The Socialist Ace: What If You Were in Charge?

As a free-market person, I am sometimes jealous of socialists. They seem to march from political success to success. Even the murderous failure of the Soviet Union seems, in retrospect, a minor pothole on the road as opposed to the cliff to cast socialism forever outside of the Overton Window of socially accepted opinions. By contrast, the horrors of Nazi Germany have made it impossible to be a respectable fascist. It does not matter if you claim that the Nazis were not "real fascists" and that you support "democratic fascism." 

An essential component of recognizing the evils of fascism is a refusal to distinguish between the ideals of fascism in theory and the horrors that actual fascists inflicted upon the world. This principle extends so far that, in practice, one is forced to teach a cartoon version of fascism in school where fascists are motivated simply by hatred and a feeling of superiority over all other groups. Teaching kids that fascists were motivated by the democratic ideal of the nation coming together under the leadership of a leader who would make everyone turn from selfishness and instead work for the common good would raise too many uncomfortable questions and cannot be allowed.

Socialism, by contrast, is allowed to be judged by its ideals disconnected from its mass murders which are attributed to the personal failings of leaders like Stalin and Mao. In truth, as with fascism, the crimes of socialism were committed not because people failed to live up to its ideals but because they followed them all too well. Understand that if you truly believed that you had the solution to the problems of mankind and could make the world a loving happy place and all that was standing in your way were a few million bad people motivated merely by spite, you would agree to kill them. To refuse to save mankind out of a personal desire not to get your hands dirty with a few homicides would be monstrous.

What makes the ideals of socialism particularly appealing is a very simple question. If you look around the world, it is obvious that it is an incredibly unjust place with the world's resources distributed in a way that can neither be defended on grounds of fairness nor for its ability to maximize utility for all of mankind. If you were in charge of distributing the world's resources, could you distribute them in a way that was fairer and optimized utility? For example, it does not take a genius to come up with the idea that the world would be a better place if we paid professional athletes less and used the money to pay for lunches for poor kids.  

If you answered yes to giving kids free lunches or to any number of the schemes that are likely running through your head, then it is very difficult to resist socialism in principle. We might still have to figure out a means to make sure that the right person, someone like us, came to the top. That being acknowledged, once we solve this problem, we should be able to make the world at least somewhat of a better place. Recognizing that the world's resources are not distributed justly, it is the job of all moral people to work to redistribute resources in a way that is more equitable. From this perspective, it is hard to resist dividing the world into socialists, the good guys who work to better mankind, and opponents of socialism who want the world to be unjust presumably because they either are too ignorant to recognize that the world is unjust or because they are part of the oppressive class who are responsible for all the oppression.

Historically, most people, particularly if they have had some education, have believed that the world would be a better place if only they were in charge. One thinks of the example of Plato and his philosopher kings. It is not a coincidence that Plato was essentially a socialist who believed that the rulers of his republic should hold everything in common including wives and children. 

A partial defense against the siren call that socialism would lead to a better world if only your people were in charge is to recognize that it is unlikely that your people will ever get to put their plan for a better world into practice. Imagine that you had to choose between accepting the political/economic order that we have or agreeing to live in a world in which a random individual was allowed to redistribute resources according to their sense of justice. How many people would chance socialism then? Make no mistake that one person's version of justice is, to others, a nightmare worth forstalling even at the cost of their lives. I can imagine that certain ex-girlfriends and advisors would rather kill themselves than take a chance on living in my "just" world.    

A higher-level defense against socialism would be Hayek's "Why the Worst Get to the Top," which essentially argues that we do not even have the opportunity to take our chances with the moral sensibilities of an average person. Choosing socialism will mean submitting ourselves to the sort of moral monster willing to do what is necessary, even mass murder, in order to place themselves in a position where they can refashion a country according to their notion of justice. 

To truly break free of the spell of socialist ideals, one has to instinctually believe to the core of their being that if they were the benevolent dictator and had the power to redistribute resources according to what they believed was right, the world would not be a better place. Consider the example from earlier of using a socialized athletic system to fund education. We already have a version of this with college athletics where the millions that some athletes are worth are redistributed to universities that work for the "public good." I have a hard time accepting that the NCAA is really more just than the NBA or the NFL but I am sure readers could tweak the system to make it fairer. 

I confess, even after being a libertarian for more than a decade, I still cannot shake the fantasy that I would make a pretty good world ruler. Granted, my fantasy of being the Messiah includes a lot of telling people that they are all individuals and can think for themselves. As this is a fantasy, everyone is able to think for themselves while simultaneously doing what I would have wanted them to do anyway, saving me the effort of even having to think what orders I should have given in the first place.           

Can There Be a Video Game Too Immoral to Play?

In a Jonathan Haidt style exercise of asking disturbing moral questions that people feel strongly about even as they are unable to defend their positions, I asked a student of mine whether it is possible for there to be a video that would be immoral to play. He immediately jumped on the obvious liberal utilitarian response of no; simply playing a game, by definition, cannot, in of itself, harm anyone so it can never be immoral.

Level One: Wolfenstein 3D.




This classic game involves running around and systematically shooting people and dogs, who scream and produce pools of highly pixelated blood. Of course, the people you are shooting are Nazis (as are the dogs one guesses) so pretending to commit mass murder is, perhaps, defensible.

Level Two: Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR).




It is a feature of a number of Star Wars games that you can choose to turn to the Dark Side. This means that instead of light-sabering and blasting your way through stormtroopers (the moral equivalent of Nazis) you can murder innocent people on your path to becoming the Sith Lord ruler of the galaxy, bringing misery to trillions of beings.




In defense of KOTOR, the violence here is safely out of the realm of reality. None of us can use the Force (let alone become Sith Lords) or lightsabers. Perhaps, the distance from actual mass murder is enough that pretending to commit such horrors is not in bad taste.

Level Three: Grand Theft Auto (GTA).

GTA allows you to play a street-level criminal. You can commit crimes ranging from selling drugs to running over the prostitutes of a rival pimp and shooting police officers. Unlike Sith Lord, this is a plausible career choice for players. This raises the question of whether GTA encourages violence. Alternatively, a person who likes GTA is at least signaling that he might wish to behave like this in real life. Clearly, a game like GTA forces our utilitarian to hunker down on his insistence that direct physical harm should be relevant. He is particularly vulnerable here as it is hardly obvious that banning the game would not reduce crime. By insisting on only direct harm, our utilitarian is showing that it is his liberal convictions that dominate.

Level Four: Racial Violence

It is my understanding that neo-nazis and others of that ilk have produced games that allow players to fight a race war against blacks, Jews, and other "undesirables." Imagine a game where you can shoot your way through a black church and then burn it down with small children inside.

My student conceded that such a game would be immoral to play though he could not offer a reason why pretending to murder black people in church should be wrong while pretending to murder cops is ok. It cannot be simply that playing a racist game is itself racist and not just pretend racism. To be ok with shooting cops in a game also demonstrates a lack of concern for the lives of cops, particularly to the extent that you are not ok with shooting blacks in a game.

The stakes here are very high and not just for video games. Once we acknowledge that there are some things so horrible that you should not even pretend to do them, much of literature becomes endangered. Plato famously wanted to ban the Homeric epics on account of their immoral behavior. In defense of Plato, the fact that Achilles and Odysseus make lies, murder, and sexual assault appear respectable, arguably makes the Illiad and the Odyssey a greater moral threat to society than a racist video game.

I agree with my student that there is an important line between GTA and racist violence games. If I were to defend this position, I would argue that even pretend racist violence is out of bounds because it violates a kind of social contract in ways that regular pretend violence does not. Chris Caldwell argues that the 1964 Civil Rights Act created a new constitution with the power to trump even the actual Constitution. Similarly, we can see American whites after the Civil Rights Movement agreeing to a new social contract with blacks. Since blacks had the moral high ground due to the fact that America's history of slavery and segregation was particularly embarrassing during a period of post-colonialism and the Cold War, they could demand not only technical legal equality but also that the American narrative should be reimagined to place the struggle over racism at the center. Blacks got to become an essential part of the American story and not just an inconvenient historical quirk. Liberal whites got to be the whites who fought for equality. Now for a white person to now be a "good American" they must actively present themselves as active opponents of racism.

Part of what makes this new social contract possible is that whites consistently underestimate the difficulty of living up to their end of it. It is easy to condemn racism as something other less enlightened people do. Truly opposing racism is actually quite impossible. For a white person to argue that they are free from racism is to demonstrate that they are actually racist as they fail to appreciate the true centrality of racism. To the extent that any white person can escape the taint of racism, it loses some of its centrality and reduces the relevance of blacks.

To be white in America is to be Tantalus, ever reaching for that reasonable goal of not judging people by the color of their skin and hoping that black people will give them absolution. If we only denounce other white people slightly less embedded within this narrative then that absolution can be ours. This game gains its highly seductive power precisely because it appears so reasonable. Racism is real and it should be denounced. Reasonable people should be able to agree that certain things, particularly within the context of the real horrors of American history, should not be said or done. So only a "racist" could reject this process. For example, I oppose the use of blackface and the n-word. I oppose Trump largely because he empowers genuine racists. Does this protect me against the charge of racism? To believe that it might would demonstrate that I am, in fact, a secret racist.

From this perspective, playing a racist game raises a different question from playing a murderer. For the American post-Civil Rights narrative to function, we must see the murder of blacks as different from other kinds of murder to the extent that we would take racist murder as something personal that strikes at our very being. Anything else demonstrates that we do not truly buy into the notion that racial struggle is central to American identity or worse that we take the white-supremacist side. Regardless of how we really feel about a racist game, it is of even greater importance that we condemn other people for being open to playing such games. Who can resist the opportunity to earn a little absolution for racism at so little cost by taking a stance against a hypothetical game?

There is a certain irony here. Freedom of expression is an intrinsic part of American identity. As such, it would be considered un-American to condemn the playing of a game even one that advocates murdering prostitutes and cops. To even attempt to argue from the perspective of virtue ethics that such a game could corrupt one's soul simply and that one should at least be bothered by the concept demonstrates that one is not sufficiently embedded within the American notions of freedom of expression. To support censorship when it comes to racist violence becomes a kind of antinomian embrace of American values. You value the new narrative of defining America in terms of the struggle against racism that you are even willing to support censorship, risking your American identity.

As Haidt argues, our moral values are intuitively formed in our emotions and it is left to our intellects to justify our morality after the fact. My objection to racist games is honestly heartfelt. As a product of the post Civil Rights social contract, I was educated to not only oppose racism intellectually but, more importantly, to be horrified at the concept. Any attempt on my part to defend anti-racism on intellectual grounds is bound to feel contrived at best. 

So I put it to my readers, is it immoral to play a racist game as opposed to shooting cops in a game? If so, what intellectual justification are you willing to offer as opposed to strongly worded self-righteousness?

Averroes on Women

Neither Plato nor medieval Islamic philosopher are particularly known for their feminism, though apparently in the case of Averroes (Ibn Rushd), the two seem to have combined to serve such a cause. This is pointed out by E. I. J. Rosenthal in his work on Averroes’s theory of politics:




Ibn Rushd's critical attitude to State and Society of his time is also shown in his outspoken pronouncement on women and their status in contemporary Islam. It is also an interesting application of Plato's ideas about the equality of women as far as civic duties are concerned. The relevant passages are found in the first treatise of the Commentary (xxv, 6-10). It is for our purpose sufficient to quote paragraphs 9 and 10-Averroes' application to his own time and place:


Yet, in these states the ability of women is not known, only because they are being taken for procreation alone therein. They are therefore placed at the service of their husbands and [relegated] to the position of procreation, for rearing and [breast] feeding. But this undoes their [other] activities. Because women in these states are not being fitted for any of the human virtues it often happens that they resemble plants. That they are a burden upon the men in these states is one of the reasons for the poverty of these states. For, they are found in them in twice the number of men while at the same time they do not support any (or: carry on most) of the necessary [essential] activities, except for a few, which they undertake mostly at a time when they are obliged to make up their want of funds, like spinning and weaving. All this is self-evident.



This pronouncement runs counter to Islamic teaching and practice and is the more remarkable since it is made by an orthodox member of the Muslim community which was ruled by the amir al-mu'minin, and moreover by a practising lawyer steeped in fiqh. He openly attacks their way of life as the result of the official attitude. It is clear that Plato's ideas must have drawn Averroes' attention to the wastage of human labour so detrimental to the State, and led him to advocate a reversal of orthodox Muslim policy. (“The Place of Politics in the Thought of Ibn Rushd” pg. 251-252)

I would add that this view of women is distinct from that of the Jewish thinker Maimonides with whom Averroes is often compared. Throughout Maimonides' work he used women as a term of derision and he is a major source in Jewish law for stringencies on the role of women in public life. To be fair to Maimonides he, as with most "misogynistic" philosophers, possessed a general all round contempt for human beings as a whole. For Maimonides, women had all the flaws of the rest of the human race without the redeeming quality of having produced a least a few great rationalist thinkers. Averroes shared Maimonides' contempt for human beings and like him distinguished between the exoteric claims which can be revealed to the masses and the esoteric truths which can only be understood by the philosophical elites. In this they were both following the political philosophy of Plato's Republic. Yet Averroes supported women taking on public roles and believed them capable or rational. 
 
So what pushes a person to ideological misogyny?      

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.

Are Haredi Girls More Open Minded When it Comes to Intellectuals?

Michael Makovi has a post on his experiences with dating girls to the right and more modern girls. As someone whose religious views are still fairly liberal in many respects, one would expect that he would have an easier time dating more modern girls. Such girls would be expected to be more "open-minded" and accepting of him. Judging from his experiences with dating websites like Frumster, this is not the case:

Whenever I write to MO women, specifically ones whose profiles evince some basic compatibility with me in terms of both hashqafa (weltanschauung or ideology) and general intellectuality (she doesn't have to be a nerd like me, but she at least has to be intellectual enough to appreciate one), the response I usually get is quite negative. That is, if I get a response at all; about half of the women don't respond at all. (They have premium accounts, so that's not the problem.) Just earlier this week, one wrote back to me, saying, "relationships with high-maintenance, socially-unaware, overbearing people who suck me dry are exactly what I just cut out of my life." ...

By contrast, when I write to the more yeshivishe or Beit Ya'akov-ish women, I almost always get a very warm response. I don't know how many times the woman has said that if only my hashqafa were further to the right, that she'd be very willing to date me. In fact, several times, I've been told that even with my left-wing hashqafa, she'd love to be platonic friends, if only she were willing to have platonic friendships with the opposite sex.

I have had some similar experiences (one of the reasons why I am still gloriously single). I have used Frumster from time to time with little success. Like Makovi, I focused on trying to contact girls, who appeared to be well educated, open and having similar interests to mine; in essence Modern Orthodox girls. I rarely got a response back, and fewer still led to any meaningful contact. Contrary to expectations, I find that I have an easier time getting to conversations with Haredi girls. Even when they do not understand what I am trying to say, they will make the extra effort to ask and try to understand. Maybe this has to do with Haredi girls being actively trained to be polite and make the extra effort to be kind to strange creatures like me. It also might have been to my advantage that most of these situations were non-dating ones to begin with.

My theory is that Haredi girls, coming from a "patriarchal" mindset, expect a man who is smarter than they are and who can talk over their heads. Remember these girls are supposed to be looking for a "Talmud Chacham" and the "best boy in Lakewood." Girls from the Modern Orthodox camp are operating in an equality framework and expect someone who is their intellectual equal or even someone they can intellectually dominate. This is not to question the intelligence of any woman. The problem is that they are also very defensive about this intellectual parity. They will see any situation where you can out-talk them as you attempting to be a show-off, out to prove that you are their intellectual superior.

In her last email to me, my ex-girlfriend Dragon wrote: "I know you consider yourself an intellectual, however, that does not mean I am an idiot and have little knowledge on some subjects. You have in the past insulted my intelligence when having conversations with you."

I could swear on a stack of bibles, that I never called her an idiot or questioned her intelligence. She was a very smart person otherwise I would not have agreed to date her in the first place. What we did have was me speaking in my normal string of association fashion. One needs to be fairly well-read in the sorts of things that interest me (the sorts of things that I regularly discuss on this blog) to follow what I am saying. Some people do better at this than others. This, though, was transformed into a personal attack even if experience with me should have told her, on an intellectual level, that this was not the case. Dragon may have been a very smart person, but she emotionally needed to be clearly acknowledged as being the one on top. Anything less would mean accepting inferiority.

In my personal situation, there is also the Asperger syndrome element. I would argue that this merely plays into this model. My style of speaking is connected to my Asperger situation. Ironically enough, it is my attempt to relate to people within an Asperger context. The difficulty with Asperger syndrome is forming emotional relationships. I want someone I can talk to, that is what a relationship means to me. Modern girls can be expected to wish for some sort of emotional connection that is beyond my understanding and my ability to give, putting me in an unwinnable situation. With girls who are a little "less modern," I still have a chance. They are more likely to think in more pragmatic terms, the good man, the intelligent man. These are things that I can deliver.

I have no idea what the situation is like outside of Orthodox Judaism. I put the challenge out there to feminists of the Maureen Dowd school; is it really that men cannot bear to deal with intelligent women or is it the feminist women who cannot bear to deal with an intelligent man?

The Ethical Case Against Sex Outside of Marriage (Part II)

(Part I)

Where does this leave sex? We must accept an almost Pauline position of seeing all sex as morally problematic. Sex is in a category of its own because it requires you to physically take hold of someone and use them for your own benefit, violating the categorical imperative in an inescapably literal way. Furthermore, this categorical imperative would forbid us, to a lesser extent, from touching anyone in a sexual manner or even look at someone dressed in a sexually provocative manner. How can you indulge, through touch and sight, in the use of someone else's body as a means to your own pleasure? If it were possible we would ban sex and have everyone live in celibacy. (Catholic Church 1, Jewish outreach specialists who like to attack straw-man versions of Catholic sexuality 0) Since there is a need to procreate to create more rational beings with inherent value, we require some system that gives us at least some plausible ethical cover. The solution thought of by almost all societies is to have sexual activity take place within the context of some relationship. So I go over to a woman (this could also plausibly work for homosexual relationships) and say to her: "I desire to establish a special relationship with you that will allow us numerous opportunities to engage in ethical actions, live according to universal categorical imperatives and even bring into this world and raise up rational beings capable of engaging in ethical actions of their own." Since this woman is equally concerned about living according to categorical imperatives, she swoons at my pick-up line and immediately agrees to consummate this special relationship by having sex with me. Now societies, out of their desire to encourage such ethical behavior, have created various formal activates to make this official; we tend to call it marriage.

I grant that it is possible for a couple to be engaged in a meaningful relationship without it formally being a marriage with a marriage license. Furthermore, there are plenty of sham marriages out there that are simply cover for sexual activity, regardless of a signed piece of paper. For the purposes of this discussion of marriage, the former type of relationship counts as marriage. This is the sort of marriage found among primitive tribes and the biblical patriarchs. That being said, the society at large needs to ask some questions about such a couple. Why would such a couple, living in a civilization that possesses formal marriage and stigmatizes those who do not take advantage of it, choose to live without formal marriage? The most obvious explanation would be that such a couple was not serious about their relationship and were simply engaging in a mutually parasitical set of sexual acts. Thus, such couples must be presumed guilty until proven innocent of being unethical and placed under public scorn.

There are a few other alternatives that would be relevant, in theory at least, to some people. Members of Plato's philosopher's republic are not being immoral when they engage in free love. This society is built around the absolute sacrifice for the common good. Within this context, the sexual act itself becomes one more act of absolute submission as the person surrenders all claim to power over another, even a wife and children. (This is to say nothing about the feasibility or advisability of Communism.) This would require a person to be a great philosopher and have a commitment to principles to compare with the religious fanatic. Just being a casual hippie is not going to be enough to get you through the gates of this republic. Great philosopher artists like Goethe and his Faust could engage in sex outside of marriage as part of a bildung process. A great philosopher like Faust, whose genius benefits all mankind, needs to go out and physically come to terms with the world around him in order to fulfill his mission as a philosopher. He is allowed to sell his soul to Mephistopheles in order to pursue this goal and he is allowed to seduce young Gretchen. (We could possibly fault Faust for putting himself as a stumbling block, causing an innocent non-philosopher to engage in unethical behavior.) Gretchen's subsequent pregnancy and her arrest for attempting to kill her fetus are a tragic accident for which Faust is not to blame. Faust is not motivated by any base desire and he has no intention of using Gretchen; she is an incidental participant in his great project. While common artists may not be at the level to truly engage in such Faustian activity, it is reasonable to allow them a greater license in terms of what they can touch or see. For example, I fully accept that nudity has artistic value and should, therefore, be allowed within the confines of artistic circles. Since all societies in history have been built around people who are distinctively not great philosophers (at best people working on becoming them), we cannot make calculations based on great philosophers. This leaves us, as a society, having to insist that everyone make at least an outward show of only engaging in sexual activity within the context of marriage.

I believe in creating an ethical society where all humans are recognized as rational beings with inherent value, not to be used simply to serve some other purpose. This means a society that rejects racism and all forms of bigotry as a violation of the categorical imperative to recognize the inherent value of all rational beings as ends in themselves. This also means that in our day to day personal relationships we must treat people as beings of value in of themselves. We dare not, in any way, indulge in another person's body simply to serve our own pleasure by engaging in sexual activity, even to touch or look at someone in a sexual manner. Through societal pressure we have managed, in only a few decades, to remove at least the outward manifestations of racism from the public sphere. Through similar efforts, we can do the same with human sexuality. I look forward to the day when we take the bulk of our generation's movies and televisions shows, which implicitly or explicitly endorse the legitimacy of sexual activity outside of marriage, and put them next to Birth of a Nation and Triumph of the Will as immoral works, serving to promote unethical behavior and mindsets.

My Presentation at the History and Fiction Conference at the University of West Georgia: Speaker for the Dead: a Historian’s Tale (Part II)

Post I


The three books that make up the Speaker Trilogy are about Ender's search for redemption. At the end of Ender's Game Ender secretly writes a book, called the Hivequeen and the Hegemon, to explain to humanity that the Buggers were not the monsters everyone thought they were. He writes this book under the pseudonym Speaker for the Dead. Having destroyed his own reputation, Ender disappears. The novel Speaker for the Dead opens more than three thousand years later. Ender is still alive, thanks to the laws of relativity, having spent the vast majority of these years traveling at near light speed. Over this time, Ender's book has become the holy scriptures of a major humanist religion, the Speakers for the Dead. While the Speakers do not have a deity or an afterlife, they believe in the value of all intelligent life. They try to tell the life stories of those who have departed this life in the same way that the original Speaker for the Dead spoke about the Buggers.

 Ender operates under the cover of a common speaker. With him is the last hive queen. Ender's hope is to one day find a world in which the Buggers could repopulate and where humans would no longer fear them. He takes his chance on a world called Lusitania; a world on which humanity has once again discovered an alien race, one with stone-age technology, called the Pequeninos. This new first encounter has come with its own set of misunderstandings. Already one scientist sent to study these beings has been murdered. Ender will have to stand forth as Speaker for the Dead, not only to rectify his own xenocide but to stop a new one.

A speaker tells over the life stories of those who had died not to praise or condemn the dead but simply so that those hearing could understand what the deceased stood for and how they understood themselves. The motive of the speaker is that he believes that there is an inherent value to human existence and that by honestly seeking to come to an understanding of an individual one can come to a greater understanding of humanity as a whole. I see the historian as serving a similar function for modern-day society. We are the stewards of the knowledge of societies and worlds that are dead and buried. Their values and all that they stood for are gone and there are few who would even understand them. (Just as our society will one day pass from this earth to be inherited by people who are incapable of even understanding our values and what we stood for.) The historian's task is to serve as a speaker for those who can no longer speak for themselves. Not out of any present-day agenda, but simply because he believes that human beings have intrinsic value and that by honestly coming to terms with human beings, even those no longer here, we can come to a greater understanding of present-day humanity. This is not to say that the past repeats itself, but simply that it gives a context with which to place ourselves.

The historian studies the past, but more than that he lives in the past. If the past is like a foreign country then the historian is like the intelligence officer who has spent decades living in the country he studies and has more of this country within him than that of his native land. While this intelligence officer may never become a native of the country he studies, he will never again be able to truly be a native of the country of his origin either. Not that I believe that historians are infallible oracles from whom the past radiates through. Just as a person today cannot embody anything more than just a perspective of this world so to the historian is simply an expression of one among many legitimate perspectives on the past.

Being a historian involves being both a liberal and a conservative. The historian is a liberal in that he actively seeks to challenge the status quo. He lives with an open mind and with the possibility of other ways of living one's life. On the other hand the field of history, unlike any other field of study besides for religion, is built around defending tradition, the conservative action par excellence. Not to say that the historian necessarily wants to replicate past ways of living in the present. That being said, if the historian did not believe that there was some real value to traditional ways of life he would have chosen a different field.

My goal in teaching history is to challenge students by forcing them to come to terms with the fact that there were sane, moral people who thought in ways that go against everything my students have been taught to believe. For example, most societies in history have tended to be hierarchal in their structure and in particular they have been patriarchal. I take it for granted that all of my students oppose slavery. I wish for them to understand why sane, rational, moral people made different decisions.

I, living in the year 2009, oppose slavery. It is economically inefficient and it undermines the moral fabric of society, both of the slaves and of the slaveholders. The list of objections can go on. Put me back to the United States of 1850 and none of these arguments change, but they are met with different concerns. Slavery is the foundation of the southern economy and the South is unlikely to give up their slaves without a fight that will cost thousands if not hundreds of thousands of lives. As for the black slaves themselves, it is questionable that most of them would benefit. They have not, by and large, been trained to live as free people or to take up the responsibilities of citizenship. With all of my visceral hatred of slavery, it would not take me too long until I find myself negotiating with southern slave holders. How about we agree to allow slavery if slaves are given some legal protections, maybe some limits on work hours and bans against bodily mutilation. And if slaveholders refuse to budge, we can simply cave in and give them everything. Slavery, as a backward economic system that has no place in our industrial age, will likely die eventually without anyone doing anything. I would shake hands with the Devil, knowing full well what I was doing. Now we know that those in the North who made such calculations failed. The Union did not hold, there was a civil war and over half a million Americans lost their lives. It does not mean that they were wrong.

As for the defenders of slavery themselves, it should be noted that it is possible to justify slavery without turning to racism. There is no problem as long as you operate on the assumption that society is meant to be hierarchal with some people at the top and some below. This does not even have to mean that those on top are in any way better. Even today we learn to live with the reality that we, as Americans, live on top of the economic pyramid, despite the fact that we have done nothing to deserve it, while much of the world starves. Once we enter our post-Enlightenment world where equality and not hierarchy is the presumed natural order then racism becomes the obvious tool to allow us to continue to enjoy the benefits of the hierarchal model.

I want to bring about just a glimmer of a crisis of faith; that just for a moment my students should wonder whether it is we who are wrong and Plato, Aristotle, and Jefferson Davis who were right. Not that I want my students to stop believing in equality. On the contrary, I want to make them stronger believers. I would want them to go from simply spouting dogma about equality to actively accepting it, fully aware of the price they pay in doing so. By being aware of the Devil's bargains made in the past my students may come to an awareness of the sorts of deals with the Devil made in the present. For is that not what politics is, a deal with the Devil as you compromise and accept a situation that you do not like in the hope of getting some of what you want and avoid getting nothing.

I often wonder how historians of the future will judge us. By treating our predecessors firmly, but with charity, maybe we can begin to set the ground to receive a similar judgment at our own coming trial when we can no longer speak for ourselves, but need a speaker for the dead to stand in our place.

Whig Propaganda Coming Soon to a Theater near You

Lionel Spiegel has tipped me off to the coming movie Agora, starring Rachel Weisz. It tells the story of the late antique pagan female philosopher Hypatia, who was murdered by a Christian mob. Judging from the preview, the film seems to hit the basic Whig and feminist talking points. The fourth century is the downfall of civilization with the coming of fanatical misogynistic Christianity, who also burn down the Great Library at Alexandria. Might it be too much to ask that the movie actually give some context to these events and actually deal with some of the complexities of the political situation beyond pagans were good and tolerant and Christians were nasty and intolerant? And they have the nerve to call this a true story.

Hypatia was not a modern scientist nor was she a modern feminist. She was a Platonist philosopher who lived in the period of late antiquity. Of course, this would actually require some actual background on philosophy in late antiquity. The moment you treat her as anything besides this, you are no longer dealing with history but with fiction. Any attempt to consciously pass off such fiction as history is to engage in falsehood.

Fifteenth World Congress of Jewish Studies: Jewish Philosophy in the Middle Ages – Authority and Sources

Jonathan Dauber – Knowledge of God as a Religious Imperative in Early Kabbalah

Students of Isaac the Blind referred to themselves as Kabbalists. They developed their own traditions, combining many different elements. Kabbalah is not just the sum of existing traditions, it created something new. Why this impulse to fashion new traditions? One explanation is the coming of philosophy in the form of such thinkers as Abraham bar Hiyya, Abraham ibn Ezra and Maimonides and the translation of Greek philosophy from Arabic sources. Moshe Idel updates Heinrich Graetz who argued that Kabbalah was a reaction to philosophy. The Kabbalists were trying to set the record set. They saw themselves as the true interpretation of Judaism as opposed to philosophy. This first reaction does not preclude the possibility that Maimonides played a positive role in Kabbalistic thought.

The various philosophical works mentioned share the commonality that the study of philosophy could have religious value. Judah ibn Tibbon translated Bahya ibn Pekudah who believed that one had to “pursue this wisdom.” This is a philosophical turn that does not come from rabbinic thought. In his commentary on Song of Songs, Ezra of Gerona, a student of Isaac the Blind, argued that actively seeking out and gaining knowledge of God is the principle of everything. This is following Maimonides who held that the first commandment is to seek out the first cause. As Jacob Katz points out, Ezra of Gerona’s list of the commandments are close to Maimonides. Rabbi Ezra sees the source from Deuteronomy “and you should know today” and not the “I am the Lord thy God.” This is like ibn Pekudah.

Philosophy would say that one cannot actually study God, but only his actions. Ashur b. David saw the sephirot as God’s actions. Asher b. David was the nephew of Rabbi Isaac. His Sepher HaYichud presented Kabbalah in a popular manner. He uses “and you should know today.” As he explains, Moshe, the prophets and the Messiah charged us to investigate the Creator. This is identified as the catalyst for his work.

The Gerona Kabbalists, who came later, are more hostile to Maimonides than the Provencal Kabbalists. Early Kabbalah is open to a moderate Maimonides. We need a reverse of Menachem Kellner’s book on the influence of Kabbalah on Maimonides and talk about Maimonides’ influence on Kabbalah.


Arthur Hyman – Maimonides on Intellect and Imagination

Maimonides wrote the Guide to the Perplexed to offer a philosophical interpretation of the Torah. He never, though, provided the philosophy itself. Instead he relied on the Arabic books of his day. Leo Strauss, years ago, pointed this out that the Guide is not a work of philosophy. The main purpose of the Guide is to elucidate difficult points of the Law. It becomes the task of the interpreter to construct the background of Maimonides philosophy. Maimonides does not follow one Muslim philosopher consistently. He does not develop full theories of the intellect and the imagination. His interest in the intellect is largely psychological. With the imagination he is interested in the political, its role in prophecy and the creation of a society.

Maimonides attacked the Mutakalim because confuse the categories of the imagination with the intellect, assuming that anything that imaginable can exist. Maimonides is troubled by the Metukalim’s proof for God from creation. These are categories based on the imagination. All that could be pointed to from creation is that there are certain irregularities in the cosmos which imply the existence of God. Maimonides attacks Avicenna as well because he claimed that the intellect enters from without and can return there. Maimonides goes with the early Greek interpretation of Aristotle which claimed that the intellect is a material element that arises in the human being.

This is interesting because it does not offer a mechanism for life after death. Did Maimonides believe in individual immortality or did he follow ibn Bajja and Averroes and believe in collective immortality? Maimonides actually quotes ibn Bajja in the guide. Samuel ibn Tibbon and Moshe Narboni along with more recent commentators such as Shlomo Pines believed the later. Alexander Altmann held the former. Is Maimonides even entitled to a view on life after death? According to Aristotle anything that comes into existence must cease to exist. Maimonides held certain exceptions, such as the world which will forever be maintained by a specific act of God’s will.

Maimonides believed that the masses understand the categories through their imagination while the elites understand through their intellects. Should the masses be enlightened? Averroes said no because it would lead them to unbelief. Maimonides disagreed at least in terms of teaching them that God has no attributes.

Imagination has a positive role to play, for Maimonides, in prophecy. A prophet needs to have imagination. A philosopher and a lawgiver could get by with just intellect. Following the platonic model of the philosopher returning to the cave, the imagination is required for the parables needed to convey ideas to the people.

Fifteenth World Congress of Jewish Studies - Jewish Thought: New Challenges

Alan Brill – Is There Still a Mystery to Mysticism after Modernity?

You can find the full lecture at Fordham. This is just a small piece that deals with Judaism. Today mysticism has dropped off the map. Instead we tend to use words that are more descriptive. There are five major schools in thinking about mysticism.

The first school treats mysticism as a series of texts that offers images. This is the view you can find in Bernard McGinn and the Chicago school. Michael Fishbane is a Jewish representative of this school. For him mystical texts are a continuation of midrashic interpretation. The second school focuses on the lack of divine presence. This is very useful for people who do not want to talk about God anymore. An example of this is Arthur Green. According to Green, God withdraws from a dimension and allow us to engage in our own interpretation. You can use god language without dealing with the implications of it. The third school is the political. I will not deal with it here, considering where we are. The fourth school sees mysticism as esoteric writing and knowledge. This covers a wide range of people. Moshe Idel, for example, treats Kabbalah as esoteric knowledge, a map that one becomes familiar with. The goal of Kabbalah is to unpack the text using a number of methods. He downplays negative theology and Neo-Platonism in Kabbalah. Moshe Halbertal now follows this. In a strange way the Kabbalah Center also works like this. They have hidden secrets, technology of sorts, to understand the universe. To go to the other extreme, Haredi Kabbalist Moshe Shapiro works within this school. This allows him to go against science. From his perspective, he knows the secrets of reality and you in the university are just grasping at it. The fifth school focuses on meditation. Mysticism is not secret but an open practice that one learns how to do. The Dalai Lama and Mary Carruthers of NYU operate within this model. Carruthers even looks at medieval texts like this.

Many of us are used to looking at the Zohar from twentieth century categories. The first model looks at the metaphors for their own sake. What do they mean? The second model would try to deflect the theist language. If God is a tree it is not as scary. The fourth wants to ask about how you go from the plain meaning to the esoteric. The final model looks at the pragmatic elements. In the last twelve years there has been a turn away from devekut. Texts have become resources in of themselves. To make the comparison of the spider and the silkworm. In the Ingmar Bergman film, Through a Glass Darkly, a woman sees God as a spider. In the Zohar God is a silkworm spinning the universe. In post modernism we are no longer interested in the experience but in the image itself, god as the spider, god as the silkworm.

(See here for a series of clips of Dr. Brill teaching meditation. I will leave it to the reader to come to their own conclusions as to where Dr. Brill stands in terms of the various models he outlined.)

Eric Lawee – Adam’s Mating with Animals: New Data on Christian and Jewish Receptions of a Strange Midrash

And now for something completely different. According to the opinion of Rabbi Eliezer, Adam mated with every species of animal but was not satisfied until he mated with Eve. Midrashim can have an effect even centuries after it was written. Rashi modified the midrash, but did not view this as strange that the first man engaged in bestiality. It only becomes a problem once Christians pick up on it. In the thirteenth century this Midrash was used by Nicholas Donin to attack Jews. Pablo Santa Maria also used this Midrash to mock Judaism. One solution for Jews was to read this non-literarily. Shem Tov, for example, argued that one should interpret such things according to their allegorical meaning in the way of Maimonides. Moshe ibn Gabbai interpreted this Midrash as saying that Adam investigated every animal with his intellect.

There is new data from the sixteenth century. This is the start of print and a wider diffusion of rabbinic writing among Christians. Sixtus of Siena, an apostate, used this Midrash. Johannes Reuchlin defended Rabbi Eliezer by saying that he only felt desire when he came to Eve. Rauchlin’s Jew, Simon, quotes Sefer Nizzahon (See David Berger’s Jewish-Christian Debate in the High Middle Ages.) arguing that Adam could not have had intercourse with insects. Censorship was one Christian solution for such a problem. In the third Bamberg edition we see a denuded Rashi that does not refer to this midrash.

In modern times we have Pastor Cohen G. Reckart in the role of Nicholas Donin for the internet age. He says about the Talmud that “No Christian could read this book in a true heart of faith in Jesus and not come away from a study of it shocked and alarmed.”Rabbi Shimon Schwab distinguished between higher order versus lower order animals. Adam might have had intercourse with high more human like animals. The Schottenstein Talmud goes in a different direction of earlier Artscroll references to Rabbi Eliezer, which acknowledged different opinions on the matter. The Schottenstein Talmud simply follows Maharal and says that this should not be taken literally.

Fifteenth World Congress of Jewish Studies: What is Jewish (If Anything) in Isaiah Berlin’s Philosophy?

Dikla Sher – Isaiah Berlin vs. Hannah Arendt: Their Political Ideas through the Prism of their Jewish Identities

Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arendt were very different thinkers. Berlin was quite open in his contempt for her. Much of their differences can be seen in their different experiences with totalitarianism and their criticism of Enlightenment. Berlin opposed the over-rationalism of the Enlightenment. The claim that human’s are the same everywhere and should have one reason. This comes from the Platonic ideal of one universal that applies everywhere. Such monism inevitably leads to totalitarianism. Arendt, coming from her personal experience with Nazi Germany, saw the failure of human rights as something beyond any government. Her criticism is political and not philosophical. For Arendt the most important right is to have rights. Such rights are based on societies and not, as Berlin argued, with individuals.
Berlin divided liberty into positive and negative liberty; he preferred negative liberty. True liberty requires examination, active decisions; to be free is to make an unforced choice. The attraction of totalitarianism is that it allows man to avoid action. Arendt distinguished freedom from liberty. True political freedom cannot be ownership but is part of man’s essence. To be free is to act. This action must take place in a shared public space.

Berlin acknowledged a value to nationalism in that it served the need for a common culture. Arendt’s community is not national; she opposed the nation state. In its place she supported a republican alternative. This is not the classic model of republicanism; Arendt went against Rousseau in that there, for her, is no giving up of individuality to the republican state. Instead one takes on an additional identity; thus making the individual life richer.

Neither Berlin nor Arendt believed that one had to be religious. They do not use Jewish sources. Their Jewish identities, though, were dominant. Berlin celebrated Jewish holidays as a way to identity with his community and heritage, which he wanted to continue. Arendt, writing to Scholem, said that she never felt that she had to identify herself as a Jew; being a Jew was a fact of life. Berlin was a strong supporter for Zionism from the beginning. Arendt saw the power of Zionism in terms of taking responsibility for Jewish problems. She turned against Zionism, though, when she found out that it would be a Jewish national state without cooperation with the Arabs. It was a forced solution after the social one had failed.


Joshua Laurence Cherniss – Judaism, Jewishness, and Liberalism in Isaiah Berlin’s Political Thought

There is a difference between Judaism and Jewishness. Judaism here can be taken to refer to a set of given beliefs. Jewishness is to be defined in terms of a culture that one is in dialogue with. In terms of Judaism there is not much there in Berlin. He did not use Jewish texts in his writing. Conditioned by his own views of Judaism as an intellectual position, he viewed Judaism as a series of claims that were outside of reason or ethics. A pivotal example of this is God commanding Abraham to sacrifice his son. Similar to Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Berlin saw this as a move against the ethical. For Berlin, to respect Judaism was to reject it.

Berlin was engaged in the situation of Jews in a post emancipation world. For Berlin this emancipation was a failure. This larger course of Jewish history comes from his experience with the Russian situation. There was more persecution, but Jewish life enjoyed a greater coherence and integrity. It was not surprising to Berlin that Zionism was more successful in Russia than in the West. Jews had a model in the Russian intelligentsia to imitate, which Berlin greatly admired this. Berlin also had his experience with British Jewry. They lacked persecution but suffered from a class conscious society. They were caught trying to fit into society that was not made for them, wearing clothes that did not fit. For Berlin liberty was a matter of choice. To be deprived of choice is to be denied the fundamental dignity of a human being. The tragedy of the Jew was that choices were not open to them.

(During the question and answer section there was some discussion of A. N. Wilson’s attack on Berlin as the “dictaphone don” in the Times Literary Supplement, which depicts Berlin in ways that were quite contrary to that of the panelists.)

My Tisha B’Av Speech to the Chofetz Chaim Heritage Foundation

Today is the fast day of Tisha B’Av (the ninth of Av) when traditional Jews mourn the destruction of the two Temples and the many subsequent tragedies of Jewish history. In honor of the event, every year the Chofetz Chaim Heritage Foundation, a Haredi organization, sponsors a video presentation shown to thousands of Jews across the world. The video usually features prominent Haredi speakers such as Rabbi Paysach Krohn (apparently he is not on for this year), Rabbi Shmuel Kamenetsky, Rabbi Yissocher Frand and Rabbi Mattisyahu Salomon. (For some strange reason when I played the ad for the event on their website they had music playing in the background. Music is certainly not something permitted today.) Usually, when I try to go, I find that the combination of my empty stomach and the rancid theology on screen proves too much for me and I end up having to walk out before the end. For all those with similar theological-gastronomical dispositions, I offer you the speech that I am confident you will not be hearing this year from the Chofetz Chaim Foundation; it is, though, what I would say if I were given the chance to speak as part of their lineup.

A good churban to all of you gathered here today from across the globe. The fact that all of you are here in the afternoon on a fast day is remarkable. I say this because I do not wish to come across as completely negative in my comments, as someone who ignores the good in our community. Now that we have gotten past that I would like to move on to business. I am not much of a storyteller nor am I the sort who likes throwing around little vertlach on midrashim, with no purpose other than to entertain and offer pithy moral value statements. I am afraid that if you are looking for someone to make you feel good about yourself you have come to the wrong speaker. By my nature, I possess a skeptical view of human virtue along the lines of Augustine and John Calvin. (You can look those people up later.)

By training, I am a historian and a contemplator of human politics and society. From this, I have become a strong believer in the importance of a bottom-up understanding of human affairs. Major changes happen in society because the vast majority of society agreed to go along with them. As Leo Tolstoy (You can look him up later as well.) understood, those at the top, those supposed “great men,” are not the ones controlling events but are being controlled by them. For example, in the case of Nazi Germany, if you ask me who was responsible for the murder of six million Jews I would not say Hitler or those who ran the camps. Every society has its insane murderous people; they should be mercifully placed in mental hospitals, protected from harm or from harming others. The people really responsible were those regular sane German people who allowed Hitler to come to power and go to war. Without millions of regular Germans agreeing to serve in the German army and run German factories there is no World War II and no Holocaust. These were sane rational people who came to the sane and rational conclusion that the removal of Jews and other undesirables and the expropriation of their property would benefit them. Going along with the Lebensraum policy, had the sanity and rationality necessary for an act of first-degree murder. If it were up to me, I would have put the entire German population above the age of eighteen on trial at Nuremberg and those who could not prove that they actively tried to stop Hitler would have received a sentence of death. (Whether or not it would have been feasible to carry out such a sentence is another issue. Most probably this death sentence would have needed to remain something symbolic.)

Similarly, with the problem of Islamic terrorism, the people responsible for Islamic terrorism are not the terrorists, such as suicide bombers and the hijackers of September 11. The real people responsible are those Muslim and liberals who act as apologists for Islamic terrorism, blaming the West and Israel for bringing trouble upon themselves. I see such people on a regular basis on the college campus where I work. These people get to pursue their vendetta against the West and they hypocritically Pontius Pilate their hands of the affair. (Look it up.) They correctly claim to not be terrorists and make a big show of taking offense at any implication that they are. In truth, they are something worse, moral scoundrels, who lack the courage to pay the true price of their beliefs.

The past few weeks have seen numerous scandals erupt from our community; whether it is youngsters from our community burning trash cans and smashing traffic lights or the arrest of rabbanim in New Jersey. The common refrain is that these are the sins of just a small minority and have nothing to do with the overwhelming majority of us who are good righteous people. My response is that these are precisely the sins not of the few but of all of us in the community for they happen because we, as a community, are making the sane rational, and immoral choices that allow for it. And let us not play innocent here, we benefit from these things. The least we can do is have the decency to openly endorse what was done.

Why do we have a population of youngsters with time on their hands and a lack of any concern for secular authority to riot? Should young men in their teens and early twenties not be in school, learning a useful trade, or in the workplace practicing a trade? No, because we created a system in Israel in which young men must sit and study Gemara and are discouraged from pursuing any other option. Most people, including people with high levels of intelligence and talent as it pertains to other fields, are not suited for Gemara. Such people might be well suited for other fields of endeavor, but they are trapped by the system they are in; the system we have created. People in such a situation might be tempted to leave the community to pursue other options, but refrain from doing so, in large part, because we have taught them to hate, fear and despise the outside world. Make no mistake about it, we did it with intent; we taught them this precisely because we knew that by doing so we could stop them from leaving, joining the ranks of the off the derech and becoming an embarrassing statistic. So we reap what we have sown in the riots. We can no more say that we did not want or endorse the riots than Arabs can denounce the state of Israel as a Nazi occupier and not support the terrorism used to destroy it.

Jewish life is expensive with tuition and large families. It does not help matters if you are less than enthusiastic about advanced secular education. (A necessary platform for many of the sorts of jobs that allow one to pay for such a lifestyle.) We can try giving tuition breaks to needy families, but that simply spreads the cost somewhere else. At the end of the day we, as a community, have to be able to come up with the funds to support ourselves. You are shocked and horrified that members of our community, even leaders in our community, turned to defrauding people of their kidneys? I am talking to the real criminals right now. No one here can play innocent. We just thought it would be best to look the other way and hoped that if we did not notice no one else would. And some Germans innocently thought that the Jews could all just be shipped off to the East and everyone would be the better for it.

For all of you so-called “Modern Orthodox” Jews sitting in this audience, feeling pretty good about yourselves right now; I mean you too. You have allowed yourselves the luxury of using systems built by others. Why are you sitting here listening to this lineup of speakers; why do you not have your own speakers, who actually believe in the sorts of things you claim to believe in? It is sheer laziness. You abandon the running of Torah-true Judaism to people who support an ideology you oppose. Do you think it actually matters that, when this ideology fails, you can claim that you did not support it; for all intents and purposes you did support it.

In conclusion, let us resolve ourselves to taking some moral responsibility for what goes on in our world. There is a churban going on right now. If you are one of those people who looked at articles in the press about Haredi rioting and complained that we are being picked on then you are responsible for our churban. If you are one of those people making comments on websites like the one run by Rabbi Yakov Horowitz, telling him that he needs to stop talking about what is wrong with our community and do more to tell us how wonderful we are, then you are part of the churban. My bracha to you all is that, if we take it upon ourselves to clean up our own mess, Hashem should bless us so that next year we will have the luxury of only having to mourn the burning of a building in the year 70 C. E.

My Presentation to the International Medieval Congress (Part I)

Philosophers, Conversos, and the Jewish Campaign against Heresy in 15th-Century Spain – Benzion Chinn (The Ohio State University)

One has to admit that there is something just a little bit odd about studying orthodox attempts to suppress “heretical” ideas. As academics, our very lifeblood is free inquiry. It would only be natural for us to simply view these defenders of orthodoxy as the “ultimate evil,” attempting to destroy "reason" and establishing the tyranny of “dogma” and “superstition.” I believe this speaks to the best of the historical profession that we are committed to giving all those from the past a chance to speak, particularly those who seem to be the most distant from “modernity.”

This paper is primarily about a question and I will spend most of my time dealing with this question. I will suggest a solution. Not that I am convinced that I have the evidence to completely solve the question. I would be interested in getting feedback if anyone can offer anything to further my case or to refute it.

One of the major features of Spanish Jewish thought, during the fifteenth century, was its polemic against philosophy. Philosophy was supposed to lead to the abandonment of the commandments, to heresy and even to apostasy. This element received particular emphasis in the work of the late Yitzchak Baer and his History of the Jews in Christian Spain. (Probably the finest study of any one particular Jewish community.) I first started exploring this topic with the intention of writing about the practical side of this move against philosophy, such as bans, book burnings, and excommunications. It seemed only logical that such things went on; what is the point of denouncing philosophy if you are not going to actually do something about it? As I am sure many of you can relate to, this project took a dramatic shift when, after several weeks of work, I realized that I had absolutely no evidence of such things happening. Out of frustration, as strange as this sounds, I found myself almost yelling at my sources: “what is wrong with you people? Why do you not show some spine and ban something?” I could have pretended that I had the evidence and hoped no one would notice. Instead, I chose what I think is the more interesting option and asked myself why I had no evidence. We are left with the conclusion that the reason we have no evidence of bans, book burnings and excommunications is that they did not happen.

So why would a rabbinic establishment devote so much energy to denouncing philosophy without taking any practical measures against it? To suggest some obvious possibilities: Maybe Jews were remarkably tolerant and did not go for banning books? Maybe Jews were just not that interested in dogma? Maybe the Jewish community during this period was remarkably orthodox and there were no dangerous philosophers? Maybe Jews just did not have the power to do something about it?

Attempts by the Jewish community to take action against perceived heterodox beliefs had clear precedent both within Spain and outside of it. Spanish Jewry possessed a particularly strong precedent for the active suppression of heterodox beliefs since it served as the host for most of the Maimonidean controversies. In 1232 Solomon of Montpellier and his students, Jonah of Gerondi and David b. Saul banned Maimonides’ Guide to the Perplexed. Furthermore, Solomon sent Jonah of Gerondi to Northern France in order to gain support for the ban. The Rabbis of Northern France themselves went and banned this book as well. The Maimonideans responded with a ban of their own against Solomon of Montpellier. Furthermore, they sent David Kimhi to Spain to rally support for their position. While Kimhi gained the support of a number of important community leaders, he met some fierce opposition from such Jewish leaders as Nachmonides, Judah Alfakar, and Abulafia. This fighting only came to a close when the Inquisition got involved and burned copies of the Guide.[1] This event shocked both sides and caused them to temporally halt their campaigns.

A similar controversy occurred in the fourteenth century. In 1304 Abba Mari ben Moses (d.c. 1310) and Solomon ben Aderet (1235-1310), the chief rabbi of Barcelona and student of Jonah of Gerondi, issued a ban of excommunication on all those under twenty-five who studied philosophy. The focus of Abba Mari and Aderet’ zeal was Levi ben Abraham of Villefranche who supposedly claimed that Abraham and Sarah represented Form and Matter and were not real historical figures. As with the case of Solomon of Montpellier, this attempt also met with stiff opposition from a number of scholars, most notably Menahem Meiri. Abba Mari collected his correspondence in a book titled Minhat Kinot (Offering of Jealously). It serves to detail all of his efforts to stamp out Aristotelian thought within the Jewish community. His efforts to get different communities to sign on to his ban, the rabbis that he convinced to sign and those that turned against him. He also recounts his efforts to defend himself against his opponents, who went after him personally and tried to destroy his reputation.[2]

As strange as this sounds, one has to admire these people. They took a principled stand, based on what they believed, and where even willing to put themselves at some professional risk for those beliefs. Keep in mind that the pro-Maimonidean forces possessed considerable power and were perfectly capable of moving against those who dared oppose them.

To move on to the issue of dogma. The central figure in the history of Jewish dogma was Maimonides (1138-1205) with his Thirteen Principles of Faith. As Menachem Kellner has argued, Maimonides attempted to reformulate Judaism as a theologically based religion as opposed to a law-based one. Furthermore, Maimonides redefined the meaning of being a Jew. For Maimonides a Jew was not simply someone born to a Jewish mother or a convert to Judaism; a Jew was someone who believed in the dogmas of Judaism. While Maimonides’ thought played a major role in the theological controversies of the Middle-Ages, his Principles of Faith only came to play an important role in fifteenth-century Spain. It was Hasdai Crescas (1350-1410) and his student Joseph Albo (1380-1445) who first made an issue out of it. They criticized Maimonides’ choices as to which doctrines should be viewed as the foundations and axioms upon which Judaism was to be based and put forth their own alternative lists of dogmas. Kellner suggests that the reason for this sudden interest in dogma was the church’s missionary assault at the end of the fourteenth and early fifteenth century. Christianity set the terms of debate and that meant dogma. Any responses on the part of Jews needed to formulate a conception of Jewish dogma and how it was different from Christian dogma. This predicament lead Jews back to Maimonides and the acceptance of all or parts of his reformulation of Judaism.

While Kellner notes in passing that this interest in dogma did not lead to any fissures within the Jewish community, he does not bother to follow through and consider the implications of this lack of any real-world crackdown on heresy. One would think that the point of formulating an official established dogma was so that one could define heresy. Once we have an official dogma all those who do not conform to it are heretics and should be persecuted. Why would someone go through so much trouble formulated dogma unless they intended to use it as a platform with which they could hunt after heretics? Both Crescas and Albo, in the early part of the fifteenth century, and Isaac Arama (1420-97) and Isaac Abarbanel (1437-1508), in the latter part, engaged in anti-philosophical polemics and in attempts to formulate official Jewish dogma. For some strange reason, though, none of these people ever banned a book or excommunicated someone for their philosophical leanings.

Where there radical Jewish philosophers in the fifteenth century? We do have some evidence to indicate that the Jewish community possessed some active philosophical radicals during this period. The mid fifteenth-century preacher, Haim ibn Musa, in a letter to his son wrote:

Now there is a new type of preacher. They rise to the lectern to preach before the reading of the Torah, and most of their sermons consist of syllogistic arguments and quotations from the philosophers. They mention by name Aristotle, Alexander, Themistius, Plato, Averroes, and Ptolemy, while Abbaye and Raba are concealed in their mouths. The Torah waits upon the reading stand like a dejected woman who had prepared herself properly by ritual immersion and awaited her husband; then, returning from the house of his mistress, he glanced at her and left without paying her further heed.[3]

While Ibn Musa did not give any specific names, the preachers he attacked clearly lived in his time.




[1] Whether or not the anti-Maimonideans denounced the works of Maimonides to the Inquisition is an open question. Maimonideans, such as Hillel of Verona, blamed their opponents for what happened and sought to use this event as a means of discrediting them. Daniel Silver has argued that such actions would have been highly unlikely as it would have elicited the complete opposition of the Jewish community at large.
[2] For more on the Maimonidean controversies see Joseph Sarachek, Faith and Reason, Daniel Silver’s Maimonidean Criticism and the Maimonidean Controversy and Bernard Septimus’ Hispano-Jewish Culture in Transition: the Career and Controversies of Ramah.
[3] Saperstein, Jewish Preachers pg. 386.



(To be continued ...)

International Medieval Congress: Day One Session One

Heretical Destructions: Incitement and Symbolic Violence

Moving Violence: Images of Persecution in Late Medieval Art – Assaf Pinkus (Tel Aviv University)

There is a certain allegorical framework to medieval depictions of violence. There is the motif of monsters and the damned in hell and the triumph of faithful. In the twelfth century we begin to see a lot more martyr cycles. Early studies have focused on these stories in terms of the life and suffering of Christ. We see St. James the Greater holding on to his head after it has been cut off. St. Denis, as contrast, is depicted as being crowned by angels, standing in victory. St. James is down on the ground and clearly suffering. St. Simon has his head split open. St. James the Lesser has an ax in his head. These violent images are shown outside the context of the suffering of Christ. Furthermore, the use of smashed limbs creates an image of submission rather than triumph.

This can be seen as an inversion of values. We see the moral triumph of those suffering in that they demonstrate their suffering. Did viewers see this as violent? Did the audience enjoy a voyeuristic sense of suffering? Caroline Bynum argues that these images were not viewed as violent but as access to the body of Christ. This is in keeping with the Augustinian bifurcation of body and spirit. Contrast to the violence of the spirit when one is forced to renounce one’s faith. Aquinas, it should be noted, argues that the body is the form of the spirit. This changes the straight dichotomy of Augustine.

Late medieval violence did not just exist in the symbolic sense; there is a growing awareness of urban violence. These depictions of the violent martyrdom of these saints was meant to confront this everyday urban violence.

The Destruction of Heretical Books – Alexander Murray (University College, University of Oxford)

There is an interest in the destruction of books that is not just school boy impishness. We are part of a culture that worship of books. Fernando Baez has a book on book burnings for those who are interested. Much of the historical destruction of books has happened not through censorship but through simple neglect. If you look at Hogarth’s Gin Lane painting you will see a wheel barrow of books going to the trunk makers.

Agobard of Lyons Opera Omnia was saved by mere chance from being turned into wrapping paper.

This presentation is a summary of a book by Thomas Werner titled Den Irrtum liquidieren Bücherverbrennungen im Mittelalter. There is nothing original in this presentation but then again originality is a modern value. Werner deals with some 200 book burnings during the Middle Ages. They become more common after 1200. In the fourteenth century you have the Wycliffe persecution which leads to a lot of books being burned. You see more censorship for a while. Then in 1521 Lutheran books are being burned in London. Jonathan Israel’s Radical Enlightenment has a lot on book burnings. Lots more books were destroyed during the Enlightenment. This has to do with the increased production of books.

Book burnings were an efficacious sign; it demonstrated things. Books were even written in order to be burned. For example there is a whole genre of collections of errors by teachers accused of heresy that students were asked to write in order to denounce those teachers. This happened particularly in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Copies of heretical books were sometimes kept in order to identify the heresy in the future. Johann Huss’ works were kept in Rome even though they were burned at Constance. Burning is actually a hard way to get rid of books. Cutting or tearing a book up make more sense, but were considered a lesser punishment than burning.

This emphasis on burning applies to the burning of heretics as well. Heretics who were dead or unavailable were burned in effigy. We have examples of where the defendant is made to burn his own books as a sign of penance. We see this with Abelard. Lollards were put on display with their books hanging from them along with faggots as a sign to where the books were headed.

What did one do with books that were a mixture of orthodoxy and heresy? Pico de Mirandola had only three thesis declared to be heretical. Yet all nine hundred were burned. This attitude runs counter to scholastic dialectic where one preserves the heretical view in order to respond to it. Huss and his followers make this point. If one burned an entire book because of it contained a heretical statement then Canon Law would have to go as well as the Old Testament as these books contain heretical statements. Also, forcing someone to burn something he believes to be true would force them to sin. They would be acting against their conscious.

It should be noted that church courts had the authority to burn books but could not burn people. This was even after the clergy had lost their monopoly on reading. The church burned books and the secular authorities burned people. Because of this, you could not have people being burned with their books. All the clergy could do to people was hand over relapsed heretics to the secular arm with a plea not to execute them. Quite hypocritical of them, one has to admit. The first time we have unequivocal evidence of a heretic being burned with their books is in 1510. Now the secular authorities are taking the lead in the pursuit of heresy.

(I spoke to Dr. Murray for a little bit after his presentation. I would describe him as some sort of ultimate Platonic version of a kindly elderly English academic.)

Historians in the Philosophy Department: A Response (Part IV)

(Part I, II, III)


I would like to say a few words about the issue of post-modernism and why I object to it.

This is a picture of me at the Museum of Modern Art in Los Angeles (MoMA). I am standing next to one of the exhibitions, which consisted of the New York Daily News covered in bird droppings. Now I am not opposed to the message of the work, namely that the Daily News is a load of bird droppings; I agree. I also agree that this work raises a valuable issue in that it challenges us to consider the nature of art; what is the difference between a work of art such as the Mona Lisa and a page of newspaper covered in bird droppings? The problem with this is that, while this is a great point, it is the enemy’s point. The conclusion to be drawn from being unable to distinguish between the Mona Lisa and a page of newspaper covered in bird droppings is not that the page of newspaper with bird droppings should go up in a museum and that we should have a museum of modern art devoted to such work but on the contrary, that we should not bother sticking up the Mona Lisa in a museum and that we should send the Mona Lisa and all the rest of the works housed in the Louvre in the trash bin along with the page of newspaper with bird droppings, thus allowing us to use the Louvre for something that actually benefits people.

At the Barcelona debate in 1263, Nachmonides was forced to respond to Christian charges that the Talmud confirms the truth of Christianity. At the beginning of the debate Nachmonides admitted to being puzzled by this; how it could be that the rabbis of the Talmud, living centuries after Jesus, could believe in Jesus and still reject Christianity? It seemed to be a matter of course for Nachmonides that, if the rabbis of the Talmud believed that Jesus was the Messiah and the Son of God, they would have done the intellectually honest thing and ceased practicing Judaism and converted to Christianity. Obviously, Nachmonides never met a post-modernist.

Post-modernism thrives on people undermining the legitimacy of their own work and still having the chutzpah to ask that society fund them in their endeavors. It is called deconstruction. If post-modernists really believed in what they were doing and were intellectually honest they would admit that the entire humanities field, including their own particular slice, was worthless and they would pack up their things and leave academia. Frank Donoghue wishes to blame our business-oriented society for killing off the humanities and he is right. What Donoghue does not ask is why the humanities have so utterly failed to defend themselves and make their case to society in the face of the business suits and number crunchers. For that, you need Allan Bloom. Bloom, in his Closing of the American Mind, blames the modern left, with its worship of cultural relativism and its deconstruction of values, for bringing about a situation where even the humanities have no value. If all values are relative and there are no ultimate questions let alone ultimate answers then why should someone spend years of their lives studying Plato and Aristotle; why not just go to law school and make as much money as you can. Bloom was a tenured professor at the University of Chicago so his main concern was attracting students. As a graduate student, who made the choice to study history instead of going pursuing law school, my concern is getting a job at the end of the day. If the humanities have no value then why should a university bother to make the investment in hiring me?

I have a suggestion for all post-modernists out there. If you do not believe that the humanities have intrinsic value and if you do not even believe in ultimate questions and in ultimate truths then please have the intellectual honesty to leave the university system; pack your bags and get a job in the real world. There are few enough jobs in the humanities as it is; the least you can do is leave those jobs to those who actually believe in what they are doing.