Am I to Blame for Killing Your Lord (or for Racism)?

 

As a principled classical liberal, I believe in the importance of reading things that one disagrees with the goal of being able to pass an Ideological Turing Test. This means being able to talk about a position in such a way that people will not be able to tell the difference between your description and the words of genuine supporters. I do read plenty of things that I disagree with. That being said, recently I find that a large percentage of that reading is being taken up by contemporary Christian conservatives like David F. Wells, and Voddie Bauchman. This is to say nothing of my great love for classical Christian writers like C. S. Lewis, who I have been reading since my Yeshiva University days, and G. K. Chesterton, and John Bunyan. All of these are writers that I can listen to for hours at a time with great pleasure. By contrast, I have a difficult time with Woke writers such as Robin DiAngelo, and Ibram X. Kendi to the point that I cannot listen to them for more than a few minutes without getting annoyed. The reason for this, I suspect, has much to do with my annoyance, as a teenager, with Rabbi Avigdor Miller; I take their criticism personally.

By contrast, I do not take Christianity as a personal threat to me. As I once explained to my students, I am privileged to be able to read the New Testament in a post-Vatican II world where the Catholic Church has denounced anti-Semitism and specifically the charge that the Jews are responsible for the death of Jesus. This means that I can read the New Testament, and by extension the wider corpus of Christian literature, without getting hung up on whether someone is blaming me for killing their Lord even to the point of wanting me dead. I am well aware of the historical reality of Jews shuddering in fear on Easter Sunday from drunken peasants who had just been told by their priest that the Jews murdered Jesus. This only highlights the fact that this is not the world in which I live. On the contrary, as far as I can tell, conservative Christians are far more likely on Easter to contemplate how fortunate they are that the Jewish people gave them their Savior and that it is a wonderful thing that the Jews have returned to the land of Israel just like in the days of Jesus. 

I am particularly grateful to the Protestant tradition with its emphasis on total depravity. From this perspective, the Jews, as a group, can never bear particular responsibility for crucifying Jesus. All human beings are equally depraved in their sinfulness. This means that Jews cannot be worse than anyone else. Furthermore, since Jesus died for the sins of the entire world, the sins of both Jews and Gentiles equally serve as nails in the Cross. 

Conservative Christians may wish that I convert to their religion and even believe that I will be condemned to Hell for all eternity for not accepting Jesus. That being said, I do not believe that they take my failure to convert personally. It is not as if I am, in some sense, torturing Jesus with my Jewish practices, beyond all the other eight billion sinners on the planet, showing that, if I had lived in the first century, I would have been crying out for Jesus' crucifixion just as loudly as my ancestors. 

When I read Woke literature, the essential point that I cannot ignore is precisely that I am being personally held responsible for American racism (or sexism, homophobia, or economic inequality). It does not matter that I do not feel any ill will towards black people, particularly as this group includes members of my family. Nor does it matter that none of my ancestors lived in the United States before the 20th century so none of them were owners of African-American slaves. The mere fact that I hold ideas they deem racist (mainly anything they strongly disagree with), makes me racist even if I never had any racist intent. The mere fact that I have white skin means that I have, in some sense, benefited from racism. By not getting on board with their plan to end racism, I fail to be an "anti-racist" and this, according to Kendi, makes me a racist.

The claim that I am responsible for racism has much in common with the traditional Christian anti-Semitic charge of deicide. My ancestors were never threatened by Christians out of a belief that my ancestors personally crucified Jesus. The assumption was that my ancestors, by remaining Jews, showed that they would have crucified him. As such, it was like they crucified him. As long as there were people, like Jews, exposed to Christian teachings but who stubbornly still rejected it, Jesus, in some sense, would continue to suffer on the Cross. From this perspective, the only solution would be to eliminate Jews either through conversion or through violence. 

Similarly, from the Woke perspective, I am guilty of racism simply because I am white. This is possible because, as with the Christian notion of sin, racism is assumed to be systemic. It is not about what you do but about who you are. In Christianity, this notion of sin is countered by the doctrine of total depravity. Since all humans are equally guilty of sin, no person can set themselves over anyone else in judgment and demand that they atone. No one can claim that they have committed the sin of lust in their hearts fewer times than me and are therefore less guilty of fornication. By contrast, for Wokeness, being marginalized means that you can lecture others about their privilege. For example, a black person can lecture me about my racism on the assumption that the mere fact that they are black means that they are less guilty of racism. It should be noted that, from the Woke perspective, it is impossible for a black person to ever be guilty of racism against whites, no matter how hateful their words are, while white people are guilty of racism simply by being white. The black person, it is assumed, does not wield power, while the white person, by virtue of their skin color, does. 

Something that I find fascinating about DiAngelo is that she specifically targets Jews as one of her main examples of whites trying to deny their complacency with racism. The white Jew tries to claim that they cannot really be guilty of racism because, as a Jew, they have also experienced oppression. This is parallel to the traditional Christian anti-Semitic argument that Jews bear a unique kind of guilt for the death of Jesus because Jews claim that they are saved through their works in following the Law and do not need Jesus. Just as Jews present a challenge to Christianity by opening up the possibility that some people might not really be tainted by Original Sin and therefore do not need Jesus, the white Jew challenges people like DiAngelo with the possibility that skin color might not be the best prism for understanding oppression. As such, white Jews bear a special guilt for racism. Since the Woke definition of racism is built around power. 

I can read conservative Christian writers, whose theology is premised around the doctrine of total depravity (distinct from Christian white nationalists) because I do not have to worry that they want me dead or that someone might "misunderstand" their words and try to kill me. When it comes to Woke writers, I have a difficult time interpreting them as anything other than dog-whistling calls to kill me as a white person who refuses to own up to the fact that I am responsible for most of the evil in the world today. For example, there is the wide support for the Palestinian cause and the willingness to tie it to American civil rights movements. If members of Black Lives Matter openly proclaim that their cause is simply another side of the Palestinian "fight for justice," I have no objection to taking them at their word and concluding that they are a terrorist organization committed to violence. Let us assume that, at the very least, they consider the murder of millions of Jews in Israel as an acceptable price for making Palestine free from sea to sea. I should also assume that they support something similar here in the United States where whites pay their "reparations" by accepting that it is only just and right that they should be robbed and even murdered. The fact that whites include Jewish whites and even Holocaust survivors will not cause them to pause. On the contrary, white Jews are particularly guilty of racism in that they have served to bring "Zionism" to American shores. 

From this perspective, no reasonable dialogue is possible. This certainly makes it harder to justify reading their books. It is not as if I am going to be sitting down with the Woke to show them that I have taken their concerns to heart and it might be possible to reach a compromise. If Wokeness is simply a plot to offer intellectual cover for mass murder then the only reason to read Woke literature is to convince the non-Woke of this fact and to warn the Woke that we know that their claims regarding social justice are a sham and are not going to submit to their moral blackmail.              

Racism and the Fundamental Attribution Error

I recently started listening to Eliezer Yudkowsky’s fanfiction series Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality on Audible. There is an episode where Harry explains the fundamental attribution error. Living in our own heads, we are inclined to recognize the role that circumstances play in our behavior. I got angry and shouted not because I am a bad person who hates other people but because I just received some really distressing news. If did something good, it is likely because I did not find it so difficult to do so I felt it was my responsibility to offer a hand. When it comes to other people, though, we are less inclined to acknowledge such complexity. Other people act the way that they do because it is fundamentally who they are. Either they are wicked satanic sinners who act out of a conscious hatred of the good or they are heroic saints deserving of veneration. The practical implication of this mistake is that, if you believe that people act according to their fixed nature, then what people do is who they are. A person who does bad things is a bad person. 

It occurred to me that racism can be seen as an extreme version of this fundamental attribution error. Not only is Aleksis, in all of his complexity, going to be reduced to a liar, instead of someone who might shade the truth depending on the circumstances but now we are going to say that Latvians, an entity that is millions of times more complicated, are liars. It should be noted that the claim that Latvians are liars is an indisputable truth. It may also be true that Jews, Hungarians, and transgender Manhattanites are liars as well, along with the entire human race. Let us not get sidetracked here; I am talking about Latvians.  

What is really interesting is that it is not just racists that make this fundamental attribution. To be an anti-racist also requires making the fundamental attribution error. In reading someone like Ibram X. Kendi, one cannot escape the Manichean logic of either you are a racist or an anti-racist. This follows the larger critical tradition as we have seen with Paulo Freire. There is no sense that people say or do things based on particular circumstances. 

It is not practical to truly escape racist or otherwise prejudiced thinking. Everyone has a narrative about why the world is not a better place. This usually implies some sort of villain. Since the problems of this world clearly go beyond the lifespan of any individual person, it is inevitable that people will place some group or institution as their villain such as Latvian Hungarian Jews. If you are Richard Weaver, the big bad is William of Occam and 13th-century nominalism along with minor bads such as 20th-century jazz. One can hope that, with the help of a classical liberal education, a person can come to construct ever more intelligent narratives with factually more plausible groups of villains and gain a degree of skepticism even over their own narratives. That being said, just as every person shades the truth from time to time, everyone will make reductive statements about other groups that are less than charitable and demonstrate a lack of awareness or empathy for that group's historical circumstances. 

To make things even more difficult, any attempt to make a pro-tolerance statement about a particular group means that you are not making statements about other groups and, as such those groups are of lesser importance. For example, to put up a "Black Lives Matter" sign in your yard is not just to say that black lives matter but to say that, in some sense, black lives matter more than Uighur lives. To be clear, it may be ultimately defensible to argue that black lives may be more relevant to your situation as an American and therefore you have constructed a narrative in which blacks are the victims even as you lack a similar narrative to wrap your head around Uighur history. That being said, this is hardly an innocent claim. 

The anti-racist needs to take all of these very real human foibles and label people as either racists or anti-racists. It is the same temptation as racism to wish to simplify the world into either good or bad people. Clearly, people are not one thing or another. As with every other virtue and vice, people exist along a spectrum and do better or worse depending on the particular circumstance. 

Obviously, the anti-racist cannot denounce say the Trump voter as racist without making themselves vulnerable to the charge of hypocrisy. In the case of Kendi, he holds up Angela Davis as a model anti-racist. This is a person who defended jailing Jewish Soviet dissidents. In a sane world, Kendi could be forgiven for being a non-Jew who never internalized the history of Jewish suffering into his psyche. If we are to play by Kendi's rules, both Kendi and Davis must be rejected as anti-Semites. 

The traditional leftist solution to this problem is to engage in special pleading. Firstly, only certain kinds of blanket statements regarding racial groups really count as racism. It is not racist to declare white gun owners responsible for a Hispanic teenager going on a shooting spree because white people are responsible for most of the evil in this world as all true anti-racists know. Second, the anti-racist redeems himself through leftist politics.   

My purpose is not to say that, since everyone is a racist to some degree, it is ok to be racist. The fact that everyone lies and that society requires the grease of some judicious "manipulating of the truth" does not make lying ok. Whether we always know precisely where to draw the line, we can still recognize, at least in theory, a difference between the person who makes the honest attempt to be truthful and the person who no longer holds that they have a moral responsibility to society to tell the truth. Similarly, even if the wheels of society need to be greased with some prejudice, there is a difference between a person who imperfectly tries to still expand their circle of moral responsibility and the person who does not believe that they have moral obligations to members of the "wrong" groups. Can I tell you, in every case, who belongs in what category? I have no wish to fall into the fundamental attribution error any more than I have to. People exist along a spectrum. I will stand up for my imperfect sense of what is right and I will leave it to everyone else to judge their own hearts.