In Search of the People (Part I)

We have previously discussed the role of Motte and Bailey tactics in leftist revolutionary thought. Words like critical thinking, education, racism, oppression, and genocide do not mean what most people think they mean. Specifically, they have nothing to do with physical violence, teaching people to read and think for themselves. Instead, these words are simply reduced to matters of whether you support the leftist revolutionary agenda. If you do not, then you are guilty of racism, oppression, and genocide. If you are a parent or teacher, you are guilty of failing to educate children and teach them critical thinking skills. Because of this, leftist revolutionaries are justified in using violence against you.

Here, I would like to turn to the word “people.” Within classical liberal thought, people are important in the sense that everyone should have equal rights and be equal before the law regardless of their birth or personal wealth. For leftist revolutionaries, while they pretend to support the masses, in actuality the People are those who support leftist revolutionaries as opposed to the vast majority of individuals who live in a country who are alienated from themselves and suffer from false consciousness. This has important implications for democracy. Democracy, for leftist revolutionaries, is about not elections and rule by the majority of voters. On the contrary, a country like North Korea is a true people’s democracy as Kim Jong Un represents the true consciousness of the People. This notion of the people goes back to Rousseau, who had even greater contempt for the masses than even Plato.   

Much of the story of leftist revolutionary movements can be seen as a search for the People. Leftist revolutionary intellectuals can never be more than a small percentage of any society. In order to seize power, they have needed to hold up some larger group and pretend to rule in their name. This has meant finding a group that not only is physically oppressed and demands reforms but is so alienated from the rest of society that their needs can only be satisfied through a complete revolution.

Consider the example of the French Revolution. The French political system in 1789 was in need of reform such as the elimination of feudal privileges and that the monarch should share power with a national assembly. These were things for which there was widespread support throughout French society. The problem for the French Revolution was what to do after the low-hanging fruit was dealt with in the summer of 1789. There was no national consensus for any truly revolutionary changes. As such, the radicals of the revolution ran into stiff opposition not just from aristocrats who fled abroad and supported foreign invasion to restore the ancient regime, but also from peasants. 

This challenge to the Revolution helped bring about the Reign of Terror. Robespierre was faced with the problem that for all his talk about the People, the majority of actual people in France were quite counter-revolutionary. As a Rousseauian, Robespierre’s solution was simply to define the People as those who supported the Jacobins, with himself then as the embodiment of the will of the People. He could then commit mass murder against Frenchmen in the name of the People and turn himself into a dictator. As the majority of Frenchmen lacked a revolutionary consciousness, they did not count as the People. As such, they needed to be reeducated or killed in order for the real people to come into themselves.

One of the main ways that the French Revolution influenced classical Marxism is that it taught Marxists to distinguish between peasants and urban workers and assume that only rural workers counted as the People. Peasants lacked a revolutionary consciousness. They still clung to Christian beliefs and the land that they worked on. Allow for some basic land reform to turn peasants into small landowners and peasants would turn into the staunchest defenders of the establishment. By contrast, Marxists assumed that urban workers could be turned into a properly revolutionary class. By moving to the city, workers could be assumed to have dropped their Christianity and their dreams of owning some land or a small business. Trapped under the heel of a capitalist boss, the worker would have no choice but to embrace a total revolution of society.

The main threat to urban workers developing a revolutionary consciousness was nationalism. Workers, having abandoned their precocial identity as living in a village or province, might, upon moving to large cities, choose to identify with the nation and believe that they could improve their lot by engaging in national politics instead of a global revolution. As such, nationalism needed to be denounced. Those who believed in their nation could not be the People. 

The classical Marxist opposition to the bourgeoise, religion, and nationalism helps explain the deeply seeded anti-Semitism within Marxism and the wider left. Historically, Jews have functioned as an economic class, a religion, and as an ethnicity. All three of these manifestations of Judaism were problematic from a Marxist perspective. Obviously, Marxists could not accept the role that Jews have historically played as merchants and moneylenders. Jews also needed to abandon their beliefs in being chosen by God. Finally, Jews could no longer think of themselves as a people but instead should assimilate into the wider human family. Take away Judaism as an economic class, a religion, and an ethnicity and there is nothing left. As such, for Marxists, Jews did not exist as a people and Judaism needed to disappear. Only by abandoning Jewish peoplehood could Judaism join the People. 

One of the ironies of Marxist anti-Semitism is that it was not lessened by the large numbers of Jewish Marxists. On the contrary, Jewish Marxists promoted anti-Semitism. To be accepted as a Marxist, a Jew needed to demonstrate that they rejected everything about Judaism. At most a non-particularist version of Judaism (Tikkun Olam) could be allowed to survive. Such a Judaism is not any kind of Judaism at all but it is useful for covering the fact that the goal is the elimination of Judaism. Following this logic, Jewish identity could be allowed as long as a Jew used their position as a Jew to denounce Judaism and argue that they were not being anti-Semitic in doing so on the grounds that they were Jewish and were fulfilling the true Jewish spirit of humanistic universalism.     

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.  

Entering the Matrix: Individual and Structural Oppression

In a previous post, I discussed what it means to be critical from the perspective of critical theory and how it differs and frankly is the diametric opposite of the conventional sense of being critical. I would like to turn here to the question of oppression. Here too, the term can mean different and even opposing things. Just like, for most people, critical reasoning is something carried out by individuals, oppression is an evil experienced by individuals. For example, slavery is evil not simply in an abstract sense but because it involves literal violence and even rape and murder. For Marxism and later critical theory, since individuals are not the primary moral unit, oppression is disconnected from the actual suffering of individuals but is the existential product of one group of people having some kind of metaphysical power over others. The problem with capitalism is not rooted in the actions of individual capitalists but in the structure of capitalism itself. For example, capitalism is evil not because workers are poorly paid and do not receive healthcare but because the workers are under the power of capitalism and are unable to develop themselves into their full consciousness. The practical difference comes down to the value of reform. If you are a good Marxist, it should mean nothing if workers unionize for shorter hours and better conditions if they are not also coming into a knowledge of themselves as workers oppressed by the structure of capitalism. 

This privileging of theoretical over physical violence becomes particularly important for understanding critical theory. By the 1920s, it was clear that capitalism in the West was not about to collapse into Dickensian horror from which a revolution might arise. Conditions for workers were not worsening so workers were not radicalizing. For critical theory, the nightmare was not that capitalists would grind workers into the dirt but, on the contrary, capitalists would seduce workers with increasing luxuries so that workers would lose all desire to rebel.   

To understand this notion of structural oppression, it is useful to look at the Matrix film, which brilliantly differentiates between individual and structural oppression. At the beginning of the movie, Neo finds himself living in what is clearly a less-than-ideal world. The computers are outdated even by 1999 standards. Furthermore, there are these superpowered agents, who do not respect people's constitutional rights. Instead of allowing Neo to call his lawyer, they cause his mouth to seal itself and allow a metallic insect to burrow itself into his belly button. The movie could have been about Neo developing his own superpowers, defeating the agents, and making the world a better place to live. 

The critical twist of the Matrix is the discovery that Neo is really living in a computer simulation run by an AI that has enslaved humanity. Accepting the existence of the Matrix upends anything one might believe about oppression and revolution. Neo believes that he is a rebel against the system but, until he takes the red pill and escapes the Matrix, nothing he does is truly productive in fighting the Matrix. On the contrary, Neo the rebel hacker actually plays into the hands of the AI as he distracts people from the real problem, which is not the computers or the agents, but the fact that the world itself is fake. Neo the rebel hacker is still as much a battery that powers the machine as the most conformist corporate drone.  

Imagine if, at the end of the trilogy, the AI were to tell the residents of the rebel human city of Zion that it has come to the realization that oppressing humans under the heel of Agent Smith was wrong. To make amends, the AI is willing to make an "improved" Matrix. There will be high-speed wi-fi; everyone will receive a lifetime subscription to Netflix, and all the computer-generated steak they can eat with no need to diet. Obviously, it would not be a happy ending if the residents of Zion were to give up their Gatling-gun mech suits and return to the Matrix. Now the interesting question is why would such an ending really be worse than the film's actual ending where the AI agrees to allow the humans the option of leaving the Matrix to live in an underground hellhole, with terrible food, under the authority of a human military that will interfere with their daily lives far more so than the agents of the Matrix.  

What should be understood here is that individual and structural oppression are distinct and, in practice, believing in structural oppression will force someone to ignore the physical well-being of individuals. For example, I have found that PETA protestors, despite all their rhetoric about the abuse of horses used for carriage rides, care very little for the actual horses. I once asked such protestors if they would be willing to continue allowing these rides if the alternative was for the horses to be slaughtered and used for glue (think of Boxer from Animal Farm). None of the protestors were willing to say save the horses. These protestors did not really care about whether these horses were being mistreated. Their real objection was horses being used by a private company to make a profit in the first place. 

We see a similar line of thinking among Palestinian activists. Imagine they had two possible futures. In the first, the political situation remains the same with Israel in charge but Israel has managed to greatly improve the Palestinian economy and Palestinians are now enjoying life as middle-class westerners so much that they have abandoned all thought of national liberation. In the second, from sea to sea Palestine is free but people are economically just as poor as they are now. The frightening reality is that many of them really would choose the second option. Consider the recent Ben & Jerry's boycott of the territories. The really odd thing is that it does nothing to benefit Palestinians on the ground. It is one thing to oppose companies selling Israel military gear to be used in the territories. Someone who cares about Palestinians as people should still want private companies to invest in the territories regardless of whether Israel is in charge so that Palestinians can have jobs. 

Political activism needs to be grounded in the real needs of people. If you cannot deliver tangible improvements to people's day-to-day lives, then all the noble theories in the world will not help. This is one of the strengths of markets. They are not a comprehensive ideology but a tool to improve people's lives a few percentage points of growth a year at a time. 

When Paulo Freire Says He Loves You, Run

 

I have finished my first two courses for my teaching certification. In case you were wondering what the schools' politics are, I was strongly encouraged to read Paulo Freire. As a good student and someone who tries to keep an open mind, I bothered to read two of his most famous books, Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Pedagogy of Hope, even though they were not formally assigned. The two things that really struck me about Pedagogy of the Oppressed were that it is simply a terribly written book and that very little of it actually has anything to do with education. Pedagogy of Hope is somewhat better in the sense that it is mostly understandable but it also has almost nothing to do with education. The book is best seen as a self-indulgent autobiography, focusing on the author's interactions with fans of Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  

Considering that most of Pedagogy of the Oppressed was not written for clarity, it is important to focus on those parts where Freire was remarkably clear. 

Any situation in which "A" objectively exploits "B" or hinders his and her pursuit of self-affirmation as a responsible person is one of oppression. Such a situation in itself constitutes violence, even when sweetened by false generosity because it interferes with the individual's ontological and historical vocation to be more fully human. With the establishment of a relationship of oppression, violence has already begun. Never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed. How could they be the initiators, if they themselves are the result of violence? How could they be the sponsors of something whose objective inauguration called forth their existence as oppressed? There would be no oppressed had there been no prior situation of violence to establish their subjugation (p. 55). 

Freire's universe was an utterly Manichean one in which people could be divided into oppressors and oppressed. This is not a world in which, to use Solzhenitsyn's term, the struggle between good and evil runs across every human soul. On the contrary, an oppressed person could never wrong their oppressor. Note how easy it is to be an oppressor. You do not even need to physically harm anyone; you simply need to get in the way of their self-expression. If we are to take Freire seriously, my parents oppressed me through the "violence" of regular bathing and underwear changing. By this standard, the only way for Freire's bifurcation of oppressor and oppressed can make sense is by declaring, a priori, that Freire's people are the oppressed and their opponents are the oppressors. We will then cherrypick the data to show how the members of the opposition are the oppressors while deciding that any contrary evidence is irrelevant since Freire's people are already oppressed and, therefore, can never be oppressors.   

Freire's bifurcation into oppressor and oppressed takes a truly satanic turn once you realize that he actively justified literal physical violence as long as it was carried out by those people he thought were oppressed. Such acts are not only to be deemed non-violent but are actually manifestations of "love." According to Friere:

Yet it is - paradoxical though it may seem - precisely in the response of the oppressed to the violence of their oppressors that a gesture of love may be found. ... Whereas the violence of the oppressors prevents the oppressed from being fully human, the response of the latter to this violence is grounded in the desire to pursue the right to be human. As the oppressors dehumanize others and violate their rights, they themselves also become dehumanized. As the oppressed, fighting to be human, take away the oppressors' power to dominate and suppress, they restore to the oppressors the humanity they had lost in the exercise of oppression (p. 56). 

Keep in mind that Freire was not a pacifist. His praise of Che Guevara shows otherwise. So, when Freire talked about acting against oppression, he clearly meant to include killing. Not only did Freire believe that it was ok for his people to murder their opponents, anyone who did anything to get in their way, doing so not only did not violate their opponent's human rights but was an act of "love" that made them human once again. 

Consider how this logic can be applied to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israelis are, by definition, oppressors because we are going to decide that the cause of the conflict was Palestinian refugees in 1948 and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. The mere existence of the State of Israel hinders the fullest expression of Palestinian national identity so any support for Israel is an act of violence against Palestinians. Nothing else matters because Palestinians are the oppressed. Therefore, nothing that they do, even the murder of children, can be considered violence. If Israelis die, they are only suffering the results of their being oppressors. 

Since Israelis are the oppressors, they do not really count as human beings and have forfeited all claims to human rights. Hence it is not an act of anti-Semitism to call for the murder of Jews using the same tropes as Der Sturmer. On the contrary, it is an act of "love." It is only in death that the non-anti-Zionist Jew can be redeemed from the crime of Zionism and regain their lost humanity. 

It is worth noting that Freire was at least nominally a Christian and worked for the World Council of Churches. One of the great lies of Christianity is that it is a religion of love in contrast to Judaism which is supposed to be the religion of judgment. It is precisely this Christian claim to love that has served to justify over a thousand years of oppression against Jews. Historically, Jews have long known that the truest expression of Christian love was to murder Jews. 

One of the oddities of living in a post-Holocaust world is that it is precisely the more conservative branches of Christianity that are likely to have repented from this tradition of anti-Semitism. This is possible because of the doctrines of Original Sin and the divinity of Jesus. Original Sin makes it possible for Christians to imagine that they are not the hero of the story and are capable of doing truly terrible things, including crimes against the Jewish people. This is why Jesus, the true hero of the Christian story, needed to die on the Cross and not simply teach people to love their neighbors. No one, not even the most decent Christian, could ever fulfill that commandment.  

If you believe that the main point of Jesus' ministry was that he was the Son of God and needed to die for the sins of the world as opposed to teaching people to love their neighbors, then there is little need to turn the Jews into villains. Jews in the first century CE may have been the most righteous and godly people to have ever walked this Earth. They still lacked Jesus and were therefore destined to fail. The moment you believe that the point of Jesus was to teach a new morally superior doctrine then the Jews need to become the villains. If Jesus taught people to be kind even to Samaritans and prostitutes, it must be that the Jews were mean fanatical people who hated Samaritans and stoned prostitutes.  

Freire exemplifies a Christianity that has replaced the Cross with Marxist class struggle. What remained was his self-righteousness. He knew that he was one of the good guys of history because he cared about the downtrodden and oppressed. It never occurred to him that he could be the true face of evil, someone who could see murder and call it love. 

Toward a Meaningful Neo-Liberalism: A Historical Narrative

As a general rule of intellectual honesty, one should try to describe one’s opponents using their language as opposed to using loaded straw man language. This is an extension of the Ideological Turing Test. Can you describe a viewpoint you oppose without it being obvious you oppose it? For this reason, it is, in practice, counter-productive to call people racist or anti-Semitic unless they already embrace those labels for themselves. An extreme example of this problem with labeling is the term “neoliberalism.” While you can fill a library with books on neoliberalism, I know of no neoliberal thinker, someone who self-consciously embraces the label for themselves instead of using it as an epithet against others. Contrast neoliberal with neoconservative. Neoconservatism may have taken a hit with the failure of the Iraq War (which is part of the reason why I abandoned the system) but there still remain proud neoconservatives.

One of the reasons, one needs to stick to what people openly proclaim about themselves is that, without that grounding, it is all too easy to fall prey to conspiracy theories that say more about you than your opponent. Nancy Maclean is the perfect example of this. Her search for a secret agenda makes her incapable of engaging with the thought of the late James Buchanan specifically or of Public Choice in general. Instead, she falls prey to conspiratorial thinking that sounds delusional to anyone not already convinced of the existence of a Koch Brothers plot to take over the world.

This is not a unique problem for people on the left. Consider the state of conservative discourse on Marxism. In the case of Marxism, we are dealing with a concept that continues to attract open self-proclaimed, followers. Furthermore, Marxism, by its very nature, is a conspiracy. More so than any other political ideology, Marxism is not simply a set of beliefs but a methodology for seizing power. Furthermore, Marxists pursue the dishonest strategy of framing their position in terms of their noble intentions as opposed to what they may have to do to bring about those ends. Despite all this being true, it is usually counter-productive to accuse people of being part of a Marxist conspiracy. (For one thing, not all Marxists are conspirators; many are not even political.) Such anti-Marxist thinking will usually backfire on the accusor, trapping them in paranoid delusions. Personally, I think Jordan Peterson is great until he starts talking about Cultural Marxism and equating it with post-modernism. The moment he does this, he stops engaging living people but his own fears. He should stick to Jungian literary analysis and preaching personal responsibility.

I would like to suggest a means to rescue neoliberalism from being a generic conspiratorial term of abuse for those not sufficiently on the hard left. We can use neoliberalism to refer to the political consensus that arose in the 1970s in England and the United States that combined a pro-business skepticism in regard to heavy welfare spending with a warfare mentality abroad and at home.  Underlying this was a cultural Christianity even as the shifts in society made openly theocratic politics implausible.

The key thinker here was William F. Buckley, the founder of National Review, who fashioned late 20th-century conservatism as an alliance between social conservatives, neoconservatives, and limited government free marketers. Getting such different groups to cooperate was possible because all three groups had a perceived common enemy in the 1960s liberal, who wished to use an expansive state to overthrow traditional values and undermine the United States military in order to allow the Soviet Union to win the Cold War. It was this brand of conservativism that defeated the post-war liberal consensus and fashioned a neoliberal consensus in its place.

The United States and England, after the Great Depression and World War II, were dominated by a "New Deal" consensus in which it was assumed the government would take on a greatly expanded role in running the economy and offer a wider range of welfare programs. In England, national healthcare was seen as a reward to the English people for the sacrifices they underwent fighting Nazism. Even if Churchill had been able to stave off the 1945 Labor landslide, there was no way that conservatives could have resisted the popular tide to offer a major state-sponsored safety net.

This did not mean that voters in either country rejected right-wing parties. One of the marks of a political consensus is its ability to draw in even the opposition to the point where, even as they criticize particular points of policy, they accept the fundamental premises behind those policies. This serves the ironic purpose of establishing the consensus as it makes it almost impossible to think outside of it. The Republicans in the United States under Dwight Eisenhower did very well for themselves. That being said, Eisenhower helped entrench the New Deal, perhaps with a more corporate spin. In England, Conservative prime ministers like Harold Macmillan or Ted Heath could succeed by being innocuous managers of the ship of state. Neither of them were ideologues with a vision to counter that of the Labor Party. As such, whether Labor won or lost, it was still Labor's agenda that was going to dominate; the only question conservatives were left with was to what extent specific Labor policies would be implemented.

This post-war consensus in the United States and England was made possible by strong working-class support. This collapsed in the late 1960s and 70s. In the United States, we see white disillusionment with the Civil Rights movement. The parallel for England, perhaps, was the end of the British Empire, which had the ironic result of England bringing the empire home with its liberal immigration policy for those from the former imperial holdings. This undermined a sense of common ethnic identity so important for consensus building. Both the United States and England faced the problem of transitioning to a post-industrial economy. As long as both countries benefited from the post-war economic boom and the optimistic belief that things were improving it was possible to paper over the differences in society, making compromise possible. A growing tax base would be able to pay for an expanding list of programs either in the present or at least in the near future. Without the economic boom and the optimism that it usually generates, such compromise became impossible as politics was reduced to a collection of tribes fighting over the remnants of a shrinking pie, each side trying to grab their piece before it was all gone.

Into this gap left by the failed post-war consensus came neoliberalism as represented by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Unlike their Conservative and Republican predecessors, they actually had an ideology. Limiting government spending in the name of free markets served a practical purpose under the economic challenges of the 1970s. It also helped frame neoliberal policies as advancing the cause of freedom through limiting government. It is important to realize that neoliberalism was a product of a wider liberal consensus and, unlike traditional conservatism, was not about to take any kind of principled stand in favor of hierarchy.

Much as neoliberalism was not a defense of any kind of crown, it also rejected the altar of religious authority. As Victorian morality was an attempt to find a justification for religion in a world with Darwinian Evolution and Biblical Criticism, Neoliberalism was a product of the secularization of the public sphere and an acceptance of that reality. Neoliberalism still wished to fight a rearguard action to save religion as a cultural force. Beyond that, religion served to cement the 1960s liberal as the enemy trying to shove secularism down the throats of common folk. Abortion is a good example of this. Making abortion illegal was never a practical goal. Roe vs. Wade was the product of a growing wave to legalize abortion (ironically enough, helped along by then Gov. Reagan of California) even as the Supreme Court's decision counter-productively short-circuited the national conversation. The Court's ham-handed approach gifted neoliberals by allowing them to campaign less against abortion itself than against Roe. The real story of Roe became liberals trying to force their values on the rest of society as opposed to a woman's right to choose.   

From the earlier liberal post-war consensus and ultimately the Wilsonian tradition, neoliberalism inherited an activist foreign policy in the name of advancing democracy. Thatcher famously fought the Falklands War in 1982 to hold on to one of the last vestiges of the British Empire even as it served little purpose beyond taking a final stand in the name of the Empire. What was different now was that this foreign policy was meant to be pursued in defiance of the hard left who rejected the Western tradition, seeing it as the source of imperialism and racism. Neoliberalism was meant as a war to be fought at home as well as abroad. One manifestation of this was the War on Drugs, which served to establish active drug users (in practice those on the left) as the enemy and gave the police the tools to wage actual war against this enemy.

Up until now, my description of neoliberalism has simply been late 20th-century Anglo-American conservatism. Here is the twist; just as the post-war consensus did not keep conservative parties out of office as long as they were willing to play the moderate pragmatists to the dominant liberal ideology, neoliberalism offered a temptation to liberals to gain electoral victory as the moderate pragmatists, cementing neoliberalism as the reigning ideology. From this perspective, a critical part of neoliberalism was the rise of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. They were not a rejection of neoliberalism but the epitome of its power.

Both of these politicians criticized Reagan and Thatcher but from within a certain consensus. So conservatives were to be criticized for running up deficits to support tax cuts for the wealthy. Gone was the romantic notion of a welfare state that could transform society. In its place was an accountant's pragmaticism of getting the maximal utility for the taxpayer's money. Clinton was willing to fight for abortion but he did so from within a consensus that still paid religion cultural deference. Most infamously, he signed the Defence of Marriage Act. Clinton's foreign policy was a continuation of a neoliberal desire to see the United States as the global defender of freedom now being practiced without the Soviet Union as an excuse. Bush's Iraq Invasion in search of weapons of mass destruction was simply an extension of Clinton's use of the American military in a post-9/11 world. It was Blair who was Bush's most important ally in invading Iraq.

Just as the post-war consensus benefited from the post-war economic boom, which granted legitimacy to the dominant government policies, neoliberalism benefited from the computer and internet revolutions of the 1990s. How does one argue with policies that seem to work and seem to be creating a rising tide that should raise all boats? Just as the economic stagnation of the 1970s made the post-war consensus appear suddenly vulnerable, the economic crisis of 2008 made neoliberalism suddenly appear as the emperor with no clothes. The political fallout was slow in coming as the political class remained under its spell long after the general public. Barack Obama came from the same mold of pragmatic neoliberalism as the Clintons. Thus, he framed his policies in anti-Republican terms, ignoring the wider neo-liberal framework.

Donald Trump brought down Republican neoliberalism by demonstrating it lacked a real basis of ideological support. Similarly, David Cameron was brought down by Brexit, which demonstrated that his own Conservative Party base did not support the relatively free-trade and open-border policies of the European Union. Once neoliberalism fell as an ideology within conservative circles, there was no longer a reason for liberals to play pragmatic lip service to neoliberalism either. Hence the rise of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the United States and Jeremy Corbyn in England.

In the wake of the fall of neoliberalism, Anglo-American politics seems to be turning into a conflict between nationalists and democratic socialists. What the new dominant consensus will be remains to be seen. I suspect that it will be some version of a blatantly extractive state that attempts to bribe its voters with the right and the left simply disagreeing on who should be expropriated and for whose benefit.

From this proposed definition of neoliberalism and this history offered a few things should be clear. I discuss neoliberalism within an Anglo-American context, though I confess that I might be stretching things even to include England. How much more problematic to include other countries. I readily grant that one could draw parallels between Anglo-American neoliberalism and policies in other countries. Those who are more knowledgeable than I am regarding non-Anglo-American politics should feel free to make those comparisons as long as they show proper caution. The more you stretch a term, the greater the risk of either distorting the reality on the ground or rendering the word meaningless. One thinks of the problem of talking about "feudal" Japan. Yes, there are certain parallels to Europe but it is risky to push those comparisons too far. Similarly, I do not think it is productive to call authoritarian figures like Augusto Pinochet of Chile or Deng Xiaoping of China neoliberals. Doing so risks distorting the differences between these countries and descending into conspiratorial thinking where Anglo-American neoliberals not only become people plotting to violently undermine democratic norms but also have Elders of Zion capabilities to rule the world.

Even within Anglo-American politics, notice the number of people who should be placed outside of neoliberalism. While Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek were influential figures in the rise of neoliberalism, one should not make a direct link between neoliberalism and libertarianism. Here, the War on Drugs is important. Nor should one equate neoliberalism with neo-confederates or white nationalism. On the contrary, neoliberalism grew out of a world in which open white nationalism was no longer politically viable and its fall has opened that door once again.

Because I have limited the scope of neoliberalism in time and place it appears much less all-powerful and sinister. Neoliberalism was a political ideology espoused by specific people in a specific time and place with a variety of policy positions some of which may or may not appeal to readers. My teenage self was more supportive of this kind of neoliberalism than I am now. That being said, the fact that whatever is going to replace neoliberalism is likely to be worse, I do confess to being nostalgic for neoliberalism. 

Ungodly Words: Toward a Political Philosophy of Heresy (Part II) – Is Uncle Moishy Kefira?

(Part I)

What does it mean when we say that a statement or even an entire work is heretical (kefira)? Examples of statements that have been, at one time or another, been declared heretical by Jews would be: "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life," (John 3:16)  "Religion is the opiate of the masses," (Karl Marx “Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right”)  "the Bible was formed from the documents J, P, E and D" and "man is descended from monkeys." How are we able to say that such statements, and by extension the books in which they are contained, are in contradiction of statements of dogma and therefore heretical? There are a number of possible models which one can use in order to tag a text as heretical. The most obvious way would be to interpret a text and decide if it contains any heretical assumptions; this can be referred to as the Interpretive Model. Another way to go about the task would be to decide if the author had intended the text to mean something that is heretical; this can be referred to as the Authorship Model. A third way with which one could decide the matter is to look at how the text has generally been interpreted; this can be referred to as the Historical Model. The final possibility is what I like to refer to as the Community Model in which we would assume that the communal body is licensed to eliminate ideas that it views as dangerous and as such the community has the right to, on a whim, declare texts to be heretical. As I will attempt to demonstrate, each of the first three views, taken to their practical applications, lead to extremely problematic situations where we would either have to declare "safe" texts to be heretical or not be able to justify, on a rational basis, declaring certain "dangerous" texts to be heretical.

The problem with the Interpretive Model is that, once you start putting texts under a theological microscope you can find heresy almost anywhere. Take something really innocent like an Uncle Moishy song, a major staple of my childhood. If you think about it, the lyrics: "Hashem is here, Hashem is there, Hashem is truly everywhere," taken in their literal sense, are highly heretical because they imply that Hashem (God) occupies space. This could only be possible if God were a physical being or had some sort of physical element to him.

Everyone would agree that within the four-cubits which define "here" for me at the present there is a being named Benzion Noam Chinn, a desk, a computer, a copy of the 6^th edition of Wheelock's Latin, sound waves which are coming together to form the First Movement of Beethoven's Third Symphony along with the trillions upon trillions of nitrogen and oxygen atoms which make up the air that I am at present breathing. It would seem that Uncle Moishy and by extension my supposedly Orthodox parents would have had me believe that in addition to the list of things that I have just mentioned there is an omnipotent, omniscient, being better known as Hashem taking up space in the "here." Now in regards to things that are not physical we do not deal with them in terms of space or of "here" or "there." For example, we do not, except in a poetic sense, talk about peace, love, happiness, or the law of inertia being "here," "there" or occupying space. Just as the statement "the surface of the planet contains x amounts of love, or of Newtonian mechanics, per square cm" is meaningless, so to, for the purposes of all of us who believe that God is not a physical being, the statement "the surface of the planet contains y amounts of Deity Blessed be He per square cm has no meaning. Since it is not reasonable to assume that Uncle Moishy was singing gibberish, it would become conceivable that Uncle Moishy believes that God is in some form or fashion a physical entity pervading the entire universe. To be specific it could be assumed that Uncle Moishy believes in a Pantheistic conception of God, just as Baruch Spinoza did, or at the very least Panentheism, that God is in all things.

So maybe you could tell me that Suki and Ding, the makers of Uncle Moishy, only meant the song in a poetic sense. I would respond that first of all I never did see any notice on any Uncle Moishy tapes saying: "Warning, to all philosophically inclined children, this song should only be understood as a figure of speech and should not be taken in any way shape or form literally, Chas V'Shalom (God Forbid)." Even if such precautions had been taken it still would not allay the concern that the people behind Uncle Moishy were covert Pantheists, trying to poison the minds of innocent children with their heresies, because I could argue that not only are they Pantheists but they are also Straussians. They very well may have read Leo Strauss' Persecution and the Art of Writing, in which he argued that various writers, such as Maimonides in particular, hid the heretical aspects of their beliefs by spouting the orthodox creeds that contradicted their real beliefs, in order to fool the cursory censor, and then inserted their real beliefs in a backhanded fashion. In this same vain, any warning given by the producers of Uncle Moishy can be taken as mere cover for their real beliefs as stated in their songs. Particularly in this case since, let us face it, five year-olds as a whole do not read the warning labels on cassette tapes. Therefore the trick warning would never reach the eyes of the children and they would take in the real message of the song mainly that God is simply the physical spirit permeating all matter. In such a way a whole generation of Jewish children can be led astray and turned into Pantheists. For the purposes of the Interpretive Model, the fact that I might not be able to find a single person who has become a Pantheist through listening to Uncle Moishy songs is irrelevant. All that matters is what the song means to me, the Interpreter.

(Just to make you breathe easier, I do not actually believe that Uncle Moishy is the product of a Cabal of Straussian Pantheists. I do not consider the collective intelligence of the Jewish music industry to be high enough to actually know anything about Spinoza, Pantheism or Strauss let alone to be able to conspire to inculcate children to those ideas.)

My Problem with Terry Eagleton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

History 112: The Rise of Nazi Germany (Q&A and Quiz)

1. In the reading it briefly mentions how the Nazis did not identify with mainstream religions. I watched a documentary on the Discovery Channel a while ago about the Nazi's "occult conspiracy," which talked about Hitler's dependence on astrological predictions, even leading him to have a person astrologer. How much truth is there in this? What's your opinion?

The interest by Hitler and many of the leading Nazis in the occult is quite real. For example it is believed that Hitler held back from counterattacking after the Normandy invasion on the advice of his astrologer who told him that the real allied attack would come at Calais. In what is probably the most bizarre incident of the war, Rudolph Hess grabbed a plane and crashed-landed in Scotland because his astrologer told him that he was destined to bring about a peace treaty between Germany and England. Himmler set up his own neo-pagan religion for the SS. This issue of Nazi beliefs has gained public interest, at least within the realms of internet polemics, in recent years because of the rise of the new atheism of Richard Dawkins, which argues that organized religion leads to mass murder. Opponents of Dawkins have been very quick to point to Hitler and Stalin and argue that the two most blood soaked regimes in history were militantly secular.


2. In the Davies text it mentions that Mussolini prided himself on being separate from Hitler until 1939, did the two men get along, or did they have plans to conquer each other?

The fact that Mussolini eventually joined with Hitler was never inevitable and in fact the two were quite hostile to each other into the late 1930s. It is important to keep in mind that Fascism is not a movement. It is simply a convenient label that we use in order to group certain movements together.


3. From what I gathered from the Davies reading, it seems that Hitler had the SS blackshirts and brownshirts as his "stormtroopers" or militia. What exactly were these entities and how were they different?

A major part of the early Nazi rise to power, from when they began until shortly after they took power, was their ability to use street gangs in order to beat up opponents, particularly Communists and Jews. Keep in mind that up until that later part of the 1930s there is still a meaningful distinction between Germany and the Nazi party. The Nazi party at this early stage did not have direct access to the police and military arms of the state so they needed some form of military power of their own to enforce their totalitarian agenda. One can see this with the use of the SA and SS. The SA was the armed force of the early Nazi period. These were common street thugs, not that different from our modern Crypts and Bloods. The SA are eliminated in 1934 in the “Night of the Long Knives.” The group that comes to replace the SA is the SS led by Himmler. The SS operates with the full power of the state. They are a lot more sophisticated and a whole lot more ruthless.

4. If Hitler would have died in WWI do you think there still would have been a second world war? Secondly, since I haven't asked questions for all the classes, why is it do you think that the Nazis were able to scare everyone into their party. What i have gathered about the situation was that most people were forced to be a part of the Nazi German Army.

This question is a classic example of the great man issue in history; to what extent do “great” individuals affect the course of history? Popular history tends to focus heavily on individuals because it makes a better narrative. Professional historians tend to be more weary of such a claim. Hitler was certainly a talented speaker and a forceful personality, but he was not the only person capable of doing the sorts of things that he did. It is perfectly reasonable to assume that Nazi history could have proceeded without Hitler, but with someone else at the helm. Earlier this year I had a discussion with Dr. Stephen Kern about this issue. He actually came out quite strongly on the side of no Hitler no Holocaust.

Personally I think this whole notion of saying that the German people were scared lets ordinary Germans off the hook. Hitler could not have waged World War II and the Holocaust without active willing cooperation of the vast majority of Germans. You want to know who to blame for World War II and the Holocaust? Forget about Hitler, he was just a man standing in front of a microphone. The real culprits were the millions of German citizens who went along with it. I would recommend Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem. It has often been criticized for humanizing Adolph Eichmann, one of the central figures behind the Holocaust, who was kidnapped by the State of Israel, put on trial and executed. For me humanizing Eichmann turns him into every ordinary German who went along with the flow and by extension turns every ordinary German into Eichmann. On share moral grounds I would have had no moral objection to, in 1945, lining up every German man and woman over the age of eighteen who could not prove that they actively worked against the Nazi regime and shooting them. On practical grounds this could never be carried through, but there is no doubt in my mind that every one of them deserved to die.

5. How does Hitler get enough political coverage to get 96% of the German vote? Did class differences play into the voter turnout, as I am sure that it would be common people who supported him, as he was, in some limited sense, a collectivist?

When a leader is a getting 90% of the vote you know that this is not a fair election. Think how difficult it is to get 60% of Americans to agree on something. In real societies people have dissenting opinions. If you are not seeing large amounts of dissent than what you are seeing is a mirage.

6. Was Hitler only racist against Jews? Or did he just dislike everyone else other than his own people?

Nazi ideology held numerous groups to be subhuman, Slavs, gypsies, blacks, homosexuals and Jehovah Witnesses are some of the groups that come to mind. In addition to the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust, the Nazis killed another four to six million people from other undesirable groups. Anti Semitism, though, clearly had a special place in Nazi ideology. For the Nazis, Jews were not just a group of undesirables; they were the undesirable group par excellence. Jews were the great enemy behind both Capitalism and Communism, which Germany would have to defeat.


For the quiz I asked the following questions:


1. What were the “Three Estates” in Old Regime France and how did their existence contribute to the breakout of the French Revolution? (2 pts)

2. What did “Liberalism” and “Conservatism” mean in the nineteenth century? How are these terms different from how we use them today? (3 pts)

3. According Karl Marx: “All hitherto history is the history of … (1 pt)

4. How did the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand lead to the start of World War I? (2 pts)

5. What were the two Russian revolutions of 1917? (2pts.)


Bonus: What peace treaty did Hitler blame Germany’s woes on? (1 pts)

Does History Have any Utilitarian Value? A Response

In Part II you state, "The humanities have no utilitarian." In Part III, you state that history-buffs are of "no practical use to anyone" because they do not analyze primary/secondary sources and do not use the historical method, which in turn implies that the work of historians does have practical value. In Part IV, you challenge post-modernists who do not believe that the humanities have intrinsic value. My confusion may be cleared up if you could explain the relationship between those statements. Does your assertion that the "humanities have no utilitarian value" exclude history (i.e. Does history have utilitarian value? Practical value? Non-utilitarian value?). Also, is History part of the Humanities or is it a Social Science? Does it make a difference as to whether History has utilitarian value if you classify it as one or the other? 

I view history as part of the humanities and not as one of the sciences, social or any other. As part of the humanities, history has no utilitarian value; it does not produce any goods with direct empirical benefits for human beings. Also, history is outside of the sciences as it has no predictive value. During the nineteenth century, it was quite common to view history as a science and to formulate specific laws. Hegel and Marx are good examples of this. In fact, Marx wanted to dedicate Das Kapital to Darwin, because he saw what he was doing for history what Darwin had done for biology. This endeavor to find laws for history and create an overarching narrative has failed. Admittedly there is still the popular notion that one can learn from the past. But you will find about as many professional historians who believe this as you do scientists who reject evolution. In Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series there is a character named Hari Seldon who, through his study of psychohistory, is able to formulate laws as to how human societies work to such an extent that he is able to predict the future with mathematical precision. He foresees the collapse of the Galactic Empire and a Dark Age lasting thirty thousand years. Through the creation of the Foundation, Seldon hopes to preserve the knowledge of the Empire so that the Dark Age would last only one thousand years. (Asimov essentially took Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and turned it into a series of science fiction novels.) No historian can do what Seldon does. We are just as clueless as everyone else. History as a science, therefore, is going to have to stay, for now, in the same realm as hyperspace travel, in science fiction. 

So what purpose does history serve that we bother to have students waste some of their valuable time studying it? The most obvious answer, and in my view the least important, is that history is useful for giving context for present-day events. For example, it is reasonable to expect that young people participating in our recent election of Barack Obama should know something about the civil rights movement and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It may also be reasonable to expect that they know something about the history of American slavery, about the Civil War and about Abraham Lincoln. It is reasonable to expect that, with all the discussion about the recent downturn in the economy, people should know something about the Great Depression. Again this is not learning lessons from the past, this is just being able to put events into a certain context. The key difference between lessons and context is that context does not point and say that this happened in the past therefore you should do … . (whatever action fits into the ideology of the speaker) This understanding of history justifies at the very least that students in elementary school and high school should have to take some basic history courses taught by a teacher with a degree in education but not history. 

For me, history is important for three reasons. The first is that history is a method of thinking, a way of interrogating texts that is of vital importance for processing present-day issues. When I read a newspaper or listen to a public speaker, because I filter everything through the historical method, I read and hear a very different text. One that the authors of the text usually do not want me to pick up on. This interrogation of texts is quite similar to a police interrogation of witnesses and suspects. While it is possible to learn this method without studying history, I would say that history is a very useful setting because it allows you to step away from the issues of your day. For example, most people living in modern America have no particular strongly felt convictions one way or another as to who was right in the Hundred Years War, the English or the French. This leads to my second reason. History, when properly taught, encourages one to transcend issues. While the English and the French fought the Hundred Years War, for the historian, neither side is right or wrong. Both sides are products of their specific place in history. The historian, in his own mind, gets to bring both sides together and make a sort of peace between them. Imagine a generation of politicians trained on this sort of historical thinking and imagine how different our public discourse would be. (For more on this concept see Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History.) The third important thing that history does is that it forces one to confront a culture whose values are not one’s own. Not only is one forced to confront this different culture but one also finds oneself, in some sense, being drafted to defend this culture, now dead and buried, to a world that has passed on. In one sense this is very conservative as one is defending the past; in another sense, this is very liberal as it involves challenging present norms in society. 

With these three reasons in mind, I can affirmatively say with a clear conscious that history is an important field of study. Important enough that not only should children study it in elementary school and high school but that they need to be taught it by a teacher trained in the historical method and not an education major staying a chapter ahead of them in the textbook. Furthermore, history is something that should be a requirement in universities. Finally, for a select few, history and the historical method should become a way of life that they devote themselves to mind, body, and soul.