Historians as a “Special Interest” Group

(This exercise in irony is dedicated to the memory of the late "mercenary professor," Dr. Milton Friedman.)


I am a Special Interest. I am not like some the bad Special Interests you may hear about on the news, Big Oil, Pharmaceuticals and Wall Street though. I am a good Special Interest. How could I be anything else; I teach history. My sole motivations in life are the pursuit of knowledge and passing that knowledge over to your children. You can trust us historians to never be motivated by greed or ego and always have the public interest at heart. For this reason, you will see history departments, across the country, dedicating themselves to teaching. Show me the history department that will allow a course to be taught by anything less than a fully qualified professor. We would never throw wet behind the ears graduate students to teach classes in order to free up professors to do research and gain more prestigious posts. Universities always deliver on the high-quality teachers you think you are paying for and would never cut corners to make a quick buck. I can recall many conversations with my advisor telling me that the most important thing I need to worry about as a graduate student was teaching and that it was alright if I delayed finishing my dissertation by a year or two in order to invest more time in my students.

As a historian, I have worked hard lobbying school administrators and politicians on behalf of your children to make sure they receive a good history education regardless of whether they wanted one or not. Since we in the history profession are so wise and know what is best for people, even better than they do themselves, we have insisted on mandatory classes in history starting in grade school. History teachers would never treat their job as a means of slacking off and collecting a paycheck. And because it is so obvious from talking to any high school graduate how effective these mandatory history classes we have been teaching them all these years have been in giving over a solid understanding of the field, we can only insist that the practice continues in college. This is to make up for any deficiencies in their history education which may have come about due to you not giving us enough money and not creating more mandatory courses. You should certainly vote for those patriotic politicians who promise you to increase funding for history education, smaller class sizes and more of them so that your children become proper Americans and grow up to be like you; people who hate learning themselves, but are eager to hoist it on others just like you did to them.

Considering that I am so smart and spend my time reading history books unlike you members of the unwashed television-watching masses (whom I have the utmost respect for and whose interests I serve), it is only right that I have access to a high-quality lending library. Since I do not wish to pay for one out of the meager paycheck I have you give me for teaching history classes that I make your children take, I think I will have you pay for it instead. Have you not been listening to the politicians we historians have hoisted upon you when they tell you that our children need books in order to compete in the global economy and if we only built more libraries they will flock to them? I enjoy the quiet library full of books and librarians on call to help. One would think that the library was built just for me.

If you let us, we historians have an exciting future planned for your children. It is only proper that not only should every child in this country have to take history classes starting in kindergarten, but that every history class needs to be staffed by a teacher with a Ph.D. in the topic. I say this not to hoist a money-making scam on the public, but out of the sincere wish that every child receives the sort of high-quality history teacher they deserve. We will be very pragmatic about things. If a school is unable to find enough history teachers with doctorates they will be allowed to exempt themselves from the program by paying a small fine of several thousand dollars per child to the newly created American Board of History Educators, who will provide you with a history consultant to advise the unqualified teachers you will have to hire. This history consultant will be guaranteed base history administrative salary, to be paid for by your school, of at least a half a million dollars. Can you put a price on your child's education?

We historians serve the public out of the purest altruism. We do not have our fingers in your wallet. Every politician who speaks on our behalf telling you to give us more money does it because they recognize how indispensable we are to the nation and not because we threaten to get them voted out of office if they do not give us more of your money. It is so obvious that anyone who would question our integrity can only be an agent of some Big Business Special Interest, who wish to rob your children of the education they deserve and which only we can give them. So this November please vote for the politician who promises to give us the most funding out of dollars created magically ex nihilo as only governments can do. Your children deserve an education and I deserve a paycheck.

A Hobbesian Round of Prisoner’s Dilemma

For me the most fundamental question in all politics is the one asked by Thomas Hobbes: how is it that large numbers of people live in close proximity every day without murdering one another. Instead of going to work next week, it makes perfect logical sense for me to murder my neighbors and take their clothes and any food I find in their apartment. Alternatively, I can make an alliance with my neighbors to live in peace and brotherhood and massacre the people down the street, down the river, or the next State over. (Think Attila the Hun.) Of course, if I am feeling slightly humanitarian, I might spare the lives of these other people and simply enslave them formally or under the guise of some system that establishes them as my inferiors, existing only to benefit me. The fact that you and I have been fortunate to live under more "civilized" circumstances does not take away from the fact that we are the exception. The natural state of human affairs is Hobbesian war where everyone tries to kill everyone else before they are in turn killed. Of course, as Hobbes understood, it is only under civilized regimes, where people do not wake up thinking about how best to murder their neighbors, that there can be any serious cultivation of the arts or scientific progress. (It is important to understand that the point of this entire discourse is not that you should murder your neighbors. Quite the contrary, it is about how we avoid murdering our neighbors.)

I might not accept Hobbes' answer (I do not support absolute monarchy), but his framing of the question places him in the front rank of political philosophers. What fundamentally separates me from Hobbes is an Enlightenment faith in reason. If Hobbes saw man as a material animal that could only be kept in check by the brute force of government authority, I assume that man is a rational animal, who can, through force of reason, negotiate his way out of mass slaughter. One way to think of Democracy is one grand act of societal negotiation; we go to the polls to vote as an alternative to killing one another.

Game theory's prisoner's dilemma offers a useful way of posing the Hobbesian question. Prisoner's dilemma is a scenario in which the police have two people in two separate rooms and offer them the exact same deal. If you agree to talk you go free and your partner goes to jail for ten years. If both you and your partner remain silent you both go free. If both you and your partner squeal on each other then both of you will go to jail for five years. Critical to this scenario is the fact that neither party knows what the other party is going to do. The irony of prisoner's dilemma is that if both parties follow their own rational self-interest they will both squeal on the other. Talking to the police means that at worst you get five and that is only if your partner was going to talk himself and put you away for ten. Of course, having both parties follow this logic means that they both will end up in jail. Both parties are trapped and neither can afford to do the right thing and keep silent even if that will save everyone; you have to assume that the other person is going to do what is best for himself and you must, therefore, do what is best for yourself, particularly knowing that the other person has no reason to trust you and is making the exact same calculation. Thus, we are trapped in a cycle of selfish behavior in which both sides lose.

To apply this to Hobbes, I might like to think of myself as a moral person, but I can make no assumption that anyone else is moral. When I walk out my door, I have every reason to assume that my neighbor is plotting to kill, rob, or enslave me. The object that he is reaching for in his pocket is likely a gun and not his wallet. When he goes to meet with his friends he is probably plotting with them as to how best to get me and not the latest in sports or celebrity gossip. The only solution is for me to get a gun and start shooting, or at least find allies of my own and plot with them as to the best time for shooting. I am not a bad person; I am just acting rationally in self-defense. Of course, everyone else is making the same exact calculation and is forced to come to the same conclusion, a conclusion only strengthened by the assumption that others have reached this same inevitable line of reasoning. Thus we are trapped in a cycle of violence.

Now there is a way out of prisoner's dilemma; it requires that, instead of this being a one-time deal, the players have to do repeated rounds. This changes things by bringing in the possibility of retaliation. If you squeal on your partner, you can be certain that your partner will do the same to you in the next round. Relying on the assumption that my partner is a rational being pursuing his own self-interest and will not do something that is clearly going to harm him on all the next rounds, I can safely remain silent. My partner, relying on the fact that I am a rational being making this exact calculation, can do the same. Thus the cycle of squealing is broken.

To apply this to Hobbes, when I make the decision whether or not to turn violent against my neighbor, I also have to take into account the fact that, even if I get to my gun first and kill my neighbor, I still have to deal with the six billion other players in this game. The fact that I have just demonstrated that I am the sort of person who will go for his gun, guarantees that everyone else will reach for their guns all the faster when it comes to dealing with me. Considering my own rational self-interest, I take the chance that my neighbor is not trying to kill me, relying on the fact that, as a rational being, he, in turn, is going through this same calculation. Thus we break the cycle of violence and allow for the work of civilization to begin.

There are two principles of politics that come out of this system. One, as this method of breaking out of prisoner's dilemma only works when the threat of retaliation is swift and certain, it is necessary that anyone who goes for their gun must be viewed as an absolute threat to the entire system and wiped out without hesitation as one would a rabid dog. (The cases of Nazi Germany, Japan, and the Palestinians come to mind.) The second principle is that one can only deal with people who are highly rational in all their dealings with others. The moment that I no longer possess clearly stated lines of thinking that I can rely on my neighbor to follow and which lead me to conclude that he is not reaching for his gun, I have to assume gun and the cycle of violence begins. So the next time you hear someone say that reason does not define their politics, better reach for your gun.

Call it Midrash

Bart Ehrman's Peter, Paul and Mary Magdalene deals heavily in early Christian mythology. From early on in the book, Ehrman recognizes that there is very little of use that can be said about the historical figures of Peter, Paul and Mary Magdalene. Instead, Ehrman finds a far more fruitful line of discussion in using these figures to shed light on the early Christian communities; what stories did they tell about the founders of their religion and for what purpose. I find this to be a useful exercise for students in that it gets them past the trap issue of whether scripture is TRUE or not, begetting either a fundamentalist line of this is true and the academics no nothing or the New Atheist line of this is simply ridiculous and irrelevant. Both positions would render the whole study of history to be meaningless, the handmaiden of polemics.

Part of the problem here I think is that we lack a useful word for this entire process. Words like "myth" and "legend" connote something that is simply false, made up and therefore irrelevant. We need a word to cover a process of textual interpretation that fills in the narrative gaps in order to deal with weaknesses within the narrative, adds clarity and offers a final product that is useful and fits the present ideology. While the Christian tradition never produced a word for this process, the Jewish tradition has, it is called Midrash. (Islam has the concept of Hadith, but I think Midrash is the better fit here as it implies a process that is more informal and organic.)

Take the example of Abraham. Abraham enters the biblical stage at the age of seventy-five when God tells him to journey "to the land which [God] will show him" (ultimately the land of Canaan). The reader is struck by the fact that the Bible has failed to tell us anything about the first seventy-five years of Abraham's life, particularly how Abraham came to believe in God. Come the rabbis to the rescue and we are provided with the story. Little Abraham once saw a magnificent building; he concluded that something as complex as a building must have been created by a master craftsman, who was simply out of sight. Abraham looked out at the world and wondered who could have created something so unbelievably complex; the world must have a hidden designer. Abraham's father, Terah, owned an idol shop. Abraham, no longer a believer in idols, was put in charge of the shop and proceeded to dissuade customers from buying anything: why would an old person like you want to bow to something that was made yesterday? Why would you want to buy an idol to protect your home when the idol cannot even protect itself? Finally Abraham smashes all the idols in the shop, leaving only the largest in which he placed an ax. When Terah comes back, Abraham explains that the idols had gotten into a fight and the biggest one had smashed the rest. Terah smacks Abraham: what nonsense is this. Idols do not walk or talk. To which Abraham responds: then why do worship them? Abraham is taken in front of King Nimrod (just a name in the Bible, but now fleshed out into a useful villain). Nimrod throws Abraham into a fiery furnace, but God does a miracle and saves him. So here we have it, a really good story that improves on the biblical narrative, helps it make a lot more sense and on top of it all gives me useful talking points to use against my Hellenistic pagan neighbors. I should be able to prove the existence of God, refute paganism and tell an entertaining story all in under forty-five minutes. This back story about Abraham was so good that a version of it even ended up in the Koran. In looking at such a Midrash it is irrelevant as to how this story might relate to some theoretical historical Abraham. It is not really about Abraham; it is about Jews living in Classical times and interacting with their Hellenistic pagan neighbors.

Now we are doing Robert Harris' Imperium, a novel about Cicero. One can think of Harris as writing his own Midrash about Cicero, taking Plutarch's biography, Cicero's speeches and letters as the foundation material and filling the story in as a political thriller to suit a twenty-first century audience.

Reflections on the Autism Speaks Protest

So I spent Sunday morning protesting the Autism Speaks Walk. I took part in the protest as an associate of ASAN. I am not, though, an actual member of the group even if I did originally help found the Columbus chapter and even if I continue to view it as my family here. For this reason nothing that I say should be taken as representative of ASAN, a liberating position if at times I am critical of them. (Melanie, Noranne and Aspitude have already posted on the event so see them for an alternative perspective.)

We had a dozen or so people, Autism Speaks had about eighteen thousand so it gives an idea about what we are up against. Standing around waving signs is not an ideal way to win friends and influence people in the best of circumstances. In our case, the area we were given by the university to protest was away from the arena where the walk was being held, across a giant parking lot, across a busy street. People driving into the parking lot could see us and the end of the Walk was right by us, but other than that we were irrelevant. I know someone in the OSU band, who performed at the event, and she told me later that she was unaware that we were even there. Maybe it would have helped if we could have provoked some sort of reaction. In truth, though, besides for the occasional catcall of "you're stupid," "get a life" or "go home" we were pretty much ignored as we deserved. Why should anyone pay attention to some people waving signs? If anything the people of Autism Speaks were very nice to us. One of the organizers came out to offer us water if we needed it (we had brought plenty of our own). If we did not succeed on the ground we did succeed where it counts most in the twenty-first century, media. We were interviewed by the local ABC and NBC stations. The credit for those needs to go to our front office, particularly Ari Ne'eman, and to those in our group who made the phone calls. State representative Ted Celeste also stopped by. Representative Celeste is a good friend of the group, whom we have spoken to multiple times in the past. He apologized to us for having a puzzle pin on his lapel, knowing our strong opposition to its use. The fact that Celeste bothered to even talk to us in such an environment (we being outnumbered more than a thousand to one) says a lot about him.

I can only admire Autism Speaks for creating the sort of trans-generational, trans-community networks that they have. Central to their fundraising and what the Walk is meant to demonstrate is that autism is first off a family issue and second a community issue. For this reason you did not have just autistic children walking, but their entire families as well. And not just families, you had large groups of friends and neighbors as well so surrounding every autistic child is a large "team" of support. Now as someone from the group pointed out, this entire Walk was designed with neurotypicals in mind and not autistics. One can only imagine the hell some of these kids were being put through, taken off of their schedules to a place with lots of noise and people running around. A step in the right direction for Autism Speaks would be if it would openly fashion itself not as an organization for autistics, particularly as autistics are not represented in its leadership, but as a support group for the parents of autistics. However difficult it might be to go through life autistic, it cannot compare to the challenges of being the parent of an autistic child. These parents need and deserve the support of their families and communities.

This brings us to the trap that Autism Speaks has maneuvered us into, one that we have failed to solve and until we do we will not be able to stand up Autism Speaks in the public arena; Autism Speaks has pitted us, not against their front office, but against the parents of autistic children. Say what you want about the front office, their eugenics policies and their misuse of funds, but that is not going to help you deal with a parent grasping for solutions in the here and now. The toughest moment of the Walk for me was not the taunts (I am a brawler and cannot resist a fight); it was when that organizer, who offered us water, followed up by asking us who is going to speak for his son who is unable to speak. I admit that the person is not me. I have not spent a single day being the parent for that man's kid nor do I have the solution to his problems. The most that I can say is that I am the obvious ally, who would be willing to help him, as long as I am not alienated by talk of disease and cure, lines of discourse that will make it nearly impossible for me to hold down a job and eventually get married. There was a good conversation with him and the group and he was really nice to us. We spoke about advances in communication technology that offers alternatives to verbal speech. After the man left someone from the group made a crack that the man was prejudiced with his talk of "all people communicate by talking" Fine, maybe they are right and this man suffers from petty prejudices (don't we all); that simply dodges the real issue at hand that this man is on the front lines dealing with the real challenges of autism and we do not have any readymade solutions to offer.

What we need to have is a dialogue with the parents. All this rhetoric about Autism Speaks giving out $600,000 salaries and only spending four cents to the dollar on families very well may be true, but that simply makes us sound like every other political group this time of year going negative against the opposition. I do not wish to fight all those parents, friends and family who came to the Walk and they certainly deserve better than political attack ads. If given the chance, here is what I would want to say to them: I acknowledge the difficult situation that you are in and that I am in no position to judge you as to whether you are truly "tolerant." As someone on the autism spectrum I am incredibly fortunate in ways that many of your children are not and because of that I feel a sense of responsibility. Whatever the future of autism holds I am here with you for the ride. That being said we need to consider some hard realities. First off, whatever theoretical debates we can have about using a magic pill to cure autism, no magic pill is on the horizon. This leaves us with ever improving methods of schooling and therapy, all of which will remain expensive. Secondly genetic screening and finding out the root causes of autism is not going to help a single child with autism presently. Thirdly, every one of your autistic children is going to become an autistic adult and that is going to require a system of its own that is not in place at present. Autism Speaks, for all of its high sounding rhetoric, offers nothing to help you with any of these real issues. For your sakes and more importantly for the sake of your children you need to start talking to other people; perhaps to people who are on the spectrum, but are still leading productive lives. They might not be able to offer you a cure, but they can at least open up a serious conversation as to how live with autism.

Getting Ready to Protest Autism Speaks

Tomorrow morning I will be joining my friend Melanie and the rest of the gang from ASAN over at the Ohio State campus for the annual Autism Speaks Walk. We will be protesting. Those of my readers who are in the area please feel free to come along.

While this is a protest, I also like to think of it as a celebration. The Autism Speaks walk is a birthday of sorts for us. It was two years ago that I and other members of the Aspirations support group went to the Walk in good faith. Being new to autism advocacy I was not familiar with Autism Speaks ideology. At the Walk I learned from, President Gee of Ohio State no less, that I was a disease that needed to be eradicated. Wishing to take action, Melanie first wrote a letter to President Gee. Later she decided to create a chapter of ASAN and recruited me as her co-chair. So tomorrow we will not just be standing up to neurotypical bigots determined to eliminate us from the gene pool, we will also be taking the time to celebrate legitimate autism advocacy, one in which autistic people actually get to speak instead of being spoken for.

Catching Up on Things: History 111 Fall 2010

Sorry for being offline for the past two weeks. This past month, just in time for our string of three-day Jewish holidays, I moved back to Columbus and started teaching again at Ohio State. On top of all this, I did not have an internet connection at my apartment until last night. (While I might miss New York and Silver Spring, what I am paying for my half of a two-bedroom apartment goes a long way to making up for things.) I hope to be back posting on a regular basis, though likely a little less often than earlier in the year.

So to get things back on track, I would like to invite everyone on board my new teaching experiment. For this quarter I decided to run my History 111 class as a book club. Instead of using one textbook and doing a survey of European history from antiquity up until the Enlightenment, we will be doing a series of shorter books on specific topics. Ideally, I would like to do secondary sources, but I am open to doing primary sources and even good historical fiction. While I picked the first book, Bart Ehrman's Peter, Paul & Mary Magdalene: The Followers of Jesus in History and Legend, subsequent books are to be picked by the class. We have already voted for the next book, Robert Harris's novel Imperium, which deals with the life of the Roman orator Cicero as told by his servant Tiro. It is similar to Robert Graves' I, Claudius, though it is, I believe, more accessible to a general audience.

I was inspired to do this in part by the wonderful book club I have here in Columbus and in part by my desire to take Alfie Kohn seriously to see what might come about with implementing some of his ideas. (See The Book Club: or How to Destroy School.) If the Alfie Kohn model of education could work anywhere it should be in a college where there is at least some degree of self-motivation among students. By allowing students to pick what books we read I am allowing the opportunity to structure the class to suit them. I still will be maintaining graded assignments, including homework. For example, as in previous years, students are supposed to email me a question or comment about the reading before class. (An idea I took from Prof. Louis Feldman.) I then structure my talk around responding to these questions. That being said, this is a rather open-ended assignment and serves to further make room for student input.

What attracted me to Ehrman was, one, he writes about the historical Jesus and early Christianity, topics of popular interest. He writes in a balanced fashion which, while not openly hostile to orthodox religious sensibilities does a very effective job of explaining how an academic approach differs from an orthodox one and for its superiority. Two, Ehrman provides an entry into the historical method as he talks his way through texts and how to use them. What Ehrman does to the New Testament is what historians do to all texts, sacred or otherwise. Part of what is subversive about the historical method, a Pandora's Box so to speak, is that it is impossible to accept it partway. If you accept the historical method then you commit yourself to applying it to all texts, the Bible just as much as Julius Caesar. Regardless of how orthodox your eventual conclusions, the moment you agree to subject the Bible to the same cross-examination as any other text you have put a knife into orthodoxy, committing yourself to the Kantian charge of placing everything before the bar of reason. There can be no return to innocent belief.

So this experiment seems to be going well even if I seem to be speaking a lot more than I might have liked. If anyone has book recommendations, please feel free to post them.

Does God Hate Deaf People? Toward New Bible Based Bigotry

In addition to the black civil rights movement, my own Asperger advocacy makes use of the models of deaf advocacy and the gay rights movement. Both are examples of groups that have been able to bring mainstream respectability to something traditionally looked down upon by society. I admire the gay rights movement in that they were able to get themselves off the listing as a psychological illness. The deaf community, going back even to the nineteenth century, has been successful, through the creation of sign language, in forming a deaf culture and by so doing has helped redefine how we think of disability, creating a social model of disability. Once you have a culture with language, literature, and artists then you can longer be defined by what you lack, say hearing, and can insist on being treated like every other culture. Furthermore, the deaf community has in the case of cochlear implants been able to fend off attempts at "curing" them even from the mainstream medical establishment.

In advocating for myself and others on the spectrum, my goals are first to get away from the medical model used by groups such as Autism Speaks, where autism is a disease to be cured, and move toward a social model of disability, where autism is viewed as an alternative and equally valid way of processing information and dealing with the world. This is neurodiversity. In the long run, I would hope to see certain elements of the autism spectrum, like Asperger syndrome, taken off the diagnostic list and turned simply into another social and cultural group.

In talking about neurodiversity with people, I make frequent use of both the deaf and gay models. For obvious reasons, when I am in more conservative company I shy away from talking about gay rights and focus more on the deaf example. Who would object to the idea that being deaf is a culture no different than Spanish, Irish, or Jewish, that one could create a perfectly functional society without the use of hearing and that there is nothing wrong about being deaf that is in need of being cured? I was mistaken in this assumption.

I was recently talking to a religious person about Asperger syndrome, using the deaf example, when the person responded that being deaf went against nature; God created people with ears so, therefore, lacking the use of one's hearing was a defect not intended by God. I pressed the person, arguing that hearing is not necessary for living one's life and that perhaps human beings will evolve away from being dependent on hearing. (Bats still have eyes even though they rely primarily on a biological sonar to see.) At this point, that person retorted that the Bible spoke about deafness as an impairment. I let the conversation end by noting that I was not talking theology and that, under a secular system of politics, it is irrelevant. I would have liked to continue and ask the person whether they were willing to follow through with the implications of their views. Should we allow deaf people to do such non-Bible sanctioned activities as voting, serving on juries, or even as witnesses? What business do deaf people have in thinking they can create their own non-sound-based language? Was it among the languages used after the Tower of Babel? Might all this deaf culture really be a secular liberal plot to undermine our Bible-based traditional aural values?

I am used to the Bible being used to object to gay rights. Apparently, there are those who might consider using it against the deaf. I guess we should be grateful that the issue of deaf rights has flown below the radar screen of certain people otherwise we might end up with a defend the sanctity of aurality movement.

The Bard and the Mouse

I recently attended the Shakespeare Theatre Company's production of All's Well That Ends Well. It is not one of Shakespeare's better plays. The central plot is about a woman named Helena, who falls in love with Count Bertram, who rejects her. Helena succeeds in curing the King of France of an ailment with the help of a medical secret left to her by her late physician father. As a reward, she is given the choice of any man in the kingdom. She chooses Bertram. Bertram, though, runs off to Florence, resolving to never accept Helena as his wife until she can produce his ring on her finger and his child inside her. Helena pursues her Count and discovers that is seeking to bed Diana, the daughter of an innkeeper. Helena manages to switch places and gain Bertram's ring and baby. So we have a lead female character defined by her supposed intelligence and her willingness to throw herself after a man who neither wants nor deserves her. Bertram is someone who spends the entire play being a complete louse yet nothing bad actually happens to him. At the end of the play he is humiliated, but for some strange reason is now in love with the cause of his misfortune. I find this more problematic than anything in Taming of the Shrew.

There is one bright spot in the play in that, like all Shakespearean comedy, All's Well features a great comic side character, the foppish and cowardly Parolles. Parolles gets a deliciously naughty back and forth with Helena at the beginning on the uselessness of virginity and, later on, is tricked by his comrades into believing that he has been captured by the enemy and promptly agrees to sell out his own side. All's Well is worth it simply as an exercise in how Shakespeare relied on side characters, usually of relatively base origin, as comic relief and commentary on the higher born main characters. Parolles is essentially Falstaff of Henry IV parts I and II and Merry Wives of Windsor. Much Ado About Nothing has Constable Dogberry and Midsummer's Night's Dream has Puck and Bottom. All of these characters, in the hands of the right actors, are quite easily capable of taking over their respective plays.

There is another institution in modern times that does this, Disney. From almost the beginning, when Disney started to make full-length animation films, it worked on a model of taking well-established stories, adding in a few musical numbers and some wisecracking sidekicks. Pinocchio got Jiminy Cricket, a cat and a fish and Cinderella a band of talking mice. Flash forward to the more recent era of Disney animation, Little Mermaid gets a talking crab and a pair of henchmen eels; Beauty and the Beast gets talking dishes and Aladdin, a monkey and a parrot. It is almost always these side characters who are the most interesting parts of the film to the extent that the films would not work without them even though they are not that important to the actual plot.  

Considering all this, it is surprising that, with the exception of Lion King (Hamlet in the Sahara, complete with an evil uncle, a murdered king, a dithering hero and a ghost), Disney has not ventured to do Shakespeare. I, for one, would be curious to see what Disney could do with Midsummer's Night's Dream or The Tempest. Then again, considering what they did with The Hunchback of Notre Dame, maybe not.

Social Networking and Bank Robbery: Some Thoughts on The Town

Last night I went along with a friend to a sneak preview of The Town, directed by and starring Ben Affleck, unfortunately (to be fair he is actually watchable in this movie), but also featuring Mad Men's Jon Hamm. The premise of the film lies in the fact that Charlestown, a working-class neighborhood in Boston, has the highest rate in the world of producing bank robbers. To my mind, speculating as to the cause of such a phenomenon begs one to combine Sudhir Venkatesh's Gang Leader for a Day, in which discusses gangs and the economics of drug dealing, with Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers and Tipping Point. Outliers examines the societal features that enable those with genius and extreme talent to succeed. Tipping Point deals with what sort of social connections necessary to transmit ideas. Gladwell is mainly interested in phenomena like hockey players in Canada, the computer revolution and Jewish lawyers, but his argument could be applied to bank robbery.

The vast majority of people growing up in a place like Charlestown do not go out and become bank robbers. That being said, there are certain features in growing up in Charlestown that can enable such life choices. Robbing banks requires a certain level of intelligence and technical expertise. Our potential bank robber needs to be intelligent enough to work through the details of a bank job plan but be unable to get the education and social connections necessary to enter into more lucrative and physically less hazardous fields of crime such as investment fraud. Think of what might have happened to Bernie Madoff if he had never received the sorts of opportunities he did; maybe he would have been knocking over banks at the point of a gun. Once our bank robber has decided on his chosen career, he is going to need particular training of a kind not generally provided in school; things such as firearms, forensics, carjacking a getaway vehicle, video surveillance and safe-cracking. It is unlikely that one person would be able to master all of these things, which brings us to the social networking aspect of bank robbery. Robbing a bank is a team effort. Where does our bank robber find a group of other intelligent criminals, who have not gone into white collar crime, to be trusted to guard his back and not simply turn him over to the government? (Certainly not on Facebook.) The same place he went to in order to learn the trade in the first place, friends, and family. A place like Charlestown can produce bank robbers because it already has the people on the ground to pass on their knowledge and form social networks to produce new generations of bank robbers.

I would have loved to see a movie that really explored these issues. Going on a spree of bank robberies could be the culmination of a story going back decades as we follow our young future criminals on their road to bank robbery. Unfortunately, the movie decided to only deal with the social networking issues in passing in order to make way for, what Hollywood loves turning everything into, a love story. You see there is this pretty female witness briefly taken hostage in the film's opening robbery, who might be able to give our team of bank robbers away even though they had masks. The leader of the team (played by Ben Affleck) takes it upon himself sniff out what she might know and promptly falls in love with her, setting up all sorts of obvious complications. This plotline does culminate in one useful line. When the girl confronts Ben Affleck about the truth and asks him why she should believe him, he responds: "because you are not going to like what I am going to tell you." As a historian, this is a central foundation of how we evaluate information. You can gauge the truth based on how damaging it is to the speaker; incrimination equals truth.

Not that this is a bad film. On technical grounds, the film performs well; it is well written, directed, shot, and acted. There is plenty of action and good laugh lines, particularly with the sequence when they hold up an armored vehicle with assault rifles and nun's costumes. I defiantly enjoyed watching the movie and do recommend it.

Making Religion Asperger Friendly (More Texts, More Rituals and More Opportunities to be Sociable Without Having to Actually Talk to People)

There is a running debate as to the relationship between Asperger syndrome and atheism. Are Aspergers more likely than the general population to be atheists and if so why? (See John Elder Robison and James Pate) I certainly know a number of Asperger atheists and anecdotal experience indicates that people on the spectrum are more secular than the general population. I think it has less to do with religion or no religion than it does about what type of religion. The Asperger mind is not socially based like that of most people, but is more rule-based. One does not relate to people, but to abstract ideas and concepts. This creates a problem in that, not surprisingly, most religions were designed and evolved from a neurotypical perspective and to suit neurotypical needs. Particularly, they rely on social relationships as a means of forming and maintaining themselves. For the purposes of this post I will limit myself to the case of Orthodox Judaism and my own personal experience with it; I would be interested in hearing from those with practical experience with other religions as to what extent what I say here is relevant.

Judaism, as a minority and often persecuted religion, evolved a strong sense of its own vulnerability and of the need to take active measures to pass itself on to the next generation and keep its youth in the fold. What many of these methods have in common are that they rely on creating attachments to other people and, as such, are distinctively ill suited for dealing with Aspergers. Thinking in terms of my own personal experience growing up, it was no good to tell me that I was part of a link in a chain of tradition [mesorah] connecting me to my parents and grandparents and ultimately to the Exodus and the Revelation at Mount Sinai. Regardless of what I might think of the historicity of these claims, the very concept of being attached to other people was foreign to me. (As a historian let me add that the notion that you could have a tradition connecting one generation to the next to the extent that one can draw straight lines and use equal signs is an absurdity.) I was never very good at forming an attachment to a rabbi to learn from. I never found praying as part of a quorum to be spiritually uplifting. The threat of what the people around me were going to think was not going to keep me in line; I was usually blissfully unaware of what other people were thinking.

Orthodox Judaism, though, does have certain features that did speak to me; these have played a major role in keeping me within that orbit. Texts play a major role in Orthodox Judaism and, while I might not relate well to people, I do relate to texts. I might not have taken well to Talmud and being in an environment that forced me to study the subject nearly did me in. I did, though, develop an attachment to the Bible and the commentary of Isaac Abarbanel; reading him for hours on end was certainly a spiritually edifying endeavor. Something should also be said about the role of ritual; Judaism offers things for me to do every day to structure my life. If I were a Christian I do not know how I would deal with my "getting right with God;" am I a good Christian, living up to the Sermon on the Mount? As I Jew, I can wash my hands in the morning, pray, eat kosher food and believe that I am at least on the right track to forming a relationship with God. (One of the ironies of Christianity is that, while it claimed to replace the unfulfillable demands of an Old Testament deity, it is the religion that is truly unfulfillable.)

I would like to end with something that occurred to me over the previous days of Rosh Hashanah, which may sound somewhat counter-intuitive. Being stuck in a room for six hours, two straight days, reciting texts is enough to get anyone to start asking some serious questions about what he is doing and why he is doing it. My father once pointed out to me that Jewish prayer is not very interactive and, if you are an outsider experiencing it for the first time, it can prove quite boring. Most of it consists of people reciting things under their breath and a cantor to pace everyone. Ironically enough, this actually works very well for me because it allows me to be "sociable," for hours on end even, on my terms, without actually having to talk to another human being. I get to read, meditate and think about the things that I like to think about and that I normally do by myself in my room. Now, since I am doing all of this, not in my private bedroom but in a room full of other people, what was something that might have invited reprimands for being anti-social, becomes the exact opposite. Now that I have been such a good sociable person for hours on end no one should be able to deny that I have earned the right to turn back into myself to my heart's content for a few days.

This is one Asperger Jew's take on thing.

The English Language Makes Me Laugh Loudly and Immoderately

Those who have spent any significant time with me in person know that I have a rather strange laugh, something in between a hyena laughing and donkey braying. Children tend to get a kick out of my laugh, particularly when it is accompanied by me chasing after them and pontificating on the health benefits of medieval surgery and working in the mines. Adults, for some strange reason, tend to find my laugh grating and bothersome.


Recently, thanks to dictionary.com's word of the day, I discovered the word "caCHINNate."

"Cachinnate \KAK-uh-neyt\, verb: To laugh loudly or immoderately."
So the next time, someone asks me where I got such a god-awful laugh, I can respond: "Don't look at me. I am just an innocent victim of the English language."

Rebbe Judaism, the Vilna Gaon and Kupat Ha’ir

I am sitting in my room flipping through the latest Kupat Ha'ir brochure, declaring that Haredi Gedolim have ASSURED contributors "a good, sweet, year with no distress or serious ailments." Back in my day, it was enough to simply wish people a "sweet new year," a "good signing and sealing" and believe that "repentance, prayer, and charity overturn evil decrees." According to the brochure, Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky and Rabbi Aharon Leib Steinman are in the habit of meeting to discuss Kupat Ha'ir. "Why? There's no answer to this question. It's impossible for human logic to fathom." For those of us still bound by in the realm of human logic, Rabbi Kanievsky informs us that Kupat Ha'ir is the reason why we have not had a "Second Holocaust."

What really caught my attention in this brochure was the fact that it mentions the eighteenth century Rabbi Elijah of Vilna (the Vilna Gaon), comparing the crowds gathering outside to catch a glimpse of Rabbi Kanievsky and Rabbi Steinman talking about Kupat Ha'ir to the people, who supposedly gathered in the town of Meretz to catch a glimpse of Rabbi Elijah of Vilna when he visited. As anyone familiar with Jewish history will tell you, Rabbi Elijah of Vilna was a highly reclusive individual, who hardly left his house, and was hardly, during his lifetime, the sort of famous personality to attract crowds. His one major public act was the excommunication ban on the early Hasidic movement and his subsequent campaign against them.

One of the major shifts in Orthodox Judaism over the past few decades has been the "Hasidic" turn even among Lithuanian Jews, who claim ideological descent from Rabbi Elijah of Vilna. As Kupat Ha'ir is a good example of, even Lithuanian rabbis now offer blessings and claim miraculous powers; the sort of thing that used to be the province of Hasidic rebbes.

If Rabbi Elijah of Vilna were around today, he surely would point to Kupat Ha'ir as an example of how necessary it was to excommunicate Hasidim in the eighteenth century and proceed to excommunicate those presently involved with Kupat Ha'ir. So, how about it.

Isaac Asimov and the Submission to Law

In an earlier post, I spoke about the necessity of submission to Law as a form of salvation from "every man doing what is right in their eyes." I was recently reading an Isaac Asimov novel, The Stars, Like Dust, that, in its own way made a similar point.

Before I continue, I might as well say something about the novel as a whole. It is very typical Isaac Asimov, both in its strengths and weaknesses. It is a pan-galactic mystery novel with a square-jawed hero, Biron Farril, a female companion, Artemisia oth Hinriad, who serves no purpose but to be a mindless damsel in distress and fall madly in love with the hero midway through the book, and a wise old comically endearing scientist, Gilbret, to serve as the voice of reason, off on an adventure through space. Writing in 1951, Asimov did an incredible job covering the technicalities of hyperspace travel with plausible sounding jargon. That being said, he has his characters stick paper labels on ship controls, and smoke cigarettes on a space ship. One can only imagine: "Welcome aboard my spaceship. Please take a cigarette. No need to worry about such primitive diseases as lung cancer; you will be blown to bits by the exploding oxygen long before that." Asimov had this problem covered by something even more bizarre. He seemed to have assumed that it is necessary to constantly breathe in carbon so his spaceships have carbon in their atmosphere and his spacesuits have small carbon emitters. I have no idea where he got that idea. Perhaps one of my readers who know something about 1950s science could help me out here.

Our heroes, Biron, Artemisia and Gilbret are on the run in a stolen space cruiser from the evil Tyrannians (pun very much intended). Seeking to free the Nebula Kingdoms, our heroes search for the hidden rebel world. Along the way, another mystery keeps floating over their heads; there are references to a secret document from ancient Earth that if ever revealed would destroy the Tyrannians. While fighting for freedom and justice, our heroes have a problem; they are all noblemen and, as such, illegitimately rule over their subjects just much as the Tyrannians do over them. In fighting against the Tyrannians are they merely seeking to replace them? This ceases to be an idle question when they come up against a rebel leader who is trying to do precisely that.

After many twists and turns (and Asimov was nothing if not clever), our heroes finally find the rebellion and meet its leader. The leader, it turns out, has heard of the secret document from Earth and even has it in his possession. Biron breathlessly asks the leader to reveal what is in this document; how could a mere document be so powerful as to destroy an empire? The leader explains that, yes, this document, once revealed, will destroy the Tyrannians as well as the nobility, paving the way for a truly just government. He begins to recite the text by heart: "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

And the novel ends just like that.

There is a simple beauty to Asimov with his utter faith in classical liberal principles, that a free society combined with scientific rationalism could bring the salvation of society. As ironic as this might sound talking about an agnostic scientific rationalist, but, in reading Asimov, I cannot help but feel overwhelmed by the force of his faith as it demands that I too submit myself to the power of such law and put my faith in it. (See also On the Comforts of Reading Isaac Asimov.)