Live Not By Godwin's Law: A Book Review

 

According to Godwin's Law, as an argument continues on the internet, it becomes inevitable that someone will accuse their opponent of being a Nazi. There are two important implications for this. The first is to recognize that the moment that reductio ad Hiterlum arguments are put into play, all hope for civilized discourse ends. One thinks of the infamous example of the William F. Buckley Gore Vidal exchange in 1968, decades before Godwin's Law or the internet. 

The second implication is that whoever makes the Nazi comparison first loses. This is a necessary outgrowth of the first principle. Once you recognize the destructive nature of implying that your opponent is a Nazi and how tempting it is, it becomes necessary to heavily penalize anyone who goes down this path.   

I bring up this issue because it gets at the problem of Rod Dreher's otherwise excellent new book, Live Not By Lies. Following up on his earlier work, The Benedict Option, Dreher continues to develop the idea that conservatives need to recognize that they have lost the culture war and that they face a society that is increasingly actively hostile to them even to the point of not being willing to show them traditional liberal tolerance. Dreher's particular concern is the potential for corporate soft totalitarianism. What is to stop corporations from using online data to create their own version of China's social credit system? One could imagine that the fact that I bought Dreher's book and listened to it in a day might put me on a blacklist. Amazon could send their information about me to my bank, which then drops my credit score. 

Under these circumstances, religious people, if they want to pass on their faith to their children, are going to need to form small close-knit communities with fellow believers. Voting Republican is not going to help as this corporate soft totalitarianism does not require government assistance.  Your local mega-church is also not going to save your children. On the contrary, it likely is already taken over by people under the influence of woke ideology and will cave the moment it finds itself under pressure. 

The problem with Dreher is that he allows himself to get trapped comparing this soft totalitarianism to the Soviet persecution of Christians. To be fair to Dreher, he acknowledges that these situations are not identical. His point is that there is a lot that Christians in the United States can learn from former Soviet dissidents. That being said, he is left in a bind. Without being willing to violate Godwin's Law, at least in spirit, the book loses its coherency. If Soviet persecution really was something different then there is little point in putting Soviet dissidents at the center of a book about contemporary leftist persecution. 

I feel that Dreher would have been better served writing one of two alternative books. He could have written primarily about Soviet dissidents based on his interviews. I certainly would have loved to hear more about reading Tolkien from behind the Iron Curtain. The fact that many of these interviewees believe that some form of leftist totalitarianism is coming to the United States should be left as a point to take seriously with readers asked to imagine how their local church might handle being declared a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, let alone if Soviet tanks drove into town. If nothing else, this should help Americans appreciate the truly impossible dilemmas that people under Soviet rule faced.  

The second book that Dreher could have written might have been about leftist soft totalitarianism. Instead of talking about Soviet dissidents, he could have used examples of people who stayed religious on college campuses by forming small social groups with fellow believers. The spiritual challenge of college for many people is that they arrive on campus at the age of eighteen and find themselves, for the first time, in a setting in which the basic assumptions of their faith community are not taken as a given. To survive, a student needs to find a network of fellow believers and be willing to be part of an underground counter-culture. If campus extremists have gone out into the world and taken over corporations, turning the entire country into a college campus, the solution is to imitate small campus fellowships.   

Even here, there is room to bring in the example of Communism. One of the major surprises in the recent collapse of conventional liberalism in the face of woke ideology has been the willingness of people to confess to the most absurd charges. One thinks of the recent example from my alma mater, Ohio State, where a professor apologized for writing positively about college football in a way that does recall Soviet-style confessions.

Why would someone confess to something that they knew was false? Perhaps they were threatened with torture and death. Another possibility is that they were trapped by the logic of their own belief. Imagine that you are a good believing communist who supports the party and Comrade Stalin. You are accused of treason. There are two possibilities. Either you are innocent and the party is really just a scam to allow men to seize power by falsely accusing their fellow comrades or you are guilty and the party is right. A true believer would accept that it is not possible for the party to be wrong even if that meant that he was guilty. It must be that he really committed treason, perhaps even just subconsciously by not submitting himself thoroughly enough to party discipline.  

I could imagine the professor who defended college football making a similar calculation. Here he is, a man who probably spent his life verbally supporting civil rights and denouncing racism. Now he finds himself in a situation where civil rights leaders are calling him racist. If he were not a true-believing leftist, it would be easy to ignore his accusers. He did not intend to suggest that blacks should be sacrificed for the entertainment of whites. Anyone who thinks otherwise should be locked away for psychiatric treatment, not given an apology. The problem is that this man probably is a true believer. Either he could admit that civil rights, despite its lofty moral goals, is a scam used to blackmail people and seize power or he could confess that he really is a racist. Perhaps he is not consciously racist but, by failing to sufficiently educate himself, he fell prey to his white privilege and subconsciously allowed himself to indulge his fantasy of sacrificing blacks for his own entertainment.

This professor was vulnerable the moment he accepted that campus civil rights activists had the legitimate right to judge him and that he needed to live up to their standards. Since these activists control the university system, he would have needed to accept the fact that the university, as a whole, no longer held any moral authority, undermining his own authority with it. Because of this, denouncing these activists was never an option. If they accused him of racism, it must be because he really is racist and should apologize. 

Religious people are going to have to be willing to avoid getting ensnared by this line of reasoning no matter the cost. I used to think that Haredi objections to college were absurd and hypocritical. What is the difference between going to a secular college and getting a job in the secular world? Furthermore, many Haredim go to night school to get a degree. As I have lost faith that our university system reflects even my secular values, I have come to realize that going to college, particularly pursuing elite schools as opposed to taking some classes to get a degree, implicitly grants moral authority to the system. You are saying that you care what they think about you and that they have the right to judge you. Do that and they already have your soul even before you walk on campus. Part of what makes the Haredi system effective is that it has its own standard of judgment that is not connected to getting a degree and a respectable job. The secular world has no ability to blackmail them into giving up their children freely. If you want those kids, you are going to have to send in the government to seize them. 

In Support of Actual Nation-States: A Response to Yoram Hazony's Virtue of Nationalism

In the previous post, I spoke about my leaving conservatism for libertarianism and even anarcho-capitalism while recognizing that, in certain subtle ways, I remain tied to aspects of conservative thought. Yoram Hazony is a thinker well-positioned to challenge my turn against conservatism as he is the kind of conservative that I am still attracted to. He comes from the classically liberal Burkean tradition. He is remarkably nuanced and avoids the obvious anti-left polemics that dominate conservatism today. This comes from him having actual conservative beliefs as opposed to simply hating the left. Finally, Hazony is a serious Jewish thinker committed to making Jewish tradition relevant to the Western political discourse.

I would like to, therefore, take this opportunity to respond to Hazony's most recent book, The Virtue of Nationalism. Hazony's goal is to defend nationalism, as embodied in the nation-state, as an essential component of the classical liberal tradition. This is opposed to the nationalism equals racism view that has come to dominate the post World War II West. For Hazony, nation-states are the only alternatives to the extremes of tribalism, which cannot recognize individual rights and empires based around universal ideals that are compelled to eliminate all opponents. Like a good Burkean, Hazony opposes attempts to build political systems out of pure theory. Instead, states need to arise from the ground up based on the experiences and traditions of the particular group in question. I agree with Hazony's basic argument. I would simply apply it in a very different manner. For example, I fail to see how the United States as a whole could be considered a nation-state any more than the European Union. The United States should be considered a universalizing empire. Therefore, in the name of the nation-state, I call for the United States to be split up into culturally unified sections that could plausibly claim nation-state status.

What is a meaningful nation? I would say that it is the largest group which so encompasses one's identity that self-sacrifice becomes not only possible but even expected. Take the family, for example. Imagine that some billionaire tried to bribe me to walk out on my wife and kids so he could move in and take my place. I would turn him down despite the fact that everyone would be better off if I agreed. The reason for this is that my identity is so wrapped up with my family that to take that away would effectively make me a different person to the extent that I might as well kill myself.

Let us widen this sense of identity to a religion/ethnicity like Judaism. Any close study of the history of Jewish martyrdom reveals that many of the best-known examples, such as the Crusades, violated Jewish Law. (No, Judaism does not allow you to murder your children and burn the synagogue down around you in order to avoid falling into the hands of Christians.) So, historically, people have been willing to die for Judaism less because they were particularly religious but because Judaism was fundamental to their identity to the extent that apostasy effectively became a form of suicide.

Now, in a post-Holocaust world, it is unlikely that Judaism, either as a secular culture or as a religion, can survive the combined threats of genocidal anti-Semitism and the modern demand for assimilation without the State of Israel. This makes Israel a functional nation-State. Jews across the religious spectrum and whether they actually live in Israel or the diaspora, recognize an obligation to sacrifice for the sake of Israel for without it there can be no more Judaism. (Note that I am defending Israel's right to exist and engage in self-defense. This is not a blank check to deny Palestinians the right to create their own nation-state.)

How about the United States? Imagine if someone offered you a well-paying job if you abandoned your American citizenship and became a Canadian. How much of your identity is wrapped up in being an American (or whatever country you are a citizen of) to make such an abandonment the equivalent of suicide? I think that people on both the left and right really do identify with a country, red and blue America respectively. Republicans and Democrats see their voters as the "real Americans" and the other side as people who happen to live in the United States, who, unfortunately, enjoy the legal privileges of citizenship. This leads to both sides pretending to be patriotic while simply hoping that one day that other America will disappear, resolving the conflict.

As I have mentioned previously, unity has a tendency to turn into an intellectual trap where what is really meant is that everyone should agree to do things my way. Unity is only meaningful when it becomes an end in itself to the extent that we are willing to do things the other person's way. Supporting a unified America means that it is so important to you that America remains a united country that you are willing to surrender to whatever major political party (Republican or Democrat) that you hate more and give them complete control. By this standard, there are few genuine Americans.

A step in the right direction would be to simply divide the country into several regional countries. Let us admit that Americans in the Mid-West, the West Coast, the South, and New England do not obviously have more in common with each other than with people in Canada or Mexico. It is unreasonable to expect New Englanders to lay down their lives to protect the South's version of America but I expect them to be willing to die for New England. Divide the country and almost all of our political, social and cultural conflicts would be solved. California would have abortion and gay marriage and Mississippi would not. People would be free to be perfectly apathetic about politics because there would be no threat that a few thousand votes would send their country in a direction they would find that objectionable. I encourage readers to take a look at Colin Woodard's American Nations, which tells over the story of American history as if the United States were a collection of different countries making alliances and in competition with each other. If we really are a collection of different nation-states, then why not make it official and stop pretending that the United States is anything other than an attempted universal empire.

Defending the nation-state is often used as a reason to tighten borders and restrict immigration. Breaking the United States down into regional nation-states should actually make them more friendly to immigrants. For starters, it would be in the interest of all the new states to attract like-minded individuals from the rest of the former United States as this would allow for more self-consciously ideological states. So, for example, the South should want to attract religious conservatives from the newly independent California, who fear that they will be forced to bake gay wedding cakes. This will allow the South to grant smaller pockets of territory to those Southern liberals who cannot be bribed into leaving for California a state of their own. From there, it is only a small step for the South to want to market itself as the place of refuge for Christian conservatives from around the world. Since Christianity would be written into the Constitution of this new state as the official religion (hopefully with some degree of tolerance for non-Christians), only people comfortable pledging loyalty to such a state would want to come so there would be no threat of immigrants hostile to local values. On the contrary, immigrants could be embraced as the true embodiment of the nation, people who were already such Southerners that they felt compelled to move to the South. Such a state of affairs could further be strengthened by eliminating the welfare state. If there are few government-funded social services then no immigrant is going to want to come in order to take advantage of them.

This is in contrast to our present situation where Republicans and Democrats have different values, want different countries, and, therefore, desire different sets of immigrants. They both also desire to use the welfare state to support their particular tribes. Hence both immigration and welfare become weapons in the unnamed civil war ruining our political discourse.

To understand Hazony's blind spot for existing states, it may be useful to look at another set of eighteenth-century thinkers, besides Burke, that loom behind him, the authors of the Federalist Papers. For Alexander Hamilton and company, the chief alternative to the Constitution they had to argue against was dividing the new United States up into individual states or perhaps three regional groups. Their main argument against this position was that each faction would be trapped into pursuing its own particular interest as opposed to the general welfare of the country. The problem with this argument is that if there is no general consensus that could be agreed upon by separate countries then there can be no agreed-upon common good whatsoever.

In practice, the common good of the Federalist Papers was simply taking the welfare of Hamilton's New York Federalist bankers as the pretended welfare of the country. It turned out that Jefferson and his Republican farmers could be equally disingenuous. Despite his objections to federal power, once he became president, Jefferson was perfectly willing to engage in the Louisiana Purchase despite his lack of constitutional authority to do so. Furthermore, the Louisiana Purchase was not to the benefit of the entire country as it was detrimental to Federalist business interests, turning the American economy away from the Atlantic coast and trade with Europe. In the end, trying to maintain a unified country has meant that the United States has been racked by sectional differences, even leading to the Civil War.

Hazony supports the nation-state as an alternative to petty tribes and universal empires. The problem is that he fails to offer clear distinctions between the three. How big does a tribe have to become in order to be a nation-state and how much does ideology have to mix with culture for the nation-state to become an empire, particularly as in the case of both Judaism and the United States, ideology and culture are hopelessly intertwined? Hazony tries to paint the United States as an English Protestant nation that managed to assimilate a variety of other cultures. I fail to see America as a unified nation-state. It is simply too big and diverse. By contrast, I see Israel as the model nation-state as it offers something specific, a Jewish homeland, that cannot be matched by any other country. By contrast, what can the United States give me that Canada cannot? Hence, it makes sense for Jews to die for Israel in ways that it does not make sense for Americans to die for the United States. The solution is for the United States should be divided into parts that are culturally unified enough that everyone could get behind one particular vision that is worth sacrificing one's personal interests.

Scourged: The Price of Having a Character Who is Too Powerful

A few months ago, I used Brandon Sanderson's Second Law, which deals with the importance of non-omnipotent characters, as a means of talking about the Exodus narrative. Here I would like to further explore this with Kevin Hearne's Iron Druid series, one of my favorites over the past few years. It is about a two-thousand-year-old druid named Atticus O'Sullivan on the run from deities from numerous pantheons. As far as I am concerned (and the evidence of a tournament suggests that there is a large fan base that agrees with me on this), the real star of the series is Atticus' wolfhound side-kick, Oberon. This is in no small part due to Luke Daniels' incredible voice narration. Largely on the basis of this series, Daniels has become one of those narrators that, barring a romance novel, I will read a book regardless of the author just because he narrates it.

I would like to discuss one weakness of the series and its ramifications for its ending in Scourged. Even (and perhaps especially) for a fantasy series, Atticus is simply way too powerful. There is not a single character in the series that completely outclasses him in brute magical strength. Furthermore, he is immortal thanks to a secret mix of herbs a regularly consumes as well as a special relationship with a death goddess, the Morrigan. In addition to moral problems about Atticus' decisions as to whom he shares his herbs with, for all intents and purposes, Atticus being immortal makes him a god with all the narrative pitfalls that come with it.

For a story to have emotional power, the main characters need to change. A god, by its very nature, cannot change without destroying itself. The reason for this is that part of what makes change possible is confronting real stakes in which something important is at risk.  Gods are beings above the natural order of things including suffering and loss. Because of this, nothing that happens to a god can really have high stakes. A narrative event happening to a god as opposed to a mortal is the difference between playing a friendly game and being in the Hunger Games. Think of the Book of Job. What starts as a friendly wager between God and the Satan becomes a blood-soaked tragedy for a human being like Job. We can emotionally invest in a character like Job in part because there is actually something at stake for him. Will he or will he not get justice from God? It might be interesting to tell the story from Satan's perspective as he is playing a truly high-stakes game of baiting God. As for God himself, he is fundamentally boring in his utter incomprehensibility.

For a god to be interesting as a lead character, as opposed to serving as a personified force of nature, they have to face change in the form of the destruction of whatever context they made sense in, the true meaning of death for a God. The classic example of this is Norse mythology where the gods possess a tragic pathos precisely because they are fighting a battle they cannot win; their choices can only end in Ragnorak and their destruction. This is the essence of the Wotan character in Wagner's Ring Cycle. He is a god who is trying to cheat fate through his ability to make laws only to be undone by his own laws. The modern author who best comprehends this ethos is Neil Gaiman. Key to his Sandman series is the fact that Dream cannot avoid change. Ultimately, that means that he needs to die and his only real choice is the circumstance under which that happens. It is not a coincidence that in recent years, Gaiman has turned to directly retelling Norse mythology something that has been an undercurrent in almost everything he has written. What is particularly strange, is that Hearne is clearly a fan of Gaiman's and understands this principle. It is precisely for this reason, that he kills the Morrigan off in the middle of the series. That being said, he refuses to apply this same logic to Atticus.

What is ever at stake for Atticus? He is already two-thousand years old. Even his death would simply be his long-overdue fate as a human. For the series to work Atticus needed to embrace his godhood by sacrificing himself on the altar of facilitating change to a world that, even if it might be a better one, has no place for his kind of magic. Hearne, though, is too charmed by all of Atticus' power and his joking personality to write the kind of tragedy this character needed.

One never gets the sense that, over his long life as an immortal on the run, Atticus was ever any different from the wise-cracking twenty-something bookstore owner. Note that this would have been fine if Atticus had started the series off as precisely that without any backstory. Once we have trapped Atticus into his two-thousand-year-old self, it is difficult to plausibly get him to change. 

Going back to the very first book, Hearne had the option of killing off Atticus and making the series about Atticus' student, Granuaile. This would have had the advantage of giving Granuaile all of Atticus' challenges even, as a druid in training, she would remain distinctly ungodlike. This would not be any different than having Luke Skywalker or Harry Potter having to solve the problems of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Albus Dumbledore. Oberon would still be in the series and would now have a real purpose beyond comic-relief. In between trying to convince Granuaile to give him more sausages and tell him what a good hound he is, he could cough up some partial bits of wisdom remembered from his time with Atticus. Instead, Atticus is left as the main character of the series, despite the fact that he is too powerful to serve in that capacity. Granuaile is left to serve as Atticus' love-interest despite the fact that their power differential make them uninteresting together. This further wastes an opportunity as Atticus and the Morrigan would have made sense as a couple.

The critical turning point in the series was the third book. Much like Prisoner of Azkaban allowed J. K. Rowling to elevate Potter from a collection of clever jokes about school and mythology to a story with real stakes by having Harry make the mistake of keeping Peter Pettigrew alive with the consequences for the rest of the series, Hammered allowed Atticus to make the mistake that he spent the first two books being maneuvered into, leading an attack on Asgard to kill Thor. Having Atticus take on the consequences of getting one friend killed and causing another to eventually betray him in addition to setting Ragnorak in motion could have elevated the series to another level. Instead, Hearne treats this as an afterthought to training Granuaile and Atticus being his upbeat self despite the fact that this does not fit the story that needs to be told. This is similar to the Star Wars prequels in which George Lucas wanted to tell all kinds of stories except the sci-fi Paradise Lost/Faust sci-fi telling of the origins of Darth Vader that was needed.

The prequels trapped Lucas into telling a story he did not want to tell, the downfall of Anakin Skywalker, causing him to pursue it as an afterthought. Similarly here, Hearne cannot escape the need for the forces of evil, led by Loki. to break out and Atticus having to unite all the various pantheons in a last-ditch effort to save the Earth despite the fact that about the only thing the gods can agree upon is killing Atticus. This essentially is the plot of Scourged and Hearne has been building to it on the side when he has not been distracted by less important things.

The problem with Scouraged is that it has no sense that anything is really at stake. The only urgency here is to wrap the series up so that the author can move on to other things without angering his fan base. There is no sense that the good guys are outgunned and in need of something desperate and creative. On the contrary, one feels that Loki's forces are like the British soldiers of World War I about to cross the Somme after giving the Germans a ten-minute warning with the end of the artillery bombardment to get into position. Obviously, Loki stands about as much chance of winning as a James Bond villain, but the author owes it to the reader to allow for the suspension of disbelief that this is not the case.

Hearne clearly understands this problem that he has written himself into and tries belatedly to inject some consequences. Atticus loses an arm with the tattoos that bind him to the Earth and that serve as the source for most of his power. He ends up betraying Granuaile in order to keep her out of serious danger and she leaves him in the end. This allows for the Morrigan (a death goddess is never truly dead) to appear and offer Atticus the opportunity to join her in death. Atticus turns the offer down even as he acknowledges that there really is no drawback to someone like him choosing death. Even at the end, Hearne loves his super-powerful immortal Irish hippie too much to take him where he needs to go.

The Rhetoric of Critical Theory and Intersectionality: A Review of Authoring Autism

Melanie Yergeau is an old friend of mine from my Ohio State days (though she has since gone over to the School Up North). She was the driving force behind the founding of the Columbus chapter of ASAN. I would describe our relationship as she led, I followed; I spoke loudly, she got things done. (You can say that I was the Emerson to her Peabody.) 

She was a very quiet person, but that quietness masked a very sharp tongue that did not suffer fools lightly. When I got into trouble with the central ASAN office over my understanding of rights, she had my back. Of the two of us, she was the one to actually finish her doctorate and enter academia. (Just in case you were wondering which of us is the better dysfunctional autie.) So it was with great pleasure that I read her book, Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness.  

The book perfectly embodies Melanie's ability to get you to underestimate her soft-spoken nature until she knocks your teeth out. In a sense, Melanie offers a more sophisticated autism narrative designed to demonstrate that behind the peculiar autistic quirks lies a serious intellect. This personal narrative serves as a vehicle for self-reflection on the role of narrative in crafting personhood. The central thesis of the book is that autism is a form of rhetoric to express oneself instead of the non-rhetoric of the missing person stolen by autism. 

There is a lot to recommend in this book (besides for the fact that I am mentioned in the acknowledgments). Melanie's fighting personality comes across throughout and never allows the book to get boring. I cannot think of an academic work that has more cursing in it (and I have read books about the history and psychology of profanity). This is a rare example in which the profanity is appropriate and adds to the book. This is not some abstract analysis of autistic rhetoric, but a primal scream of someone who has lived with the specter of being shut down and denied a voice. It is only proper that the author's voice ring out uncensored for good and ill. This is not a rose-tinted view of autism, but an honest one, literal and metaphorical poop included.  

Melanie notes that many in the medical profession would dismiss what she has to say about autism on the grounds that her ability to communicate and write a book precludes her from "truly" understanding autism. Of course, if she was unable to write she would not be able to communicate her autie experience.  I particularly wish to call attention to Melanie's use of Zeno's Paradox as a means of describing the rhetorical trap we face. If you constantly gain fifty percent on someone, you will never catch up. Similarly, auties live in a world in which, no matter how hard they work, they are endlessly running to live up to neurotypical standards of behavior and can never catch up. The problem is that the neurotypical has been placed in a position of judgment in the first place, from which they can always find reasons why you do not measure up to their standards. 

I am reminded of something Trevor Noah brings up when talking about South African apartheid. One of the reasons why the white minority was able to rule was that there existed a wider population of coloreds, who were placed above the black majority. Whites held out the promise to coloreds that, if they met certain arbitrary bureaucratic standards, they too could become classified as white. Hence you had a colored population forever chasing acceptance for themselves while also keeping blacks down at of a fear of being tainted by them. 

The problem with Authoring Autism is that it feels the need to place itself within the structure of critical theory and intersectionality. Despite the fact that people on the autism spectrum face very real violence, Melanie often seems far more concerned with denouncing as violence any time other people have power over her. Even though our cause would be just even if we lived in a world that lacked other oppression, Melanie feels the need to attach autism to other causes like LGBT rights to the point that it often is not clear which one she is advocating for.

                                                                                                      

Obviously, it is reasonable to be both pro-autistic and LGBT rights. That being said, they are distinct and any attempt to confuse the two is not only intellectually dishonest but likely to cause harm to both sides. Consider the example of libertarianism. I am an autie libertarian. There are a number of us out there and there is certainly a lot of overlap between the two. That being said, they are not the same. Furthermore, it is inevitable that a conflict of interest will arise and one will have to choose between the two. Even when I choose to be a libertarian over being an autie, I have the intellectual honesty to acknowledge what I am doing. Even here, I benefit the cause of autism by not writing myself a blank check to piss on autistics and pretending I was doing otherwise.   

Much of the book is an attack on ABA, which is perfectly legitimate. The practice can easily cross the line into physical abuse. Such abuse is facilitated by an attitude that delegitimizes the personal lives of autistics. If you view people on the spectrum as suffering something akin to being dead then it logically follows that any attempt to “cure” them, no matter how extreme, is acceptable. One can imagine even agreeing to play Russian roulette with autistic lives; either we cure them or they die, which would still be better for everyone involved.  

For some strange reason, Melanie seems intent on connecting ABA to gay conversion therapy programs. While I am inclined to see gay conversion as the more problematic of the two, it almost seems as if the real crime committed by the founders of ABA, in Melanie’s eyes, was supporting gay conversion therapy. Furthermore, whether it is ABA or gay conversion, Melanie seems less concerned with physical abuse than with the very notion of people in power making judgments about those in their care.  

This need to declare autism professionals guilty of every non-autism related charge leads to some comically absurd conclusions, such as that autism organizations are racist. According to Melanie: "Even a cursory glance at the boards of major autism advocacy organizations reveals white supremacy at work." (158) The reason for this is that they are "surprisingly white." For example, in 2013, Autism Speaks had twenty-five white men and only one person of color on its board. As someone who dislikes Autism Speaks greatly and has repeatedly denounced racism on this blog, complaining about the racial makeup of their board seems beside the point. 

A lack of diversity on a board is a problem as it strongly suggests a lack of openness to alternative points of view. This marks an important step on the road to actual racism, but in of itself is not racism. If you wish to say that this is a symptom not of white supremacists but of a white supremacist society, you may be right. That being said, it makes everyone, from me to Melanie, racists and renders the term useless in the fight against actual racists.

Efforts should be made to make autism organization boards more diverse, but that is hardly a top priority. If Autism Speaks made a serious effort to recruit more minorities, I would not see them as any less dangerous. Quite the contrary, as the Me Too movement has demonstrated, a general support for progressive causes can coexist and even facilitate highly abusive behavior against women. Similarly, if Autism Speaks were to unveil a front office made entirely of black Muslim lesbians, I would suspect that they were trying to create some ideological cover for themselves in order to blatantly call for eugenic policies against autistics.   

If we are going to be accusing autism professionals of heteronormative thinking and downright white supremacy, it is only reasonable to also throw in … (can you guess it?) neo-liberalism. Thus, we learn:

… cognitive rhetorics quantify both behavior and free will and gain their rhetorical traction through neoliberalism. The productive subject reigns, and mental hygiene is a paragon of productivity. What neuroplasticity lends to capitalism are rhetorics of improvability and calculability. … under neoliberalism, we will always need more of these things, and it is our individual responsibility to acquire them. (130)

I confess to being uncertain what this passage even means. I think it has something to do with condemning anyone analyzing society from a rationalist perspective and who believes in individual self-improvement.

Neoliberalism is a term that, in practice, can mean anyone from Donald Trump to Ta-Nehisi Coates, anyone not Prof. Cornel West. (I am sure, though, that someone, at some point, has accused West of being a neoliberal. Who else, but a secret neoliberal, would so recklessly accuse others of being neoliberals?) There is a certain irony to this. In a book premised on the notion that people have a right to their own discourse and not to be defined by others, a word like neoliberalism is used even though epitomizes not allowing people to define themselves. Neoliberalism is not a word people use for themselves.  It is an epithet used to define other people with little sense of what they might actually believe. Let us be charitable and assume that Melanie was simply mentioning how other people have attacked neoliberalism because she needed to cross off neoliberalism from some checklist.

This leads me to a more personal complaint. Melanie mentions an incident with the autism book club we both were involved in that used to meet at the Barnes and Noble on High St., near the OSU campus. The members were a mixture of people on the spectrum, mostly boys in their late teens and early twenties, and people involved with autism social work. There was a vote between Catch-22 and the Curious Incident of the Dog at Midnight. Incident of the Dog won largely because the non-autistics in the group voted for it. From Melanie's perspective, it was not just that the book was badly written or that it failed to accurately portray autism, the book itself was oppressive. The fact that non-autistics dared to vote at all was bad enough, but they used their vote to "make" us read this book. 

I confess to not remembering the vote. I cannot recall what book I voted for. I do remember reading Incident of the Dog and that we later read Catch-22. Let me state for the record that I did not like Catch-22 and thought it was over-rated. I was ok with Incident of the Dog largely because, having previously read it, I had no large hope invested in it. It was a humorous book, but hardly the book I would have recommended to people trying to understand what it means to be on the spectrum. My teenage self had little in common with Christopher and the same could be said for the other teenage boys in the group. 

The non-autistics were in the book club to better their understanding of autism and one of the virtues of the club was that it allowed them to interact with us in a non-hierarchical manner as opposed to a more professional setting. I don't think anyone was trying to force us to think of autism in any particular way. It was only reasonable for them to be curious how autistics would view what had, by then, become a classic novel on the topic. Let me state for the record that I am very grateful to Dr. Renee Devlin, Hillary Knapp Spears, and the others who took part in the club over the years. I find their implicit treatment here to be unfair and downright insulting. 

I believe that autistics have a voice and are capable of rhetoric. For that voice to be heard, it is necessary to take control of the autism narrative away from parents and professionals, even well-meaning ones. Melanie is a powerful force on this front and I look forward to reading her future work. That being said, Authoring Autism is a cautionary tale of how critical theory and intersectionality can taint even a noble cause. I look forward to the day when auties can engage in their own rhetoric, unfettered by the boxes that others, whether parents, professionals, or modern liberalism, wish to place us in.  

Kosher Jesus' Lack of Historical Context (Part IV)

(Part I, II, III)

To turn to Rabbi Boteach's treatment of Christianity. Considering that this is a book that is about reconciling Jews and Christians, one would expect Rabbi Boteach to take a positive view of Jewish-Christian relations. And there is much within the Christian tradition to support such a view from Augustine's witness doctrine to the active philo-Semitism of early modern Protestant millenarians. This is not to let Christianity Pontius Pilate itself from numerous crimes against Jews, but there is certainly room, particularly for American Jews who have benefited so greatly from American Christian society, to be charitable to Christianity and see its crimes as crimes of Christians instead of Christianity. The account that Rabbi Boteach delivers is absolutely crude, in a sense even worse than his treatment of the Romans. For example, he calls Augustine an anti-Semite. Calling John Chrysostom an anti-Semite is one thing as would calling the later writings of Martin Luther, but to accuse Augustine of anti-Semitism is to render the very term meaningless. By this logic any Christian who ever believed that Judaism is a historical relic and that Jews are better off simply converting to Christianity is an anti-Semite. That would render almost all Christians anti-Semites and leave any Christians not interested in making radical changes to his theology no reason to work with us. We would also be left with no word to describe those with a psychological obsession with Jews as incarnations of evil and wish to cause them physical harm.

If we are to accept Rabbi Boteach's narrative of Jewish-Christian relations, it all started with a misunderstanding over who killed Jesus. Early Christians for political reasons decided to blame the Jews instead of the Romans. Christians soon came to believe their own nonsense and for nearly two thousand years, before Vatican II and the publication of Kosher Jesus, have unfortunately hated and murdered Jews. Rabbi Boteach does not paint a clear picture of this history, something about Crusades, pogroms, and Pope Pious XII working arm and arm with Hitler to carry out the Holocaust. It is like Rabbi Boteach is giving a summary of Rabbi Joshua Trachtenberg's Devil and the Jews, possibly through vague recollections of anti-Christian polemics heard in yeshiva, without any of the nuance, which Trachtenberg did not have much of in the first place.

Now that the misunderstanding has been clarified, thanks to Rabbi Boteach's brilliant efforts, Jews and Christians can finally come together in the recognition of their common heritage. Jews should forgive Evangelical Christians because they support Israel and uphold traditional values in American society. What Rabbi Boteach likes about Evangelical Christians' efforts to uphold traditional values is unclear, because he also attacks them for causing divisiveness and for focusing too much attention on gay marriage. So it is mainly for taking right-wing positions on Israel I guess. Catholics are nice too mainly because, unlike Rabbi Boteach's Evangelical friends, they are not trying to convert us these days, passed Vatican II and the two recent popes have visited synagogues. Of the greatest importance, Rabbi Boteach has personally met with Pope Benedict XVI, shaken hands with him, and can assure us that he is a really nice guy.                

I try to place myself in the place of Rabbi Boteach's assumed audience, Christians, and picture how I would react to this book if I were a Christian. I would be offended by the mere fact that someone from a different group has the nerve to tell me what to think about issues critical to my faith, attacks what I believe in ways that sound suspiciously like the pot calling the kettle black, and is dishonest enough to deny that he is even doing any of this. And this would be before I actually opened the book. At which point I would add that he has the hypocrisy to accuse me of blaming him for killing my Lord and the same time as he blames me for killing his grandparents. The fig leaf about not blaming people for the sins of their parents would not count for much as Rabbi Boteach himself clearly does not believe it as demonstrated by his obsessive insistence that Jews (the real ones and not the fake traitorous Jews, who obviously have no Jewish descendants alive today) did not kill Jesus. I would come away thinking that Jews are arrogant, self-righteous, think that the entire world runs around them and that only their interests matter. In other words what Aspergers are routinely accused of applied to form a mild anti-Semitic neurosis.

What was Rabbi Boteach thinking when he wrote this book? From his presentation, it is clear that he is an excellent public speaker and would make for an effective politician. Thinking of him as an entertainer with political ambitions, I think, explains a lot. He is not running for public office, (though he does want to be Chief Rabbi of England) but as the rabbi for Christians. In this, it is only a relatively minor annoyance that the Jewish community has yet to accept him in this role just as long as non-Jews think that he represents Judaism or at least see him as representing what Judaism should be. It says something that Rabbi Boteach brags not just of meeting the pope, but of being good friends with Christian missionaries and of having spoken at missionary training schools. Tuvia Singer at least has to make up his Christian alter-ego to present Christian missionary tactics to a Jewish audience. The fact that Rabbi Boteach wrote a book about Jesus for Christians instead of Jews also says a lot. Add to it the almost messianic tone in which he writes about this book as if he expects that this one book will change Jewish-Christian relations forever. As a politician, Rabbi Boteach does not really think in terms of ideological positions to be supported, but in personal relationships to be maintained. Ideology is a role to play in order to get on stage. The point is to get on the public stage and secure the best possible position and ideology must not be allowed to get in the way. Now that Rabbi Boteach has his public role as the rabbi he is free to use his personal charisma to make as many friendships and gain as much influence as possible even from the people he is supposed to be in opposition to.

Reading Kosher Jesus as a politician's speech explains why Rabbi Boteach thinks he can get away with offending both Jewish and Christian audiences. He had to know that Jews would be offended by the concept so he wrote a book that is in practice very Jewish in the hope that any Jewish readers would be assured of whose side he was on. On the other hand, he hoped that Christians would just focus on the premise of a rabbi who likes Jesus. Like any good politician, Rabbi Boteach works in generalities in the hopes that each part of his audience will only hear the part they would already be inclined to hear. Keeping things as shallow as possible is critical because it hinders anyone from taking him seriously intellectually and criticizing him. How can you criticize ideas that are not really there? It is the sentiments that count anyway and the beauty of sentiments is that, unlike ideas, they can contradict each other without there being a problem.

Rabbi Boteach could have written a valuable book, making the case to Jews to rethink Jesus and by extension their Christian neighbors. To defend himself he could put in something above the grade school level of scholarship that he did and presented himself as just a humble representative of a tradition. Instead, Rabbi Boteach needed to be the rabbi for Christians, something unique and incredible to match his inner vision of himself; in essence, he needed to be his own Kosher Jesus.   
     

My Review of Catholic Pirates and Greek Merchants

Ehistory already has my review of Molly Greene's Catholic Pirates and Greek Merchants up on its site even though it is officially part of its June edition so go check it out.

Wandering Through Fantasy Worlds with Kvothe and Harry Potter (Part II)

(Part I)

This focus on character and world-building leads, in the cases of both Harry Potter and Kingkiller, to something that would in most writers be considered a fatal flaw, but which J. K. Rowling and Patrick Rothfuss manage to survive even if at times by the skin of their teeth, the tendency to abandon plot in favor of character and world exploration. Both of these series do have plots centered around the defeat of antagonists, Harry Potter has Lord Voldemort and Kvothe has the Chandrian, a group so mysterious that they hardly appear even in legend and who murdered his parents just for attempting to write a song about them. That being said the reader quickly realizes that these plots are only incidental to these series, a prop to be brought out when the characters need something to react to or to offer an opportunity for further world exploration.

Harry Potter is not really about Harry's hero quest arc to defeat Lord Voldemort; it is about Harry at Hogwarts with Ron Hermione, dodging Draco Malfoy and Severus Snape, with clever back and forth dialogue and the existence of magic to provide a canvas for Rowling's vivid use of language. Now even Rowling is not talented enough to keep a book afloat with just clever writing so by the end of each book she brings out some larger element of danger and ties it to this Lord Voldemort character, who serves to explain why Harry was first placed with his relatives and why he is the continued subject of the mostly unwanted attention that keeps him interesting. Now part of Rowling's genius is that she weaves her plot throughout the rest of the book, turning much of what the reader thought was just her meandering through the story into critical plot points. This also places Harry Potter among those rare books that need to be read several times to properly be appreciated. Furthermore, starting with Goblet of Fire, Rowling abandoned the stand-alone year at Hogwarts adventure format of the first three books, which had served her so well, in favor of a more focused narrative surrounding the return of Lord Voldemort to a physical body. This part of the series also marked the point in which Rowling escaped the bounds of any meaningful editorial control, causing the books to balloon in size and leading to more character meandering. Not that I ever complained about this as Rowling is one of the rare writers who can hold you just with their writing, regardless of content.

Rothfuss seems to be following a similar path. Name of the Wind was only incidentally about Kvothe's quest to learn the truth about the Chandrian and really about Kvothe the poor scholar and musician trying to keep body and soul together as well as make tuition payments to stay in school, a task made almost impossibly difficult due to the spiteful animosity of Ambrose Jakis. Reading Rothfuss, I realize that Rowling missed a valuable opportunity by simply handing Harry a massive fortune at the beginning of the series, whose origins she never bothered to explain, taking care of Harry's finances so he never had to worry about tuition. Forcing Kvothe to struggle to meet his finances allowed for plot tension, will Kvothe find the money or won't he, without having to resort to placing Kvothe in constant mortal danger, a refreshing change of pace for a fantasy novel. Kvothe needing money also makes way for my favorite character in the series, besides Kvothe, Devi. To put it bluntly, she is a loan shark, who demands that Kvothe hand over drops of his blood as security. She is also really charming and forms a delightful friendship with Kvothe, albeit one underlined by fifty percent interest rates and threats of bodily harm if he ever reneges.

In waiting four years for the second book, Wise Man's Fear, I took it as a given that now with this book the story would begin in earnest. I expected Kvothe to be thrown out at the very beginning of the book, allowing him to finally pursue the Chandrian. The first several hundred pages are more of the first book, Kvothe trying to get money and dodging Jakis. Not a bad thing in of itself as Rothfuss, like Rowling, is fun to read just for his prose. Finally, Kvothe is forced to take time off from school and takes the opportunity to do some traveling. This leads to Kvothe being placed in a new setting, but I was almost disappointed by the fact that Rothfuss simply has Kvothe do more of being Kvothe instead of actually advancing the story.

Besides for the fact that Rothfuss is still a fun writer even when meandering, what kept me in the book was the strong suspicion that Rothfuss was weaving a giant trap for Kvothe and that things were not as pointless as they seemed. This was confirmed nearly three-quarters into this thousand-page novel when Kvothe meets a creature called the Cthaeh, who informs him that he had already met one of the Chandrian. Now the Cthaeh, despite his small part, has to be one of the most interesting villains conceptually. He is imprisoned in a tree due to the fact that he can perfectly foresee the future and can say the exact words to any person who visits him that will cause them to do the most harm. Furthermore, since the Cthaeh knows every future conversation that the person will ever have, he can calculate how that person's words will affect every other person he will ever talk to and so on and so forth until, in theory at least, the Cthaeh has the power to destroy the entire world with just one conversation.

It is hard to actually criticize a book that held my attention for over a thousand pages, but I must admit that I liked Name of the Wind better. Wise Man's Fear for too much of the book felt like it was wandering around when I wanted things to actually happen. I eagerly await the final book in the series to see how things will turn out. Rowling did not disappoint and I have every bit of faith in Rothfuss that he can match her.



                    

Wandering through Fantasy Worlds with Kvothe and Harry Potter (Part I)

If I were to describe Patrick Rothfuss' Kingkiller Chronicles series in one sentence it would be that it is Harry Potter's more mature and sophisticated sibling, who, instead of going to grade school to study magic, went to college. In a similar vein, my reaction to watching the first season of Heroes (the only one worth watching) was that it was the younger smarter sibling of the X-Men, who went of to university and got into heroin. (In the case of Heroes there actually is a character whose superpower is to be able to see and paint the future while high.) As with Harry Potter, Kingkiller is about a teenage orphan, Kvothe, whose parents were murdered off by dark powers, studying magic. As with J. K. Rowling, Rothfuss' chief strengths as a writer are his ability to create interesting characters, backed by witty dialogue and a world for us to explore through the eyes of these characters.

What Rothfuss has over Rowling is that, like Tolkien, he offers the impression of depth to his world; that it is not just a prop that will collapse if touched. Rowling's wizarding world, in contrast, while utterly fascinating as a concept striking deep into the collective subconsciousness of readers (I cannot think of another fantasy world that I so desperately wanted to be real), remains an immensely clever joke. Even by the end of the series one does not get the sense that Rowling ever bothered to work out the mechanics and limitations of her magical system and the inner workings of her wizarding society. Particularly the question of why wizards, even muggle-loving ones like Arthur Weasley, live in secret outside of general society and in ignorance of it. (See "Yeshiva Hogwarts.") One suspects that this is the reason why Rowling kept her story so narrowly focused on Harry, only allowing us to experience the wizarding world from Harry's limited perspective and kept Harry's own experience of the wizarding world to specific set pieces, like the Weasley home, Diagon Alley, and Hogwarts. Allowing Harry broader range would have forced her to take her own wizarding world seriously and not just as a prop.  Rothfuss, in contrast, treats his magic with a level of sophistication surpassing the "science" of most science fiction. As Tolkien managed to invent several fully functional languages for Lord of the Rings that people can study today, one suspects that Rothfuss would, if pressed, be able to present a plausibly sounding "scientific" lecture on his magic. The same goes for his world's various races, religions, countries, and politics.

Rothfuss' other major advantage over Rowling is in creating, in Kvothe, a fully flesh and blood lead character the likes of which exist in few other works of fantasy. With Harry Potter, the interest is always the world and characters around him. Harry serves as a means to explore Hogwarts and characters like Ron, Hermione, Hagrid, Dumbledore, Sirius, and Lupin, all of whom are far more interesting than Harry in of himself. Harry starts off the series as a star-struck modern-day version of T. H. White's young King Arthur, Wart, before evolving into a moody teenager. It is only in Deathly Hallows, as Harry contemplates the necessity of his death to defeat Voldemort, that Harry steps in as a worthy protagonist in his own right. (It is for this reason that, whether or not Deathly Hallows is the best book in the series, it is certainly the best written of the series and the one in which Rowling stepped into her own as a mature writer.) One suspects that this is why Rowling never allowed Harry to exist on his own but always has him interacting with other characters, even going so far as to make Harry's chief strength his connection to his friends as opposed to Voldemort who is completely self-contained. (See "Adolescent Military Genius.") Kvothe, in contrast, is the star attraction, not just a cipher through which to tell a story. Rothfuss does not just focus his narrative on Kvothe, he tells almost his entire story from inside Kvothe's head. One almost gets the sense that Rothfuss could have eliminated his entire world, leaving Kvothe floating in ether, and still hold on to the reader's attention.

This places Kingkiller as one of those rare fantasy series that is only incidentally about fantasy. In much the same way that Orson Scott Card novels are about characters and relationships and only incidentally take place in a science-fiction universe, Rothfuss has one utterly compelling character, Kvothe, and a world for Kvothe to operate in. The fact that this world is a beautifully rendered fantasy world only serves to establish Rothfuss as one of the greatest writers of this generation of any genre. 

(To be continued ...)                

The Yeshiva World on Trial: Some Thoughts on the Search Committee

I just finished reading Rabbi Marc Angel’s short novel, the Search Committee, which Chaviva was kind enough to send to me. This was certainly not a great novel, though it was entertaining and I think it could serve as a good conversation starter. I, therefore, recommend it and wish to say a few things about it. This is a rare creation, a Modern Orthodox novel. (Naomi Ragen and Michael Schweitzer would be other examples of this genre.) One of the weaknesses of the Modern Orthodox world is that it has not been diligent in putting out Modern Orthodox books, whether fiction or non-fiction. Forget about the secular world, this puts us at a disadvantage when it comes to Haredim, who have not held back from putting out works pushing for their brand of Judaism.

The premise of the Search Committee is a board of trustees looking to appoint the next Rosh Yeshiva (head) of the aptly named Yeshivas Lita. Lita is the colloquial term for Lithuania and this yeshiva is meant as a representative of the Ashkenazi Lithuanian Yeshiva tradition transplanted onto American soil. The two candidates are Rav Shimshon Grossman and Rav David Mercado. The two represent different ideological and sociological sides. Rav Grossman is the son of the previous Rosh Yeshiva, he was born into the Lithuanian system, believes the job is his almost by divine right, and is a staunch conservative, rejecting all innovations. Rav Mercado is an outsider; he comes from a traditional background but did not start learning Talmud until he was in college. Furthermore, he is not Ashkenazi at all but descended from Turkish Sephardim. While he is also a product of the Yeshivas Lita and has great respect for the previous Rosh Yeshiva, he sees weaknesses in the system and the need for certain changes, particularly in terms of openness to the outside world and secular subjects. (He reminded me of Michael Makovi minus the radical politics.)

In truth, the book, despite its heading, is less a novel than a philosophical dialogue in the tradition of Judah ha-Levi’s Kuzari. In this case, though, Rabbi Angel has the characters speak, not to each other, but to the silent members of the board, presumably the reader. The book offers a lineup of pairs of speakers in favor of the two candidates. First, there are the candidates themselves, followed by their wives, two rabbis in the yeshiva, two students, and finally two donors. As with most philosophical dialogues, the author’s position is never in doubt. This is Rabbi Angel’s polemic, not only against Haredim but also, as a Sephardi, against the Ashkenazi culture that has come to dominate Orthodox Judaism. I am, of course, in complete sympathy with Rabbi Angel’s position. Even if my family are Ashkenazi Jews from Hungary and Lithuania, my sympathies are with Sephardim. I even have a good excuse for this. The person I am named after, my great-great-grandfather Reb Benzion Shapiro, was an Ashkenazi who joined up with the Sephardi community in Jerusalem in the early twentieth century and served as a translator and reader for one of the leading Sephardi kabbalists.

The speeches of Rav Grossman and his wife are complete satire. They are entertaining to read, but I hold out the probably naïve belief that no Haredi rabbi would come out and speak to a board the way that they do. Of course, following the Poe Law, one can never satirize religious fundamentalists since there is going to be someone in a position of power and influence who actually fits the joke. Whether or not there are some Haredi rabbis who secretly would love the chance to do what Rav Grossman does is a separate issue. The one empathetic pro-Rav Grossman character is the donor, Clyde Robinson, who speaks powerfully about his father’s guilt over having his store open on the Sabbath. This, though, is once again an opportunity for Rabbi Angel to stick it to the Haredi world as, ironically, Mr. Robinson is not observant and all of his children are intermarried. He simply funds the yeshiva as a means of assuaging his own guilt as to not leading an observant life.

In contrast, the Mercado side gives Rabbi Angel the chance to preach his own worldview and he gives his speeches to characters that are all eminently likable. Rav Mercado is followed by his wife, who is a Greek Orthodox convert to Judaism, with a sappy but cute family story. There is also the speech by their donor, Esther Neuhaus, a diamond dealer from a German Jewish background, the one branch of Ashkenazic Jewry that Rabbi Angel admires. She challenges the yeshiva with the economic facts on the ground as to how they intend to continue to support themselves, particularly if follow Rav Grossman’s lead.

Unlike most dialogues, Rabbi Angel allows the opposition to win and has the board appoint Rav Grossman. This allows Rabbi Angel to have more fun with his character as Rav Grossman proceeds to fire not only Rav Mercado, but the entire board as well for daring to think they had any role to play in the selection at all. Rav Mercado gets to kindly tell the board that they made their bed and are free to lie in it and that in the meantime he and his wife are taking their kids to Turkey to see the island where their ancestors lived and that he was planning on moving to Jerusalem to start his own yeshiva.

I think this book would make a very good Jewish day school assembly project. We could have the students in the audience as the teachers, playing the various roles, come up and present their pieces. Each presenter would end by taking questions from the audience. At the end, the students would get to play the role of the search committee and cast their votes. For this to work in any meaningful way, though, we would need to make the Grossman side at least vaguely plausible.

Patience with Frank Schaeffer

In discussing Frank Schaeffer’s Crazy for God, James Pate suggested that I would be interested in Schaeffer’s upcoming book Patience with God: Faith for People Who Don’t Like Religion {or Atheism}, saying: “…it addresses people who aren't satisfied with fundamentalism or atheism. That kind of reminds me of what the top of your blog says: seeking a third path, other than secularism and religious fundamentalism.” I just got the book and read it over last night and this morning. I sincerely wished to like this book, since I see Schaeffer as being one of the people on “my” side. That being said, I found myself disappointed with the book as a whole, though there were parts that I found worthwhile. The fatal weakness of the book is that it lacks much in the way of a sustained argument. Rather it is a running meditation, one that fails to say anything that has not been said and better said in other places. This would not be considered a fault at all if this was a series of blog posts. If this was a blog I could just take it as is, the rambling chaff of an intelligent person written on the fly, which contains numerous valuable nuggets. I would like to pay my respects to those specific parts of the book worthy of consideration while acknowledging the larger failings.

The book opens with a beautiful prologue about Schaeffer feeling the need to pray upon holding his grandchild and a sober summation of the danger of our ghettoized media culture where everyone has created their own news and reality filters. The book itself is divided into two sections. The first part, containing the central thesis of the book, confronts both the New Atheists and Christian Fundamentalists, who Schaeffer sees as having a lot more in common with each other than they themselves would wish to admit. In particular, Schaeffer goes after Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens, on the atheist front, and Rick Warren and the authors of the Left Behind series, Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye, on the fundamentalist front. The chapters on atheism are the weaker ones. They certainly fail to match up to Terry Eagleton’s Ditchkins attack. Even here, Schaeffer has his moments. I particularly liked his comparison of Dawkins selling Scarlet A Letter pins to his mother’s Gospel Walnuts, which, much to Frank’s embarrassment, she used to start witnessing conversations with random strangers. “So Dawkins, it turns out, is my mother, circa 1959! Hi Mom!” (pg. 30) This illustrates an important thing about Schaeffer; he is strongest when talking about his personal life and experiences. There is also something to be said for Schaeffer’s discussion of Dennett, mainly because Schaeffer is actually quite positive about certain elements of Dennett’s thought even if he comes to different conclusions.

Patience takes an upward swing when Schaeffer turns to fundamentalism. Again, I think this is because Schaeffer is one of those writers who is best when there is something personal at stake. One may find it interesting that Schaeffer would target someone like Warren, who has risen to fame largely on his reputation for being a more “liberal,” social-action evangelical preacher. Schaeffer's main objection to Warren is that he sees Warren as an example of one of the principle weaknesses of the entire Protestant legacy, its lack of a tradition and the need, in the absence of such a tradition, to create larger than life cult-figures to stand in its place. This argument is one of Schaeffer’s valuable intellectual points and it is a pity that he, in both Patience and Crazy for God, does not delve more deeply into this issue. I would love to see Schaeffer do a book just on this point. It would make it even better if he did more to place this attack on Protestantism in the context of an explicitly Eastern Orthodox position. I suspect that Schaeffer fears, and probably rightfully so, that such a book would fail to reach a general audience. My thinking is that, in this religious climate, the most important thing for American Christians to see is a serious and vigorous Christianity, any Christianity, that is not Evangelicalism. Similarly, on my particular front of the religion wars, one of the key things to defeating Haredism is merely to show that such a thing as a serious non-Haredi Judaism even exists.

I loved the fact that Schaeffer discusses C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien and the fact that the same Christian colleges that adore them would never put up with their drinking and their theology. I must object, though, to Schaeffer’s categorization of Lewis as someone who “ruined what could have been a decent literary career by slavishly working Christian propaganda into his ‘novels,’ especially once he began to cater to the evangelical/fundamentalist subculture after he became a star.” (pg. 102-103) Lewis, to the end of his life, was a professor of literature, who incidentally wrote books on Christian apologetics and one of the best-selling series children’s books of all time. Lewis never tried to make a living from being a “star” on the Christian circuit. Even Lewis’ most propagandistic novels, the Chronicles of Narnia, are filled with elements from pagan mythology. Lewis, long after he became a "Christian star," wrote Till We Have Faces, a reworking of the Cupid and Psyche myth that remained explicitly pagan, and a Grief Observed, in which he muses over whether God is a cosmic sadist, torturing us for his own amusement. One of Lewis’ strengths was that he did not sell out; he was willing to put people out of their comfort zone. As a Tolkien fan, I will treasure Schaeffer’s description of one of his school teachers, Bubble:

Having Bubble for a master was something like having Gollum for a teacher. Only Bubble didn’t disgust us by gnawing raw fish. Rather, he revolted and riveted us by snorting huge quantities of filthy, face-staining snuff, he never bathed, and he smelled oddly of pepper and was clearly drunk at times, although he did know a lot about music and made science interesting. (pg. 132)

Schaeffer’s attack on LeHaye and Jenkins also deserves mention. Schaeffer remarks:

If I had to choose companions to take my chances with in a lifeboat, and the choice boiled down to picking Tim LaHaye, Jerry Jenkins, or Christopher Hitchens, I’d pick Hitchens in a heartbeat. At least he wouldn’t try to sink our boat so that Jesus would come back sooner. He might even bring along a case of wine. (pg. 109)

Schaeffer’s primary concern with LaHaye and Jenkins, though he knows them both and personally finds them to be decent people, is that they feed a radical element that could easily turn to violence in order to bring their particular version of the end about. Schaeffer again makes an important point about the religious right and its failings.

The words left behind are ironically what the books are about, but not in the way their authors intended. The evangelical/fundamentalists, from their crudest egocentric celebrities to their “intellectuals” touring college campuses trying to make evangelicalism respectable, have been left behind by modernity. They won’t change their literalistic anti-science, anti-education, anti-everything superstitions, so now they nurse a deep grievance against “the world.” (pg. 113-114)

The second half of Patience is largely a rehash of material from Crazy for God, with some more theology thrown in. At this point, it is still interesting to hear Schaeffer talk about his life, even if it is beginning to wear a little thin. This takes time away from talking about belief. All the pity, because it is precisely this element that could have used more elaboration. It is fair enough to say that belief is something that goes beyond reason, but if one is going to go this route one needs to make all the greater effort for clarity and, dare I say it, “rationality” in one’s writing in order to avoid the obvious counter-argument that one has lost the argument and is now trying to cover up that fact by hiding behind mystery. Every chapter of Patience is headed by a quotation from Soren Kierkegaard, the Christian thinker who best exemplifies this notion of faith as a leap into the absurd. It is unfortunate that Schaeffer did not make the effort to integrate Kierkegaard more into the book itself.

For those looking to understand how Kierkegaard can be made relevant to modern religious issues, Abraham Heschel wrote a book comparing Kierkegaard and Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk called a Passion for Truth. I would particularly recommend this book to readers of this blog. It is about analyzing a type of religious “fundamentalism” that instead of walking lock stock and barrel behind the establishment, attacks and ultimately rejects the religious establishment precisely because the establishment fails to live up to the true standards of the faith. This is the sort of thinking that tells you that anyone sporting clothing that costs thousands of dollars in a world in which children are starving is not a real Christian regardless of how “orthodox” the gospel he preaches sounds. On the topic of Jewish thinkers influenced by Kierkegaard, another person who comes to mind is Rabbi Josef Soloveitchik. I first learned about Kierkegaard from reading Rabbi Soloveitchik’s Lonely Man of Faith which discusses Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling.

Probably the greatest flaw in the book is the fact that it lacks any footnotes or even an index. For example, I would be interested in finding out Schaeffer’s source for Baruch Spinoza (yes Schaeffer refers to him as Baruch and not Benedict) being offered one thousand florins to remain within the Jewish community. Such a story smacks of legend to me. This indicates a book that was rushed to print without much thought or effort. In the end, in judging this book, I feel like I am in the position of a teacher being handed a B paper by a talented student, whom the teacher knows could have done an A paper if only he had put in the effort. My inclination would be to hand the paper back and say: “Please go back and write the paper that I know you can.” Mr. Schaeffer, you have written a mediocre book. From most people, I would accept this, but I know you can do better. You have the talent to write the sort of defense of non-fundamentalist religious beliefs that needs to be written. Could you please go back and write that book!

Mary Beard - The Politics of Reviewing

Today Ohio State was privileged to host Dr. Mary Beard who spoke on some of the practical issues of getting reviewed and writing them, both issues that are of great practical concern to me. I must say that she was an absolute gem both as a speaker and as a human being. Here are my notes for the lecture. As always any mistakes are mine. Dr. Beard has actually posted a piece on her stay in Columbus including a brief overview of this lecture. She even refers to the blog question I asked. So see here for that.

Dr. Beard is a professor of classics at the University of Cambridge in England and one of the pioneering women in the field of classics. She is also the editor of the classics section the Times Literary section (TLS) so she is on both sides of the reviewing fence. She both reviews and gets reviewed.

Any interesting book is bound to get some bad reviews so it should worry a person if they do not get any bad reviews. To start with the actual process, which is the same for any mid-range literary broadsheet, no one looks at a reviewer closer than the author. Most people just glance at the beginning and maybe the end. Reviews have minimal impact on sales. Most of the impact is when you have a reasonably popular book and you get a series of popular reviews. The important thing is to get reviewed, not whether the book gets good reviews or not. Never write a review that you are not prepared to say in front of the author. People do not mind you disagreeing with them as long as you are not nasty. This is not in the financial interests of TLS but never respond to a bad review. It just draws attention to it. If need be, have a friend respond.

How to get a review in TLS? It comes out every week and has a circulation of forty thousand, which translates into a readership of at least one hundred thousand. Rupert Murdoch owns TLS but, as naïve as this sounds, there is no direct interference. Likely it serves him as a useful cover when he gets accused of downgrading things. Books come in boxes and get put down by some wage slave. Most things reviewed get sent by the publishers. It helps if TLS occasionally does a foreign, non-English, book every so often so those they seek out. There are more politics and favoritism than one would like to hear. There are some big names that automatically get reviewed. There is probably no person in the classics who gets that status. It helps if you can match up a book with a reviewer who can write an interesting review of it. You sometimes need some boring reviews, though. In the end, though, you do need to sell. There is bad luck but there is not much that is sinister. One should not send a book to a reviewer whose view on the book you can already predict. Beard once nearly sent a book to a reviewer who had just walked off with the author’s husband. One should try to get a reviewer slightly out of his main area of expertise. She likes to get a mix of views from reviewers. Beard may not agree with Victor Davis Hanson’s politics but he writes a good review. One has a one in forty to a one in fifty chance of getting reviewed for something in the classics. This is rather good considering that for novels it is more like one in two-hundred and fifty.

Reviews are terribly important still. There is something important about critical comment to serve as a gatekeeper as things move out into society. There is much less of a problem with review assassination than with brown-nosing. People are all too willing to be nice than to be critical. There is an issue of democracy. Beard worries about people reviewing books they know little about and it immediately winding up on people’s desktops. Graduate students tend to be highly patronizing. It is important to show that you have engaged the argument. She advises that one avoid adjectives like “simplistic” and “outrageous.” Do not assume that because an author did not mention something they were unaware of it. One should honestly state the argument and no one is going to object if you are critical. Her advice to graduate students who want to start reviewing is that they should start with something very technical that they, in particular, know something about. If it misfires it is less likely to come back to haunt them.

During the Q&A session, I asked Dr. Beard about blogs. As someone in the world of established print, I expected her to have a negative view. It turns out that Beard does not have the anxiety about blogs that she has about other forms of online media. With a blog, you get what you see. People write about what they read last week. Everyone knows that blogs have no quality control. Publishers in England have caught on to this and have started inviting bloggers to parties. There is going to be a creeping institutionalization of blogs. As of now, Beard likes what she sees though she suspects that things are going to change.

Another person asked Dr. Beard how one goes to the next step from being an academic writer, selling a thousand books, to actually becoming popular. As Beard mentioned previously, reviews do not help. What does help is getting on talks shows, into airplane magazines and front tables at book stores. It helps to get a big advance because that forces the publishers to try to sell your work. She strongly advises one to ask about the publicity budget. Finally, unless one hits it very big, one should not bother with an agent.

Dr. Beard’s final words of advice for writing reviews was not to start a review with poetry as it is a bother to set right and not to end with “thus we see.” Beard herself likes to start her reviews with an anecdote. Though admittedly this to can get rather formulaic too.

I asked her, after the lecture, if she was related to the famous early twentieth century American historian Mary Beard. She had a good laugh at that. Apparently her mother named her without ever having heard of Mary Beard. She herself only found out about her namesake as an adult.

The Earth is Flat and We are Not Talking About the Thomas Friedman Variety: A Review of Flat Earth

Historians often find it difficult to write books that are scholarly yet narratively engaging and that fill the public demand to speak to the issues of the day. This later issue is particularly difficult because, strictly speaking, it is outside of the historian’s field and usually works against it. Any attempt to do so risks sliding into polemic. In studying history one quickly learns that the past is a different country and it is not connected to the present. Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea by Christine Garwood, though, handles this issue magnificently. On the surface Flat Earth is a book about Flat Earth theory, focusing on the history of the movement in England and America from the nineteenth century through the late twentieth century. While this may not seem to be the sort of issue of interest or of relevancy to many people, Garwood has crafted a powerful story that is very relevant.

The underlying and understated issue at hand in this book is Creationism both in its crude form and its more sophisticated, Intelligent Design, variety. Make no mistake about it Flat Earth is a polemic against Creationism. As a polemic, this book is remarkably effective. The flat earthers that populate the book’s narrative sound exactly like Creationists (Most of them, in fact, were Creationists as well.) I recommend this book to all those who accept evolution and are stuck trying to get well-meaning acquaintances of theirs to come on board as well as to those well-meaning acquaintances. The argument is never explicitly made in the book but it essentially amounts to there is no argument that can be used to challenge evolution that cannot also be used to challenge the spherical nature of the earth. The only reason that most people balk at rejecting the spherical view of the earth but not evolution is because in our society the rejection of the earth’s spherical nature is, for all intents and purposes, a one-way ticket to a padded cell, a straight jacket and a lifetime supply of happy pills. Say that you believe the world is flat and see how long it takes for people to not want you anywhere near their kids or in any position of authority and influence. Hopefully, it will one day be that people who reject evolution will be seen in a similar light. Until we reach that point those who are willing to put up with anti-evolutionists and take them seriously as scientists have some difficult questions to face.

The great irony of Flat Earth is that it achieves its aim not by mocking flat earthers but by taking them very seriously. One almost gets the sense that Garwood admires Parallax (Samuel Rowbotham (1816-85), the modern founder of flat Earth theory. Rather than view Parallax and his followers as aberrations of the modern world or as part of some long-running church-based anti-reason tradition in a continual war against science Garwood puts them within the context of nineteenth-century science. Parallax was not simply some sort of anti-science person. On the contrary, she sees him as someone who, for all of his anti-scientific establishment rhetoric, was, in a strange way, a “scientist.” His rejection of modern science was couched in the language and ideals of science and he was able to be successful precisely because he could appeal to scientific principles. He sold himself to the English public as an open-minded seeker of the truth challenging a scientific establishment with their hidebound sense of tradition.

In this sense, Garwood plays to the best ideals of the historical profession. She does not look down at flat earthers in order to congratulate herself and her audience for their modern thinking. On the contrary, they become a challenge to modern ways of thinking. She does not support or condemn either side of the flat earth debate but sees them as part of the modern narrative. In this vein, it is interesting to note that while Flat Earth is an attack against Creationism it is also an attack on the Whig narrative. If nothing else this book is worth every cent for its opening chapter where Garwood demolishes the notion that people in during the Middle Ages believed that the earth was flat and shows how this myth was manufactured during the nineteenth century. Garwood seems to take a certain pleasure in pointing out the irony that, while people like Washington Irving were in the middle of concocting the myth of the medieval belief in a flat earth to congratulate themselves on their growing sophistication and clear superiority over the Middle Ages, it was this same nineteenth century that spawned a real-life flat earth movement. Flat earth theory is something so incredible that only modern people could ever accept it.

Interestingly enough evolution does, after a fashion, come into this story in the form of Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913), the co-founder of evolution. Wallace is a fascinating figure, particularly since he defies the usual stereotype of an evolutionist and a scientist. For one thing, he was most definitely not an atheist. While Charles Darwin is a bit of an enigma (He most probably became an agnostic after losing his daughter Anne.) and Thomas Huxley described himself as an agnostic but was most probably what we would call an atheist, Wallace was a fairly traditional believing Christian. He also dabbled in the occult, which he wished to subject to scientific analysis. This attempt to create a “scientific” occult was actually not so uncommon during the nineteenth century. Wallace took it upon himself to come to the defense of science and of the spherical earth and participated in a number of well-publicized confrontations with flat earthers. Wallace was successful but still comes across with mud on his face for even allowing himself to be dragged into this business.

Flat Earth is more than just a good book. It is one of those books that I would want to hand out to as many people as possible and say read this book. This is a book that will help people gain a greater appreciation of what science is and may even work to shame people who should know better to not apologize for anti-evolutionists or attempt to grant them credibility. Of particular importance for me, though, this is a well written smart work of history, the product of a writer with the consciousness of a true historian and the willingness to present that consciousness to others.