My Ironic Jewish Journey

On the Contrary has a post up about "Ironic Orthodoxy," outlining a form of Orthopraxy, which, while skirting the boundaries of traditional belief is deeply committed to Jewish practice and is fairly knowledgeable in terms of Jewish texts.

The Ironic Orthodox generation is the generation that comes after the Great Post-1967 Orthodox Awakening. The Ironic Orthodox are largely day-school and yeshiva educated. With their grandparents they share a certain comfort in their own Orthodox skin; to them, Orthodoxy is familiar, natural, and organizes their lives. With their parents they share a familiarity with the world of Jewish learning and are even able to access that learning to a large degree.

The Ironic Orthodox generation does not buy into the apologetics: not about the status of women, not about the integrity of the transmission of the Oral Law, not about the "timelessness" of obviously time-bound religious laws, customs, and ideas, etc. This generation is hard to inspire; its demeanor is skeptical and ironic, somewhat aloof and dispassionate. Their irony is not a dramatic irony - like Statler and Waldorf observing and criticizing the show yet remaining very much a part of it - but a jocular or sarcastic attitude or perhaps even a post-irony that simultaneously adheres to and mocks traditional religious structures. Yet it's not a bitter or angry mocking. It seems to be more of a taking-for-granted of life's absurdities and of the failure of ideology to explain or animate the full gamut of practice. It does not necessarily advocate or seek change.

 The most strident example of this sort of thinking on the Jewish Blogosphere is Modern Orthoprax, who denounces traditional claims of God giving the Torah and the possibility of proving the existence of God yet claims to be traditionally observant.

 In my own way, I see myself as falling under this category, if in a more moderate vein than Modern Orthoprax. While Modern Orthoprax comes and flat-out opposes divine claims for the origin of the Torah and proof for the existence of God, I believe that one can make a very plausible case for God's existence and that actively accepting God's existence is less problematic than assuming that he does not exist and I even hold out some hope for their being some historical truth to the Exodus narrative and the revelation at Sinai. That being said, I actively accept the fact that we live in a post-Enlightenment world and am not about to ignore the fact that the Enlightenment happened. To paraphrase Dr. Alan Brill, I am not about to rewrite Saadiah Gaon and the Kuzari in plain high school English as if there never was a Hume or a Kant. This means that all attempts to claim that God exists as an unchallengeable fact are out. For example, in a post-Darwinian world one can no longer simply trot out the argument from design as an end to all argument. Regardless of whether you believe in evolution, Darwinian evolution defeats the argument from design simply by existing as a plausible theory. All the intelligent design arguments in the world are not going to change the fact that there is an alternative to theistic creation. Thus, while our intelligent designer might very well exist, he can no longer be accepted as unchallengeable fact. Similarly with biblical criticism, one might be able to produce an army of Rabbi Joseph Hertzes to answer the arguments of Julius Wellhausen and his intellectual descendants (something that Orthodoxy has not done) but it will not change the fact that there is now an alternative to accepting the Bible as the literal word of God.

In a sense, faith is like innocence, once exposed to an alternative and made open to doubt something has been lost even if outward behavior remains the same. The child given a decent suit of clothes, a wallet full of cash, and left to spend the night on the doorstep of a brothel is going to lose his innocence even if he does hold onto his virtue. For this reason, there is a certain logic to the Haredi attempt to hold onto the faith and innocence of their members even if it is futile. 

As I said before, I still see the debate for God as being in favor of God even if by a smaller margin and even if it is more the God of the philosophers and not the God of Abraham. The God of Abraham might exist, but to believe in him requires absolute faith. The very act of doubting him changes the relationship to one with a philosopher God. Similarly with the Bible, it requires absolute faith. The very act of putting it before the bar of critical analysis changes the relationship and, whether you like it or not, it makes you one of the skeptics.

In the end, I like to think of myself as a theistic ethical humanist (I believe that intelligent life, human or otherwise, has value, that one has ethical obligations to humans as part of a universal law placed into our hearts by a universal lawgiver), who has jumped on board the train of Hirschian Judaism and managed to make himself comfortable. I still hold out some hope for the Bible to be the true word of God and for the Exodus to have happened in a direct literal sense but I accept the reality that I cannot take it as a given. The evidence is strong enough against it that it cannot be used as a foundation for living one's life. If I did not strongly believe in God, I probably would abandon Jewish practice. As a believer in God, though, I seek some form of practice to relate to him. Judaism, even as the creation of Jewish philosophers, would still be better than any religion that I might decide to make up for myself; our Jewish philosophers can still offer tradition and community. Even if I were trying to create my own religion, it would probably end up looking a lot like Judaism anyway, just without an elaborate mythology.

As a Muppets fan, I accept for myself the role of being Judaism's Statler and Waldorf as a mark of honor (Unlike most Ironic Jews, I am theatrical and love the dramatic). If I am a heretic, so be it. I still wish to be part of the show.

Of Aspergers and Robots (They Just Might Both be Capable of Emotions)

I ended my previous post with a word in about the importance of emotions and a sense of humor even in seemingly strictly rational endeavors and I thought that the topic deserved some further discussion. As with most Aspergers, I struggle against a public perception that we are simply rational automatons, robots without emotions. Anyone who has ever spent time with Aspergers knows that this is false. Asperger syndrome is not the lack of emotions; it is the inability to effectively display emotion in a manner understandable to others. In other words, it is the "disability" of neurotypicals, who cannot understand our emotions to the same extent that we seem to be hopeless at deciphering their emotions. By emotions, I mean in the positive sense of being able to desire, hope and even find joy and in the negative sense to be able to have one's feelings hurt, to be afraid, and even at times to fall into despair. The hallmark of all of these things is that in of themselves they are not rational, not subject to rational control (in terms of feelings, not actions), and have no direct Utilitarian value.

There are a number of reasons why Aspergers come across as lacking emotions. The first is that we relate to the world primarily in terms of information and not social connections. So Aspergers have an affinity for strings of information, in my case primarily history, but also politics and even the lyrics of Broadway musicals (I can remember lyrics, I just cannot sing them). The obvious conclusion from seeing someone spouting information is that such a person is precisely that, just information without emotion; what a robot would do. This is only enhanced by the fact that most Aspergers do not convey facial expressions in the same way and to the same extent as neurotypicals. Just as Aspergers have trouble reading neurotypical body language, neurotypicals have trouble reading Asperger body language. (I will leave it as an open question as to whether Aspergers fail to read body language due to not having developed one of their own or whether they do not develop conventional body language due to their inability to read the body language of others.)

What should strike one as odd about this seemingly common-sense view of Aspergers as information-spewing robots is that it fails to explain why an Asperger would bother going through the effort of learning the information and passing it along? Might I suggest that the reason why Aspergers do this is that it makes them happy in the same irrational way that neurotypicals find happiness in the mere presence of friends and in having a relationship with them? The very act of being a "robot" it turns out is only possible for one with emotions.

One has to understand that the Asperger experience is profoundly one not of lacking emotions, but of having emotions and not having them being understood while at the same time being held hostage to the emotional demands of others. Is it any wonder that one might wish from time to time to cut away one's heart and be just pure reason? Aspergers learn from early on to attempt to distinguish between emotions and reason. Reason is that which you have some hope of being able to convey to others so that they will listen. Recently I was sitting in a lounge when I overheard a meeting for a planned student trip to Germany. What struck me was the leader's continuous emphasis on the need to distinguish between reason and emotions. It is well and good for these students to find Germany and setting foot on German soil to be emotionally trying. No one is asking them to ever become comfortable with Germany or ever wish to live there. That being said, it would not be appropriate to take these emotions out on Germans they meet, the vast majority of them being born after World War II and in no way responsible for the Holocaust. Possibly for the first time in their lives, these students were being asked to do what I do every day, recognize that their emotions have no validity outside of their own heads and cannot be used to gain moral leverage over others.

Probably the greatest proof that Aspergers have emotions is that, unfortunately, so many of us suffer from depression. It makes sense; you would also be depressed if you had to live your life cut off from other people in a world distinctively not made with you in mind. To be depressed means that you can be bothered by these things, something only possible with deep emotions. For this reason, I strongly relate to Marvin, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy's depressed robot. With the exception of Arthur Dent, Marvin is the most poignantly human character in the series. If I am going to be stuck as a robot, I would hope to transcend my depressive existence by becoming Wall-E, a trash can robot, who says almost nothing but manages to be the fictional humanist hero of the decade.

My Search for Meaning: Let Things Mean Something

I spend more time than it is likely healthy for me contemplating the nature of other people and what motivates them. I am particularly intrigued as to how is it that the vast majority of people manage to live their lives without being plagued by the big questions such as the meaning of life, what is Truth and how can we come to any reasonable certainty as to any of these issues. To put the issue starkly, as far as I can tell, the universe existed for twelve to fifteen billion years in which time I did not exist. Before this century is out, barring major advances in technology, I will once again cease to exist and the universe will go on for billions of years without me as if I never existed in the first place. So what is the point? If I am to perish from all existence, let me at least come to some knowledge as to what this world, I find myself in, means. This lack of concern seems to infect both sides of our religious/secular divide. We have our materialistic secular culture searching for new ever greater pleasures almost as an opiate to avoid considering the obvious. I find that religious people are materialistic in their own more subtle ways just as secular people are. I would even go so far as to say that this particular brand of religious materialism is far more corrupting to the mind than anything the secular world could offer. In my experience, belief for members of organized religions is social in nature; you believe in the beliefs of your society. This can be seen as its own opiate and an attempt to avoid the obvious. In a religious setting, we can at least expect the big questions to be asked in a perfunctory manner. But since organized religious tend toward claiming that they have the answers, the questions lose their meaning. They become like the Four Questions of the Passover Seder, to be asked and perfunctorily answered so we can go on to other things.

Do not get me wrong, in many respects, I envy such people. They overall seem to be much happier than I am. If I ever were to be tempted to take some sort of pill to "cure" my Asperger syndrome, I think this would be the temptation, particularly if you threw in a sweet pleasant cute (along with other meaningless positive adjectives) woman to marry. Let us face it, my inability to engage in small social chit-chat and avoid talking about the big issues for any length of time does tend to scare people off and why I am still gloriously single. Not only do most people not actively engage the big issues, they find it objectionable to talk about these things at certain times, such as before breakfast, at dinner, on a first date or within thirty seconds of meeting them. Like hello, my name is Benzion Chinn. What do you do? I am working on a doctorate in history and write a blog. What do you think of the babel fish argument against the existence of God? (I will take the fifth as to whether I have ever literally had this exact conversation with anyone.)

People, who know me, throw my question back at me. Why do I care so much about issues? I am not so arrogant as to believe that I am a being of such intellect as to solve the mysteries of the world. It is also very clear that to go up against the limits of my intellect frustrates me. This is only exacerbated by the fact that I look around and see that most people do not care about these issues and live perfectly happy lives not banging their heads against a wall. Humor for them is simply something to be enjoyed, not a life and death defense mechanism to defend one's sanity in the face of utter despair. Would not my life be so much easier if I could only let things go?

I admit that I am stubborn, and in many respects in a self-destructive manner. My father often tells me that I would rather be right than happy and he is right. And if I did not have a sense of humor about my situation, I think I would have long ago been overwhelmed by it. I do believe there is a purpose in what I do and how I live my life. I may not be able to solve the meaning of life, but I can strive to give meaning to the world within my own mind. This means an insistence that words mean something and as such there are consequences to the words you use. Similarly, categories and ideas mean something and there are consequences to employing them. The ultimate goal of this process, which this blog is an expression of, is to create an internally coherent system of thinking. This system of thinking can then serve as a map outlining the world at large. Agree or disagree with what I write on this blog, but I challenge you to find where I am incoherent, simply throwing words around as rhetorical props, or where I am inconsistent. You may dislike what I say, but my positions are consistent, even brutally so. It may be useful to consider this blog as a long-running game of chess, played usually against hypothetical opponents, in which I hypothetically move my pieces around seeking to create the strongest position possible against any hypothetical attack.

This may be part of my Asperger personality, but I find meaning in this construction of my own logical world, populated by meaningful words and categories. Asperger syndrome itself is simply a useful category to be able to describe a particular way of thinking and place it in this neat little mental universe. It is useful as long as it contributes to the creation of a mental map of the world that is either more accurate or more easily comprehensible. I may not be able to give meaning to the universe. But at least I can be at home in my cozy orderly mind. From this cozy orderly mind, I can hope to venture forth, map in hand, into the world and hope to, at the very least, be able to have a meaningful discussion about it with other rational beings.

Let me end by making it clear that I do not deny the value of humor and the inner emotional life necessary in order for a sense of humor to be possible. On the contrary, in the universe I outline, while it may be built around rational beings, is not one of emotionless humorless robots. Humor has its place as we, together come to the limits of our reason. Rather than collectively bang our heads against a wall, have a good laugh at the absurdity of our situation and, by so doing, maintain our sanity despite everything.

Stanley Fish, Arizona and the Depoliticized Classroom

Dr. Stanley Fish has an interesting post on one particular element of the new Arizona anti-illegal immigration efforts, Arizona the Gift that Keeps on Giving. Arizona now wishes to ban ethnic studies classes in public schools, which are designed to promote "race consciousness." One of the things that I admire about Fish is his willingness to stand up for a depoliticized academia and he is on form in this piece as he attacks the pedagogical theories of Paulo Freire and the Mexican American Studies Department of the Tucson Unified School District for using them as the basis for their Social Justice Education Project. Fish, though, turns around and attacks the new law for proposing "that public school pupils should be taught to treat and value each other as individuals and not be taught to resent or hate other races or other classes of people."

As readers of this blog know, I am an opponent of any attempt from either the left or the right to politicize education. When I teach history, I teach the historical method of thinking and use it to consider the who, what, when, where, and why of history; I do not teach moral or political values. I see this as part of the bargain we strike together to allow us to have the sort of free society in which one can receive the sort of meaningful education that might down the road turn someone to the right or left. My objection to someone like Freire has little to do with what I might think about the existence of hegemonic cultures and thought structures and their malicious influence. My problem is that Freire not only attacks proponents of these hegemonic cultures, who we have to assume are real people and not just theoretical constructs but delegitimizes them as well. If these proponents of hegemonic cultures are as dark and as dangerous as Freire claims, then there can be no meaningful discourse with them. Any time you take discussion off the table you have put guns on the table. In essence, the pedagogy of Freire is a call for the disenfranchisement, political slavery, and even murder of ideological opponents like me, all while being hypocritical enough to deny this fact and having the gall to ask people like me to financially support my own destruction.

While I support widening the circle of people whom, while I may disagree with them I still view as legitimate, as much as possible, there are going to be people who fall outside this circle, who believe things that not only go against the free society but make it impossible for them to take part in it and still have a free society in any meaningful sense. This leads to a situation where the free society must insist, as the price of admission, on the acceptance of certain beliefs. This is no different than the situation of rational skepticism, which allows you to question everything else, but the premises underlying itself. This is the price of belief you pay in order to be a skeptic. As a Jew, I am not capable of ever debating whether or not I am a member of an Elders of Zion organization. I ask that you accept on faith that I am a good American citizen and give me the benefit of the doubt and in return I agree to give you the benefit of the doubt. Since American society has decided to accept people like me into its bosom, it has had no choice but to expel white supremacists from its midst and banish them to places like rural Idaho. This would even apply to the government. I could not be an equal part of an American politics in which white supremacists are also allowed to take part in a meaningful way. As such, having me in the system means that we are forced to use all means, Constitutional and extra-Constitutional to make sure white supremacists are not. Nothing personal against white supremacists, but our views are so mutually exclusive that we have no choice, in essence, but to kill each other.

Because I recognize this sort of bargain we make with each other. I have no objection for the government to come in and openly insist on certain ground rules in order to take part in the system. Particularly, everyone has to accept the authority of the government, obey the law, and respect the legitimacy, as opposed to liking or agreeing with them, of all other signers of this pact. In a multi-racial United States, one has to be willing to accept, at least ex post facto, that people of all races can be legitimate American citizens. This is all of course superfluous since I oppose government-funded education in the first place. I would, though, support similar language in a bill targeting who can run for public office. Yes, it would be an ideological test, but one, in essence no different than swearing to uphold the Constitution.

The Postmodern Corporate State

In the medieval corporate state, groups negotiated for political and economic advantage. In the liberal state, individuals negotiated for the right to live as they chose so long as they did no harm to others. In the postmodern state, groups negotiate for something never before held to be the business of politics; recognition, regard, self-esteem. (Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Home We Build Together pg. 55)

Dr. Haym Soloveitchik has a line that I often use with my own students: "In the pre-modern State there was no such thing as rights; there were privileges that you paid for." The common perception of the Middle Ages was that it was hierarchical and oppressive, with women, peasants, Jews, and heretics being trodden underfoot by the nobility and the Church. The hierarchical part of medieval politics was certainly true, though I am hardly convinced that hierarchy, in of itself as an abstract model of the universe, is necessarily bad. Certainly, its replacement by an egalitarian model had far more to do with changes in the natural sciences than any sudden "enlightenment" as to the unjustness of hierarchy. The notion of the medieval State as oppressive misses the point. Knights were not treated better than peasants because of any assumption of their superiority (beyond the usual sense, common to all people in all times, that they are somehow better than other people). Knights performed a valuable service as professional soldiers; hence their services bought them special privileges. As with the changes in the natural sciences, the shift to mass "citizen's" armies did far more to bring down the feudal hierarchy than any realization that it was "wrong." In highly militarized societies, where the dominant issue is not suffering sudden violent death, value is going to be predominantly determined based on military usefulness. Hence knights would be "better" than peasants and men "better" than women. The demilitarization of society (where we can now worry about social security because we expect to live long enough to receive it without suffering sudden violent death) did far more to bring down the patriarchal hierarchy than any realization that there was anything "wrong" with it. Jews were tolerated sometimes in Christendom and sometimes persecuted not because Christians were "tolerant" or "intolerant," but because Jews were useful and therefore capable of directly or indirectly paying for their protection. With the economic revolutions of the late Middle Ages, Jews stopped being useful and could no longer pay for their protection; hence their expulsion from Western Europe. If there is an underlying mission to what I teach about the Middle Ages and the rise of the Modern World, it is to get students out of their modern moralism, that we are somehow "better," than those living in the Middle Ages because we are "tolerant" and believe in "equality."

While I have no desire to return to a medieval feudal hierarchy (there are certainly good reasons why this form of government disappeared), I do believe that there is something very healthy about the model of privileges as opposed to rights. To be clear, I believe, and the medieval political tradition would agree with me, that there is such a thing as rights, in the sense of right and wrong and that one should not seek to persecute others simply because they are weaker than you. That being said, while I am morally obligated to support the "rights" of others, I can have no expectation that my "rights" will be respected in turn. All I can do is attempt to negotiate for my ability to live in peace by offering something, likely similar guarantees to others of my willingness to allow them to live in peace, in return. One of the fundamental weaknesses of modern liberalism is that it sees rights simply as givens, not something to be bartered for. This creates a situation where rights become a matter of groups demanding their "rights" and holding the rest of society up for blackmail. Now many of these things, whether gay marriage, equal pay for women or protection for illegal immigrants, may be perfectly legitimate. That being said, if there is no sense of negotiating and paying, then there can be no discussion, just the stomping of one's foot, demanding what you want and insisting that anyone who does not give you what you want is "intolerant" and an "enemy of the free society." The moment we stop thinking about rights and instead start talking about privileges, privileges that we pay for, then we might come to decide that certain "rights" might be too expensive and that we can do without them.

Some Religions Do Make You Stupider

Andrew Newberg, a professor of radiology at the University of Pennsylvania, has been putting nuns and Buddhist meditators into a scanning machine (separately, of course) to measure how their brains function during spiritual experiences. He discovered that religious experiences have a profound impact on the brain: both nuns and meditators showed heightened activity in the frontal lobes of the brain when they were in spiritual states. Newberg also studied Pentecostals while they were speaking in tongues and discovered exactly the opposite phenomenon – a marked decline in the frontal lobes. (John Micklethwait and Adrain Wooldridge, God is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith is Changing the World pg. 145-46.)

Free Shipping and the Rights of States: The Right of all States (Not Just Israel) to Wage War in its Own Self Interest

By now I assume that all of my readers have heard the news about the Israeli raid on an aid ship in which numerous civilians were killed. This has sparked the usual internet back and forth between Israel's supporters and opponents. Several students of mine got into the thick of one such conflict on Facebook. I am very proud of them; I would like to think that this reflects positively on my teaching, at least a little bit. I am not here to defend Israel, or at least I am not here to defend just Israel. I recognize that this issue ultimately is one of legitimacy and casts a wider net than just the interception of some ships. If Israel has the right to blockade Gaza as part of its war against Hamas then it has the right to not allow ships in. If Israel has the right to not allow ships in then it has the right to intercept them. If Israel has the right to intercept ships then it has the right to use force if there is a plausible concern of being met with violence. I would even go so far as to say that Israel would be justified in firing the first shot. I am not going to sit here from behind my computer and second-guess the decisions of soldiers out in the field in danger of their lives. Obviously, if Israel does not have the right to blockade Gaza then this whole discourse collapses and Israel is the aggressor no matter who fired the first shot. I am certainly on the side of the former even as I recognize that the execution of this mission was a disaster.

I would like to take a step back from Israel to consider a larger picture. When Israel comes under attack by the Leftist-Islamic alliance the gut reaction of most is to claim anti-Semitism. I agree with Mark Lilla in viewing the Leftist part of the alliance, as having more to do with an opposition to Nation-States. I would go so far as to see this as an opposition to States as a whole. There are nearly two hundred countries in the world today so it is very easy to take, for granted, what a State is. Modern liberalism likes to mumble something about States ruling over people and having the responsibility to cater to an ever-expanding list of inalienable rights and to provide services. Whatever inalienable rights exist out there in some theoretical state of nature, the State is an instrument of violence to which we sacrifice many, if not most, of our theoretical rights in the hopes of being able to enjoy some of them in practice. All laws are implicitly backed by the threat of force (disobey the law and we will physically coerce you into prison or even execute you) and all relations between nations are explicitly so (if we cannot reach an agreement then we will make war upon you and force you to give us what we want). This is not to say that the State and its instruments of violence are good things. There is a reason why I am a libertarian and support a very minimal government, even as I will back that minimal government all the way. I do not seek out violence but believe in pursuing all legitimate avenues to peace.

The United States had the moral right to wage war against Imperial Japan during World War II. As Japan was a State that systematically violated every standard of human rights known to nations almost as egregiously as Germany, the traditional rules of warfare no longer applied. Therefore, the mass bombing of Japanese cities and eventually the atomic bomb was justified. One of the alternatives to using the atomic bomb on Japan was to place a blockade. This would, of course, have likely lasted for months, if not years, and cost hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Japanese lives. Again, considering what Japan did and the threat it presented to the world, the United States would have been justified in such actions and would have been under no obligation to allow any humanitarian aid in as all such aid would by definition be aid to the enemy. Now imagine if some humanitarian aid mission had attempted to run this blockade. Such people, despite their proclamations of being human rights activists, would be nothing less than out-of-uniform Japanese combatants (even if they were not actually Japanese). As such the United States Navy would have been justified in shooting them on sight.

This incident of the flotilla reminds me of Rachel Corrie, a "human rights activist" apparently run over by accident by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza. As with the ship, it is important to keep the political ethics of the situation. This young woman, who may have been a wonderful kind kind-hearted person and meant well, put herself in the way of a military mission. This made her an out-of-uniform enemy combatant and, as such, she forfeited all legal rights, allowing for her to be shot on sight or even tortured. If she believed that Israel was a Nazi regime then she was free to take up arms and fight, with the expectation that armed force would be used in return. One way or another, no blame can be placed on Israel. I do not have anything personal against the people on the ship, but they put themselves in a military situation and thus made themselves out of uniform enemy combatants to be shot on sight. (One does not have to think that one's enemies are bad people even as you kill them.) If they wished to fight let them fight as long as they accept the consequences.

For all the talk of a clash of civilizations between the Western and Islamic worlds, I see the real conflict as within the heart of the Western world. On one hand, there are the classical liberals, who believe in Nation-States as instruments of justified violence to be kept in check by laws and treaties, and modern liberalism, which rejects such States. While modern liberalism seeks the moral high ground with its claims of pacifist peace-making, in truth its actions are de-facto apologies for the likes of Hamas and all those who seek to make war without the restraint of the systems of checks and balances built up by the West over the past centuries. It is either real war, with real causalities, but with real checks and balances, or unchecked Hobbesian war.

A Regional Recipe for Creating Radical Movements

Those attempting to understand what is coming out of Iran today need to appreciate the extent of which the region of Persia has served to foster militaristic messianic movements. It is actually not just Islamic movements. In terms of Jewish history, this region gave us Abu Isa in the eighth century and David Alroy in the twelfth century. In many respects Persia can be seen as the Islamic world's equivalent of medieval Provence and Italy, regions beloved by modern medievalists for their tendency to do fun things like produce heretical movements and popular revolts. In trying to wrap my head around Persian history (both in terms of my modern interests and in trying to understand the context for the Jewish messianic movements in this region) there seems to be a number of factors that parallel the Southern European situation and have helped contribute to this state of affairs. I am mainly interested in medieval Persia, but these things seem to continue to be relevant to modern Iran.

1. 
   
   The ghost of an ancient advanced culture.
   Italy and Provence were the parts of Western Europe in which the Roman Empire exercised the strongest influence. In many respects, even after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the symbols of the Roman Empire did not go away, particularly in terms of physical monuments. Besides for centralized government bureaucracy, the other thing that the Romans did better than anyone else in pre-modern history was to build. One of the things that have struck me about Ahmadinejad of Iran is the close personal connection he feels to ancient Persia. This is perfectly understandable. The papacy still claims the title of Pontifex Maximus, high priest of the ancient Roman pagan religion. Persia was certainly a culture equal to Rome. The Parthian Empire was, for the most part, more than a match for Rome militarily. Do not underestimate our Iranians; they are a very sophisticated people, just the right amount to be both intellectually and militarily dangerous.
    
2. 
   
   The absence of a strong government.
   Medieval Italy was a collection of city-states. There was no unified Italy until the nineteenth century, a galling reality for classical republicans like Machiavelli, with dreams of reconstituting the Roman republic. Provence was outside the authority of the French monarchy until the thirteenth century. Not unsurprisingly, Provence was brought into the orbit of the French monarchy due to the Albigensian Crusade, when French forces came south to eliminate members of the Gnostic Albigensian sect, branded heretics by the Church and the original targets of the Inquisition.
   Since the downfall of the Sassanids up until modern times, Iran has had periods of strong centralized rule, for example the Safavids in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. That being said, the dominant narrative is one of a region outside of the major centers of power. While Iran converted to Islam, it successfully resisted Arabization, maintaining a Persian culture. (The number one thing I repeat over and over again to my students is that Iranians are not Arabs. They do not speak Arabic, they speak Farsi.) Furthermore Persia managed, in the long run, to resist Arab military control. The Umayyads and later the Abbasids were never able to establish a firm control over the region. Unlike almost the entire Arab world, Persia managed to resist Ottoman control. This left Persia as a haven not just for Twelver Shiism which eventually became the dominant mode of Islam, but also numerous other brands of Shiism for Zoroastrianism, which survived the Islamic conquest. In terms of Jewish history, Persia was a major center of Karaism.
   
   

In creating radical societies, such as medieval Italy and Provence and Iran down to modern times, we are looking at two contradictory forces. While we want a history of an advanced society, with a legacy of strong government, that strong government should be lacking in the present day reality. We need to be far enough from established centers of political authority to avoid notice. This creates the sort of power vacuum that allows radical movements to flourish in the first place and not get crushed. But it is precisely these contrasting forces that allow for radicalism to work. While the lack of centralized rule on the ground allows for radicalism in practice, it is precisely this history of strong centralized government that forms the ideological basis for such radicalism. Here political history serves as the perfect State, all the more convenient for it being a non-existent State, open to be claimed by anyone willing to use it.

Jack Bauer’s Last Hobbesian Battle: Some Final Thoughts on 24 and its Politics

I must admit that I did not particularly care for this last season of 24. Looking back, I wish the show had ended with season five (seasons one, three and four are the truly brilliant ones). Seasons six and seven, to say nothing of the truly horrendous made for TV movie, lacked the energy and the writing to keep them interesting. 24 may not be a well written show in the conventional sense, but at its best it stands as the most truly addictive show in the history of television. This came from a manic intensity and the show's utter unpredictability. As the perfect show for our ADHD generation, it was always who is going to get killed next, when is the next bomb going to go off, and who is going to be the next person to be revealed as a double agent? At the center of this was Kiefer Sutherland's Jack Bauer. Sutherland brought an aggressive power to this role, tempered by a humanity that makes Bauer the secret agent/cop hero against which all future such roles will be judged. The last few seasons descended to parodies of 24 as the same plot-lines were recycled with utter predictability, the writers followed by the actors just going through the motions.

Season eight of 24 was, for the first two thirds of the season, running steady for being the worst season of the series. Then a sniper took out Jack's love interest, Renee Walker, and Jack went off the deep end. This, in of itself, is fairly standard 24 fare. Added to the mix, though, was the reintroduction of the Nixonian former president Charles Logan. (Jack took him down in season five for his part in the conspiracy to take down the beloved President of the early seasons, David Palmer.) Logan manages to worm his way into the confidence of President Allison Taylor and convinces her to cover up evidence that the Russians were behind the events of the first part of the season (including the assassination of the president of a foreign country and a dirty bomb nearly going off in New York) in the hopes of keeping them at the peace table.

President Taylor might never have been the moral rock that President Palmer was, but she was decent enough. Her corruption is rendered plausible since it is the capitulation to that basic politician's conceit that what they do, the deals they negotiate and the pieces of paper they sign, are actually what matter and not the military reality on the ground. This sort of politician's conceit has played itself out tragically in real life with the British government covering up from the public the fact that Germany was rearming out of the fear that the public would force a war. The British eventually signed the Munich agreement to bring "peace in our time." Similarly the Israeli government signed the Oslo accords with Yasser Arafat. Throughout the peace process, whenever things broke down the reaction of the political class was that the parties needed to come back together to negotiate another round of accords, regardless of whether Arafat could be trusted to keep it. The dictum "war is politics by other means" has it backwards. Politics is warfare by other means. The natural state of affairs is for nations to wage wars of destruction with each other. Peace treaties are our attempt to find a better solution. No one has an innate right to live in peace. You earn the right to live in peace by convincing others that you can be trusted and that it is their interest to let you live. I support peace in the Middle East, even land for peace and a Palestinian State. These things will only happen when the Palestinians and the Arab world at large believe that the choices are either peace and acceptance of Israel or the destruction of their cities and countries as was done to Germany and Japan. (My brother refers to my politics as "Liberal Machiavellianism.")

Jack reacts to President Taylor's betrayal by going on a killing spree, taking down the people involved one by one, carving out the guts of one Russian operative and impaling the Russian ambassador. This climaxes in the final episode with Jack putting Logan and President Suvarov of Russia in the scope of a sniper rifle. I find Jack's actions to be perfectly morally defensible. Even to the question of whether assassinating the president of Russia will lead to war, I would respond that an international politics with leaders who initiate assassinations of other leaders and WMD attacks on other countries in order to scuttle legitimate peace treaties, is going to lead to a major war anyway. Better take your chances with attempting to remove such leaders. For treaties to mean something then those who would violate them must not be allowed to benefit from them. I was actually hoping that Jack would kill President Taylor. Governments are based on treaties with their citizens, no different than the treaties between nations. The treaty is that citizens should obey their leaders and not murder them and leaders agree to follow their own laws. Taylor violated that treaty and therefore undermined the very legitimacy of her government. She even went so far as to implicitly allow for Jack to be killed. This leaves only Hobbesian war and Jack is certainly someone capable of waging such a war. Jack could even be excused for the innocent civilians that get hurt or killed along the way. Taylor allowed herself the moral license to allow civilians to be hurt. Jack, in order to fight this Hobbesian war, has no choice but to arm himself with the same moral license. This is the reason why one needs to keep treaties. Treaties only mean something when the consequences of breaking them become too horrifying to contemplate.

What a great way for the show to go out for Jack to assassinate the President. Instead the show got cold feet and sold out. Jack does not even kill Suvarov and Logan. Instead he allows Chloe to talk him down to try to reveal the cover up. As part of the plan Jack orders Chloe to kill him, knowing that the government would never allow him to live. It would have been great if Chloe had followed through and the show could have gone out with the loyal Chloe killing Jack. Instead Chloe only shoots him in the shoulder. The plan fails, but the day is saved when Taylor repents her actions after seeing Jack's video where he explains his actions and refuses to go through with the treaty. The early seasons of 24 deserved something better for an ending.

Between Baron and Scholem

In his eulogistic review of Salo Baron, "The Last Jewish Generalist," Ismar Schorsch criticizes Baron and the last ten volumes of his eighteen volume Social and Religious History of the Jewish People for adopting an external view of Jewish existence, one that privileged sociology and economics, over an internal view of Jews, focusing on religious experience. According to Schorsch:

Ours is a politically secure generation hungry for the sacred. Its guide to the past is not Baron but Gershom Scholem, and its own historians tend to concentrate on subjects of religious import often studied from an exclusively internal perspective. If Scholem fertilized all sectors of Jewish thought with his lifelong study of kabbalah, contemporary scholarship is rediscovering the magic of midrash. The present temper prefers text to context, literature to history, meaning to significance, and regards Baron as the pinnacle of positivistic Wissenschaft.

For those of you familiar with the state of academic Jewish history, does Schorsch's declaration from 1993 still stand or was he crowing victory a little too soon? I find his declaration in favor of Scholem to be ironic, considering that, when he made it, Moshe Idel had already become the flag carrier for the revisionist movement in Kabbalah studies against Scholem, a trend that has only accelerated in the past seventeen years. Furthermore only several years ago Schorsch himself, when he stepped down from being the chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, delivering a "what is wrong with the Conservative movement" farewell address in which he lamented the fact that the Conservative movement had abandoned the sort of scholarship represented by, wait for it, Gershom Scholem.

In terms of general historiography, I am wondering as to what extent the trend Schorsch describes is representative of the study of European history in general. Baron can be seen as a Jewish version of the sort of socio-economic history represented by the likes of such early and mid-twentieth century historians as Marc Bloch and Fernand Braudel. So where are we historians at, dropping dry technical sociological studies in favor of a history of "meaning?"

Jack’s Last Battle: Some Final Thoughts on Lost and C. S. Lewis

This past week saw the series finales of two of my long-running favorite shows, Lost and 24. Without them, I will probably get more work done. So here are some final thoughts of these two (usually) brilliant and revolutionary shows.

To deal with Lost first, I have long cherished the fact that they included C. S. Lewis in the guise of Charlotte Staples Lewis among the great philosophers such as Locke, Rousseau, and Hume to be named on the show. So I was particularly intrigued by the fact that they chose to pull off an ending reminiscent of how Lewis ended the Chronicles of Narnia with the Last Battle. Lewis famously (or infamously) had almost all the major human characters from the series killed off in a train accident and taken off to Aslan's kingdom where they all live happily ever after. Keep in mind that we are dealing with a series of kid's books. Most infamously of all, Lewis has Susan left behind, because she had abandoned "belief" in Narnia for her adult cares, mainly nylon stockings. Many have argued that nylons were meant as code for sex and that Lewis was telling kids that if they have pre-marital sex they will go to hell.

Anyone familiar with Lewis' wider body of work, not just Narnia, would tell you that, for Lewis, it really is about the small things, such as nylons, to such an extent that if Lewis had written that Susan was not going to be saved because of her sex life, sex is really code for all the petty vain things, like nylons, that are really at the heart of the matter. In Lewis' theology, it is always the small sins that are important and which damn us. The big sins are merely the end result of all the small sins. For this reason, it is of little importance that, in Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Edmund betrays his siblings to the White Witch. The real issue at hand was Edmund's pride and jealousy, present from the beginning of the story. A chastened humble Edmund is a savable Edmund, regardless of the consequences of his misdeeds. On the contrary, having to live with the consequences serves all the more as a chastisement to cure the original sin. The real problem with sex is not the act itself. The real issues (at least potentially) at hand are the pride that led one to think they are above conventional morality, the desire, not so much for physical pleasure, but to be part of the inner circle of people in the "know" and the rebellion against conventional morals. As Lewis points out in his essay, the Inner Ring:

Freud would say, no doubt, that the whole thing is a subterfuge of the sexual impulse. I wonder whether the shoe is not sometimes on the other foot. I wonder whether, in ages of promiscuity, many a virginity has not been lost less in obedience to Venus than in obedience to the lure of the caucus. For of course, when promiscuity is the fashion, the chaste are outsiders. They are ignorant of something that other people know. They are uninitiated. And as for lighter matters, the number of people who first smoked or first got drunk for a similar reason is probably very large.

A person could easily come to regret a sexual action, in of itself, and repent. It is not so simple to repent from the pride that led to it. Without facing the issue of pride there can be no meaningful repentance for sex and the deed will be repeated and worse things will follow.

The major mystery with Lost in the final season was what to make of the alternative parallel universe, populated by versions of the main characters, that came into existence, seemingly after Juliet Burke set off a nuclear bomb on the Island at the end of season five. I was hoping for Desmond Hume to bring back John Locke from the alternative universe to save the Island from the smoke monster, who had taken the form of Locke. (Hats off to Terry O'Quinn for the range he showed over the series, playing the noble John Locke with his struggles with faith in the Island for four seasons, the smoke monster pretending to be Locke for one season, and the utterly satanic yet chillingly charming smoke monster this last season. Whatever qualms I may have with the quality of the writing of this show at times, I cannot stress enough how talented a cast of actors Lost had.) The alternative universe Locke would be followed by the rest of the people in the alternative universe, who sacrifice themselves and the happier existences of the alternative universe to cross back over and save the Island.

I was always far more of a John Locke fan than a Jack Shephard fan. Shephard might be important as the political leader of the survivors, establishing a community, but it was Locke, who confronted the big questions of meaning and the purpose of the Island. (I never cared about the Jack-Kate-Sawyer love triangle.) I would compare the relationship between Shephard and Locke to the relationship, I once discussed, between Peter and Ender Wiggin in the Ender series. Instead of letting this play out, the writers decided to let Jack take on what should have been Locke's role as the faith leader to save the Island.

To top it all off, in the end, the alternative universe ends up playing no role in the final conflict with the smoke monster. It is a gateway world where all the characters who died during the show along with the characters who survived but will one day die have been gathered together to fix their relationships before moving on together. The "Jew" Benjamin Linus is even given a truly moving repentance scene that Lewis would surely have approved of. Linus asks Locke for forgiveness for trying to kill him; the sin he focuses on is not murder, but the jealousy that drove him to it. That being said, this gathering together was a cop-out that dodged the major issues and failed to give six seasons of mystery the ending it deserved. Whatever else you can say about what Lewis did to Narnia in the Last Battle, and it certainly is the most difficult of the seven books, at least his narrative made sense.

Asperger Discrimination: Some Self Evaluation

One of my recent posts dealt with some of my reactions to being let go by the high school I was teaching at. I used an email sent by a member of the administration, which praised the job that I did for them even if I they would not be able to have me back as a launching pad to muse about the nature of discrimination and where one draws the line between saying that those with certain character traits are ineligible for a job and saying that members of certain minority groups are ineligible when the characteristic in question is closely related to a specific minority group. The example I gave was that of a black teacher. We need to be honest that integrating society and creating a more tolerant one is not a simple or painless task. Having a black teacher teach a white class is likely to create friction. A world in which blacks carry the burden of integration, of making sure that there is no friction and of having the right "touch" in dealing with students civil rights is one in which civil rights would never get off the ground. Every act of bigotry can be hid behind a smile and the claim that unfortunately the person fails to socially integrate himself. As an Asperger, I see myself as a member of a minority group and feel we should receive everything that society grants to other minority groups such as blacks and gays. Looking back at the post I can see how it could have been misread by people, not familiar with my thought processes, casually glancing at.

To be clear, I was not arguing that I had been discriminated against. I specially pointed out that, even in my black teacher scenario, it is not clear to me that our black teacher would or should win. It would be touch and go. I practice, I suspect, it would come down to the school being able to demonstrate that they are acting in good faith in dealing with blacks and the struggle with students was not simply an excuse or a more politically correct way of framing discrimination. This piece was also not meant as an attack on the school for daring to fire a teacher as "talented" as me. I specially said that I was very grateful to the administration for the opportunity. My whole argument is dependent on the fact that it was very kind of them to write me this letter. A person is never truly in a position to evaluate himself so I have no desire to argue one way or another as to whether I am a "good" teacher or not. I took the stance that overall I did a good job on all things subject to empirical evaluation since that was the school's stance and because it sets up the whole theoretical issue, which I wished to discuss.

My evaluation of myself is pretty much in keeping with how I think the administration saw me. I have a very strong background in the material and I am a good lecturer. I still need to work on my back and forths with students and my tendency to just wind myself up and speak for forty-five minutes straight. My ability to control a classroom is a major problem. I may love teaching and honestly care about the students in my classroom, but I certainly do not have an easy time relating to them. I am brash, loud, and students often find me intimidating. This leads to situations where issues that should have been easily defused blow up into major issues and reach the attention of administrators, by definition a losing situation for me. If I were an administrator, I would have questions about rehiring me since I am one more thing to worry about and a parent brought lawsuit waiting to happen. In the end I think I am a very good teacher for certain types of students. My ideal teaching job would be what Dr. Louis Feldman has at Yeshiva University teaching Classics to two students. I could be the quirky teacher at some college off to the side with his pack of students. This sort of job, of course, is rare in this day and age and is unlikely to come my way.

Any final judgment of my teaching comes down to a question of values. What is the most important part of teaching, being a fountain of knowledge for students to tap or someone that students like and avoids trouble?

Vote Cthulhu for Your Planet’s New Deity

I finally got around to reading Eoin Colfer's attempt to step into Douglas Adams' shoes And Another Thing …. Those who are not already familiar with Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, with its very British intellectual insanity, are not likely to understand nor appreciate this book and would be better served in starting from the beginning (when the Earth is blown to bits by the Vogans to make way for an interstellar highway). Hitchhiker fans are unlikely to go for this new entry either. It is not that Colfer is not capable of imitating Adams' particular manic writing style and his random storylines; Colfer can certainly effectively imitate Adams. The problem is one of Colfer being capable of resurrecting Adams in body, while ignoring the spirit. This may sound counter-initiative, but in a random absurdist story like Hitchhiker, character and plot matter all the more. However absurd Hitchhiker might become, we need to care about Arthur Dent and his travails. His relationships with Ford Prefect, Zaphod Beeblebrox, Marvin the depressed robot, and Trillian have to work on a very human level. The absurdity is not an excuse to ignore this; on the contrary, it makes it more important. If we have nothing else to hang on to that makes sense we need to be able to grab on to the characters. The other thing to consider is plot. Hitchhiker worked best when it had a plot, no matter how ridiculous, to guide the story. The reader needs to be heading to some recognizable destination whether it is finding the ultimate question (the answer to which is 42) or saving the universe from cricket playing assassin droids. Without a goal, the story descends into a random sequence of acid trip jottings. (Adams did claim to have conceived the whole idea for Hitchhiker while drunk.) In all fairness, not even Adams was capable of consistently living up to this standard.

There was one short sequence that I found worthwhile and worth sharing. The planet Nano, and its leader Hillman Hunter, decide they are in need of a deity. They, therefore, turn to consider none other than H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu. (Do not bother trying to figure out how to pronounce it. It is not designed to be pronounced by human lips.) For those of you not familiar with Lovecraft, he specialized in macabre short stories and novelettes mainly about humans using science and dark magic to cut through the thin veil of their earthly reality. At which point they look out into a universe bereft of any benevolent deity, but instead populated by monstrous "ancient ones" like Cthulhu, a prospect that generally drives the unfortunate humans into insanity.


A huge anthropoid was seated uncomfortably in the interview room's office chair, its grotesque, scaled torso squirming in the confines of the small seat. Tentacles dripped from its chin like fleeing slugs, and hard black eyes glittered from the depth of a pulpy face.
Hillman Hunter shuffled the pages of the creature's resume.
"So, Mr. Cthulhu, is it?"
Hmmm," said the creature.
"Good," said Hillman. "A bit of the ineffable, I like that in a deity." He winked conspiratorially. "Still, it wouldn't be much of an in-depth interview if we couldn't get a few facts out of you, eh, Mr. Cthulhu?"
Cthulhu shrugged and dreamed of days of wanton genocide.
…

"I see here you were in people's minds a lot a few centuries ago thanks to Lovecraft. Not much since then?"Cthulhu spoke in a voice of meat and metal. "Well, you know. Science and all that. Put a bit of a kibosh on the god business." Clear gel dripped from his tentacles as he spoke. "I kicked around Asia Minor for a while, trying to drum u a little fear. But people have penicillin now, even poor people have reading material. What do they want gods for?"
…

"Next question. Our last god was a less is more kinda guy. Sent his son down, but didn't show up too often himself. I think, and no disrespect to the man himself, that was probably a mistake. I honestly believe that he would put his hand up to that himself now if we could ask him. What I'm asking you, Mr. Cthulhu, is: Are you going to be a hands-on god or an absentee landlord?"Cthulhu was ready for that one; he had been practicing his answer for that very question with Hastur the Unspeakable only the previous night.
"Oh, hand-on, absolutely," he said, leaning forward to make clear eye contact as Hastur had advised. "The days of blind faith are over. People need to know who is blighting their crops or demanding virgin sacrifice. And now I am going to look away, but only because prolonged eye contact will drive you insane."
Hillman shook the sudden torpor from his head. "Good. Good. Quite a stare you have there, Mr. Cthulhu. Handy weapon to have in the arsenal."
Cthulhu accepted the compliment with a flap of one prodigious tentacle.
"Let's move one, shall we? Where do you stand on the whole Babel fish argument? Proof denies faith and so forth."
"My subjects will have proof and faith," rasped Cthulhu agitatedly. "I will bind them to slavery and trample the weak underfoot."
"I seem to have hit a nerve there," chuckled Hillman. "Again, I think you're on the right track; maybe you might want to pull back a little on the slavery and the trampling. We have quite a lot of weak people here, but they are big supporters of the church, whatever church we eventually pledge to. …"
"So. An old standard next. Presuming your application is successful, where do you see yourself in five years' time?"
Cthulhu brightened. Thank you, Hastur, he beamed into space.
"In five years, I will have razed this planet, eaten its young, and stacked your skulls high in my honor." He sat back satisfied. Succinct and informative, a textbook answer.
A spluttering cough blurted from Hillman's lips. "Skull stacking! Come on, Mr. Cthulhu. Really? Do you think that's what god do today? These are interstellar times we've got here. Space travel, time travel. What we need on Nano is what I like to call an Old Testament god. Strict, sure. Vengeful, fantastic. But indiscriminate eating of young? Those days are gone."
"Shows what you know," muttered Cthulhu, crossing his legs."

(Eoin Colfer, And Another Thing … pg. 91-93.)