1800 Rabbis Will Practice Their Magic Judaism for You

Here is another ad for Haredi magic Judaism idolatry.

I notice that the Haredi rabbis listed in the ad are not actually part of the event. They were just asked to attend. Which means that they have either said no or they have not gotten back to the fine people at Ateret Shlomo (which is another way of saying no).

I should send out spam emails:

Read Izgad! The blog of Rabbi Dovid Landesman, Rabbi Shalom Carmy and Malcolm Gladwell. 

(At least one of them actually reads this blog and every one of them would be welcome to offer a guest post if they so wished.)

You have to give Kupat Ha'ir credit. They at least go through the trouble to get Haredi rabbis to offer blurbs in favor of their idolatry.   

Tour Europe and Practice Idolatry at Over 400 Graves

What particularly caught my attention was the passage: "In places that are not visited as frequently you can often have your prayers 'heard' more readily in the merit of the Tzadikim that are not visited as often." I am glad that they put the word "heard" in quotes. I would hope that they meant that God does not literally hear prayers since God is not a physical being with ears or even affected by sound. Most probably they meant to merely acknowledge that God is aware of everything and does not hear things more readily or less readily.

None of this gets this company off the hook for idolatry. Usually one can cover for praying at graves by saying that the righteous person is incidental just that if you are going to pray you might as well go to a place associated with a righteous person. One can even argue that there is a special merit in praying in a place where many other people are gathering (hence why we have synagogues in the first place) or even to pray in a place where many people have prayed at in the past. In this case, we are choosing to pray at a place specifically where there have not been many prayers said. This trip only makes sense if we accept the theological premise that God wishes for human beings to honor deceased righteous people by praying at their graves to such an extent that he counts it as a special merit to those who find out of the way graves of righteous people to pray by. Hence the focus is not God. At best, God only comes in as the Santa Claus at the end of the tunnel with his bag of goodies. This is about venerating dead rabbis as not just righteous people to be imitated, but spiritual forces in their own right. This is idolatry.

As a historian and a religious Jew, I strongly support touring Eastern Europe and tending the graves of Jewish leaders. These are historic landmarks for the Jewish people and just as the Bible records the locations where the Israelites traveled in the desert so too should we record the locations of past Jewish communities and the important figures that lived and were buried there. I would make a special effort to seek out those graves that have been forgotten. I would even make the effort to pray and recite Psalms there. God forbid out of any belief that they have power or any desire to make use of that power to "manipulate" God, but simply to include them within Jewish memory.

The Politics of Jewish Messianism (My Proposed Dissertation Thesis)

Gershom Scholem famously distinguished between two types of Messianism, a restorative Messianism that sought to reestablish the biblical Jewish State and a utopian apocalyptic Messianism that sought the end of the physical political world as we know it. (See David Biale, Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History pg. 72.) Scholem and most students of Jewish Messianism have tended to focus on the latter type of Messianism. I would like to deal with the former kind.

On the surface, Jewish Messianism has very little to do with politics. In fact, it can be seen as a counter politics. Politics deals with earthly power as it relates to a State of this world. Messianism is usually seen as a rejection of politics and the earthly political State. Instead, it looks for an end to earthly politics through the imposition of a supernatural divine State. From this perspective, there is a vast gulf between political thinkers, such as Machiavelli and John Locke, and political revolutionaries, such as George Washington and Maximilien Robespierre, on the one hand, and messianic thinkers, such as Joachim of Fiore, and messianic claimants, such as John of Leiden, on the other. In my work, I seek to argue that, in fact, that the apocalyptic world of Messianism may not be so far removed from the realm of earthly politics. Whatever various messianic movements may have thought of the politics of their day, it cannot be denied that messianic movements by definition interact with worldly political authorities, make political claims and are thus themselves political movements of this world. 

For anyone not wedded to the Whig narrative of bifurcating the “superstitious” Middle Ages and “rational” Enlightenment and ignorant of the past few decades of scholarship, this should not be surprising or controversial. There is a well-established literature linking in various ways the “religious” messianic and apocalyptic movements of the Medieval and early modern periods with the supposedly “secular” revolutionary political movements of the modern period. To give some examples, Norman Cohn, back in the 1950s, in his Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, sought to portray movements as the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the Taborites and the Anabaptist Munster revolt as the forerunners of modern absolutist movements such as Communism and Fascism. Similarly, though working in the opposite direction, Jacob Talmon, in his Origins of Totalitarian Democracy and Political Messianism: the Romantic Phase, sought to connect modern totalitarian movements, particularly those of the Rousseauan tradition, with earlier religious apocalyptic movements. David S. Katz and the late Richard H. Popkin, in Messianic Revolution: Radical Religious Politics to the End of the Second Millennium, set forth the evolution of medieval Joachimite apocalyptic tradition into the modern apocalyptic movements of today.

I seek to bring elements of all of these works together and apply them to Jewish history. This serves a number of purposes. Even more important to me than placing messianism within a political framework is the continued effort to place Jewish history within the context of the surrounding society. I seek to place Jewish Messianism within the context of similar movements produced in the Christian and Islamic worlds. Furthermore, I propose that Messianism as a political movement offers us a way to talk about Jewish politics. Jewish history has traditionally suffered from not being able to employ the traditional State narrative, for most of recorded history there has been no such thing as a sovereign Jewish State. More important to modern scholars is the lack of a Jewish political tradition. Messianism allows us a backdoor to bring Jews as actors into the political narrative, beyond being the victims of hateful mobs and capricious rulers. Thus helping us move away from the Heinrich Graetz “Jews suffer and think” lachrymose narrative. Furthermore, by dealing with messianic theorists and their confrontation with worldly politics, we can begin to construct a tradition of Jewish political thought. For this reason, I will be discussing not just actual messianic movements such as the Sabbatians, but messianic theorists such as Maimonides and Abarbanel as well.

As a multi-disciplinary project, my work should be of use in a number of fields. This is a work on Jewish history and particularly Jewish Messianism. The models I propose should be relevant to general students of Messianism and apocalypticism. Finally this is also a work of political theory meant to aid in the understanding of how to integrate Messianism as a political phenomenon.

Sparkly Fairy Vampire Princess Versus Puppy-Eared Half Demon

Recently I have gotten into the Japanese anime show InuYasha and have been watching it on Hulu. It is about a school girl named Kagome, who is transported, Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe style, to medieval Japan, which functions as a Narnia fantasy world complete with all manner of magical creatures. She has to team up with a half-demon warrior named InuYasha to recover the fragments of a sacred pearl. These serve as lots of little rings of power. Along the way, they gain for allies Shippo, a cute half-fox kid, Miroku, a sleazy monk and Sango, a demon hunter wielding a giant boomerang and a giant flying kitty. They take on a host of villains such as InuYasha’s older brother, Sesshomaru, the resurrected priestess Kikyo, who broke InuYasha’s heart and left him skewered against a tree for fifty years, and the ultimate villain, Naraku, who is less interested in killing our heroes as using them to further corrupt the pearl. I think of Naraku as a less sophisticated version of Lord Foul from The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever. The plot that you see it really bait to fall into the real plot, which is usually more interesting than simply kill the good guys.

The person who recommended InuYasha to me also happens to be a fierce opponent of Twilight, who finds Bella to be too passive and Edward to be down right abusive. I find this strange because I find myself liking InuYasha precisely for the same reasons why I liked Twilight. For me, the main draw of Twilight was normal girl Bella being thrown into this horror fantasy situation of having vampires and werewolves as the chief men in her life. Bella is never fazed by anything and insists on playing the comic straight as she applies her normal person logic to her supernatural life, taking everything to its logical absurdity. The fact that Bella has an incredible level of control over Edward and Jacob, despite not being "powerful" in any conventional sense is itself a form of fantasy wish fulfillment empowerment. Similarly, Kagome applies her school girl logic and concerns about homework and tests as she runs around her fantasy medieval Japan with her puppy-eared half demon in tow, while going questing after magical objects. She has her perfect magic boyfriend to have go fetch and literally say "sit" to. InuYasha, like Edward, might be verbally abusive, but it is in a sulking charming schoolboy sense and made up for by romantic daring and witty back and forth dialogue.  

Like Stephenie Meyer, but working long before she came on the scene, Rumiko Takahashi seeks to overturn the action superhero genre and render it into something more likely to appeal to women. She does this in two ways. First, she places a female as the central protagonist and tells the story from her perspective. It is interesting to note that this does not mean that the female character has to be empowered. Both Kagome and Bella are fairly passive characters, though Kagome is less so, surrounded and protected by more powerful men. Just as with historical narrative, the mere fact that a female is granted narrative goes a long way to neutralizing misogyny. One can take the same patriarchal story, but simply by giving the female narrative you have made her an active figure and ultimately allowed her to gain a level of humanity. Second, InuYasha, like Twilight, takes the action genre and turns it into a tongue and cheek romance. What looks like a blood and violence story is revealed to be a love story as the monster is rendered with a hidden soulful side that yearns to love and be loved in return. Thus the "male" paradigm of power and violence is defeated by "female" charm, empowering not just the seemingly passive female protagonist, but the feminine as a whole. 

    

Michael Oren: An Ambassador for Historians

I have been reading Michael Oren's Six Days of War about the Six Day War. One wonders if the people who protested his speech at UC of Irvine had read it. It probably would not have made much of a difference if they did. What struck me about Ambassador Oren, from reading his work, was the extent to which he goes to putting a human face to the Arab side. Oren uses a variety of sources to tell the story from multiple perspectives. Since he is not just using Israeli sources he is not forced into just telling the Israeli side to things. He uses American sources to bring the American government into the story, Soviet sources to bring the Soviet Union in and Arabic sources to bring the various Arab countries in. This very act of bringing Arab sources and seeking to come to terms with their narrative in of itself goes a long toward giving a balanced story. By doing this Oren, from the beginning, concedes to Arabs that they have a perspective and are not merely the satanic other. As such the story is no longer "you Arabs are the villains who must simply repent your wrongdoing and accept the judgment of the world against you." This sentiment is summarized by Oren in his introduction:

My purpose is not to prove the justness of one party or another in the war, or to assign culpability for starting it. I want, simply, to understand how an event as immensely influential as this war came about – to show the context from which it sprang and the catalysts that precipitated it.

I would describe Oren's narrative as a counter to the Leon Uris narrative of Zionism, for example in his novel Exodus. The world that Oren describes is distinctively not one in which it is simply heroic Israelis, outnumbered and outgunned, fending off hordes of Arabs intent on finishing what Hitler started. This is a drama moving from political to military leaders to diplomats. The actors are motivated by various things. Probably the most interesting thing about the book is Oren's argument that war was not inevitable. Diplomacy was something that could have worked if it were not for chance and the haphazard’s of Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian foreign policy between themselves and the Soviet Union and the power of the Arab street.

Michael Oren, while writing a pro-Israel book, manages to use his skill as a historian to offer a narrative that all sides could accept as a basis for a peace agreement. The fact that Oren would be a target of anti-Israel protestors demonstrates to what extent opponents of Israel are distant from ever coming to a meaningful peace. Not only do they reject Israel in practice, but they even reject the right of supporters of Israel to have any narrative of their own. There can be no negotiation, but simply the surrender of Israel as it confesses to being the villains and begs the pardon of the Arab world.

The Hamas Spy

Rich Schapiro of Daily News has an article, "Mosab Hassan Yousef: The Hamas prince who was spy for Israel" on Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of a prominent Hamas leader who served as a spy for Israel. On the surface it would appear as if this would argue against Eli Berman, about whom I posted earlier. Professor Berman makes the case that the strength of groups like Hamas is precisely their ability to weed out informants.

The answer comes at the end of the article:

In a statement from prison, he [Sheikh Hassan Yousef] said it was possible the Israelis recruited his son, but that his son had no access to the movement's secrets.

"Whether what Haaretz reported is true or not, Mosab was not an active member in Hamas or in any of its military, political or religious branches, or any other body," the elder Yousef said.

People who come through the system are more trustworthy and less likely to turn traitor than even family members. If you are going to build a terrorist organization you need a social service network, not a large family.

The Book Club Classroom (or How to Destroy School)

There is another possible working model for Alfie Kohn's homework free class that is worth consideration, the book club. When I lived in Columbus I co-chaired a book club for those on the autism spectrum. Every week we would meet for an hour and discuss around fifty pages of a given book. We did books ranging from two to four hundred pages so we did a different book about every one to two months. We did short stories like Isaac Asimov's robot stories, Sherlock Holmes and H. P. Lovecraft. We also did full novels like Killer Angels, Twilight, Catch-22 and Sabriel. Like any classroom, we had a range of people in the club. In our case, we ranged from graduate students in literature to people who had trouble picking up books to read to begin with. Not everyone did the reading every week (some less often than others) so we usually did not have full participation. Also, not everyone came every week. No one was forced to come to book club. We were there because we liked the company and liked talking about the books.

It is not unreasonable that our book club could be used to replace a literature class. The sort of "class" this would give us would be much more democratic and there would be no mandatory homework or tests. The teacher could come to the first day of class with some suggested books and the students could come with some of their suggestions. Everyone could make their case for their book of choice and, afterwards, everyone could vote. The book with the most votes wins. Other books that did not win can still be considered for the next vote and it would be even expected that books (like presidential candidates) will lose in their first run, which will serve to bring it to people's attention, only to win on the next try. After choosing a book, it will be announced that we will be discussing a certain number of pages or chapters for the next class. Some people will do the reading and take part in the class discussion and others won't. When the book is finished we can vote on the next book and the process continues. Since no one has to do any of the assignments there is no reason to give tests or even to give grades. Everyone is in class because they want to be. Some people might actually want to talk about the books and others might just want to hang out.

This process could easily be adapted to history. Greetings class in modern Jewish history, I am your teacher. For this coming week would you like to talk about Hasidism, the Enlightenment, the Holocaust or the founding of the State of Israel? Once we have picked the topic I can point you to the relevant parts of the textbook, primary sources, and outside academic literature that you may wish to read. Please feel no pressure, do the reading if you feel like it and if you would like to actively take part in class. If there is a topic that really interests you, I will gladly help you do further research and will even to write a paper. I am not in charge of you; you are all here because you wish to be. I am simply here to help run discussions and so that my particularly training in these fields may be used.

The potential problem with this is its mandatory nature. Those students who do not do the non-mandatory reading are for all intents and purposes not in class and are no different from the students who do not bother to even show up to this non-mandatory class. One can certainly make a very good case that modern Jewish history and even literature are not of critical importance and that therefore there is no need for them to be mandatory. These are nice things for students to engage in and so they should be available for those students who wish to take the classes. The moment we decide that class should be mandatory then we commit ourselves to making sure that students actually come to class and actually doing work. This means that we actually have to check to see if the work is being done. This means graded homework and tests.

The question of payment raises similar issues. As long as I am doing the book club on a volunteer basis it is only something of interest to me whether anyone actually gains something from coming to book club. The moment I become a salaried teacher then I become answerable to the school, which directly pays my salary, and to parents, who indirectly pay my salary. Obviously, they are paying me to run my book club classroom for a reason and it is only reasonable that I offer some hard evidence to show that their money is not being wasted. By assigning homework and tests I can procure hard empirical evidence that my students have mastered the concepts that I was paid to give over (or that my students are lazy/stupid and it is not my fault).

In theory, this book club model can be used even for math and science allowing us to turn the entire school system into a series of book clubs in which students can pursue their interests without ever being forced to do homework or take a test. Teachers would either be volunteers or baby sitters hired for their particular academic training. This would mean the end of mandatory schooling. Let us be honest, this means my childhood dream of destroying school would come true, leaving students with clubs to attend (if they wish). The adult me might also be willing to do away with school, but is this Kohn's plan?

Between Lecturing and Homework: Alfie Kohn’s Teacher Trap

Alfie Kohn, in his book The Homework Myth, offers a challenge aimed at the very structure of how we ask questions about education. Most of the book is devoted to attacking the institution of homework. Kohn, though, wishes to completely overhaul the entire system of education. He even objects to the hierarchal authoritarian structure of the teacher lecturing and giving grades. In the dystopian description of modern-day education:

Teachers are invited to consider how often they call on students to answer questions, whether they're allowing enough time for a response to be formulated, maybe even whether they are unconsciously calling on more boys than girls. But they are assuredly not prompted to think about why they are calling on students in the first place. Why should the teacher's questions, as opposed to the kids', drive the lesson? What would happen if the students didn't raise their hands – and had to figure out together how to avoid interrupting one another? What would happen if the power was shared and classrooms became more democratic? (pg. 91)

May I point out that even Congress has an elaborate set of rules as to who gets to speak? I guess this just goes to prove that members of Congress really are a bunch of children.

I like to think of myself as an open-minded/open-eared conservative. My philosophy is one that would easily be recognizable to historians as that of the reforming conservative; someone who is defending the status quo, by suggesting modest changes in the hope of forestalling the radical overthrow of the system. This certainly applies to my views on education. I operate within a conservative framework; I lecture, I ask questions, I hope for responses and I most certainly do assign homework. The content of my lectures may be slightly unorthodox and my style of speaking certainly is. This does not change the fact that I operate out of distinctively orthodox foundations.

To take Kohn up on his challenge, out of sincere respect and a belief that he asks a question deserving a response, I would gladly support a more democratic classroom where the students take a more active role in deciding which questions are important. The graduate school seminar comes to mind. We would have as many as a dozen students in a room talking about a given topic. The professor would be there, but he would usually be just one of the people there taking part in the discussion to such an extent that it would not be immediately obvious to an outside observer which person was the professor, particularly since there are middle-aged graduate students. I have been in classes where every week a student was assigned to lead the discussion. Often it would be that student, and not the professor, lecturing for most of the class.

Before I get carried away by my fond dreams of graduate school and attempt to replicate the graduate classroom there is the reality that I am not dealing with graduate students. This is more than just semantics. There is a profound difference between college and high school students that I have taught and my colleagues in graduate school. Students in a graduate-level history program have usually spent years studying history. (In my case, I have been actively into history since I was in second grade.) This means that our graduate students have a wealth of technical facts such as names and dates at their fingertips to give them an advantage. More importantly, our graduate students have absorbed a historical method that allows them to read and comprehend historical information. (In the interest of fairness, I happen to have a number of very smart students in my class; the sort of students that I might be tempted to try a seminar-style class with.)

I probably do not know much more about fifteenth-century Japan than my students do. Yet my background in European history allows me a way in so that I can read and comprehend an academic work on fifteenth-century Japan and walk away from reading it with the ability to say something intelligent on the topic in ways that my students would not be able to. I know something about governments built around religious authority. I understand saying that the political authority speaks for God and that all religious dissidents are political dissidents, traitors to be killed. I am not going to get caught up in "this is so intolerant." I have the model of feudalism and can appreciate the dynamics of such a hierarchal society to come to a daimyo system. I have chivalry to help me with bushido. (My European frame of reference and bias would be a problem when I get to a higher level. You get through college by using various models. Graduate school is about learning how these models are all wrong. Right now I am concerned with getting to the stage of learning that this is all wrong.) Furthermore, while I may not have the primary source material in front of me and certainly would not be able to read such material in the original, I know enough about how primary sources work to have a good guess as to how my book is handling it and what might be some alternatives. Thus I would be able to engage the book and ask the right sort of question. My students, facing the same task, would find themselves lost, bored shortly followed by their minds' closing down. They would need someone to guide them; someone like a teacher giving lectures.

There is another problem with this approach of bringing graduate school to my high school classroom. We were supposed to come to class in graduate school after having spent hours reading through articles and even entire books. We have a word for this in the English language, it is called homework. The same sort of homework that Kohn would have us believe is the cause of so much that is wrong with education. Our graduate students need homework in order to take part in a meaningful conversation; how much more so high school students who lack a basic background in the field to begin with.

Kohn has set a no-win situation for us teachers. He does not want us to hand out homework, because he believes that it kills interest in learning. Early in the book he condescendingly tells us to give better lectures and we will have no need to assign homework. Sure I can stand up and just give out the information (which is what most of the students want). This would be a hierarchal situation where I, the adult teacher, feed the students like little children. For good reason, Kohn objects to such a situation and tells us to try including students in the process as active learners. Of course, this requires having students work things out without me. This also requires that the students have some sort of knowledge base to work from that is supposed to come from some magical place known only to Kohn. In the real world, we turn to homework to allow students to do these things. (I could turn my class into study hall but that would simply be homework done in school.)

The more I lecture the more my class becomes a hierarchy and the students passive learners. On the good side, I can assign less homework. The more homework I assign the more my students will have to do homework. On the good side, the more they can take an active role in class as equals instead of being passive learners. As with most teachers, I believe in trying to find some middle ground between the two. This makes me guilty, to at least some degree, of creating a hierarchal classroom and killing my students' natural love of learning. I guess Kohn would think that I am a truly horrible teacher.

Porno Theaters and Aryan Coffee Shops: The Libertarian Case for Legalized Discrimination (Part IV)

(Part I, II,III)

As with the houses of sexual sin, there is a defense against establishments of racism such as my Aryan coffee shop. Obviously, citizens of goodwill would have the right to congregate outside my Aryan coffee house to protest as long as no physical harm is done to any of the patrons. If white supremacists are desperate enough to walk through a protesting mob and bear their shouts (but not the spitting) in order to enjoy my Aryan coffee then that is their right. A pro-tolerance mayor would be allowed to lend his voice in moral indignation and send out the police with sandwiches to make sure that the protesters can fight for justice in orderly comfort. Besides for this, the local government would be free to put non-discrimination laws into the zoning ordinances. It is reasonable for the city to say that it is in their interest that all businesses agree to serve everyone. If the city could not guarantee blacks that they could order a cup of coffee anywhere in the city without looking out for any "whites only" signs, then blacks might choose to take their business someplace else. Furthermore, protecting white supremacists from angry protesters costs money and the city has the right not to take on added expenses. (This is one reason why the city of New York has the constitutional right not to allow the Klan to march through Harlem.) The city would not, though, be allowed to close down my Aryan coffee shop out of any interest in tolerance. The government has no more interest in tolerance than they do in promoting Christian brotherhood and the love of Christ. This would simply be the government stuffing their morals down people's throats and violating their liberty. 

Before we breathe a tolerant sigh of relief, I will warn you that there is a price to pay for allowing the use of zoning laws to eliminate segregation. The moment we acknowledge that cities can go after segregation out of purely monetary concerns, we must also acknowledge the right not only of private businesses but local governments as well to practice segregation as long as there is some reasonable monetary justification. If Mobile, AL wishes to put blacks to the back of the bus then it should be their right as long as they can show a valid city interest is at stake such as getting more whites to use the bus system or decreasing fights on buses. (If blacks wish to boycott and bring down the economy of that city then that is their right.) Obviously, the city would not be allowed to bring in segregationist laws out of any concern for "protecting the Southern way of life" or "the natural order of things." Also, the police would have to treat integrationist protesters no differently than any other non-violent group that violated city ordinances so no hoses and attack dogs.

The main Ohio State University campus is next to a large black neighborhood with high crime statistics. Naturally, this crime spills over. During my years there, I had three bikes and a front tire stolen, one assumes by a youth from this neighborhood. Now I personally believe that a tolerant racially integrated society is more important than a few bikes stolen and I am willing to pay this price, but other people might not be so generous and moral and that is their right. They may wish to pass laws saying that no black male teenager without a proper student ID should be allowed on school grounds after nightfall. (There actually was a debate in the Lantern about neighborhood youths being allowed to use school basketball courts.) I might protest such laws, but I would essentially be in the same position as if the school had voted for free student-sponsored strippers. I would have the right to sit in my room and blog about how sinful Ohio State is and contemplate moving to a more godly campus like Michigan.

Just as the government has no business getting involved in things that offend popular religious sensibilities, they have no business getting involved in general moral sensibilities. Our southern town is not doing any direct physical harm to blacks by putting them in the back of the bus or in different schools. It is not this town's problem if blacks cannot get a better deal. If blacks wish they are free to form their own black racist towns. A group that is unable to do that probably does not really deserve rights to begin with and should come back when they have further developed as a group. (This is one reason why Zionism is so important for Jews. It shows that we are capable of being full citizens and gives us something to negotiate with in terms of our host society.) I may not like it, but as a religious person in a free society, I am used to people using their liberty in all sorts of ways that I cannot approve of.

President Joseph Lieberman Wants Your Pork Sandwich

To take a short interlude from my discussion of Aryan Coffee, I ended the most recent piece by comparing, as I have done before, homosexuality to eating pork. They both violate verses in Leviticus. The question becomes to what extent may public officials interfere with homosexuality or the eating of non-kosher animals and, to reverse the issue, to what extent is the public required to grant validity to either of these two types of behavior.

Senator Joseph Lieberman, a former Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate, now the Independent senator from Connecticut, is an Orthodox Jew. He is certainly in his right not to eat pig. I would even go so far as to say that he has the right as a member of the United States Senate to vote to cut government subsidies for pig farming. He is even allowed to "discriminate" in favor of cows, and plausibly even cows being slaughtered in a kosher manner. He does not even have to offer any secular explanations for this. All he has to do is say "I do not like pigs so I am not voting for them." On the contrary, it would be Senator Lieberman's rights being violated if the nation's pig-eating rights activists with the aid of a pork-loving Supreme Court, ruled that pork is a fundamental right, that any attempt to restrict its eating or to favor other meat was a denial of the very being of pork lovers and, as such Senator Lieberman was constitutionally obligated to grant pigs equally funding as cows. (This is all assuming that you believe that the government is allowed to hand out subsidies and tax cuts to private industries in the first place.)

To take this a step further, imagine if Lieberman were to become President of the United States. I humbly suggest that he would be in his rights to make the White House kosher and ban pork from the premises. The same would go for an official White House Christmas tree and Easter egg hunt. If this is going to be a Jewish White House then we are free to make some new customs. Maybe a White House snatch the afikomen. It would seem that Lieberman would even be able to go so far as to pass a special presidential order banning the other white meat from the premises of all federal buildings, including embassies overseas. This would not be an act of forcing religion on anyone. It would be the eccentric actions of a politician putting his personal stamp on the government he runs. It is no different than President Hayes' first lady, Lemonade Lucy, banning alcohol from the White House. I am not suggesting that Lieberman or any other aspiring Jewish politician engage in such behavior. As a minority in this country, I am content to follow my chosen lifestyle in peace and have no need to see it publically validated. Certainly Lieberman, as a senator or even as president, would not have the right to directly come after private businesses like Mcdonald's and make them stop serving pork. Also, he would not have the right to stop federal employees from indulging their pork habits in the privacy of their own homes. But that is the crucial difference; private individuals are allowed to use their own private businesses for self-validation. They have no grounds to expect the government to provide this validation. The government has no right to interfere with individuals but otherwise is free to express the eccentricities of officeholders and those who vote them in.

To the best of my knowledge, Senator Lieberman does not have a particularly conservative record when it comes to gay rights and is unlikely to be the one to stand in the breach to stop gay couples from getting their marriage licenses, but would he have the right to? Would it be any different if he voted for a special tax break for heterosexual couples without offering a similar tax break to homosexual couples than if he offered tax breaks for cows and not pigs? People raising pigs, if they were so desperate for a tax break, could, technically, switch to raising cows. Similarly, homosexual couples could choose to take up partners of the opposite sex. (I am not suggesting that they should.) Lieberman would still not be able to interfere with the private homosexual activities of federal employees, but they in turn have no right to expect validation from him.

Porno Theaters and Aryan Coffee Shops: The Libertarian Case for Legalized Discrimination (Part III)

(Part I, II) 

This relatively recent redefinition of rights as protecting not just one's physical person, but one's own personal emotional well being, is one of the foundational hypocrisies of modern liberalism and a death blow to a free society. The moment we are allowed to bring non-empirical psychological suffering then all of a sudden I have a case against the sinful women of Nevada. It bothers me that such things are allowed in this country. I am kept awake at night worried about what sort of hurricanes my zealous patriarchal deity might bring to this country and if he will stop viewing us as his special chosen nation with the right to bomb other countries at will. Scott Lively will finally be able to do something about all the homosexual activity that bothers him and will be able to push through the sorts of laws that he has been helping pass in Uganda.

As John Stuart Mill understood, if liberty, as the right to pursue your own good in your own way as long as it does not interfere with the liberties of others, is to mean something, interference with the liberties of others, in essence harm, must be very narrowly understood. Living in a society, every action affects someone else and can thus open itself to the charge of harm. If harm is understood in the sense of causing psychological harm than all actions interfere with the liberties of others and therefore there ceases to be any such thing as pursuing your own good in your own way. In essence, there is no meaningful difference between modern liberals, with their psychological harm, and historic conservatism, which denied the principle of liberty to begin with. At least conservatives are not hypocritical enough to pretend that they are offering anything else but privileges for select groups.

From this perspective, a major plank of the civil rights movement collapses. School segregation ceases to be an inherent violation of civil liberties as long as there is equal funding. It would simply be the absurd and immoral attempt to maintain a racial version of medieval hierarchy in the modern age. Blacks attempting to demand service in white restaurants were not fighting for liberty. On the contrary, they were trespassing on the property of others in the attempt to force their values on other people and violate their right to property, association and the pursuit of happiness. Our legal system and federal government failed in their role as they chose to pursue a series of fake manufactured rights over real and legitimate ones.

Granted, I am hard-pressed to find a more deserving group for this to happen to. As all civil libertarians know, you protect the rights of those who do not deserve it, such as drug dealers, child molesters, and terrorists, knowing that this harms society. You do this because you would rather be in court defending drug dealers, child molesters, and terrorists than your child, your neighbor, or your best friend, with the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time and getting on the bad side of the wrong public official.         

Make no mistake about it; we are paying a price for violating the civil liberties of segregationists and white supremacists, no matter how much I think we are better off for them getting what they "deserved." We have allowed the left to abuse the rights of others and it is not stopping with the "bad guys." Now we have a gay rights movement taking up the mantel and claiming group victimhood and the protection of their "right" to have their lifestyles validated by society through marriage. (Note that I support gay marriage on libertarian grounds as long as it is not considered a civil right.) Our debate on same-sex marriage has long since devolved from whether it is a good thing to whether someone can oppose it without being a bigot out to oppress others. By going to the courts and arguing for gay marriage on civil rights grounds, gay rights supporters have committed themselves to demonizing their opponents and using the power of government to force their values on other people. With hate crime legislation, this becomes all the more ominous. Will I lose my job or even any future theoretical children on the grounds that I am known to believe that gay sex is a sin like eating pork or, even worse, that I deny that sex can define people any more than eating and that therefore homosexuality is about as meaningful for our discourse of rights as pig eating?    

(To be continued …)

Porno Theaters and Aryan Coffee Shops: The Libertarian Case for Legalized Discrimination (Part II)

(Part I)

Before we continue, I think it is important to make it very clear that we are talking about discriminatory policies practiced by private businesses. Obviously, the government has an obligation under the fourteenth amendment to treat everyone equally regardless of race. This is not any different from religion. The government is not allowed to have any religion, but private citizens have the right to practice their religion and even discriminate based on it. I have the right to kick you out of my synagogue or even my house for believing that Jesus is the Messiah. Let us not be naïve as to the stakes. We are talking about whether the government should be able to stop private businesses from practicing discrimination. This would go for who must be served to even who can be hired. If the answer is no then you have knocked down a major pillar of modern civil rights legislation and have effectively blown a hole through modern liberalism. So, should I be allowed to stick a sign out in front of my store saying "no dogs, Jews, blacks, Scottish people or people whose last name begins with the letter K?" 

When I have raised this issue of the right of private businesses to discriminate based on race with people the immediate objection is that racism, in contrast to porn, causes harm. This quickly becomes indefensible to any degree of seriousness. The "kind decent peaceful" white supremacists enjoying my Aryan coffee are not lynching anyone. No one, no matter their skin color, has any natural right to a cup of coffee or a place to sit and drink it. The only reason why we enjoy these things is because, due to the market, it is in the self-serving interest of someone to provide it in exchange for compensation. If it is not in anyone's interest then no coffee. As a businessman, who mainly caters to white folk, it is likely in my economic self-interest to lose the business of one undesirable minority (either explicitly with a sign or by privately telling the person that he is not welcome) in order to maintain one's larger cliental.

Some people have countered by saying that they would be willing to accept discrimination by small establishments that only deal in relatively unimportant things like coffee. Large national franchises, though, like Starbucks should not be allowed to discriminate. Furthermore, critical industries like health care, real estate, and car dealerships should also be forced to do business with anyone. The logic being that these industries are, unlike coffee, necessary for the day to day functioning of society and therefore the people who work in them have entered a pact with the public to serve the public good.

Why should it be a problem if we have a franchise of racist coffee shops? There are people who wish to engage in their pursuit of happiness by looking at naked women. Let bigots across the country practice their racist pursuit of happiness by going to my Aryan coffee shop in whatever city they live in. Just as Starbucks competes for the social justice dollar with their green and fair-trade coffee, let them also compete for the racist dollar with Aryan coffee. As for the issue of health care, car dealerships, and real estate, why can't they practice discrimination too? If real estate can deal in porno theaters why can't they deal in racism? Find me a place in the country where there is only one provider of health care, one car dealership and one real estate business, particularly in our internet age. Even if there was such a place, this would merely create the need for an alternative that the free market could easily provide. As I see it, we are doing blacks and all opponents of racism a favor by allowing discrimination. I do not want to do business with racists. If business owners could come out and be openly racist then we would know who we don't want to be doing business with. The fact that such businesses are so important to society does not mean that they owe some sort of debt to society to be nice. On the contrary, it means that society owes them and should be grateful for the service they provide and keep its morals to itself. 

The final and most critical argument that people will point to is the psychological harm done through discrimination. Obviously, the black man or Jew who finds himself unable to get a cup of Aryan coffee and finds himself staring through the window at our group of white supremacists drinking their coffee and having a racist good time feels dehumanized by this. If we wish for such people to take part in society as equal citizens then the government must step in and demand that they be allowed to get a cup of coffee anywhere like anyone else. One of the fundamental shifts in American law over the past century has been this willingness to accept such psychological suffering into the equation. This has been at the foundation of much of modern civil rights law. Now it no longer matters if someone is not directly being held back from his legal rights at gunpoint, most famously in the Brown case that ended school segregation. Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP presented the Warren court with psychological studies demonstrating that (big shocker) segregation negatively affected the self-esteem of black children. The court accepted this argument and ruled that separate was by definition unequal even if no direct harm was caused.

(To be continued …)

Porno Theaters and Aryan Coffee Shops: The Libertarian Case for Legalized Discrimination (Part I)

(The Nazi girl's youth group, the BDM, served to corrupt the morals of German girls all around. In addition to indoctrinating adolescent and teenage girls in racism and anti-Semitism, girls were also actively encouraged to get pregnant out of wedlock to produce children for the Reich.)  

I do not think it will come as a big shock that, as a believer in civil liberties, I support the right to buy and sell pornography in person and online. I do not personally support pornography, either ideologically or monetarily. Pornography violates my religious beliefs as an Orthodox Jew. As a rationalist, I believe anything that objectifies human beings as sexual objects is a threat to society. I cannot agree with my friend Clarissa that there can be any legitimate exploration of sexuality for its own sake. I would even go so far as to say that this form of behavior, in practice, particularly harms women. I am even willing to grant that the presence of a porno theater in a neighborhood will attract potentially "undesirable" elements and indirectly cause an increase in crime. That being said, I am willing to put myself out in support of the producers and consumers in this industry, despite my personal contempt for such people. This is what it means to support liberty. I am willing to protect the right of anyone to do anything that does not cause direct physical harm to other people without their informed consent. This includes those whom I oppose with all my heart. As a libertarian, I am willing to go even further, in the name of ideological consistency, in this regard to things that regular liberals will usually back down from. I believe in a right to prostitution and drug use without any interference from the federal government. Since I accept the rational validity of engaging in extramarital sexual activity even prostitution, I cannot accept the legitimacy of any laws barring minors from engaging in sexual activity, pornography, and even prostitution.  

There is one safety mechanism that I would put into play. I recognize the right of individual cities, acting solely for the material benefit of those living there, to regulate businesses, including the sex trade. Having a house of ill repute next door affects the value of my home and thus crosses the line into my direct physical interest. In contrast to this, I cannot make a plausible case that sinful women in Nevada are causing me direct physical harm through their existence and that the federal government owes it to me to "protect" me from these women. I am not even allowed to raise the issue of zealous patriarchal deities out there that might smite the nation if we allow such ungodly behavior in our midst. Cities and neighborhoods would be able to regulate and even ban the sex trade as long as they are acting in good faith only for the material benefit of its residents. Members of the local government cannot pass such laws out of any desire to protect the morals of residents or out of any personal opposition to the trade. That would violate the rights of the producers and consumers in the sex industry. Personally, despite my libertarianism, I have no desire to live in a neighborhood in which the trade is being practiced and can lobby my local government not to allow such activity. I can tell the producers and consumers to put their faith in the free market and try setting up shop in the next town.      

This will likely get me into trouble, but I support the right of individual stores and even individual cities to practice segregation. What if someone wanted to set up an Aryan coffee shop so that middle-class white supremacists can come to relax, sip $4 lattes served by pretty white waitresses and not have to be bothered by the sight of any black or Jewish faces as they discuss the latest in racial theory and Holocaust denial? What is the difference between this and a strip club or even a brothel? Obviously, I am no supporter of racism. I would even go so far as to say that my personal distaste for racism exceeds my distaste for the sex industry and that I have an easier time giving such people the benefit of the doubt than I would for racists. As an Orthodox Jew, I believe that racism is a denial that human beings are all created in the image of God. (I recognize that there are plenty of Orthodox Jews who are racists. There are also plenty of Orthodox Jews looking at dirty magazines.) As a rationalist, I believe that racism denies the power of reason to save all human beings through its grace. Defining human beings by race denies reason as the primary characteristic of human beings. I even believe that racist institutions will attract the "wrong" sort of people and indirectly lead to violence. (If you question my sincerity on this point, I will ask you to keep in mind that there are people who would question my sincerity in opposing various sexual taboos because I will not support laws banning such activity either.)   

(To be continued …)