Rich Schapiro of Daily News has an article, "Mosab Hassan Yousef: The Hamas prince who was spy for Israel" on Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of a prominent Hamas leader who served as a spy for Israel. On the surface it would appear as if this would argue against Eli Berman, about whom I posted earlier. Professor Berman makes the case that the strength of groups like Hamas is precisely their ability to weed out informants.
The answer comes at the end of the article:
In a statement from prison, he [Sheikh Hassan Yousef] said it was possible the Israelis recruited his son, but that his son had no access to the movement's secrets.
"Whether what Haaretz reported is true or not, Mosab was not an active member in Hamas or in any of its military, political or religious branches, or any other body," the elder Yousef said.
People who come through the system are more trustworthy and less likely to turn traitor than even family members. If you are going to build a terrorist organization you need a social service network, not a large family.
Showing posts with label Eli Berman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Eli Berman. Show all posts
Friday, February 26, 2010
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Why Are the Haredim Holding Up? II
Reuben Seligman responded to Garnel and my comments to his last post:
In my post I said that I don't claim to know all the answers regarding how things changed. However, I can give you some suggestions, by looking at how people make choices (contrary to Ironheart, who believes in brainwashing). I was surprised when you said that as a non-economist you didn't focus on the economic issues, since as a libertarian, you should be focusing on those issues. Remember that people have many goals, economic goals, religious goal, and status goals. Let's first look at the "flipping" phenomenon. Their parents want them to study torah and indeed encourage them to study torah. They then come to the point where they go away to study torah for a year or two. They enjoy that year and they are told by their Rabbeim that they could and should continue that rather than going to college. They realize that they can fit into a community where they will have the status of a "learner" and that they can continue to enjoy a life of study. Yes, they realize that they may be poorer, but as you mentioned, because of the welfare state in both the U.S. and Israel we are currently in a situation where nobody starves. Economists assume that we discount future rewards. That means we value current rewards more than future rewards. It is thus not entirely irrational for a young man to prefer studying torah, rather than going to college, since the status rewards for studying torah are current and the resulting poverty is several years in the future (usually when he has children and his wife cannot work). If this analysis is correct, then parents may be able to pressure their children to choose college by not supporting them (after a certain period) unless they go to college, since that would cause the child to experience current poverty, rather than future poverty.
I will make another suggestion based on an idea that Berman mentions obliquely. Assume that Orthodox Jews want to form a community with other Orthodox Jews. They want to study Torah, participate in shul, and engage in all similar activities. In their community, they obtain status, in part by their activities (knowledge of Torah, piety, etc.), but also by the status of the group in which they are involved. This creates a "free rider" problem in which each person wants to be associated with people who are more committed, not less committed. The people who are more committed then create barriers so that they don't associate with people who are less committed. These barriers are seen in schools and shidduchim: schools will not admit a child whose parents own a televisions, or are otherwise nonconforming and, by screening prospective marriage partners for their children, parents hope to gain status. A young person can gain status by showing that he is more committed (Berman mentions that as the reason why people continuing to study, rather than work). Thus, while studying and not working are not financially rewarding they provide status rewards for the family, as well as the person studying. (Note that if there are fewer barriers, there will be less of a push towards Haredism. For instance, in communities where there is only one school, the school cannot serve as a barrier. Similarly, if young people can meet on their own, rather than through shadchanim, there will be less of a pressure towards Haredism.)
I hope that you find these analyses interesting. I would have liked to take more time to think about these issues, but I understand the time constraints that apply to blogs. I apologize if my analyses are somewhat half-baked, but that is the best I can do given the time constraints. However, I do want to specifically address the issue you raised regarding the great books and classical culture. I assume that you would consider me well read. However, I do not see any future for that as an ideal. The reason is not multiculturalism, but simply that the world has moved from the view of education as bildung to an instrumental view of education. In the 1970s, YU didn't offer an accounting major because that is not in accordance with its mission of providing a liberal education. It all seems quaint now. Students want a financial reward from their education. Modern Orthodoxy would be better advised to compete by providing a better torah education while allowing people to make a living than by professing an ideal of torah and madda (with madda being some type of bildung). (I have some more ideas regarding YU and Touro college, but I cannot put them in sufficiently coherent form in the short time I have now.)
...
My response: Let us be clear, Garnel Ironheart does not believe in brainwashing people. He does follow the fairly common belief that people turn to terrorism because they are brainwashed. He would probably benefit from reading Eli Berman.
I see this change in how one views education, from bildung to being instrumental for making money, as coming from modern liberalism. I agree with Allan Bloom, in his Closing of the American Mind, that once the modern academic world stopped defending the notion of eternal universal truths then the humanities lost all claim to having any value. So now why should students bother to study Plato? Instead, they should go off to Sy Syms business school and try to make as much money as they can. One of the advantages the Haredim have (and this goes for all religious fundamentalists and explains why, contrary to the liberal narrative, they have been gaining in strength) is that they can still make claims about universal truths with a straight face. If you are interested in universal truths you are not going to go to liberal post-modernism and multiculturalism. (Maybe I am an intellectual optimist, but I like to believe that people care about their lives having meaning that they would be willing to accept the fact that death would be the end as long as they could believe that what they did accomplish in this life was actually meaningful in some ultimate sense.) I am probably old-fashioned and too much of an ideological purist, but I believe that Yeshiva University should never have started offering accounting degrees. In fact, I would want them to abolish the entire business school. An education means a method of thinking, not just a utilitarian skill. As such, real education means the humanities or a math or science. Accounting and physical therapy degrees are a contradiction in terms and are no more an education than a degree in managing garbage. If Yeshiva University and Modern Orthodoxy wish to continue to be relevant they need to take up the banner of the humanities and of universal truths. Secular liberalism cannot maintain a faith in universal truths so it has lost the ability to defend the humanities. What is needed are people whose religious faith gives them a belief in universal truths and who value the humanities as helping us understand these universal truths. Such people could defeat the relativism of the left while defending liberalism (the classical kind) from the fundamentalism of the right.
Why are the Haredim Holding Up? A Response to the “Would Haredim Make Good Terrorists?”
Reuben Seligman sent me a response to my review of Radical Religious and Violent and was kind enough to allow me to post it.
I read your posts regarding the Berman book and I was disappointed. I would have preferred that you focus on the economics of Haredim. Economics is the science that deals with how people make choices and this science has been extended by several economist and sociologists (including Rodney Stark) to religious choices. Berman focuses on the structure of religious societies that make place barriers to exit, including Haredim. What I find interesting is how successful they have been. The best way to bring it out is the contrast with the terrible situation of Orthodox Judaism in prewar Europe which you had posted in the last few days. In contrast, both in the U.S. and in Israel, Haredim have managed to establish themselves in communities that are largely successful in retaining their children and are in fact growing. You may be correct that you have had contact with many people who grew up in the system and would leave if they could, but there are many who had many opportunities and chose to go into the system despite pressure from their parents.
To me, the question is how did we get from where we were fifty years ago to where we are now. You posted correctly that many of the Satmar Chasidim today are descended from what were considered Modern Orthodox Jews. Why is it that they were not successful in perpetuating their way of life; their descendants became Chasidim. The issue is not whether you are happy about it or not, but how people made choices that led to that result.
Another example, you may ask your father, but in my generation of Torah Vodaath, the parents universally wanted their children to go to college and were largely successful. I believe that about 70% of my class went to college of some sort. Yet many of the children of my contemporaries who went to college are not going to college. What were the choices that my contemporaries faced in raising their children and how did their choices lead to that result?
I can best speak about my own choices. I did go to college, but I spent two years in yeshiva after high school before going to college and went to Brooklyn College at night. In doing that, I gave up on my chances of going to a better college, but it was worth it to me because I wanted to study torah. To use a neologism (coined by the economist Herbert Simon) I satisficed (combination of satisfy and sacrifice). My question is why wasn't I able to reproduce myself. I see people studying torah and they have no education; Faigy tells me that there are no people in her generation who replicate me: a decent knowledge of Torah and a good secular education. Why is it that way? Is it that choices that were available to me are no longer available? I don't claim to know the answers.
To recapitulate: I don't believe in the historic inevitability of the collapse of the Haredi world. I believe that there are many problems with the sustainability of Modern Orthodoxy, but it is not collapsing either. But in order to make decent predictions about the future, a study of the religious economy, i.e., how choices were made in the past are essential.
My response:
Fair enough that I did not focus on the economics question. I am not an economist. My field of interest leans more to political theory and the mechanics of creating movements. My doctoral thesis deals with the worldly political issues that go into creating apocalyptic movements. This was what interested me about Berman's work and formed the bulk of my review
You ask two questions. What has allowed the Haredi community to be successful in the United States and in Israel in ways that they were never able to in Europe? The second question is essentially about the failure of the "Modern Orthodox" option; why are we unable to create people who are masters of both Jewish and secular subjects?
I would argue that ironically enough, the Haredi situation has been made possible by the rise of modern multiculturalism. (I think Samuel G. Freedman was fundamentally correct in regard to this, in Jew vs. Jew, when he argued that the big Jewish winner in this shift in American culture over the past few decades has been the Haredim and the big loser has been the secular Yiddishists.) Modern liberalism is far more willing to tolerate men with long beards and funny hats than early twentieth century America. While modern liberalism may give more tolerance to its favored groups, they are still trapped into at least making a show of tolerance. You cannot deny someone a job because of a beard and peyos and because they want to leave early on Friday. Modern liberalism has also helped in that it created the welfare state. This is one of the reasons why I oppose modern liberalism. What most people do not see is that this does not serve to create a more liberal society, but to bring out all the worst superstitions of the Old World. (The willingness of hard leftists to jump into bed with Islamic radicals is a more extreme and dangerous form of this same problem.)
What has benefited Haredim has to a large extent hurt Modern Orthodoxy. Modern multiculturalism devalued the "Great Books" and classical culture. If Modern Orthodoxy was the commitment to a dialogue with the best of the surrounding culture then modern multiculturalism robbed Modern Orthodoxy of its partner in dialogue. If, in sophisticated gentile society, it is no longer absolutely necessary to be able to know something about Shakespeare why should boys learning in Yeshiva have to? The difference between Modern Orthodox society and Haredi society is that Modern Orthodoxy society is premised on the working man (preferably a doctor or a lawyer), even if it acknowledges the necessity of having individuals sitting and learning. The Haredi world is built around a society of learners. Obviously, it requires people to hold down jobs. The jobs that pay the sort of salaries needed to support a Haredi lifestyle and hold up this community of learners require an advanced secular education. Even the more conservative members of the Haredi world can accept that there may be a value in having individuals with knowledge about the humanities. This Haredi society could only function in Eastern Europe as a rabbinic elite, one of the reasons why Eastern European religious life was so dysfunctional. Before the 1960s, in essence, almost everyone had to be Modern Orthodox so Modern Orthodoxy did not have a serious competitor. Comes modern liberalism and the modern welfare state and now there is another option.
The situation in Israel is slightly different. There the main issues are government welfare, in a more extreme version, and the army. I think Berman is right on in his discussion of how government subsidies only serve to encourage men to sit and learn and not work. As Libertarians know, government welfare is really simply government funding poverty and when you fund something you get more of it.
As to why we do not see more people who can do both, I do not have any good answers. It is hard enough for someone to be able to do one let alone do both so I suspect that, in any age, such figures are going to be few and far between. To what extent was your generation better at this than ours? I suspect this is largely a matter of the eye of the beholder. Obviously, the Haredi world is not going to be producing switch hitters. Your generation's Haredim were still in many respects "Modern Orthodox." They were raised as part of American society and they still operated on a worker model. That was a world that could produce you. Can the Modern Orthodox produce switch hitters? I would argue that they can even if not many. I admit that the Modern Orthodox suffer from a major limitation that it lacks a culture and model of intense Torah study. This will limit the amount of serious Torah scholars to come out of this society.
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Would Haredim Make Good Terrorists? Some Thoughts on Radical Religious and Violent (Part II)
(Part I)
It occurred to me that this argument, that successful terrorist organizations require agents with high defection constraints and this is best accomplished by recruiting candidates with long histories of service to the group's social welfare network even before they became terrorists, would explain why certain terrorist and counter-terrorism strategies used in television shows might not work in practice. In season two of 24, one of the major twists is the revelation that the point man in a plot by Islamic terrorists to use a nuclear device over Los Angeles is a blond haired blue eyed American female raised as a Protestant and whose family is unaware that she converted to Islam let alone has become an Islamic terrorist. If I were running a terrorist organization and had the good fortune to come into possession of a nuclear bomb (supplied by a conservative cabal looking to push the United States into a war with specific unnamed Muslim countries), would I be willing to trust this bomb to an American woman who was not raised in the system and has not even made the sacrifice of coming out to her family about her extremist beliefs? This would undermine the anti-profiling premise of this sequence of episodes. Certainly, if the government is looking for Middle-Eastern men I could recruit an all American white female, but do I have any that I can trust? If terrorists are dependent on people from very specific backgrounds then they would be vulnerable to profiling.
On the flip side, the show MI-5 (a British version of 24) has an episode devoted to a project designed to undermine Islamic terrorist cells in England by getting active members to turn and then agree to attempt to turn other members. The story focuses on the recruitment of a black convert to Islam by using his ex-girlfriend from his pre-Muslim days to get to him. If real life terrorist groups behave like Berman assumes they do then it is unlikely that they would ever allow a black convert to be in a position of serious responsibility where he could turn on the group. On the flip side, if I were a terrorist mastermind, I would look at the MI-5 episode as an excellent example of why I do not want to trust converts, no matter how sincere they sound and instead stick to people who have come up through the system.
Ultimately, there is both a liberal and a conservative side to Berman's argument. On the conservative side, he demolishes the common apologetic argument for groups like Hamas that they are primarily a social service network that only incidentally also maintains a militant wing. From Berman's perspective, it is precisely this social service network that is the foundation for terrorist activity so no separation can be made. This though also has a liberal face as Berman argues that counter-terrorism, instead of a military approach, should be focusing precisely on these social services by offering alternatives.
To step away from terrorism, this book is primarily about the economics of religion, particularly of the Haredi system, which is the inspiration for Berman's more general ideas. This book could be read as a study of the Haredi system, sidestepping any concerns about terrorism. Personally, I find Berman's study of Haredim to be a useful refutation of the sort of Haredi apologetics offered by Jonathan Rosenblum. Barring spectacular individuals, the Haredi yeshiva system is not useful as an alternative to secular college in preparation for competing in the job market. As Berman notes:
Israeli secular education in the 1990s had a return of 9.4 percent, a pretty good investment (a little higher than the U.S. return). Ultra-Orthodox education, on the other hand, was a terrible investment, at 1.8 percent. In other words, for every year in yeshiva a student was forgoing a permanent raise of about 7.6 percent, which they could have realized by spending that same year in a secular school. (pg. 73)
It is important that Haredi groups like Satmar do not get credit for their social services. The usual defense for Satmar is to point to their admittedly extensive social services, both in and even outside their own community. Kiryat Joel has the highest rate of poverty in the United States. Their philosophy of attempting to shut out the world is the greatest mass system of poverty creation that remains legal. As with the case of terrorism, the social service network is not something distinct from the extremism; it is the very foundation of the entire system that creates radicals and allows them to continue in their beliefs. (One of the reasons why I am a Libertarian and wish to eliminate government welfare is the knowledge that such policies will be the destruction of the Haredi community as they are faced with having to adopt Modern Orthodox policies or starving to death.)
This brings me to the big question that I came away from this book asking; for all this talk about the similarities between the social systems used by Haredim and Islamic radicals, would Haredim make good terrorists? In fact, Berman's major example of a failed terrorist organization is the Jewish underground that came from the Jewish settler movement. They lacked a system of culling out potentially untrustworthy recruits and were all too easily infiltrated by the Israeli government and neutralized. The Haredi system is very useful if you want to send out riotous youths to smash traffic lights and burn garbage cans or even to harass immodestly dressed women. This does not require any great planning, there is no valuable intelligence to sell, nor does it threaten any high-value targets. Imagine a Haredi youth calling the Israeli police: "hay I have a tip on a planned demonstration against chilul Shabbos. All I want is that you get me out of this life and give me a full year of college tuition with room and board." With something so basic, one could rely on moderately committed youths, motivated more by boredom than ideology.
As I see it, the Haredi system would not be effective for higher defection constant jobs like terrorism. It is not that they lack an effective social welfare system. The problem is that their system is almost too successful and is able to survive and even rely on free riders. The Haredi world is loaded with people who have been trapped into the system and would leave if only they were not dependent on the Haredi social system. (One of the few things that Unchosen got right.) In theory, these would be precisely the sorts of people who would turn traitor the moment they had something to sell. Would these people even be useful as drones, to be given specific low-level missions without any valuable intelligence to defect with?
If you insist you can do the cheap Jewish thing and have a friend lend you this book, do that. It would be hypocritical of me to complain. Better yet go out and purchase this book yourself. I look forward to hearing your reactions to it.
Friday, February 5, 2010
Would Haredim Make Good Terrorists? Some Thoughts on Radical Religious and Violent (Part I)
A few months ago a friend of mine, Reuben Seligman, recommended that I read Radical Religious and Violent: The New Economics of Terrorism by Eli Berman. Many people recommend books to me, I welcome it and I occasionally even get around to reading them, particularly if it comes from a person whose taste I have a high regard for. I put this book on my Amazon wish list and ignored it. This person continued to pester me about why I had not bothered to read it. Finally he asked for my address and sent me his copy. Publishers and authors have sent me books to review before, but this was clearly serious. So I had no choice but to read this book and write about it. Let me say that this book was worth every bit of Seligman's pestering. Think of it as Freakonomics devoted to terrorism and religious radicals. Dr. Berman analyzes the relationship between radical religious groups and violence. He offers a highly edifying trip from Meah Shearim to Gaza and Afghanistan. The book treats both Haredim and Islamic fundamentalists with an economist's indulgence; they are rational beings who respond to worldly incentives. Dr. Berman assumes that there is a relationship between religious radicalism and terrorism, but does not indulge in any simplistic religion causes intolerance, which leads to violence as the believer attempts to enforce his beliefs on others. Berman's offers the intriguing if subversive model of social welfare groups, something that organized religions and particularly religious radicals seem to do better than anyone else, becoming the foundation for successful insurrectionists engaging in either conventional warfare against established militaries or terrorist attacks against civilians. The key to this is what Berman refers to as the "defection constant." What would it take to cause a member of a group to sell out? For example a Hamas operative to phone in to Israeli intelligence the planed suicide bombing against a bus or a Taliban fighter to hijack the cargo of a caravan of trucks on a Taliban controlled road through Afghanistan. The higher value the target, the greater the reward will be for betrayal. Western intelligence will offer more for information that stops a plane being flown into buildings than they would to stop a bus bombing. Western countries can pay more for defectors than non-Western countries. Assumedly, everyone has their price, money or otherwise, and the leadership of a group, better than anyone, has a rough idea what that price is for its members. This in turn sets a limit to what you might trust your people for. The same person that you might trust with a simple kidnapping job might not be trustworthy with a weapon of mass destruction. This means that groups with a higher defection constant, whose members require a higher price to sell out, will be able to attack higher value targets and thus become a more successful terrorist or insurrectionary force, without fear of betrayal.
So what does this have to do with organized religions, even religious radicals, let alone religious social welfare networks? The social welfare network offers a highly effective self selecting method of weeding out people with low defection constants. The social welfare network is premised on the notion of members helping each other when needed. The problem with this is that it is a system that invites free riders. I might join the group and take advantage of your help, but when I am called to lend a hand I will conveniently be unavailable. Because of this, social welfare groups need to actively weed out free riders by demanding that their members demonstrate their good faith by making sacrifices. Thus social welfare networks have a ready supply of members, who have demonstrated their loyalty to the group and their high defection constant. This becomes decisive the moment the service changes from visiting sick members in the hospital to blowing up hospitals full of non-members of the group. Religious radicals have the inside track on creating social welfare networks because they demand regular demonstrations of sacrifice as signs of allegiance, the keeping of religious restrictions such as what you can eat or what clothes you can wear. Berman advices, only half in jest, that graduate schools put the following rules in place to ensure that students all prepare for class:
- Avoid alcohol consumption with anyone not in our group.
- Do not travel by car.
- Avoid beaches, coffee shops, and movies.
- Do not watch television or use the Internet.
- Do not read books other than texts of our profession.
- Follow our own very unusual dress code.
- Eat only according to the strict rules of our membership.
- Speak only our fairly arcane language.
- Adhere to rules about how, when, and with whom you can have sexual relations.
People might be attracted to this lifestyle and embrace its restrictions if the rewards were suitably enticing, say being able to belong to such an elite group, full of people willing to make such sacrifices, and attend the very interesting class it gives. As long as the penalty for breaking the rules is high enough, say expulsion, then people will agree to pay the price. What might, in theory, work for graduate students, has proven to work very well for religions.
(To be continued …)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)