Friedrich A. Hayek on the Fundamental Weaknesses of Conservatism

I was just reading Friedrich A. Hayek's essay "Why I am not a Conservative." It is an exemplary statement of the travails of someone who, having rejected modern liberalism, finds he is unable to stand with conservatives. There are a number of passages I thought worth sharing with readers. As Hayek sees it, the fundamental weakness of conservatism is that it is an intellectual non-option.

[Conservatism] by its very nature … cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving. It may succeed by its resistance to current tendencies in slowing down undesirable developments, but, since it does not indicate another direction, it cannot prevent their continuance. It has, for this reason, invariably been the fate of conservatism to be dragged along a path not of its own choosing. The tug of war between conservatives and progressives can only affect the speed, not the direction, of contemporary developments. (The Constitution of Liberty pg. 398.)

The ideological bankruptcy of conservatism plays itself it in how it confronts new ideas.

Conservatives feel instinctively that it is new ideas more than anything else that cause change. But, from its point of view rightly, conservatism fears new ideas because it has no distinctive principles of its own to oppose to them; and, by its distrust of theory and its lack of imagination concerning anything except that which experience has already proved, it deprives itself of the weapons needed in the struggle of ideas. Unlike liberalism with its fundamental belief in the long-range power of ideas, conservatism is bound by the stock of ideas inherited at a given time. And since it does not really believe in the power of argument, its last resort is generally a claim to superior wisdom, based on some self-arrogated superior quality. (Pg. 404.)

Hayek specifically castigated conservatives for their lack of imagination concerning evolution:

I can have little patience with those who oppose, for instance, the theory of evolution or what are called "mechanistic" explanations of the phenomena of life simply because of certain moral consequences which at first seem to follow from these theories, and still less with those who regard it as irreverent or impious to ask certain questions at all. By refusing to face the facts, the conservative only weakens his own position. Frequently the conclusions which rationalist presumption draws from new scientific insights do not at all follow from them. But only by actively taking part in the elaboration of the consequences of new discoveries do we learn whether or not they fit into our world picture and, if so, how. (pg. 404-05.)

I find Hayek's call to take part in the intellectual discussion of the day particularly noteworthy. If you are not an active part of the discussion, offering serious alternatives, then you have no grounds to offer a word of criticism even to begin with.

An Anthropologist Does ArtScroll: A Review of Orthodox by Design

I was really looking forward to reading Jeremy Stolow's Orthodox by Design: Judaism, Print Politics, and the ArtScroll Revolution, about the Haredi ArtScroll publishing company and its influence on Judaism today. Unfortunately, the book is hamstrung, by a dreary anthropological style of writing, a failure to fully engage the material and needless padding in the attempt to create a short book out of what should have been a long article.

Stolow's argument is one that should be familiar to readers of this blog; Haredim, like any self-proclaimed conservative group bent on defending tradition, are trapped by the fact that their very attempt to defend tradition constitutes a change in of itself. ArtScroll is a textbook example of this. Its stated goals are twofold; first to present an "authentic" (i.e. Haredi) version of Judaism and, second, to make this Judaism accessible beyond the narrow enclaves of Haredi yeshiva schools. What the editors of Artscroll, Rabbis Nosson Scherman and Meir Zlotowitz, are not willing to face up to is the fact that such goals are mutually contradictory; the very act of attempting to make Judaism accessible to those raised in a Western culture fundamentally changes it. Also of interest was Stolow's proposed attempt to look at ArtScroll as a mode of transporting authority from the Haredi leadership to people with only a tenuous connection to that world. (I have written about networks of authority mainly within the context of Sabbatianism.)

The fact that ArtScroll represents something different was something understood, I think, intuitively by all of us growing up in the yeshiva system. "Rabbi ArtScroll" constituted its own form of Judaism with only a formal connection to the Judaism we were studying. Looking at the issue from the perspective of John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge's God is Back, the existence of this ArtScroll Judaism is simply the arrival of the American model of religion to Haredi Judaism. ArtScroll offers a surface traditionalism, supporting traditional doctrines and rejecting academic criticism, while at the same time supporting the latest in comfort living and self-help. This goes a long way to explain the existence of Susie Fishbein's Kosher by Design series and Rabbi Abraham J. Twerski, about whom Stolow devotes full chapters.

Unfortunately, this is not a line of inquiry that Stolow bothers to follow. Instead, the author allows himself to get caught up in writing a work of anthropology, trying to apply Clifford Geertz's notions of "scripturalism" to Haredi Judaism and ArtScroll, "treating 'the written word' as a strategically decisive source of knowledge and source of religious authority." (Kindle 731) This issue has already been the subject of Dr. Haym Soloveitchik's stunning essay "Rupture and Reconstruction: The Transformation of Contemporary Orthodoxy." We would have been in Stolow's debt if he would have added depth to Dr. Soloveitchik's narrative. Instead, Stolow seeks to take this issue of "scripturalism" and apply it to the physical process of bookmaking and distribution, leading to the dullest parts of the book.

Part of Stolow's problem is that he is not a historian. He lacks the ability to analyze texts and formulate a narrative from that analysis. He could have written a history of ArtScroll, showing how the story of ArtScroll fits into the larger narrative of the rise of Haredi Orthodoxy in the latter part of the twentieth century. This would have required an in-depth knowledge of American Jewish history and the ability to confront texts. For example, one could talk about the reinterpretive process undergone by Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, with his underlying asceticism, at the hands of Rabbi Twerski in order to fashion a Path of the Just comprehendible to a modern audience. This would require that one confront both Luzzatto's the Path of the Just and Rabbi Twerski as serious intellectual positions.

Stolow's approach seems designed to avoid engaging actual texts; this goes for traditional Jewish texts in Hebrew and Aramaic as well as the popular English texts of ArtScroll, supposedly his field of study. Instead, Stolow comes to the field as an anthropologist; he talks to people, from the editors of ArtScroll down to lay users, looks at books as physical objects, outside of their actual content, and attempts to fit his observations within the general context of some theory, without a narrative or a serious intellectual engagement with the object of his inquiry. This serves to create a study with surface intellectual sophistication but which actively avoids any such thing in practice. Instead of writing a book that was readable and advanced the discussion of modern Jewish, Stolow does neither.

The Military Mission of the Ottoman Empire

I previously discussed the difference between the military and missionary models of conversion as they relate to the Islamic and Christian traditions. The military model sees the conversion of the targeted population as a logical consequence of political rule, while the missionary model eschews politics, even to the point of accepting martyrdom, in the hope of converting the dominant society through argument and claims of miracles. I would like to point readers to an example of the military model as practiced under the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century.

Marc David Baer, in Honored by the Glory of Islam: Conversion and Conquest in Ottoman Europe, analyzes Ottoman conversionary tactics during the reign of Mehmed IV (1648-87). Mehmed IV is best known to Jewish history for being sultan during the outbreak of Sabbatai Sevi's messianic movement in 1665-66, to European history for presiding over the failed attempt to capture Vienna in 1683 and to Turkish history for being a pleasure seeking hunting enthusiast who allowed his empire to decline around him. Baer puts all three of these things together to knit an apology for Mehmed IV. Baer sees Mehmed IV's policies as being part of a consistent and remarkably successful plan of converting Christians, Jews and wayward Muslims. In this Mehmed IV was largely influenced by the conservative Kadizadeli movement, particularly the preacher Vani Mehmed Efendi. Instead of killing Sabbatai, the Ottomans hoped to use Sabbatai as a conversionary tool. Baer conclusively demonstrates how Sabbatai's conversion fit into a common pattern of ritualized conversions where Jews, Christians and heterodox Muslims would come before the court of the sultan to receive instruction in the faith, be dressed in new garments, and to be rewarded with a purse full of coins and a symbolic position at court. The failed siege of Vienna and the setbacks suffered at the end of Mehmed IV's reign, leading to his overthrow, should not detract from several decades of Ottoman military expansion, enlarging the sphere of Islamic power. This involved not just conquering territory, but the "Islamification" of the physical space under their control. This was also accomplished, in cases like the major fire in Istanbul, by not allowing Jews and Christians to rebuild and expelling them from specific neighborhoods thus turning former Jewish and Christian neighborhoods to Islamic spaces. Even Mehmed IV's love of hunting is seen as a means of projecting an image of the conquering Muslim warrior. Hunting served as a form of mock warfare where the sultan could demonstrate his personal bravery and command over other men. Furthermore the hunt served to allow Mehmed IV to travel around the empire and bring him in contact with his non-Muslim subjects and bring them to the faith.

What interests me about the conversion tactics described by Baer are that, while they bear a surface resemblance to the missionary model, they are still rooted primarily within the political and as such remains part of the military model. In our Ottoman scenario people might come to Islam out of their own free will. Even the accounts of Sabbatai's conversion, the major example in Baer's discussion of a forced conversion, carry the sense more of a gentlemen's agreement than brute force. The gist seems to be: "you Sabbatai are guilty of treason and should be put to death, but the sultan has nothing personal against you and is willing to call the whole thing off. He would just like you to do him a small favor, convert to Islam." Despite the absence of formal violence, though, the primary vehicle of conversion (for Sabbatai or anyone else) was the State and the realization that one could most effectively deal with this State by simply converting.

Such conversions lack drama and it was probably the point for it not to be dramatic. Jews and Christians are people of the book; they just need to accept the true conclusion of their faith and accept Islam, which should not be a big deal for them or require any sort of "rebirth." As such there is no need to use physical coercion. There is also no need for a sophisticated attempt to understand Judaism and Christianity and argue with their adherents on their own ground. There is something positive about this, in that Jews and Christians are not demonized; there is no need for them to be shown the "error" of their ways because they already know the truth and should be expected to readily convert. On the flip side, such a view does not take the opposition seriously even to the extent of acknowledging that the other side has opinions to be refuted. Christianity at least took Judaism seriously enough to polemicize against it. One is hard pressed to find an Islamic tradition of even achieving that baseline of respect.

Of Matisse, Skirt Lengths and Teaching Skills

In a recent essay in the Orthodox Journal Conversations, Esther Lapian attacks the Modern Orthodox Memlakhti-dati school system in Israel for caving in to Haredi standards in terms of girls' education. She tells the story of her daughter choosing the artist Henri Matisse as the topic for her school project and getting a poor grade on it despite the hard work she put in. What is interesting is the response Mrs. Lapian got from the teacher when asked for an explanation:


"Well," she said hesitating, "it was a bit skimpy." "Skimpy?!" I cried in disbelief. "She's in fifth grade. She could have chosen 'Water' or 'Color' or 'Why Is the Sky Blue?' Instead she picked a difficult topic and handed in work she did herself. What do you mean by skimpy? "Well," she said quietly, "the truth is … I have never heard of Matisse." ("When Worlds Collide: Why Observant Student Teachers Refuse to Teach in the Memlakhti-dati School System" Conversations Spring 2010 pg. 134)


Mrs. Lapian goes on to note that:

Part of the reason why the teacher in the Matisse story continues to teach in our schools is because she looks the part. She and hundreds like her are teaching in our schools, despite the fact that they may be inferior teachers, because her elbows are covered, her skirts are long, and in the case of married women, her head is covered.

Over the past 10 to 15 years, the dati-leumi establishment has become obsessed with the dress code of women. Prominent rabbis write outrageous articles measuring centimeters on the neck and on the arms. While the suitability of male teachers is measured in how much they know and the quality of their prayer, in the case of women, the skill of pious dressing can override the skills of good teaching. (pg. 138-39)


I would see this issue as a variant of the dress code challenge I raised previously. Every time one chooses to make an issue out of something, by implication one is also saying that other things are not important. Think of it as a point system in which you have a limited number of points to invest. Thus every point you invest in women's dress is a point you are not investing in women's learning or in male civility. To invest in something of minor importance is not just wasting a point it is the support of the negation of a virtue that has value. In our case of women's dress, one cannot play innocent in the statement being made. When you state that women have to be dressed a certain way you are also saying that women do not have to be well educated and that men do not have to respect them. The fact that you do not come out and explicitly say this is irrelevant; it only means that you also support mendacity as well.

It is very easy to say, as politicians regularly do, that you support certain values, whether they are long skirts, children, motherhood, or apple pie. Because such support is so cheap, it is also irrelevant and meaningless. Values only mean something if you are willing to pay a price for them, particularly when that price is that of another value. In the real world, values are going to clash with each other. They gain their meaning precisely when put up against the other and sacrificed for something higher. Do not tell me what values you support; tell me what price you will pay for them.


(For a different reaction to this article see QED.)

Happy Birthday to the American Messianic Dream

Solomon Schindler (1842-1915), a German Reform Rabbi who immigrated to the United States, ended his book on Messianism, Messianic Expectations and Modern Judaism, with the following declaration:

At the very moment when the old bellman's grandson shouted up the belfry, "Ring, ring, grandpa! Oh, ring for liberty!" and when the old state-house bell of Philadelphia spread with its metal tongue the news that the United States had declared their independence, the Messianic idea heaved its last sigh. At that auspicious moment its soul passed away, and what was left of it was a lifeless corpse, which has for some time lain in state, but which is buried for good.

Schindler would, at the end of his life, such views as he turned toward a more traditional brand of Judaism.

Much of my work with messianism can be seen as my attempt to come to terms, not only with the fact that such a view of modernity is flat out incorrect, but also why. This is the same American society that produced Levi Parsons and Pliny Fisk, a pair of Christian missionaries who traveled to Palestine, not only in hopes of converting the Jew, but of restoring him to his homeland in Palestine. A task which Parsons and Fisk believed was necessary for bringing about the Second Coming. Parsons and Fisk were pioneering figures in an Anglo-American Christian Zionism that continues to this day. Surely American messianism should take its place at the heart of the American narrative as part of what moves this country.

In looking out onto the world of the twenty-first century, one of the questions that has to top our minds is why has messianism, in all of its various forms, not died out. A good place to begin is precisely that Liberty Bell and the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The United States does not just represent the secularization of society or even the continuation of messianism by secular means, like Marxism; the United States represents a blending and reconciliation of religion and secularism and a means of bringing religious messianism into the realm of secular politics.

My God is Back Review Over at Book of Doctrines and Opinions

I did a guest post for Dr. Alan Brill over on his blog; it is a review of the book God is Back by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge. The book deals with the continued role of religion in modern day politics. The first part, a general review of the book, is already up. There is also going to be a more specific discussion of the book's relevance for Modern Orthodox Judaism. So check it out.

The Tradition Based Conservatism of a Liberal

One of the foundational premises of my worldview is a certain Burkean conservatism. By this I mean a belief in the value of tradition as playing a necessary role in the maintenance of society. While the liberal looks around at society and sees all that is wrong and might be improved, safe in his faith in the natural goodness of human beings, the conservative wonders why we are all not being murdered in our beds as society collapses into Hobbesian warfare. The chief reason for this, our conservative soon concludes, is that people have this inclination to do and accept things simply because it has been done that way for a long time, tradition. If one digs a little deeper one comes to understand that tradition is an implicit pact we make with each other to submit ourselves to an outside authority. This can be illustrated by the trap Strepsiades falls into in Aristophanes' The Clouds. He cannot deny the validity of tradition that he is obligated to pay back his creditors without undermining the tradition that his son has to respect and obey him.

This support of tradition goes against and ultimately delegitimizes all revolutionary systems, anything that attempts to cut itself off from the past and start anew. All attempts to simply overturn the established government or society, no matter how flawed the old system, are doomed to descend into violence and tyranny. Edmund Burke understood this early on about the French Revolution even before it descended into the Reign of Terror. In modern times, in an even more blood-soaked manner, this pattern has been repeated in Russia, China, and Cambodia. The "revolutions" that worked were precisely those revolutions, like the American Revolution and the English Glorious Revolution, which actively confirmed existing established authorities and thus were not really revolutions at all. With revolution not being an option, the Burkean conservative seeks to work within the system, reforming it, but in ways that not only do not undermine the system but actively confirm its validity.

Burkean conservatism is easily misunderstood because it is often confused with another tradition based ideology that also calls itself "conservative," one that sees the maintenance of tradition and opposition to change as values in of themselves and even as the ultimate value. The most common forms of this mindset are fundamentalist religions. The weakness of this narrow conservatism, and ultimately why it is not conservative at all, is that very act of recognizing something as a tradition in need of defense against the assault of modernity and liberalism is in of itself a radical mental paradigm shift that changes the system. Thus a true conservatism can only exist in a mind that is not conscious of it and in a society with no liberals to challenge it. Living in a world where such conditions do not exist we are left with degrees of conservatism.

It is here that any conservative most face a paradoxical dilemma of having to pick their change; do you accept the obvious change offered by the liberal or do you accept the more subtle changes implied by actively opposing the liberal. Take the example of women's dress, which I have previously discussed; As an Orthodox Jew, desiring to maintain traditional Jewish law and practice in the face of modernity, what am I more concerned about, women wearing clothing that does not conform to traditional Jewish practice or the existence of goon squads enforcing such standards? Am I even comfortable with the publishing of specific guidelines as to how women should dress? What high spiritual values am I upholding as I put a tape measure to women's skirts to make sure they go x amount of inches below the knee? Whatever one believes about how women should dress, noticing that common standards of dress today do not conform with what one might read in Jewish legal codices and deciding that the letter of Jewish law must be maintained at all costs, without seriously considering the potential unintended consequences, or worse to even embrace them, is not just short-sighted, it is not even conservative. Being a conservative under such circumstances means picking your poison in regards to change and having a mature appreciation of your tradition to know what parts to defend.

An honest tradition supporting conservatism contains in itself the seeds of its own form of liberalism. It is plausible to argue that in defense of traditional Jewish values such as rabbinic authority and not having men obsessing about women one should categorically invalidate all laws pertaining to modest dress. We should declare that we no longer hold of such things and even that one is now not allowed to dress in a traditional manner (much the same way as the Lutheran Church now rejects all statements of Luther against Jews and does not allow anti-Semitism) in order to completely undermine and rip out the hearts of those who would threaten the very essence of Judaism by instituting rule by goon squad and replacing modesty with skirt lengths.

I would not go this far. In a Judaism run by me, laws concerning modest dress for men and women would remain on the books, but without any active community enforcement. In its place would be a strong push for modesty, that one should not draw attention to oneself as a physical body at the expense of the spirit and the mind, on the part of both men and women. If religious Jews, already keeping the basic essentials of Jewish practice, were to come to me and ask how to put these ideals of modesty into practice then we could bring out the sources and discuss the possibility of holding oneself to a stricter standard of dress than the society at large.

To bring this back to Burkean conservatism, I put a high value on tradition not because I see tradition as having a value in of itself or because I believe that it is somehow possible to just have tradition without changing anything, but because I see tradition as the foundation upon which one can build a stable society, the sort of society in which can afford to tolerate diversity and in which one can experiment with different possibilities even to the extent of making changes. In the long run, no tradition can go on forever without change; the choices are either moderate change, which serves to support the essentials or the downfall of the entire system. In the end, being a Burkean conservative not only allows me to be a liberal, it makes it a necessity.

My Feminist Response to the Haredi Marriage Crisis

With all of my opposition to modern feminism, it is easy to lose track of the fact that I am a feminist if of a nineteenth-century John Stuart Mill School. I believe that human beings can better themselves through reason, as they pursue their own good in their own way. It helps if they are left to themselves and are not shackled by tyrannical governments and societies. Since women make up a little more than fifty percent of the human race, this applies to women as well. Women need to be brought in as equal partners in society and government and this can most effectively be done through education and suffrage. I do not recognize the concept of "women's rights," only human rights. Also, since I deal with rights solely within the context of protection from direct physical harm, I have no interest in waging war against "patriarchy" or deconstructing "male" modes of thinking. Feminists would be correct in criticizing me for employing a distinctively Enlightenment/male discourse and attempting to shove women into it, thus making it impossible for women to ever truly be "equal" in its most extreme sense. I do not care; what I offer is a logically consistent system and if women do not wish to take it they are free to try their luck with traditional patriarchy.

My nineteenth-century feminism was awakened by a recent article I saw on the Haredi website Cross Currents, "Avoiding Corruption in Shidduchim," by Rabbi Jonathan Rosenblum, which attacked the current manifestation of marriage dowries within the Haredi world. Rabbi Rosenblum argues that the practice of insisting that the prospective in-laws of Haredi men be expected to support their future sons-law while they sit and study in order to gain their daughters a respectable match creates its own back-door materialism, as marrying the girl from the wealthiest possible family becomes a status symbol. I thought it was a very good article. That being said, I was struck by the fact that the article and subsequent comments all focused on the boys vs. in-laws dynamics. Lost in the shuffle was the fact that there are young women involved here, being asked to make life-altering decisions in support of a system that relegates them to if not second class status then at least to secondary roles. So I put up the following comment:

Something should be said here about the situation of women. I think that it is interesting that women remain passive figures even at your hands, Rabbi Rosenblum. I was just talking to a married a Haredi woman about her decision to become a speech therapist and asked her what her goals were in growing up. She responded that her goal in life was "to be a Mommy." A very wonderful girl, but there are lots of people who want to be mommies and many who might even make good mommies. Why should any bochur [young man] take someone simply because they will make a good mommy, unless this woman can support him by becoming a speech therapist or has a father who can support him? Change has to start with women valuing themselves as individuals, beings with unique talents who cannot simply be replaced like a spare part.

You can say that I was channeling Mary Wollstonecraft in seeing women's equality as starting with women taking control over their lives. To be fair, there is even here a bit of the modern feminist in that I am asking a modern question; what does it mean when one party is the activist initiator and the other remains passive to be acted upon? One can also pick up from my comment that, however I may like individual Haredi women as people, I have little respect for them as beings capable and deserving of the sort respect and equal treatment that the Haredi world is not giving them.

Cross Currents took down my comment. I guess suggesting that women need to come forth as individuals in control of their own lives is too radical for some people. I can get used to the idea. Mothers lock up your daughters for I am coming with my radical feminist doctrines. I offer them the chance to be people and even to be respected for it.

Can Pacifists Be Citizens? A Jewish Solution

As previously noted, I view government as a devil's bargain. I accept the existence of an institution with the power to engage in violence and whose main purpose is violence. This applies to fighting wars and even the punishing of criminals. Government authority means nothing if, at the end of the day, they are unable to physically harm those who defy them. The main reason why I endorse government violence is that I see it as the alternative to private vendettas. I am not about to accept a world in which "every man does what is right in his own eyes." I can fathom turning the other cheek precisely because there is a police officer out there who can strike the person for me. Thus my purpose is not to engage in violence, but to do whatever I can to limit it. Openly acknowledging the necessity of violence puts me in much the same situation as Machiavelli, begging to be misunderstood as endorsing tyranny. I would argue that, on the contrary, my willingness to acknowledge the Machiavellian reality of government allows me to be a true defender of liberty and limit government violence. I recognize what kind of deal I am making and have clear boundaries. This is different from the person who pretends to deal with government and not make compromises with liberty. Such a person has no protection when faced with the real moral dilemmas of a tyrannical government.

 It is the common practice in times of war to grant draft exemptions to pacifists and "consciousness objectors." I fail to see the reason for this and fully agree with Richard Dawkins on the absurdity of giving people special protection simply because of "religion." By agreeing to be a citizen you accept the legitimacy of the government to fight wars and agree to help it do so. Since pacifists cannot agree to this, they cannot be citizens in any meaningful way. This is not a violation of anyone's religious liberties. Religious liberty only exists when you pay the door fee of becoming part of the system by accepting its validity. If you cannot pay that price then you are not part of the conversation.

The citizenship question really goes far beyond military service. If pacifists were consistent in their beliefs they would become "conscientious objectors" from jury duty and voting. By serving on a jury the government is asking you to accept their legal authority to punish people even with physical force. The government is also asking you to honestly declare whether you think a person is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Maximum security prisons are directly connected to the threat of physical violence; prisoners who do not comply face being beaten and if they try to escape they may be killed. How can a pacifist ever convict someone of a violent crime? I would add that since we can assume that any violent criminal was brought in by police licensed to engage in physical violence, such violence was either used or implicitly threatened. Thus a pacifist would have to automatically throw out any case rather than be an active participant in this system of government violence. If you let a person go who you believe beyond a reasonable doubt is guilty because you object to prison conditions and police tactics you are not keeping your end of the bargain you struck with the government.

When you vote for your congressional representative, you are voting for someone licensed by the Constitution to vote to declare war. The President is the Constitutional Commander in Chief with the power to lead the United States military in battle. Participating in an election means declaring the moral validity of the Congress to declare war and the President to wage it as put down in the Constitution. Since the Constitution is a war validating document, no pacifist can ever accept the legitimacy of the Constitution without making a hypocrite of himself.


Rather than forcefully expelling or killing pacifists, I would suggest a solution from Jewish history. Up until the end of the eighteenth century, Jews even when tolerated and allowed to live in peace, were not accepted as citizens. In each city Jews lived under the authority of their own kehilla system, operating as its own semi-autonomous government. It was the kehilla that negotiated with the Christian authorities for Jews to be allowed to live in the city and practice their own religion. These negations usually involved monetary payment, call it taxes or bribery. "In the pre-modern world, there was no such thing as rights. There were privileges that you paid for." Jews were also subject to blasphemy laws which barred them from making statement offensive to Christianity. This was not due to "intolerance," simply a matter of Jews, by definition, not being able to accept the legitimacy of a Christian State, whose claim to authority rested on Christian theological claims.

Pacifists should be allowed to live in peace within this country; not because of any right to religious liberty (they lost that right the moment they rejected the government, which gives allows for religious liberty to exist), but because they are non-threatening producers, whose presence benefits society at large. Pacifists should not actually be citizens. They should not have the right to vote, they should not serve on juries but should pay an extra head tax to cover their lack of military service. They would also have no free speech protection and be barred from making any statements deemed "subversive." Since they are outside the political system they have no reason to involve themselves in it or even speak about it. Every American would have the right to put themselves down as a pacifist and pay the consequences. (Children of pacifists should have the option of going to court and rejecting the beliefs of their parents and immediately take the test and oath of citizenship without having to wait five years.) Those who do not and instead decide to enjoy the full benefits of citizenship, lose all claim to ever being "conscientious objectors."

Aspirations on the Autism Puzzle

Jerod Smalley of the Columbus NBC affiliate station interviewed some people from Aspirations, including my friends Melanie Yergeau, Patrick Meehan (who served with me on the Autism conference panel on Wednesday) and Justin Rooney, for his Autism Puzzle news segment.





I particularly recommend the discussion about humor at the end and Justin's comment about his admiration for Richard Pryor for using humor precisely in the face of all the bad in one's life. Humor plays a major role in my life as a defense mechanism. I find that I take life so seriously that if I did not laugh I would be crushed by it.


Rather than being incapable of humor, I suspect that Asperger people have a special relationship to humor in that they have a foundational narrative of humor built right into them. Take a rational person and force them to confront an absurd situation. He can continue to insist on reason, futilely beat his head into a wall and become the object of the joke or he can become the initiator of the joke as he uses his reason to face down absurdity, expose it and even to embrace it to some degree. This is one of the most basic comedic narratives, but it is also a summary of what life every day is with Asperger syndrome and the challenges that come with it.


  

Presenting at an Autism Conference

I spent the day at an Autism conference sponsored by Ohio State's Nisonger Center, titled "Transition: The Challenges, Strategies and Models in School, Work and Health." It is great being back in Columbus for a few days and meeting up with friends. I, along another person from the Aspirations group, took part in a panel organized by Dr. Tom Fish. The panel was on the topic of transitioning from school to the work place for those on the spectrum. I admit that there is something ironic about having me speak about this since the Hebrew Academy let me go. My learning experiences this year as a high school teacher, including the fact that things did not work out as I had hoped, were among the major points I touched upon. I am not going to talk about any clinical neuro-supremacist (that neurotypical behavior is the standard against which we judge good and bad and the purpose of the professional is to "help" people on the spectrum to be more like neurotypicals) biases. Melanie was there and I leave the matter to her and her Twitter site. I do wish to speak about the manner of presentation. This was my first experience sitting in, as part of the audience, on a professional conference presentation for a non-humanities field. I have sat through quite a number of history conferences with presentations ranging from brilliant to horrible, but there was something strikingly boring about the presentations on autism I witnessed today. I certainly do not have a large enough sample to make any judgments on the matter and would love to hear from someone with more experiences with such conferences, particularly if they also have been to conferences in the humanities fields, but here are some of my explanations.

The humanities teach rhetoric – Overall you are going to get better public speakers with people from the humanities. The humanities encourage the sort of self expression necessary as the foundation for any explicit or implicit study of rhetoric.

The humanities are a labor of love – Say what you will about the humanities, but every single person at a graduate level has made a conscious decision to turn down going into a different field and making more money. If you are in the humanities you are there because you love what you are doing and find it interesting. Even if you cannot pass this on to someone else, it is there. Take a person with no speaking skills, reading off a page with a Ben Stein drawl and the love is going to come through somehow. Professional educators and clinical researchers are doing what they are doing because it is a job to them. They might truly love what they do, but there is no reason to go looking for it.

Length – At humanities conferences I am used to 1.5–2 hour sessions with 3-4 speakers going for 20-30 minutes each plus question and answer time. This conference had single speakers going for 1.5-2 hours. There are limits to my attention span, even with skilled speakers. I also think there is something to be said for the notion that if you have a specific message that is important you should be able to deliver that message in twenty minutes. Anything over that and you have to start asking yourself some hard questions as to whether you are speaking because you actually have something to say, you do not know how to organize your own thoughts or because you simply wish to kill time and hear yourself speak. If you cannot believe with complete faith in the importance of what you are saying, why should anyone believe in its importance enough to listen?

PowerPoint – I admit that I have come to use PowerPoint a lot in my own lectures. It organizes the material for me and makes it easier for students to write down the major points, which leads to more effective memorization. I have never seen people so enslaved to their PowerPoint as some of the presenters today. PowerPoint no longer simply served as an aid; it was the center of the presentation, without which there could be no presentation. If one can more easily imagine a presentation going on without the speaker than without the PowerPoint then we have a problem. It is bad enough when lectures cease to be actual speeches, just mere reading from a text; add a second printed source, this time for the audience, and there truly is no speech to present.

My panel went well and I will only take part of the credit. We had three real people on the dais, speaking about something important to them, with a message to impart. At the end we received one of the nicest compliments I have ever heard, one truly befitting our modern age. "Your panel was the only one today during which I did not send off a single text message."

Rev. James Lawson and the True Meaning of Pacifism

During the Korean War, Rev. James Lawson, a future Civil Rights leader, went to prison as a "conscientious objector" rather than serve. As someone involved in the clergy, he could have protected himself, but instead chose not to, in itself an act of protest. He argued, and in this I agree with him, that it was wrong to exempt clergymen or those studying for the job from the draft and that it was simply a means to buy off established religions by protecting their people. I certainly admire much of what Rev. Lawson would later do for the Civil Rights movement and, in practice, support non-violent tactics when dealing with private individuals protesting social and government ills. That being said we need to consider the true meaning of pacifism as a consistent ideology when practiced by the likes of Rev. Lawson.

First off, let us consider the very act of being a "conscientious objector" to the Korean War. Rev. Lawson took it upon himself to stand in the way of the United States government's efforts to protect South Korea from being overrun by the forces of Communist North Korea and China. If Rev. Lawson would have had his way with the United States government, South Korea would not be one of the leading technological innovators in the world today as well as a source for millions of new converts to various denominations of Christianity; he would have sentenced millions of people in South Korea to, like those in North Korea, starve to death in the world's largest maximum-security prison. Who knows to what extent people like Rev. Lawson bear a share of the blame for the millions of people still sentenced today to a living death in North Korea. (I do not know how someone sleeps with that on their conscience.) More importantly, by opposing a relatively justifiable war, out of an innate opposition to all war, Rev. Lawson had backed out of his covenantal obligations as a citizen. He grew up accepting the benefits of the United States government, a war-making institution but refused to follow through on his obligations when this war-making institution followed through with its foundational purpose and went to war. (Obviously, as a black man living in segregationist America, Rev. Lawson did not enjoy the full rights he deserved. As such it would have been justifiable for him to not serve until the United States lived up to its obligations to him and all blacks.) Rev. Lawson was not just expressing his opinion or even practicing civil disobedience against a law he found unjust. He was not just objecting to our involvement in Korea. He was challenging the very legitimacy of the United States government. What are governments if not an institution authorized to use violence? As such, Rev. Lawson was guilty of a passive, relatively harmless, but still quite real form of treason. I would not go so far as to have him executed, but it was certainly reasonable for him to do hard-time in prison.


While in prison, Rev. Lawson found himself threatened by the inmates and faced with the prospect of being raped. Realizing that he was not even safe in his own cell, he prepared to defend himself with a chair. This put him in a dilemma; how could he, someone who went to prison in order to avoid engaging in violence, justify using violence even to save himself from being raped.


It was at that point Lawson had one of his numinous experiences. It was as if he heard a voice explaining everything to him. Everything which had been so difficult suddenly became clear. The voice told him that he was not there of his own volition or because he had done something wrong. He had not sinned; if anything he was he was there because he had been sinned against. The voice explained his dilemma to him. "If something terrible happens to you, it's not you causing it, and what happens is not your fault. What happens would be outside your control. You are responsible for only one thing – above all you must not violate your own conscience. If something terrible happens it is because of them, not because of you. It is not about personal choice. That makes it one more thing you have to endure in order to be true to Him. It is part of the test He set out for you." When Jim Lawson heard that voice, his fear fell from him. He would not resort to physical violence to protect himself. He would endure. He prepared himself for the worst. (David Halberstam, The Children pg. 46-47.)

 In the end, nothing happened to Rev. Lawson. It is believed that one of the prisoners he befriended put the word out that Lawson was not to be touched.

One wonders what advice Rev. Lawson would have given if it had been his daughter threatened with rape. "Daughter, do not fight these men, not even with a can of mace. When these men corner you and you have nowhere to run, just submit to them and let them do what they will." Maybe Rev. Lawson could stand by his daughter's side while this is going on and read her the passages in Augustine's City of God where he argues that it is not an evil for a woman to be raped; as long as she is unwilling her soul remains undefiled and, as such it is irrelevant what happens to the body.

Loving your neighbor as you love yourself means that in order to love other people you have to start by loving yourself. As a child of God and a creature of reason, you have value. As such you are obligated to protect yourself even if it means turning to violence. Once you are obligated to value yourself, you are also obligated to value and protect every innocent person even if it means turning to violence.

To Shoot a Man Trying to Kill Your Children: A Moral Trap for Pacifists

One of the major underlying forces behind modern political thought is pacifism; that the use of violence in of itself immoral. This is not to say that most modern people, even modern liberals, are active pacifists, but there is an admiration of pacifists (Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. are two of the most revered figures of the twentieth century) and a given assumption that they hold the moral high ground. Would not the world be a better place if everyone pursued non-violence? There are real-life consequences to this sentiment as it puts anyone not following a pacifist path on the defensive, particularly when going up against an opponent with at least the pretense of pacifism. For example the State of Israel opening fire on the flotilla of aid ships. (The passengers attacked first with knives and poles, but those are just technical details.) Israel is forced to fight the moral censor from western liberals that they should pursue a more "ethical" path, one that turns away from violence. At the same time, our western liberal (particularly if they are Jewish) are allowed to, without cost to themselves, grab this moral high ground for themselves, as the opponents of violence by "both sides," and judge Israel for their lack of moral enlightenment. As such, I believe it is important to confront this ideology of pacifism head on. Not only is pacifism not a worthy ideal to be pursued, but it is also itself fundamentally immoral and those tainted by it are de facto apologists for and aiders in the abuse of human rights that they claim to oppose.

There is a challenge that I often put to people who claim to be categorically against the use of violence: a martyrdom-seeking terrorist is pointing a gun at your child with the clear intent to kill. You have a gun; do you shoot or do you allow your child to die? Alternatively, the SWAT team has the man in their sights and can take him out by sniper fire; do you call the sniper and tell him to back down? As should be clear from this example, for pacifism to be meaningful as pacifism it must be pursued even when it ceases to pragmatic, even at the expense of innocent lives. In essence, pacifism kills. There is a long tradition of people sacrificing their children for various causes and it is perfectly plausible that pacifism should simply be one more such example. But I think that most people would view someone who refused to fire as failing in their responsibility as a parent and partially responsible in the death of their own child, most certainly not a paragon of moral virtue.

The moment we decide to open fire then we have crossed an ideological Rubicon and we can no longer categorically oppose violence. All slogans of "make love not war," "war is not the answer" and "give peace a chance" fall away to be replaced by a discussion of where violence is appropriate and is even "the answer" as something virtuous. One would still be free to oppose specific military actions, such as the war in Iraq, but now the opposition must be couched in language other than simple opposition to war. Of course, no value is absolute. One does not believe in truth less because he points a potential murderer in the wrong direction away from his intended victim. The difference with pacifism is that by definition it is an absolutist ideology. One is not a pacifist if one merely does not like fighting. Furthermore, pacifism requires the denial of any virtue of those who would pursue its opposite; it cannot acknowledge any virtue in taking up arms for a just cause.

It is funny how despite the numerous times I have raised this issue with pacifist sympathizers, I have never been given a straight answer of shoot or not to shoot. They will try to dance around the issue by saying that they would not be in possession of a gun in the first place or would simply shoot to wound. The point of a moral dilemma is that it is supposed to be simple and extreme, far more so than you would likely find in real life. In our terrorist scenario, you are not in a position to stop him in any other way but to use violent force. He has a gun pointed at your child's head. Either he dies or your child goes. Whose life do you pick?