able to engage in consensual behavior between adults as they wish whether that is non-heterosexual sex or gender reassignment surgery. As language is an arbitrary social construct, LGBTQ+ people have the right to call themselves married or members of the opposite sex. If they can convince the majority of society to speak their language, all power to them. This would be no different from the advocacy of Esperanto speakers. 

I would not be willing to grant LGBTQ+ people positive liberty but then again I do not believe that anyone has a right to positive liberty. I am willing to accept a legal obligation under the social contract to be drafted and have to mow down, with machine gun fire, a mob of theocrats trying to violently stop a gay orgy from happening. I am not willing to execute Christian bakers who refuse to bake gay wedding cakes. 

In any argument, it is crucial to control the terms used. Once the issue is framed in terms of supporting or opposing LGBTQ+ rights, the LGBTQ+ side is guaranteed to win. My students may not know what rights are but they have been raised to believe that rights, whatever magical black box they might be, are an important good to such extent that your support or opposition to them is what makes you a good or bad person. If we are going to change minds on LGBTQ+ issues, we are first going to have to get them to think seriously about what rights mean.  

On Coaching and Teaching

 

When working with students from disadvantaged communities, it is easy to fall into a negative cycle. These are students who are often even less inclined than most kids to read as they come from cultures that do not even offer the pretense of supporting reading. The parents are likely not going to be able to help them with homework so the temptation is to not give them homework in the first place. These students are often significantly behind their peers so it is tempting to keep the curriculum simple and not demand too much from them. We do not want these kids to become frustrated and drop out. While this sort of thinking may be founded upon good intentions, there is a trap. These students will, one day, go out into the world to compete for college placements and ultimately for jobs against students who have been given a vigorous education both at home and at school.   

Imagine being a basketball coach for a team of middle-class Jewish day school kids. These kids have their Judaic classes plus a variety of secular interests and hobbies besides for basketball. Most of these kids are here because they think it might be nice to hang out with their friends after school. Shooting a basketball and playing pickup ball is fun so why not join the team. You want them to run laps and do drills? How mean of you. Why are you yelling at them? They are doing their "best."  

I used to be one of those kids when I was in 5th grade at Columbus Torah Academy. I particularly remember one practice where the coach made us run ten laps around the gym. After finishing, I went to get a drink of water from a fountain in the gym. The coach yelled at me and then made the entire team run another ten laps. In essence, that practice consisted of us running laps. Why did he "waste" our time like that? We could have run laps at home. Shouldn't our couch have been actually teaching us how to play basketball? 

As an adult, I now recognize that the coach was right. One of the most essential parts of being on a team is to put yourself into the hands of a coach, recognizing that the coach understands the larger picture of what the team needs in order to win better than you do. As a player, if you do not understand this down to your very gut, the coach should cut you immediately even if you have Stephen Curry's 3-point shot. The greatest shot in the world is not going to help your team if you do not know how to get open and can easily become a trap if you lack the humility, when double-teamed, to accept that you might not be touching the ball that game. This might be the game for the number five guy on the team to be fed the ball and take those open shots.

To be clear, we were not a good team and regularly lost heavily to local Catholic schools like Saint Catherine’s and Saint Pius. I was certainly one of the lousier players even though I honestly tried. This was not our coach's fault. He did his job even if it was not a pleasant one. I do not believe that he acted out of any desire to beat down on elementary school boys. The fact was that we were going up against more talented teams and he had to make do with what he had. It would not have been kindness if he had told us we were great only for us to get blown out by reality. 

A more extreme version of the coach is the drill sergeant. Consider the example of the film Full Metal Jacket. It is easy to laugh at the antics of the sergeant but there is something truly tragic about his situation. The Vietnam War is in full blast and the recruits he is training are draftees. We can assume that they are not America's best and the brightest. These are kids who could not make it into college even to avoid military service in an actual war. The sergeant knows that many of these kids are going to die. It is his job to make sure that they do not get their squad mates killed. Then you have someone like Gomer Pyle who most certainly should never have been allowed into the army except that it was the job of some bureaucrat to meet a quota by drafting Pyle even if Pyle is going to get someone killed.

Being a teacher does not involve life and death responsibility like a drill sergeant but the stakes are higher than that of a coach. The worst that can happen if a coach fails at their job is that the kids will be humiliated for an evening by a better-prepared team, possibly leading some of the kids to conclude that they do not have a future in sports and, instead, should become accountants. If a teacher fails at their job, then students will graduate and apply or even start college not even realizing that they are not prepared because, all along, they were fed a fake education.

From this perspective, it seems logical to license teachers to do anything we allow coaches to do. Specifically, teachers should be allowed to accurately describe a student’s shortcomings to their faces and expel them from the classroom for failing to live up to basic standards. Furthermore, obedience should not be something up for negotiation but should be seen as the price of entrance. 

The reason why this does not happen is that the consequences of a teacher not doing their job are entirely long-term. There is no big game next week where the students will be crushed by a better-prepared squad. In practice, even exams usually fail to properly demonstrate that students are not up to task as they are created and administered by the teachers who have every incentive to not hurt their students’ self-esteem. Imagine if my coach had been allowed to schedule a game for us against our school kindergarten. We could have been an A+ team.

As teachers, we work under a further significant disadvantage. Students volunteer to join a team so the coach is free to kick anyone out if they do not get with the program no matter their individual talent. Most students who come to my class have no particular desire to study history. I have to be grateful to the students who do their work as they are told even if they then take a sip of water. If students tell me to "go F myself," the most I can do is report them to the administration, knowing full well that, at best, any punishment will be symbolic and that the student will be back in class the next day. I stand a greater chance of losing my job for "creating" a situation where a student might become "frustrated" enough to curse at me than that student has of being expelled from my class or from the school.       

I have taken to teaching some of my students to play chess. Chess teaches critical thinking and focus. You cannot simply do the first move that occurs to you. Most importantly for my students, chess is unforgiving in its exposure of your ignorance. You think you are smart; why did you just lose? Let us go over the game and see all the better moves that you should have seen if you were actually paying attention. There is no need to insult the students. The game itself can offer more biting criticism than I ever could. With chess, you do not need to wait several weeks for the big game to expose your failings; all chess needs in order to expose you is a few minutes. 

Quasimodo in the Classroom

 

Imagine that you are the principal at a school at the beginning of the year and you are given Quasimodo as a student. Quasimodo is a hunchback and incredibly ugly but this is no fault of his own and his loathsome exterior covers a truly decent soul. How far would the administration be morally obligated to go in order to accommodate Quasimodo? Clearly, the school needs to protect Quasimodo from blatant bullying. Quasimodo's teachers need to be prepped before the year starts for having Quasimodo. For example, the teachers need to be conscious of the fact that Quasimodo notices how people grimace at the sight of him and that it does real psychological damage. That being said, there are going to be real limits as to what Quasimodo's two moms, the Notre Dames, can demand from the school. 

Despite the fact that social standards of beauty are largely arbitrary and that they discriminate against Quasimodo, who never chose to look the way he does, it would be unreasonable to demand that the school overthrow conventional standards of beauty in order that Quasimodo no longer be considered hideous. A different standard of beauty, besides being impractical, would simply leave some other unfortunate student as the ugliest kid in school. To eliminate all standards of beauty, besides being profoundly impractical, would harm society. Beauty is foundational to art and to ethics. It is by contemplating mere physical beauty that we come to comprehend the possibility of a higher form of beauty such as the virtuous person. 

Unfortunately, a tragic consequence of believing in physical beauty is that, inevitably, there will exist an ugliest person such as Quasimodo who will be made to suffer even if no one is actively mean to him. While it would be wrong to stare at Quasimodo, he will catch on fairly quickly if people are not looking in his direction at all or if the timing for how long people look at him is different from how they look at other kids. What is the principal supposed to tell Quasimodo when Esmeralda turns him down for the prom and instead goes with Phoebus, the football captain, even though he is a jerk? Before the school accepts Quasimodo, the principal will have to be honest with Quasimodo's moms. If they really want to avoid getting him hurt at all costs, the best option would be homeschooling. 

For Quasimodo to attend school, it will need to be acknowledged that, while there is an obligation to tolerate and be kind to him, he will never be truly accepted. The very act of trying to be kind to Quasimodo will only further his alienation. Why would anyone feel the need to go out of their way to be nice to Quasimodo if it were not for the fact that they have already "Othered" him and, feeling guilty about it, wish to cover up for their moral failure? As such, the Notre Dames would have to agree to let the school off the hook for trying to make Quasimodo fully part of the community even though that is what pure Justice would demand.  

I bring up this example of Quasimodo because it sets an outer limit for the moral obligations of a school to a student. The fact that Quasimodo did not choose to be the way that he is allows his moms to make real demands from the school if it wishes to plausibly claim that they are serving the entire community but there is not going to be any blank check to refashion society to allow Quasimodo to function within it. 

Imagine that, while Quasimodo's principal is talking to the Notre Dames, he has to put them on hold because a call is coming in from Steve Urkel's parents, who want him to do something about the fact that Urkel finds himself socially isolated. Obviously, there is nothing wrong with Urkel dressing like a nerd and the school should protect him against physical violence. That being said, the Urkels cannot expect a higher level of support than the Notre Dames. Fairly quickly, the principal is going to have to point out that Urkel is choosing to wear dorky glasses. Even though it is wrong that kids do not want to be friends with him because of how he dresses, if Urkel wants friends, he should probably change his clothes.    

The moment we start dealing with students who violate social norms out of any religious belief or ideology, the ability of the school to act should constrict even further. Imagine that Quasimodo and Urkel were to come out of the closet as transgender Trumpist Christians and came to school wearing skirts, MAGA hats, and crosses. Clearly, Quasimodo and Urkel have the right to wear such paraphernalia even though it will make many people uncomfortable, particularly as they are likely to strongly oppose the beliefs of transgender Trumpist Christianity. 

While the principal is on firm ground to admonish students for making fun of people for their clothes and certainly for their looks, he is on far trickier grounds when students criticize or even mock the beliefs of other kids. Disagreement is an essential part of a free society. As a public servant, the principal needs to be absolutely neutral in the often brutal ideological discourses taking place around the school. He can protect Quasimodo and Urkel as long he acts in exactly the same manner for all other groups. It must be clear that he is not acting out of any desire to promote transgender Trumpist Christianity as that would violate the rights of all the other students. As this standard would be incredibly difficult to reach, the principal may have no choice but to allow Quasimodo and Urkel to be mocked. 

It will do them no good to argue that they really are women, that Trump really is their president, and that God predestined them from before creation to be part of the elect despite their sins. All three claims are things that their opponents have the right to dispute. Furthermore, it will not help Quasimodo and Urkel to argue that being transgender Trumpist Christians is essential to who they are and that their opponents are rejecting their humanity. They were on better ground arguing that being a hunchback and a nerd was essential to their being and even that offered them little benefit.      

Haredi Education and the Heroic Teacher

 

Abie Rotenberg's song, "Ninth Man" tells the story of a class of troublemaking kids who turn themselves around because their rebbe steps in as a replacement in their baseball game after the catcher breaks his leg. (One hopes that this was after the ambulance or the boy's parents were able to take the kid to the hospital.) Recognizing that they owe the rebbe a favor, the kids start paying attention in class and find that the material is actually interesting. It strikes me that this song is remarkably useful as an introduction to Haredi pedagogy. The yeshiva system relies on charismatic teachers, who are passionate about the Talmud in the hope that kids develop a close personal relationship with the rebbe and become interested in the Talmud as well. 

In essence, what we have in the song is the heroic model of teaching. The rebbe proves to be a likable person, who cares about the kids and teaching Talmud. In the end, the students come to like him and therefore become interested in what he teaches. While waiting for that to happen, though, the rebbe spends months simply lecturing even though the kids are not learning anything. This itself is part of the education. The rebbe is making the point that he cares about engaging with the Talmud so much that it is worthwhile to do so even if no one is paying attention to him and he might as well be talking to the walls of the classroom. 

There is no attempt by the administration to regulate what the rebbe does in the classroom. The principal simply puts the rebbe in the classroom and then goes out of town. In the yeshiva system, there is no set curriculum of specific things that students are supposed to have mastered by a certain time. An extension of this is the lack of organized testing. If there is no agreed-upon list of things that students should know and a timetable for when they should learn it, there is little point to test students to figure out if they are on task. Any testing that takes place is going to be largely symbolic, serving the need of putting a grade on a report card rather than any pedagogical goals. 

The point of a yeshiva education is not really about mastering material. The goal is to put kids in a room with a charismatic individual, who, if given enough time, might get the kids to want to be like him. Think of it this way. A student who graduates from a yeshiva without being able to read any Hebrew but comes away admiring the rabbis and wanting to be religious is a success story. The student who leaves yeshiva having mastered a decent amount of Talmud, which he then uses to enroll at JTS is a failure. 

It is important to stress for those who have not gone through the boys’ track of the Haredi yeshiva system, how utterly Talmud-centered it is. If you are a teenage boy who is not prepared to study Talmud for several hours a day, regardless of whatever genuine talents you possess, you are royally fracked. Whatever talented individual rebbeim are out there who understand that not everyone is going to fit the model, at an institutional level, yeshivas are not equipped to handle kids for whom a Talmud-centered education would not be appropriate. In a strange way, Haredi girls have an advantage here. Girls are not supposed to be studying Talmud in the first place so girls, at least as teenagers, have more flexibility as to how they can fit into the system. There is no we are going to continue to try stuffing you into our Talmud-shaped hole and if we fail to remake you in our image, it is your fault.  

Considering, my own not particularly positive experience with the yeshiva system, it is strange to recognize the extent to which my instinctual style of teaching history is essentially a secularized version of the rebbe model. The students do not need me to memorize names and dates. They can get those from their textbook or the internet. Furthermore, I recognize that these bits of information are, in of themselves, going to be of little value to the students as they go out into the world. The important thing that my students should experience is the fact that I am truly passionate about history. History is not simply something that I talk about for a class period but what I live and breathe. Catch me out of class and I am really the same history-centered person you see in class. Beyond telling me to stop talking, I do not have an off switch; even then my internal monologue will continue. 

Since my teaching is really an extension of the running conversation in my head, I am prepared to teach even when students are not paying attention. There are some things that are so important that they should be said even if no one is going to listen. One thinks of the Calvinist minister who preaches not because he believes that he will convince anyone, God has already decided before creation who is going to believe and be saved anyway, but to make sure that those listening will not be able to claim that they never heard the message. They were told the truth and decided not to pay attention.

This can be quite disturbing for many students but there is also a certain charm to it. My inclination is to teach what I genuinely find interesting and what I think is important to understand rather than check things off a curriculum. Admittedly, this leads to my getting sidetracked. It is my conviction that my tangents, particularly if initiated by students, are usually the most important part of any lesson. The fact that I find myself talking about something even though I did not plan on it and it is not part of the curriculum suggests that it really gets to the soul of what I am trying to convey to students. 

If I find something interesting, there is a chance that I will be able to convince someone else that this is interesting as well. At the very least, students are going to be forced to face the question of what it is with this history that has me so enthralled. 

Note that what I describe here is my inclination when left to my own devices. This is not necessarily how I actually teach nor what I think makes for genuinely good teaching.

 .  

The Rights of Chazerphiles, Chazerexuals and the Chazerphobes Who Might Still Love Them

It should come as no surprise to my readers that I have never eaten chazor (pig). It is not just that I happen to have never tried pork. A major aspect of my identity as a Jew is my active refusal to eat pork. Since I lack positive cultural associations for pig and it is symbolic of so much of the "other" for me, you might even say that I am mildly "chazerphopic." Obviously, most of the world does not share my chazerphobia. In fact, there are many "chazerphiles," people for whom the active eating of pork is a critical part of their identity in much the same way that a critical part of my identity is not eating pork. Think of all those Americans for whom the holidays would be incomplete without their Christmas ham. Presumably, there are even ideological chazerphiles who consciously eat pork as a means of rejecting the God of the Hebrew Bible. Such people may view chazerphobes like myself as a threat to the building of a godless society and resent the idea that I "force" my chazerphobic lifestyle upon my children, depriving them not only of the delicious taste of pork but also of the freedom to not worry about whether some "old man in the sky" cares about what they eat.   

As a classical liberal, I acknowledge that both chazerphobes like myself and the chazerphiles who make up the majority of society have rights. I cannot use direct physical force to stop anyone, Jewish or otherwise, from enjoying pork to their heart's content. As a practical matter, I believe that the State of Israel should eliminate all restrictions on the selling and consumption of pigs. At the same time, we should be able to agree that I have the right to keep a kosher home free of pigs. Things get a little more complicated as we deal with cases in the middle and reasonable people of goodwill are going to disagree over where precisely to draw the lines between protecting the rights of chazerphiles and chazerphobes. Among other things, this will depend upon whether we assume that pork eating is simply something that some people like to do or whether some people might actually be "chazerexuals" and eating pork is inherent to their very being? If the latter, then my chazerphobia might be deemed an act of hate against these chazerexuals that threatens their very lives. My chazerphobia should be given only the barest tolerance as some moral failing that I can indulge in the privacy of my home. I should have the decency to be embarrassed by my intolerant mindset and should make no attempt to expose my children or anyone else's to such a backward belief.  

I am raising my two boys in a non-pig-consuming home. When they become adults and move out of my house, they are free to make their own choices, including becoming hardcore chazerphiles. What if they come out of the closet to me as chazerexuals and demand that I respect them for who they are by taking them to McDonald's, even going so far as to threaten to harm themselves, God forbid, if I fail to comply? If we do not believe that chazerexuals actually exist (as opposed to people who simply really like eating pork), then I can dismiss them as being insane and I am under no obligation to indulge the delusions of crazy people. I am not endangering their physical health by not enabling their pork consumption. If, God forbid, they end up harming themselves then it would not be my fault. It is the fault of the mental illness and of any teachers or social media influencers who gave them the idea that they might be chazerexuals with the right to expect that other people will adapt themselves to suit their choice of identity.       

For the past year, I have been teaching in the Los Angeles school system. Do I have the right to tell Jewish students that it is a sin to eat pork? Do I have the right to wear a yarmulka, which might make a Jewish student feel guilty and inhibit their pork consumption? Be careful or I might ask whether a chazerphile teacher has the right to read students books that portray pork eating in a positive light or actively help Jewish students get over their inhibitions about eating pork? 

What if my school wishes to hold a chazer-pride month with a wide variety of activities designed to teach people that it is ok to eat whatever kind of ethically slaughtered meat they like. In truth, I would really wish to cooperate. My chazerphobia is really quite mild. It is not as if I have any truly intellectual objections to eating pig. As a Maimonidean, if I were to create my own religion, I would include some taboos on meat but the meat I would ban would simply be one that the ethnic group I was trying to teach about God was already inclined not to eat. As such, I would have no problem declaring pigs to be "kosher" and banning some other animal. 

I am inclined to believe that all people would do well to follow the ways of their ancestors. As such, it makes sense that non-Jewish Mexicans should maintain their ancestral customs and stick pork into everything. I would wish to support them in this endeavor. 

As part of the school community, I would want to take part in chazer-pride in any way I could. I would be willing to wear a shirt with the chazor-pride logo and march with the other teachers in the chazor-pride parade. It even seems reasonable, assuming my rabbi would permit it, to make a contest that if my students read x number of pages I would agree to personally roast a pig on a spit with an apple in its mouth. 

For me to cooperate with chazerphiles like this, though, I have to honestly believe that they support my chazerphobia and are not conspiring to undermine the keeping of kosher. In this, it is important to keep in mind the halakhic concept of "shas ha-shmad." One is allowed to violate most commandments if someone threatens to kill you but in a time where there is an organized plan to destroy Judaism, you need to be willing to die even over petty things like shoelaces. For example, normally you are allowed to eat pork to save your life. That being said, during the Antiochian persecutions of the second-century b.c.e., the Seleucid authorities tried to get as many Jews as they could to eat pork as part of their plan to destroy Judaism. Pork-eating Jews were being proclaimed as having rejected the God of Israel. The casual Jew on the street, upon seeing pious Jews agreeing to eat pork, would conclude that it was ok to simply throw away all of Judaism. As such, it became necessary for there to be truly committed Jews willing to pay the ultimate price to demonstrate that they still followed the God of Israel. If there were some Jews willing to die for kosher then the majority of Jews might still be willing to try to keep kosher even if it was just in their homes.

If the chazerphiles in charge of my school made no attempt to pressure me in participating in chazer-pride and made it clear that I would face no consequences for openly opposing chazer-pride, I would be inclined to be as cooperative as my rabbinic authorities would allow me. What if the school would declare that chazerexuals existed and needed to be supported to the extent that anyone who refused to celebrate chazer-pride by not putting on the chazer-pride logo was guilty of hating chazerexuals? What if I suspected that the chazerphile administrators, in their desire to build a "community for all" and not offer a home to "hatred" of any sort, would retaliate if I refused to wear the chazer-pride logo? If the chazer-pride logo is something so important as to threaten my job over, it must be because the chazerphiles actually have an ideological agenda such as a wish to undermine the keeping of kosher. If observant Jews like me can be bullied into wearing the chazer-pride logo then the less religious will come to the conclusion that it is ok to eat the chazer-pride roasted pig on a spit. 

Under such circumstances, I would feel compelled to actively oppose chazer-pride even if it cost me my job. I may not believe that chazerexuals really exist, but those who claim to be deserve empathy even though they should not be encouraged in their delusions. I love and respect chazorphiles and do not wish to stop them from enjoying pork. That being said, I am a Jew and, as a Jew, I am proudly chazerphobic. I oppose Jews eating pork for no rational reason at all. I simply believe that Jews eating pork would not be consistent with the will of the creator and prime mover of the universe. 

 

Tolerating People Who Happen to Have Red Hair: An Explosive Problem

 

The argument that I am about to make can, to some degree or another, be applied to any minority group and not just redheads. This certainly includes people like myself who are Jewish and on the autism spectrum. There should be no mistake; the argument here is sound but it is undoubtedly a hand grenade that can take out anyone, particularly the person foolish enough to try wielding it. Besides the importance of a strong sense of individual rights, the other important lesson that I would hope that readers take from this exercise is that giving people the benefit of the doubt is an essential value for a liberal democracy.   

When discussing tolerance, it is important to distinguish between individual tolerance and group tolerance. While a happy medium is theoretically possible, any attempt to argue for tolerance for individuals is going to be undermined the moment we begin to think of these individuals as members of groups that are distinct from the political community as a whole.  

Take the example of hair color. Readers may recall the Sherlock Holmes story of the Red-Headed League where the villain tricks his redheaded employer into believing in the existence of an organization that gives money to redheads. This fraud is perpetrated in order to get the employer out of his shop for several hours every day, allowing the villain to dig a tunnel across the street into the vault of a bank. The humor of the story lies in the fact that it is patently absurd that some wealthy person would so identify himself with his red hair that he would leave his fortune to benefit total strangers simply because they share his hair color. 

Imagine that our society would suddenly develop a prejudice against redheads and passed laws that segregated people with red hair into separate schools, limited their employment opportunities, and forbade them to marry non-redheads. Fairly quickly, there would develop a community of red-haired people, who gather together because the rest of society rejects them. Other redheads would attempt to cover their red hair in order to operate within general society. For example, someone like me might diligently shave every day to cover the red streaks in his beard and get a signed and notarized document attesting to the fact that all of his grandparents were pure non-redheads. This would likely create further prejudices against redheads as they would be transformed into an unseen menace attempting to infiltrate "respectable" society. Now, non-redheads, in order to not become "tainted" with redheadedness, must be constantly on guard and check their friends and neighbors to make sure that they are not secret redheads. 

The obvious argument against discrimination against redheads is that there really is no such thing as redheads but only individual people who just happen to have hair with a red pigment. Having red hair does not interfere with being a citizen in a liberal democratic society. People with red hair can make use of their reason to faithfully hold public offices from juror to president and serve in the military. 

This is a powerful argument for legal equality but it comes at a price, mainly that we assume that redheads really are just a collection of individuals who happen to have red hair and that there really is no such thing as a redheaded collective. The moment we begin to suspect that red hair stands as a proxy for actual cultural differences and even for different ways of thinking then we have to ask ourselves whether we think there is actually something valuable about these cultural differences and whether we believe that such people are well suited to operating a liberal democracy alongside non-redheads. 

What can people with red hair do to convince us that there really is no such thing as redheadedness and that they should be granted full rights? Clearly, people with red hair should make a point, as soon as the law and society allow them, of not differentiating themselves from people with other hair colors. An obvious manifestation of this would be large-scale intermarriage. People with red hair should have no objection to marrying people who do not have red hair and be at peace with raising children who do not have red hair and in no way identify with redheadedness. Clearly, people with red hair should not form charitable trusts for the benefit of other people with red hair so no "Red-Headed Leagues." The only exception would be for insisting that people with red hair really are like everyone else and eagerly await the day when the very idea of redheaded organizations will be so unnecessary as to be deserving of parody.  

This lack of redheaded identity should also extend itself to the study of history. While redheaded (name of people who live in the country) history should be taught, it should only be in terms of the history of the persecution of people with red hair and how it came to an end. This history should not be taught in terms of a conflict between peoples of different hair colors. People without red hair should not be treated as villains. On the contrary, examples of non-redheads who worked to fight for redhead rights should be emphasized in order to make sure that non-redheads do not feel guilty and to give them historical figures to relate to. 

Since redheads do not really exist as a distinct group, discussions of the sufferings of people with red hair should be universalized as a lesson on the importance of not judging people based on their hair color. Redheads who insist on remembering their history of persecution and remain mistrustful of non-redheads, insisting instead on redhead solidarity, should be castigated for failing to learn from their own history, making them just as bad as the color supremacists who once persecuted them. Outside of the history of redheads in times and places where they have been persecuted, there should be no general history of redheads. The fact that there have been kings with red hair who lived thousands of years ago in faraway lands (like, perhaps, King David) should be of no interest to contemporary people with red hair. We all agree that people with red hair can become presidents as well as enter into unconstitutional treaties with foreign dictators, sabotage the nation's economy with trade restrictions, and father illegitimate children.  

If redheads are really just individuals with red hair, then there should be no need for culturally responsive teaching for children with red hair. Such kids do not think differently than anyone else as hair color has nothing to do with brain structure. Furthermore, there should be no need for children with red hair to see people who "look like them." The moment advocates for children with red hair start saying otherwise, it stops being obvious why such children should be allowed into regular classrooms in the first place. If these children really are different then, perhaps, they really should be placed in separate classrooms to be with their "own kind."  

To be clear, we can expect non-redheaded people of goodwill to extend redheads some degree of charity and tolerate minor acts of tribalism. This might be out of guilt for the hair colorism of their parents, admiration for redheaded music, literature, cuisine, and comedy, or simply a sense that all of this hair color nonsense will eventually blow over on its own. That being said, at some point, if people with red hair push their tribalism far enough, this spirit of charity will end. Non-redheads will decide that redheads are taking advantage of the liberal nature of the general society, demanding rights as individuals while acting as a tribe and engaging in "reverse hair colorism." 

In essence, any attempt by people with red hair to treat their hair color as something relevant to their lives licenses everyone else to take notice of their hair color and use it against them. The moment someone is different in any meaningful way then the Pandora's Box of better or worse for the functioning of a liberal democracy is irrevocably opened. Think of people with red hair arguing for tolerance as a group as Wiley E. Coyote using a jackhammer on the precipice that he is standing on.   

Contrary to popular belief, tolerance is actually quite difficult in a liberal democracy. In contrast, for example, to a monarchy ruling over a diverse collection of people's running their own day-to-day affairs, in a democracy your neighbor who is not like you gets to vote on issues that directly affect your life. Furthermore, classical liberalism implies a commitment to a set of values that have historically been far from ubiquitous within human societies. A liberal democracy in which there are groups that lack a baseline commitment to liberal values will quickly turn into a sucker's game leading to political collapse. If we do not believe that redheads really support individualism and private property for all people, regardless of their hair color, but are simply using liberal democracy and the tolerance of the general society to advance their particular agenda then we will have no choice but to embrace our own non-redhead identity at the expense of building a country for everyone. 

 

Gone With the Master Narrative

In history, one constantly has to pay attention to who writes a source and what their interests are. This is not a value judgment. All sources have their limitations to some degree or another. This is why we engage in counter-reading. We are skeptical about anything that serves the author’s agenda but we readily embrace anything they say that harms their agenda. In my education classes, which are based around Critical Theory as opposed to critical reasoning, we are being taught something slightly different. We should not only look for the voices behind texts but also whose voices are being suppressed as if authors engage in oppression by the very act of writing. This sets up the concept of master and counter-narratives. 

From the perspective of Critical Theory, it is the job of the teacher to promote counter-narratives to rescue students from the grip of the master narrative. Any teacher who tries to simply do what history teachers have traditionally been supposed to do, mainly teaching facts and how to critically analyze them is guilty of silencing minority voices. It should be understood that, from the perspective of Critical Theory, minority voices are not really literal minorities but the purveyors of Critical Theory themselves, who are supposed to serve as the voice for authentic minorities who have been silenced. By silencing what is meant is that others have failed to fully embrace the assumptions of Critical Theory. In essence, Critical Theory is an attempt by those in power to justify their privilege and suppress anyone who disagrees with them by pretending that their opponents are the master oppressors while they are really the victims attempting to advance their counter-narrative. 

The true power of a master narrative can be seen in its willingness to unabashedly claim the moral high ground of a counter-narrative for itself with every expectation that you can intimidate your opponents into acquiescence. The true master claims to be a victim. If you can claim to be a victim then you implicitly earn the moral right to do all the sorts of terrible things to others that only masters are able to get away with. Real victims know that they do not have power and that it is useless to even speak up and claim to be a victim because the real oppressors will simply use it as an excuse to abuse them further. Morally sane individuals recognize that they are a mixture of oppressor and victim along a spectrum as are their opponents. They try to morally improve themselves in a variety of ways including trying to see things from their opponent's perspective.  

If you wish to understand the logic of a real master narrative, consider the example of the novel and film Gone With the Wind. On the surface, Gone With the Wind’s narrative of the Civil War and Reconstruction is an obvious master narrative. The heroes are literal slave owners and the book is a defense of the Confederacy and the Ku Klux Klan. All of this is true but it misses the fact that the true diabolical genius of the book is its ability to sell itself precisely as a counter-narrative. 

According to the Gone With the Wind narrative, which I find abhorrent and should not be the premise for any history class, once upon there lived a class of white Southern planters. They were a noble group with an interest in the finer things of life like manners and art as opposed to money. These planters were of such an elevated nature that they were capable of "ennobling" even the blacks who worked for them as slaves as this made the blacks part of the South's "uplifting" culture. The planters looked after their slaves as if they were "their own children." Then came the Northern Capitalist industrialists who cared nothing about culture but only for money. The Northerners built a mighty war machine and crushed the peaceful South. In order to justify their pillaging of the South, the Northerners claimed that they had come to liberate the slaves from the oppression of their masters. Many of the blacks believed these lies and turned against their "kind" masters who had treated them so well. In truth, these blacks were not being liberated. On the contrary, they were being enslaved to the relentless power of Capitalism.

The need to preserve a sense of aristocracy as something above money is critical for understanding the role of the Terra plantation in the novel. Scarlett O'Hara struggles to hold on to Terra in the face of Northern tax collectors even though it does not make economic sense. The fact that Terra is not that valuable is precisely the point. As long as Scarlett can hold on to Terra, she is still an aristocrat, someone who can love a piece of land as something that will continue to exist after she is dead, regardless of the dollars and cents involved. Similarly, Ashley Wilkes is tempted by an offer to get a job in New York. Ashley is a smart guy and would certainly do well for himself. The problem is that going to New York would mean that he is no longer an aristocrat but instead just another guy trying to earn a buck with no sense of the larger sweep of history. 

The "poor oppressed" Southerners, "robbed" of their "rightful" place of wealth and influence struggle to bring justice back to the land and join the Klan. In the novel, Scarlett is warned that she should not ride around by herself conducting her business because they are likely to be attacked by one of the free blacks that the Northern occupiers have allowed to run wild. If this happens the Klan, which all the "good" white men of the town have joined, would be honor-bound to retaliate. Scarlett gets attacked and the Klan is "forced" to go after the camp of free blacks. They run into an ambush and Scarlett's second husband gets killed. This leads Scarlett to agree to marry Rhett Butler as Ashley still insists on being faithful to his wife Melanie.     

At one point, Scarlett is forced to confront the "master" narrative head-on in the form of Northerners whose ideas of the South come straight from Uncle Tom's Cabin. Scarlett responds that the novel is full of lies and that they never abused their slaves. She should be believed as she has actual "lived experience" with slaves, unlike the Northerners who have only read about the South in books designed to convince them to hate Southerners. The stakes are high. Either Southerners really did treat their slaves well or at least justly or it was right for General Sherman to pillage his way across Georgia, freeing the slaves and repaying their owners for their crimes. 

It is hardly obvious how Critical Theorists can dismiss the Gone With the Wind narrative out of hand as a master narrative. The narrative is not really that different from the standard Critical Theory narrative. All you have to do is change the labels. Southern plantation owners can be revolutionary intellectuals and the black slaves can be workers who need to achieve critical consciousness. This is accomplished by the workers joining the intellectuals in a farming commune to labor for the "common good." In both cases, the enemy is Capitalism, the notion that people should be empowered simply because of their ability to make money as opposed to elevating those who can transcend such petty interests.

To say that Southern planters were rich and therefore must represent the master narrative fails to hold up. Loads of horrible things happen to Scarlett and she spends much of the middle part of the book trying to keep everyone around her, including her former slaves, fed and with a roof over their heads. Much of Scarlett’s power as a character is derived from her ability to do this while not losing sight of the higher things in life as embodied in Terra. This is critical because it allows us to forgive Scarlett for the pretty terrible things she does to succeed like stealing her sister's fiance (the one who gets killed riding for the Klan) and using convict labor provided by the Northern occupation. In truth, Scarlett being rich should not exclude her from being a counter-narrative. If you can watch Oprah Winfrey interview Meghan Merkle, two of the most privileged beings who have ever lived, without it being obvious that they are perpetuating a master narrative then you should have no problem seeing Gone With the Wind as a counter-narrative. 

From the perspective of Critical Theory, the real crime of the Gone With the Wind narrative is not that it oppressed blacks but that it empowered the "wrong" sort of people. How dare Southern planters claim to be victims and use that argument to justify holding on to power. The people who should be in charge are leftist intellectuals who have educated themselves about the nature of oppression through the lens of Critical Theory. They are therefore the sort of morally superior individuals who are well-suited to decide who is a victim and who is an oppressor. This is such an obvious fact that if you disagree it can only be because you are an oppressor.  

A proper history education should liberate students by giving them weapons to intellectually challenge those authority figures who seek to rule over them. It is important to expose students to brilliant and evil books like Gone With the Wind so that they can learn to see a master narrative at work. What makes Gone With the Wind a true master narrative is precisely its ability to pretend to be a counter-narrative. The heroes are "victims" who are not in the positions of power that they are naturally entitled to. This gives them the right to strike back at the "oppressors" who wrongfully hold a position better than what they deserve. If my students wish to recognize who is ruling over them, the first thing they should look for is who claims that their status of victimhood is an unchallengeable fact and that anyone who voices any skepticism is automatically a master oppressor.