Free Markets Not Turkey are Sending You Illiterate Immigrants

Hat tip to Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein.



Austrian MP Ewald Stadler goes on a rant against the Turkish ambassador, Ecvet Tezan. In general I find it useful to watch foreign politicians in action. It serves as a useful remainder for whenever someone says that our politics, here in the United States, are rough. For better or worse, our two party system guarantees that everyone behaves themselves and keeps to the moderate and boring center.

What caught my intention was Stadler blaming Turkey for sending Austria "all the illiterates of Anatolia" and "stone-age Islamists." (2:53) Anyone who is a libertarian understands that countries do not ship out their undesirables, unless at gun point; the market is responsible for that. People go wherever the best jobs they can get are available. This is a good thing as it allows for the maximal use of resources. If anything, Stadler should blame the State welfare programs for attracting "illiterates." (In all fairness, his BZO party seems pretty good in terms of economics.) Not that there is anything wrong with people who are illiterate beyond the fact that it is an inefficient use of a valuable and finite resource, the human brain. Once you assume that the State is supposed to fight poverty, how can you not open your borders to all human beings in need. As for stone-age Muslims wanting bury teenage girls alive, it is the responsibility of the State to make sure that everyone obeys the law and does not cause physical harm to anyone. Beyond that, let every person practice whatever stone-age belief they feel like.      

Making Goethe Jewish

David Goldman has an article, "Faustian Bargains," on the continued importance of German cultural tradition for Judaism. Much of the article focuses on Orthodox Judaism, particularly R. Samson Raphael Hirsch, Michael Friedländer and R. Joseph Soloveitchik. Unlike most narratives, which focus on the Kantian philosophical tradition, Goldman argues for the preeminence of German literature, particularly Goethe, for understanding German-Jewish relations. According to Goldman:


Two German thinkers demarcate the opposite poles of German culture and its Jewish response. One was Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), whose Critique of Pure Reason leapfrogged 2,000 years of debate about the ultimate nature of reality. We cannot penetrate into the inner nature of objects that we perceive, Kant asserted: All we can know is the mechanisms for understanding them that are hard-wired into our brains. The apogee of Enlightenment rationalism, Kant thought that reason would prescribe ethics and foster world peace. The poet and polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) saw instead the dark side of the Enlightenment: Freed from constraint, tradition, and faith, modern man faced instead existential despair and self-destruction. Men use reason, Mephistopheles tells God in the prologue to Goethe’s great drama Faust, to be beastlier than any beast. Kant dismissed Judaism as a relic of ancient irrationality; Goethe learned Hebrew and drew on the Bible to make sense of the spiritual crisis of modernity.

Jews who veered toward assimilation embraced Kant’s universalism, most prominent among them Hermann Cohen, Germany’s leading academic philosopher in the last years of the 19th century. Cohen never abjured his Jewish identity and struggled until the end of his life to reconcile the unique calling of Israel with Kant’s universalism. His story has become an object lesson in failed assimilation. The Jewish encounter with Goethe in many ways is more telling, for its failures as well as successes. Some of the great rabbis of the 19th century did not hesitate to draw on Goethe’s reading of the Bible; Rabbi Joseph Dov Soloveitchik saw theological importance in Goethe’s rejection of scientific determinism.

Ayn Rand’s Road to Serfdom (Part II)

(Part I)





The plot of Atlas Shrugged occurs against the background of Friedrich Hayek's scenario. The biggest departure is that Ayn Rand never bothers to bring in a formal dictator. Even this can be seen as an astute adaption of Hayek. For Hayek the creation of a Hitler, while the endpoint, is really incidental to the whole process. The real work of Fascism was not done by the Nazis, but by the mainstream German left and right decades before. Tyranny does not corrupt the free society, but is the incidental byproduct of the corrupted free society.

In the novel the two main characters, Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden, are businesspeople trying to succeed against a government and a society following Hayek's downward trajectory. Dagny works in railroads and is trying to build a new line in Colorado, the state with the fewest government regulations and the most robust economy. Hank is trying to market his new "Rearden Steel." Dagny and Hank form a business relationship (and start sleeping together) with Hank providing Dagny with Rearden Steel and Dagny providing Hank the opportunity to showcase to the world what Rearden Steel can do. The problem for Dagny and Hank is that the United States which they live in is dominated by the notion that private businesses should be run in such a way as to advance "the public interest." Dagny and Hank are unaware of this change in the culture and its implications for them. They are both people consumed with pursuing their own particular interests (with almost Asperger like dedication), who assume that everyone thinks like they do. This is not the case with Dagny's brother, James Taggart, and Hank's chief competitor, Orren Boyle, who embrace this new public minded spirit and, instead of working on their businesses, devote themselves to working the corridors of Washington in service of this "public interest."

In the name of public interest James gets an "anti-dog-eat-dog rule," to limit "destructive" competition and drive his chief competitor out of business. Next, James and Boyle get an "Equalization of Opportunity Bill" passed with the help of Wesley Mouch, Hank's lobbyist, who betrays his employer. The Equalization of Opportunity Bill is a laundry list of regulations designed to serve the "public interest," but which descends into favors for special interests at the expense of someone else. The railroad unions want fewer cars to be run on each train and a lower speed limit to give more hours to workers. James, in the spirit of public mindedness, gives in to this demand when he is given a break from paying back the bonds bought by the investors Dagny brought aboard. Hank is stopped from moving his business to Colorado in order that jobs not be lost, but a limit is also placed on how much he can produce in order that other less fortunate people, like Boyle, are given a chance.

With the help of people like James Taggart and Orren Boyle, Wesley Mouch is able to become the Senior Coordinator of the Bureau of Economic Planning and Natural Resources, an unelected official with almost dictatorial power over the country. He rules through an unholy alliance of special interests, from James and Orren to Fred Kinnon of Amalgamated Labor and Dr. Floyd Ferris of the State Science Institute. Together they pass Directive 10-289, which shifts the logic of the Equalization of Opportunity Bill from corrupt meddlesome government to State Fascism. Everyone must work for the public benefit; anyone who does not is not just selfish, but a criminal. All businesses must produce the same amount as pre-depression times. Workers must work the same amount of hours and at the same pay as they did before. No one is allowed to leave their job without special permission from the "Unification Board." Everyone must spend the same amount of money as they did in previous years. There is even a rule against new books being published (including books that might be critical of these policies) so that authors whom the public had yet to read could be given a chance.

In the spirit of Hayek, Rand is most effective when confronting the issue whose public interest is at stake and the consequences of accepting unstated philosophical premises. Some of the best scenes in the book are when the various villains wave the banner of "public interest," a term that Rand turns into a curse word by the end of the book. The villains, to great comic effect, sit down and try negotiate, between themselves, which of the many "worthy" public interests need to be considered and who should have to be sacrificed in the name of the public interest. Finally there are the moments when these characters have to face up to the true consequences of their abandonment of firm moral principles for pragmatism. For example, James Taggart finds himself yelling about the sacredness of a contract, when the labor union controlled Unification Board makes him the sacrifice to their public interest, only to realize that he was the one who destroyed the value of a contract when he sacrificed his investors by not paying them for the bonds.

The crucial difference between Hayek and Rand, where Rand goes off the train tracks to become Rand, is that for Hayek this scenario is a tragedy put into place by intelligent people, who had all the right intentions. If Hayek attacked Fascism (the socialism of the right), he also was defending German culture, essentially telling his English audience: we Germans did this not because we had any natural disposition to tyrannical rule or for mindlessly obeying orders. Our liberal tradition was as good as yours if not better. We fell because we so desired for the government to advance the public interest and turned to this ideal several decades before you did. Both the left and the right accepted this until between these two forces there were no honest liberals left. If these ideas came from the left, it was the German right that truly embraced them and took them to their logical and murderous conclusions.

For Rand, the problem is not just the notion that government should act for the public interest, but that people should try acting for the good of others in the first place. Thus, in the novel, there is no spirit of tragedy, or even tragic-comedy, in which good people are brought down by the unforeseen consequences of their strengths. On the contrary, there are simply moral degenerates, who fail to live according to Objectivist values of selfishness, and therefore deserve their fates. This is played out in Rand's solution to the problems faced by her heroes. She has them join John Galt and his followers in their "strike of the mind" as they attempt to bring down the entire economy even at the expense of allowing millions of people to die of starvation. For Rand, the true villains are not Mouch and his cronies in Washington, but the millions of people who honestly believed in doing good for others and thought they were doing that by supporting Mouch's economic planning. This point is most clearly made in one particular scene in which Rand sets up a major train crash in a Taggart tunnel. Before the accident occurs, Rand offers vignettes of different anonymous people on the train about to die, including a mother with her children who had always been hostile to the rich and assumed that government regulations would only harm them. The message is that these people, including women and children, were responsible for this state of affairs and deserved to die. The heroes are those, like John Galt, who can sit back with a lit cigarette (the groups special kind, featuring the symbol of the dollar) and allow society to crumble.

Following Hayek, I recognize and honor the good intentions and intelligence of those who support government control over the economy in the name of the public good. The fact that this is a path to the destruction of liberty, takes nothing away from this. On the contrary, it makes it a tragedy to be stopped and, failing that, to be mourned for. If a libertarian society is ever going to succeed it will do so ultimately because people are willing to work for the greater good and are willing to do so even without the government whip. For me, Libertarianism is not the rejection of public responsibility it is the opportunity to finally embrace it.

Ayn Rand's Latin

The Economist is in middle of hosting a debate between Lera Boroditsky and Mark Liberman over the role of language in shaping ideas. I have become interested in this issue recently from reading Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. Pinker, as a supporter of evolutionary psychology, argues that genes are the primary arbitrator of how people think and polemicizes against those, particularly on the left, who accept it as a matter of faith that society at large, even with its power over language, truly affects people. As with Pinker's arguments against the blank slate model of  the mind, the debate about the role of language seems to be one of defining your terms. No one is really about to say that language is irrelevant for discussions about ideas and no one is about to say that language form an unbreakable chain, fating all speakers of given language to certain modes of thought.

In the opening round Liberman, in the role of the opposition, attacks the popular belief that certain languages "lack a word for x." Interestingly enough, he takes a swipe at Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged. In the novel Rand has a character claim that only Americans have a word for "making money." Liberman retortes:

But this cute theory runs aground on the shoals of fact. If we look up pecunia in Lewis and Short's Latin dictionary, we find the gloss "property, riches, wealth", and a reference to Cicero's use of the phrase "pecuniam facere", which deploys pecunia as the object of the verb facere (to make).


To be fair to Rand, there was an important shift in the early modern period regarding money, which rejected Aristotle's belief that money was something "barren." This belief was the foundation of the Church's opposition to lending money. Even in ancient times people recognized that wealth such as cattle, (the origins of the Latin word "pecunia") could be created by human hands. It was only in modern times, though, that the view of currency changed from something static to dynamic. Of course this still goes back before the United States. I guess Isaac Abarbanel was being an "American" when he defended interest lending, contrary to the Church and Aristotle, with the argument that "money could grow" by being lent out for productive uses.

The Associated Press' Israeli Center: Ehud Barak and the Labor Party

In a news article titled "Israel's Leader Does Not Want to Share Jerusalem," Amy Teibel considers Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's opposition to dividing Jerusalem and contrasts it with the position of Ehud Barak. According to Teibel:

Netanyahu's defense minister Ehud Barak of the centrist Labor Party, called for sharing Jerusalem with the Palestinians. But a government official said Barak's idea does not reflect the government's view.

So let me get this straight; Ehud Barak and the Labor Party are the center of Israeli politics? Yes I recognize that Netanyahu and the Likud are the Israeli right. Right now he is under attack from those even further on the Israeli right for not taking a stronger stance against the Palestinians. I would see Kadima as a centrist party with its willingness to remove many settlements regardless of a peace agreement. That leaves Labor as the Israeli left with its commitment to seeing the Palestinians as equal partners in the peace process. So what makes Labor the center beyond holding positions supported by the author of the article?

Ayn Rand’s Road to Serfdom (Part I)

In an earlier post I discussed my mixed feelings, as a libertarian, about Ayn Rand. She was most certainly a libertarian and Libertarianism was the foundation of her thought, without which nothing else of hers can stand. That being said the Ayn Rand that most people are familiar with and the aspect of her thought that proves to be a turnoff, her glorification of selfishness, is that which is outside of Libertarianism. For that reason, Ayn Rand proves to be a tainted gift to libertarian thought. This was brought home to me in listening to Atlas Shrugged. At its heart, the novel plays out Friedrich Hayek's Road to Serfdom scenario. Unfortunately, Ayn Rand had to taint the novel by being Ayn Rand.

To summarize Hayek's scenario: the government, backed by mass popular demand, steps forward to direct the economy in such a way as to advance the "public interest." To do this, an economic board of planning (or group of czars) is set up to regulate the major industries, "big business," to stop the very real abuses going on and make sure they act according to the best interests of the public. These sentiments are certainly very noble and for this reason, most of the population (including its intellectuals) support this board; they are convinced that under the board's rational guidance the economy will become not just more equitable for the poor, but more effective for all. The problem is that no one realizes that in addition to the principles they thought they were signing on to, they also have, de facto, signed onto three other principles which are inimical to any liberalism. One, that there is such a thing as the "public interest" for the board to advance and to which everyone must submit to. Two, that anyone who goes against this public interest is an "enemy of the people." Three, that the economic board in service of the public interest is above the rule of law.

The board honestly attempts to promote the public interest, but immediately run up against the reality that there is no public interest, but literally millions of "special interest" groups. Who is the public interest, factory workers, farmers, office secretaries or college professors? All of these groups have conflicting interests and will insist that their interests are the interests that the board needs to advance as the public interest. It also turns out that rather than the paragons of wisdom and virtue envisioned by the public, the economic board consists of human beings, forming one more special interest, armed with the human capacity for self-delusion to equate their special interest (their continued ability to control the economy) with the public interest.

Meanwhile, in an exercise in the power of unforeseen consequences, representatives of all the major industries descend on the capital eager to demonstrate their willingness to embrace this new spirit of public mindedness and to make sure that any policy crafted by the board includes just the right loopholes to not affect them and destroy their competitors. Thus, the members of the board, rather than overseeing the abuses of big business soon find themselves in bed with them, but now under the unimpeachable banner of the public interest.

Beyond the potential damage created by any of the board's policies is the fact that they have set a new tone for the society. Even if our economic planners did not intend this, now the road to success is not in producing new goods for the economy, but in being able to navigate this new game of economic policymaking. Thus the nation's best and brightest turn from producing in the private economy to becoming lobbyists. They are followed by the nation's most disreputable and criminally inclined, who rush to take the new government jobs now that they offer a means to practice real world coercion over other people. Now, instead of being in private business, where the government can keep an eye on them, they are in the government, outside of government regulation, and serving the "public interest," making them really untouchable.

The board's attempt to craft an economic plan to serve the public interest was doomed even when the people involved actually had good intentions, let alone after what happened has in the meantime. Whatever plan they come up with will not benefit the entire range of the public. There is going to be a group of people whose interests are harmed and who must be sacrificed on the altar of this public interest. (Obviously the group of people who were the least effective at heading to the capital and lobbying the economic board.) In order to justify this, the board is going to need to villainize this group. Unlike under traditional liberalism where political losers can be left to lick their wounds and try again the next election cycle, this group needs to be cast as enemies of the people. How could they be anything less if they are against the "public interest?" It helps if this group consists of members of a traditionally despised minority. To sell its economic plan, with its chosen villain, the board will launch a massive propaganda campaign, using every available medium. Every man woman and child must be taught to know the public interest and how best to advance it.

What happens when this much touted economic plan fails to bring about all the miracles the public was promised? Rather than give up power, the board will insist that the continued economic difficulties are not proof that its measures were ineffective, but, on the contrary, that the policies were not taken far enough. Not enough action was taken against the enemies of the people, who were allowed to sabotage the public interest. The public will react not by turning against the board, but by giving it expanded power. (Government bureaucracies, like organized religions, have the power to survive any disaster and even benefit from them by arguing that failure is proof that the policies in question were not practiced zealously enough.) Before too long this board will find itself with the power to ignore such traditional protections as freedom of expression, innocent until proven guilty and due process. After all who has time to bother with such quaint practices now that there is a national emergency and the State is overrun with enemies of the public interest? The nation's former disreputable element, who previously flocked to government posts, gladly offer their services in carrying out the more distasteful of these tasks.

It should be noted that all of this is going on under a democratic system. From here it is only a small matter for a demagogue to arise and promise the public to bring the economic benefits so long promised by the board. After so many years of the board's public interest policies, which has caused everyone to act in a way that is most certainly not in the public interest, and propaganda, all sense of genuine civic virtue and liberty have long since rotted away from the society. The masses flock to this demagogue, but they are soon followed by the nation's intellectuals, whom one would have expected to know better. Finally, the board lays itself at the foot of our demagogue, placing him as dictator, Duce or Fuhrer, having already created for him the propaganda machine, police system and, most importantly, the intellectual justifications for him to use them for his tyrannical reign.


(To be continued …)

Final: History 111 Fall 2010

Here is the final I gave my History 111 students. As you can see, the class has been about Greece, Rome and Early Christianity. Note the emphasis I have placed on concepts as opposed to simple historical facts.  



Identify (Pick 7): 35 pts.




1. Crassus

2. Mithridates VI

3. Marius

4. Cato

5. Peloponnesian War

6. Aphrodite

7. Pharisees

8. Gnosticism

9. Peter

10. Herodotus





Short Answers (Pick 5): 40 pts.



1. What was the major political issue for anyone living in first century Palestine?

2. How might we go about differentiating between Paul’s real letters and those which were forgeries?

3. Why did Athens believe it could defeat Sparta in the Peloponnesian War? What went wrong?

4. How committed was Cicero to making sure that no Roman citizen was executed without trial?

5. Why did Rome end up fighting so many wars? How did success in these wars pose a threat to the Republic? What was the solution to this problem and how did it trap Rome in a vicious cycle?

6. How are myths useful historical sources? Give an example.

7. What do we mean by the “power of unforeseen consequences” in history? Give an example.



Essays (Pick 1): 60 pts.

1. What sorts of things do you need to put into a story in order to make it successful (sell millions of copies and be made into a movie)? Do these things always correspond to how events transpire in real life? How does this affect the writing of historical fiction like Imperium and SPQR as well as even works that claim to be historical “fact?” Give examples.

2. How might an anthropologist (say from South Korea) go about studying college students in the American Midwest? What are some of the obstacles that this anthropologist would need to avoid? How might these same issues of method be relevant to the study of a place like Sparta? Were the Spartans really as militaristic and sexually free as some of our sources claim?





Bonus: 5 pts.

Who in modern American politics is a populist? Why is populism such an attractive ideology today?





Now I have to finish actually grading the forty or so finals.

Spain the High School Dropout

Clarissa has a short post on an analogy by one of her students, comparing Spain to a high school dropout:

After Spain expelled the Jews, it became similar to a high school dropout who constantly lags behind everybody else, can't keep up with any intelligent conversation, and has to do trivial things just to survive.

I am reminded of the rhetorical trope used by many rabbis in my youth that any country that expelled its Jews immediately went into decline. Spain (really Aragon and Castile) expelled its Jews and it fell from being a great power. Unfortunately for this theory 1492 was also in the year that Spain began its conquest of the New World. The wealth of the New World (particularly the world's largest silver mine in Peru) would eventually fund Spain's domination of the European continent for the next century.

Of course in an exercise of the power of unforeseen consequences, this conquest of the New World would eventually become the downfall of Spain, causing Spain to fail to industrialize. Worse, this wealth ended up strengthening the monarchy making it impervious to democratic reform (much as oil in Saudi Arabia protects the Saudi monarchy).

In the end, I do think the Early Modern Spanish government can be compared to a modern high school dropout, not because it expelled its Jews, but in how it was corrupted by outside funding. Like the modern high school dropout who assumes that he can live off of public welfare as if money could simply be produced and has no incentive to knuckle down and get an education, the Spanish monarchy saw money as something that could just be produced out of the ground and never bothered to reform itself until it was too late.   

(See Secular Theodicy.)

Tax Breaks for a Noah’s Ark Theme Park

  In what should have exemplified all that is wrong with the Republican Party, Gov. Steven L. Beshear of Kentucky, a democrat, is offering tax breaks to the folks over at the Creation Museum for the building of a Noah's Ark theme park. The excuse for this is that the park will create jobs and help out the economy.

While most people would object to such tax-breaks on the grounds of separation between Church and State, I object on the grounds of there being special tax-breaks in the first place. What, you might ask? Should I not, as a libertarian, be supportive of big business interests? Libertarianism has nothing to do with being pro business and this is a good example of that. For a libertarian, the purpose of government is to protect people from direct physical harm caused by other people without their consent. The government is assumed to be competent enough (if barely) to deal with something relatively simple like stopping terrorists trying to set off a nuclear bomb on our soil. The government is most certainly not competent enough to handle something as complex as the economy any more than we are going to take them seriously when it comes to leading the moral life or getting into heaven. If the economy is assumed to be beyond the understanding of government, we have no choice but to label any attempt by government officials to offer special deals to businesses as a conspiring with a special interest against the general public.

I put the challenge to my readers. If Gov. Beshear is correct in his premise that it is possible for the government to help boost the economy by providing special tax breaks to businesses for building theme parks, what grounds do you have for objecting? Surely you would not hold the Noah's Ark theme against such a project. Would you let such a minor thing as the separation of Church and State get in the way of creating jobs for the people of Kentucky? I reject his premise so this can never become an issue for me.  

Who Owns Aslan, the Author or the Voice Actor?

There is a public furor shaping up over Liam Neeson, the actor who does the voice of Aslan in the recent Narnia movies, saying that Aslan could be any spiritual leader even Mohammad or Buddha. The Narnia books of course were written by C. S. Lewis as Christian allegories with Aslan intended to represent Jesus. Similarly, I recall back when the first film came out Tilda Swinton saying that she felt her white witch character represented Aryan supremacy as opposed to the Devil as Lewis intended. I would see this as an excellent example of the post-modern question of authorship. According to post-modern thought, a text is its interpretation. From this perspective there is really no such thing as authorship and an author has no special power over his own work. The author is simply the person who incidentally performed the labor of creating the text. He may have his own personal interpretation of his own work, but that interpretation is in no way more valid than the interpretation of any of his readers. Readers in turn are free to craft an interpretation from their own personal act of reading without concern as to original authorial intent.  

So who maintains interpretive control over Aslan, C. S. Lewis, who wrote the novels, or the millions of people who have read them, including Liam Neeson? Legally of course Neeson is free to craft any "false" or "heretical" interpretation he chooses and post-modernism says that he is on solid ground for doing so. I doubt Lewis would have really objected. My sense of the man was that he was not the sort to get worked up about anything. If Lewis had a Christian message to his work, he showed little concern to force that message to others. 

As a Jewish C. S Lewis fan, I feel no emotional qualms about accepting Aslan as Jesus. (I accept both of them equally as not my personal savior.) Part of this I think comes from my experience as a historian. Historians are unable to follow the post-modern path to its fullest extreme. We require texts to have hard meanings, otherwise the historical method would be just another form of subjective literary interpretation. We also do put a special value on authorial intent. Want to understand a text? Compare it to the author's other writing and then to ideas in general currency at the time. Under no circumstances are you to bring into play concepts that did not come about until later; that is an anachronism. That being said we historians do recognize that in practice texts do evolve. People do take texts and refashion them for their own purposes. So part of the story of any text is a "post-modern" defeat of authorial intent at the hands of public reception.

I accept as historical fact that Narnia is a Christian work and that Aslan represents Jesus. Even though I am Jewish, this does not have to get in the way or my enjoyment of Narnia or force me to fashion a Narnia to better suit my own personal beliefs. My pleasure is in trying to understand texts as the author might have and seeing how other people refashion it. If Aslan becomes Mohammad to suit our more ecumenical age, that too is a topic worthy of historical study.     


 

Here is a Religion I Could Go For

From China Mieville's Perdido Street Station:

Palgolak was a god of knowledge. He was depicted either as a fat, squat human reading in a bath, or a svelte vodyanoi doing the same, or, mystically, both at once. His congregation were human and vodyanoi in roughly equal proportions. He was an amiable, pleasant deity, a sage whose existence was entirely devoted t the collection, categorization, and dissemination of information.

Isaac worshipped no gods, He did not believe in the omniscience or omnipotence claimed for a few, or even the existence of many. Certainly there were creatures and essences that inhabited different aspects of existence, and certainly some of them were powerful, in human terms. But worshipping them seemed to him rather a craven activity. Even he, though, had a soft spot for Palgolak. He rather hoped the fat bastard did exist, in some form or another. Isaac liked the idea of an inter-aspectual entity so enamoured with knowledge that it just roamed from real to realm in a bath, murmuring with interest at everything it came acrosss.

Palgolak's library was at least the equal to that of the New Crobuzon University. It did not lend books, but it did allow readers in at any time of the day or the night, and there were very very few books it did not allow access to. The Palgolaki were proselytizers, holding that everything known by a worshipper was immediately known by Palgolak, which was why they were religiously charged to read voraciously. But their mission was only secondarily for the glory of Palgolak, and primarily for the glory of knowledge, which was why they were sworn to admit all who wished to enter their library. (pg. 60)  

I guess, though, my question would be how such a religion might have been able to evolve. In a pre-literate society such a religion would have excluded the vast majority of people from "salvation." (One of the reasons why Maimonidean rationalism failed to take control of Judaism during the Middle-Ages.) Also there is the problem of allowing people to read books. The problem is not heresy, per se, but the granting of authority to lay individuals to interpret ideas for themselves. How could a religious establishment maintain itself as a coherent set of beliefs under circumstances in which every man reads for himself and forms his own ideas? Protestantism learned this the hard way when they encouraged people to read just the Bible.

(See also Sazed's School of Religion.)

Why Israel Needs to Earn a Spot at the 2022 World Cup

Israel may not be a major soccer power in the world having only been to the World Cup once in 1970. But now the World Cup in 2022 is going to be held in the Arab country of Qatar. What might happen if Israel were to earn a spot? Would Qatar even allow the Israeli team to enter the country? One way or another having Israel take part should be enough to put egg in the faces of the entire Arab world much as Jesse Owens winning gold at the Berlin Olympic of 1936 was a slap at Hitler. Israelis love soccer so why not make it a national drive to get that spot. Young Israeli soccer fans can now dream of growing up and representing their country in a way that the world will not soon forget.  

The Yiddish Karate Kids

I ran into the following poster in a synagogue this past weekend in Queens NY.



The Yiddish heading reads as follows: "The Yiddish Karate Kids."

I would see this as an interesting example of acculturation going on even actively within the Haredi community. The fact that the poster has Yiddish and features a Haredi looking kid leads one to conclude that the group is designed for and run by Haredim. Whether or not Jacob used martial arts to defeat the angel in Genesis, karate is not part of the Jewish cultural tradition. (We shall see what happens to Krav Maga.) Nor is karate a ubiquitous part of American culture like baseball or football that it would be impossible to ignore it. I would also point out that other forms of loose clothing can be used in karate besides for the distinctively non-Jewish gi garment. If you are going to take a stand against not engaging in gentile practices and wearing their clothing, this would be a logical place.

So we have Haredim reaching out and taking a product not only from a gentile culture, but one that is actually pagan (something that, unlike American culture, actually does raise legitimate halachic issues). Far be it from me to encourage Haredim to ban things, but there are too many obvious issues for someone not to notice. I wish this group best of luck. It would, though, be in their best interest to be honest as to what they are doing so not to give the banners a chance to create a moral high ground for themselves. If you openly support acculturation then no one can use it to discredit you. Up front intellectual honesty is always the best form of self defense.