Wandering through Fantasy Worlds with Kvothe and Harry Potter (Part I)

If I were to describe Patrick Rothfuss' Kingkiller Chronicles series in one sentence it would be that it is Harry Potter's more mature and sophisticated sibling, who, instead of going to grade school to study magic, went to college. In a similar vein, my reaction to watching the first season of Heroes (the only one worth watching) was that it was the younger smarter sibling of the X-Men, who went of to university and got into heroin. (In the case of Heroes there actually is a character whose superpower is to be able to see and paint the future while high.) As with Harry Potter, Kingkiller is about a teenage orphan, Kvothe, whose parents were murdered off by dark powers, studying magic. As with J. K. Rowling, Rothfuss' chief strengths as a writer are his ability to create interesting characters, backed by witty dialogue and a world for us to explore through the eyes of these characters.

What Rothfuss has over Rowling is that, like Tolkien, he offers the impression of depth to his world; that it is not just a prop that will collapse if touched. Rowling's wizarding world, in contrast, while utterly fascinating as a concept striking deep into the collective subconsciousness of readers (I cannot think of another fantasy world that I so desperately wanted to be real), remains an immensely clever joke. Even by the end of the series one does not get the sense that Rowling ever bothered to work out the mechanics and limitations of her magical system and the inner workings of her wizarding society. Particularly the question of why wizards, even muggle-loving ones like Arthur Weasley, live in secret outside of general society and in ignorance of it. (See "Yeshiva Hogwarts.") One suspects that this is the reason why Rowling kept her story so narrowly focused on Harry, only allowing us to experience the wizarding world from Harry's limited perspective and kept Harry's own experience of the wizarding world to specific set pieces, like the Weasley home, Diagon Alley, and Hogwarts. Allowing Harry broader range would have forced her to take her own wizarding world seriously and not just as a prop.  Rothfuss, in contrast, treats his magic with a level of sophistication surpassing the "science" of most science fiction. As Tolkien managed to invent several fully functional languages for Lord of the Rings that people can study today, one suspects that Rothfuss would, if pressed, be able to present a plausibly sounding "scientific" lecture on his magic. The same goes for his world's various races, religions, countries, and politics.

Rothfuss' other major advantage over Rowling is in creating, in Kvothe, a fully flesh and blood lead character the likes of which exist in few other works of fantasy. With Harry Potter, the interest is always the world and characters around him. Harry serves as a means to explore Hogwarts and characters like Ron, Hermione, Hagrid, Dumbledore, Sirius, and Lupin, all of whom are far more interesting than Harry in of himself. Harry starts off the series as a star-struck modern-day version of T. H. White's young King Arthur, Wart, before evolving into a moody teenager. It is only in Deathly Hallows, as Harry contemplates the necessity of his death to defeat Voldemort, that Harry steps in as a worthy protagonist in his own right. (It is for this reason that, whether or not Deathly Hallows is the best book in the series, it is certainly the best written of the series and the one in which Rowling stepped into her own as a mature writer.) One suspects that this is why Rowling never allowed Harry to exist on his own but always has him interacting with other characters, even going so far as to make Harry's chief strength his connection to his friends as opposed to Voldemort who is completely self-contained. (See "Adolescent Military Genius.") Kvothe, in contrast, is the star attraction, not just a cipher through which to tell a story. Rothfuss does not just focus his narrative on Kvothe, he tells almost his entire story from inside Kvothe's head. One almost gets the sense that Rothfuss could have eliminated his entire world, leaving Kvothe floating in ether, and still hold on to the reader's attention.

This places Kingkiller as one of those rare fantasy series that is only incidentally about fantasy. In much the same way that Orson Scott Card novels are about characters and relationships and only incidentally take place in a science-fiction universe, Rothfuss has one utterly compelling character, Kvothe, and a world for Kvothe to operate in. The fact that this world is a beautifully rendered fantasy world only serves to establish Rothfuss as one of the greatest writers of this generation of any genre. 

(To be continued ...)                

Kvothe High on Asperger Syndrome

For my birthday present, I bought myself Patrick Rothfuss' Wise Man's Fear on Kindle. Considering how often Rothfuss has been compared to Tolkien, it would have been appropriate for me to take this "precious birthday present" and make it ours. To ensure that no one steals it we could run off to a secret cave underneath a mountain with plenty of fish. There we could read the precious all by ourselves and not share it with nasty thieving hobbit readers. As I am not Gollum I did wish to share one particular piece which, for reasons that should soon be obvious, I found humorous but also personally very meaningful.

At one point early in the novel, the hero Kvothe is tricked by his archenemy at the university, Ambrose Jakis (like Draco Malfoy but a bigger bastard), into ingesting a substance that completely takes away his ability to read social conventions. This is done right before Kvothe is supposed to be examined by the administration in order to determine his fees for the next term. This leads to the following interaction between Kvothe and his friends Simmon and Fela as Simmon tries to keep Kvothe in line with a series of number rankings as how socially not acceptable something is.


There was a knock on the door. "It's me," Sim's voice came through the wood. "Is everything all right in there?"


"You know what's strange?" I said to him through the door. "I tried to think of something funny I could do while you were gone, but I couldn't." I looked around at the room. "I think that means humor is rooted in social transgression. I can't transgress because I can't figure out what would be socially unacceptable. Everything seems the same to me."



"You might have a point," he said, then asked, "did you do something anyway?"



"No," I said. "I decided to be good. Did you find Fela?"



"I did. She's here. But before we come in, you have to promise not to do anything without asking me first. Fair?"




I laughed. "Fair enough. Just don't make me do stupid things in front of her."

I promise," Sim said. "Why don't you sit down? Just to be safe."



"I'm already sitting," I said.



Sim opened the door. I could see Fela peering over his shoulder.



"Hello Fela," I said. "I need to trade slots with you."



"First," Sim said. "You should put your shirt back on. That's about a two."



"Oh," I said. "Sorry. I was hot."



"You could have opened the window."



"I thought it would be safer if I limited my interactions with external objects," I said.



Sim raised an eyebrow. "That's actually a really good idea. It just steered you a little wrong in this case."



"Wow." I heard Fela's voice from the hallway. "Is he serious?"



"Absolutly serious," Sim said. "Honestly? I don't think it's safe for you to come in."



I tugged my shirt on. "Dressed," I said. "I'll even sit on my hands if it will make you feel better." I did just that, tucking them under my legs. Sim let Fela inside, then closed the door behind her.



"Fela, you are just gorgeous," I said. "I would give you all the money in my purse if I could just look at you naked for two minutes. I'd give everything I own. Except my lute."



It's hard to say which of them blushed a deeper red. I think it was Sim.


"I wasn't supposed to say that, was I?" I said.



No," Sim said. "That's about a five."



"But that doesn't make any sense," I said. "Women are naked in paintings. People buy paintings, don't they? Women pose for them."



Sim nodded. "That's true. But still. Just sit for a moment and don't say or do anything? Okay?



I nodded.



"I can't quite believe this," Fela said, the blush fading from her cheeks. "I can't help but think the two of you are playing some sort of elaborate joke on me."



"I wish we were," Simmon said. "This stuff is terribly dangerous."



"How can he remember naked paintings and not remember you're supposed to keep your shirt on in public? she asked Sim, her eyes never leaving me.


"It just didn't seem very important," I said. "I took my shirt off when I was whipped. That was public. It seems a strange thing to get in trouble for."



"Do you know what would happen if you tried to knife Ambrose? Simmon asked.



I thought for a second. It was like trying to remember what you'd eaten for breakfast a month ago. "There'd be a trial, I suppose," I said slowly, "and people would buy me drinks."



Fela muffled a laugh behind her hand.



"How about this? Simmon asked me. "Which is worse, stealing a pie or killing Ambrose?"



I gave it a moment's hard thought. "A meat pie, or a fruit pie?" (Kindle 1557-89.)



This has to be one of the best descriptions of Asperger logic I have ever read. Of course, if you are an Asperger you do not need to ingest anything and the effects are lifelong. By the time any Asperger has become an adult he will have developed a two-sided attitude toward social conventions. One the one hand Aspergers do not read social cues and therefore regularly step right over all sorts of conventions, giving the appearance of not caring about them and of even being downright rude. On the other hand, by the time one reaches adulthood, even an Asperger has come to realize that there are very real consequences to not operating according to social conventions. Because of this they will obsequiously bend over backward, constantly apologizing to others and asking to make sure they are acting in a socially acceptable manner. In my own personal experience, I have had a number of rather hilarious conversations with other Aspergers in which we both found ourselves apologizing and asking the other whether what we were saying was socially appropriate or not, neither of us knowing and, for that matter, neither of us caring.

This obsequiousness, in of itself, leads to a counter reaction. Much as with divine commands, eventually one gets tired of living under the burden of neurotypical social conventions that seem to make absolutely no sense, but which carry extreme consequences for their violation. This leads one to try break free, deny their value and systematically break them. This, in turn, leads to guilt, a renewed awareness of the consequences for violating social conventions and a return to bending over backward to try keeping them. Thus with Asperger adults, you will find that they both care and do not care about social conventions. This duality exists from minute to minute and even at the same time.

(Stay tuned for a full review of the novel.)

C. S. Lewis and the Scandal of the Evangelical (and Orthodox Jewish) Mind

Ryan Harper at the Huffington Post has an article on C. S. Lewis' influence on American evangelical Christianity, noting that Lewis is particularly valuable in countering arguments based on relativism. Harper argues, though, that the very strength of Lewis' ideas are having the detrimental effect of furthering Mark Noll's "The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind."

As is the tendency with all powerful ideas, Lewis's arguments have become a rhetorical talisman, an epistemological panacea. Because they offer a number of compelling insights that strike at the root of important questions, they are taken to resolve all root matters. Therefore, however new the wineskins, readers of popular evangelical apologetics end up drinking some version of that sound old Oxford vintage.



The result of this Lewis-worship is a two-fold narrowing of evangelical intellectual life. First, as Lewisian thought becomes the discursive structure of critical inquiry, it ceases to be the object of critical inquiry. Lewis is never put in the dock for inspection, revision, abandonment or refinement. Lewis is the dock.


Second, an evangelical milieu that so prides itself on its "engagement" with secular thought and culture begins to count reading and rehearsing Lewisian argument as such engagement. "Engagement" thus becomes a second-hand affair -- synonymous with finding out what C.S. Lewis has said on a given topic. But the 21st century has some new topics; and while it is unwise to execute some great divorce with the past and its great thinkers, each generation must write its own books.

Lewis certainly has had an influence on me and I openly admit that when making arguments about the need to put forth coherent statements about ultimate values, that I am channeling Lewis. That being said I see myself as engaging in a conversation with Lewis, a conversation that goes to different places. For me, the bigger issue than just trying to make moral statements is trying to pass those statements on to one's children. (See "When Lesbian Nazis in Bell-Bottoms Attack.") Perhaps this is because Lewis lived in a world in which even his atheists were still deeply in touch with a traditional culture. I live several generations down this path and worry when the heritage of the Enlightenment, based ultimately on early modern Christian thought, will finally run out on us.

This problem posed by Harper needs to be taken a step further. Yes, Lewis was a powerful writer. That the evangelical community has an unhealthy relationship with him I think, though, is due to the fact that it has yet to produce a writer who can match him. Perhaps this is the true scandal of the evangelical mind. Forget about being able to match secular academic culture; it has yet to match C. S. Lewis. Thus the theological conversation never moves beyond Lewis. Readers have nothing better to read than Lewis as writers are not capable of doing anything but reproducing Lewis.

I would go so far with this as to make a comparison to Orthodox Judaism and R. Samson Raphael Hirsch. Hirsch, a nineteenth-century German rabbi, was certainly the Jewish writer that most influenced me as a teenager and college student. Now as Dr. Alan Brill once pointed out to his class, Hirsch as a major influence on American Orthodoxy is a fairly recent phenomenon, due in large part to his having many descendants who translated his work into English and got them published. The other side to this, I would point out, that in terms of looking for books on Jewish thought that were sophisticated enough to pass muster with an intelligent teenager and which took an engagement with an outside world as a given I did not have much in the way of alternative options but for Hirsch. So this millennial American Orthodox teenager found himself in a situation in which the only Orthodox Judaism he could relate to was from nineteenth-century Germany. This is not a critic of Hirsch. He was a great thinker and writer. I am sure if I would be able to read him in German I would appreciate him all the more. That being said one has to ask why I was never given any serious twentieth-century Jewish literature to relate to. (The closest thing I could think of is Herman Wouk's This is My God which is Hirsch updated for 1950s America.)


As for me, I must admit that there was something particularly dangerous in Hirsch in that, considering my Asperger mental framework, I was not intuitively aware that I was not operating in nineteenth-century Germany and that I should not be trying to be a nineteenth-century German. So I had to push forward on my own to realize that I needed to face the reality of the twenty-first century and its unique issues; all this without the help of a useful Modern Orthodox literature. More recently I have begun reading the books of R. Jonathan Sacks and at least he is a step in the right direction. But until Modern Orthodoxy builds its own literature, it will remain caught between feeding off of Haredi and secular sources, while trying to create some personal dialectic whole between the two, and reaching back to some past thinker and trying to make him relevant for the present.


(Before readers bring up the examples of R. Joseph Soloveitchik and R. Abraham Isaac Kook, let me point out that I have been writing about my own personal experience as a teenager trying to mature into an intellectually serious Orthodox adult. Rav Soloveitchik and Rav Kook were not major influences on me at that point in my life. Furthermore, neither of these thinkers set out a coherent weltanschauung like Hirsch's Horeb, certainly not one that can be presented to teenagers. Most importantly, any attempt to use thinkers like Rav Soloveitchik and Rav Kook, both of whom distinct non-products of late twentieth century American culture, runs the same risk as turning to Hirsch.)

My Purim Shalach Manot

Today is the Jewish holiday of Purim, the classic "they tried to kill us, they failed, let's eat" festival. One of the traditions on this holiday is Shalach Manot where one is supposed to give gift baskets of food to other people. Think of it as reverse trick or treating. I guess this is part of the hobbit heritage of Jews. If gentiles go around in costume to take candy, we go around and give. Now the purpose of Shalach Manot is that it is meant to increase goodwill. That is the sort of absurd social-based thinking one naturally expects from neurotypicals. Anyone with even a hint of a properly functioning logical brain will realize that such a practice is only going to cause stress as people struggle to put together gift baskets to all their acquaintances and nothing but bad feelings to people left out or who received a smaller basket than those they gave to. In other words your basic Christmas shopping fallacy for people who are neurotic enough as it is and really do not need the encouragement. As an Asperger, I am inclined to prove my point through the scientific method. I could hand out baskets of peanuts and raw sugar to diabetics with peanut allergies with a note saying: "Dear acquaintance. I feel nothing but goodwill toward you and have no desire to cause you physical harm, not even to wage Hobbesian warfare at the moment. Please accept this gift as a token of the meaningless ritual gesture it is." I can then have a neurotypical friend measure the rate of hostile social gestures for me to see if there is a statistically significant shift. (To all you neurotypicals out there, this is what we Aspergers call a joke. We will try to explain it to you once we have taken over the world but, for now, you will just have to be patient.)

Here is an example of my actual Shalach Manot, which I am giving out to a few special people in my life. If you are not one of the people receiving one of these it does not mean that I do not like you or that I am even planning on waging Hobbesian war against you sometime in the near future. All it means is that either you are not close at hand in Silverspring MD or that I do not like you as much as some other people.

There is a hidden message in this Shalach Manot, in keeping with me being a Jewish autistic who spends way too much time exploring meta-historical narratives, Jewish Messiahs and apocalypticism, that I wish to share with everyone. At the start of history, this Chinn offers a sinfully delicious Asian pear as the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge. (How silly for European Christians to think it could be an apple.) Now that you have eaten the fruit, you are in need of a Jewish Messiah to save your soul with tasty wafers from Israel. Unfortunately, we live in a world in which autistic children still lie enslaved to parents who believe that gluten-free diets will cure them of the mercury that was not in their vaccines and did not cause their autism. For those children, I offer gluten-free potato chips to act as a replacement wafer. For my Messiah does love autistic children and desires that they not burn in hell for eternity. (As for people who actually need gluten-free diets, they can burn for all he cares, but if they entreat him very nicely he might find it in his all-encompassing heart to save them.)    

How Many Jewish Historians Does it Take to Change a Light Bulb?

How many Jewish Historians does it take to change a light bulb (or even to insert one in the first place)? Well, as with everything in Judaism, it is subject to a Talmudic style debate.


Heinrich Graetz: As the light bulb both suffers, by having an electric current pumped through it, and thinks, by lighting up, it is without question a uniquely Jewish symbol and should be placed within our Jewish Studies department where it will stand as a mark of Judaism's intrinsic rationality in contrast to the superstition and intolerance of Christians, who for some reason get the majority of the light bulbs. Since our kind civilized German gentile neighbors are unlikely to give us many light bulbs they will have to be rationed out. Historians of Kabbalah and Hasidism will not be receiving light bulbs in the hope that everyone will forget that they even exist, allowing the rest of us to avoid embarrassment at inter-departmental meetings.

Salo W. Baron: I object to this lachrymose narrative. Light bulbs have always been an intrinsic part of their surrounding socio-economic structures. And if you object to the lack of suffering being inflicted on light bulbs I will make you read my eighteen volume social and religious history of light bulbs.

Jacob Katz: I second Baron. To show how Jews and gentiles might peacefully interact let us bring in one of the Hispanic workers to symbolize the shabbos goy and insert the light bulb in our department.

Gershom Scholem: Graetz how dare you associate light bulbs with Jewish rationalism when it is clear that light bulbs really symbolize the light of Ein Sof and the spiritual anarchism of Kabbalah in its struggle against the rigid legalism of the rabbis. Having fled Germany just in time to not get slaughtered by your civilized gentile neighbors, I no longer care if they think we are rational civilized people so I will vote to hand out light bulbs not only to kabbalists and hasidim, but also give Sabbatai Sevi and Jacob Frank chairs with tenure.

Yitzchak Baer: As another German who fled just in time, I second Scholem. Graetz, your rational light bulbs cannot be considered truly Jewish. They are really members of an Averroist sect only pretending to shine for our department. The moment the budget cuts come in, these light bulbs will gladly agree to shine for the Christian theology department rather than be burned at the garbage dump. Of course, if the light bulbs agree to be tortured by the Spanish Inquisition that will prove that they are part of the greater Jewish light bulbhood.

Leo Strauss: My dear Baer, this secret Averroism of light bulbs is part of what makes them so intrinsically Jewish just like Maimonides. Of course light bulbs shine with both an exoteric and a secret esoteric light. I look forward to studying under these new light bulbs so they can shine all sorts of esoteric messages onto the texts I am reading, messages that the masses (you fellow members of the department) could never hope to understand.

Benzion Netanyahu: Baer, those traitorous assimilationist light bulbs; even if they were to be tortured by the Spanish Inquisition it would not make them Jewish. Clearly, this is all a conspiracy hatched by racial anti-Semites from the medieval department, who are lying about how these light bulbs are still Jewish in order to get fresh light bulbs untainted by use in a Jewish Studies department. We can only applaud the gentiles for destroying assimilationist light bulbs. This will serve as a sign to all Jewish light bulbs to go to Israel. That is unless they find it too socialist, at which point they are free to seek employment in a Jewish Studies department in the States, as long as they promise to raise English speaking future Israeli right-wing prime ministers.


This post was inspired by a piece that was circulated through my department listserve, written by David Leeson at Laurentian University.

Q: How many historians does it take to change a light bulb?



A: There is a great deal of debate on this issue. Up until the mid-20th century, the accepted answer was ‘one’: and this Whiggish narrative underpinned a number of works that celebrated electrification and the march of progress in light-bulb changing. Beginning in the 1960s, however, social historians increasingly rejected the ‘Great Man’ school and produced revisionist narratives that stressed the contributions of research assistants and custodial staff. This new consensus was challenged, in turn, by women’s historians, who criticized the social interpretation for marginalizing women, and who argued that light bulbs are actually changed by department secretaries. Since the 1980s, however, postmodernist scholars have deconstructed what they characterize as a repressive hegemonic discourse of light-bulb changing, with its implicit binary opposition between ‘light’ and ‘darkness,’ and its phallogocentric privileging of the bulb over the socket, which they see as colonialist, sexist, and racist. Finally, a new generation of neo-conservative historians have concluded that the light never needed changing in the first place, and have praised political leaders like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher for bringing back the old bulb. Clearly, much additional research remains to be done.



Matthew Lavine at Mississippi State responded:



Dear Dr. Leeson,


We regret that we cannot accept your historian joke in its present form.... However, a panel of anonymous reviewers (well, anonymous to YOU, anyway) have reviewed it and made dozens of mutually contradictory suggestions for its... improvement. Please consider them carefully, except for the ones made by a man we all consider to be a dangerous crackpot but who is the only one who actually returns comments in a timely fashion.

1. This joke is unnecessarily narrow. Why not consider other sources of light? The sun lights department offices; so too do lights that aren't bulbs (e.g. fluorescents). These are rarely "changed" and never by historians. Consider moving beyond your internalist approach.

2. The joke is funny, but fails to demonstrate familiarity with the most important works on the topic. I would go so far as to say that Leeson's omission is either an unprofessional snub, or reveals troubling lacunae in his basic knowledge of the field. The works in question are Brown (1988), Brown (1992), Brown (1994a), Brown (1994b), Brown and Smith (1999), Brown (2001), Brown et al (2003), and Brown (2006).

3. Inestimably excellent and scarcely in need of revision. I have only two minor suggestions: instead of a joke, make it a haiku, and instead of light bulbs, make the subject daffodils.

4. This is a promising start, but the joke fails to address important aspects of the topic, like (a) the standard Whig answer of "one," current through the 1950s; (b) the rejection of this "Great Man" approach by the subsequent generation of social historians; (c) the approach favored by women's historians; (d) postmodernism's critique of the light bulb as discursive object which obscured the contributions of subaltern actors, and (e) the neoconservative reaction to the above. When these are included, the joke should work, but it's unacceptable in its present form.


5. I cannot find any serious fault with this joke. Leeson is fully qualified to make it, and has done so carefully and thoroughly. The joke is funny and of comparable quality to jokes found in peer journals. I score it 3/10 and recommend rejection.

More on My Classroom Posting Board

A while back I posted on the odd pairing of ads on the posting board at the back of my classroom. Clarissa objected to the fact that there was a picture of the backside of a girl in a bathing suit and said she would refuse to teach in such a classroom. Well the girl in a bathing suit is down, but I am not sure the replacement is much of an improvement.

Now "Christ is Victor" is graced with the Young Americans for Liberty at The Ohio State University (I take it they are a libertarian group) saying that "Obama funds and supports dictators in Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan ..." So I guess the new message is "Obama being the Antichrist tops Christ being the victor," the modern conservative movement in a nutshell for you.  

History 111 Final

Here is the final I gave my History 111 students today. It covers the mix of topics we covered this quarter, Cicero, Spartacus, Christian apocalypticism, the Reformation and religion wars and Giordano Bruno. Readers will likely get a kick out of my second essay question and the bonus. Like this blog, I do try to keep my classes interesting.







I. Identify (Pick 7) – 35 pts.

1. Millennium

2. Urban II

3. Crassus

4. Charles V

5. St. Jerome

6. Verres

7. John Calvin

8. John Hus

9. St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre

10. Triumph





II. Short Answers (Pick 5) – 40 pts.



1. Was Rome a deeply religious society? Give specific examples.

2. Describe Tiro’s position in life. Do you see him as a victim of the Roman system?

3. Define martyrdom. What purpose does it serve a religion? In which periods did the Church encourage martyrdom and in which did they discourage it? Why?

4. What is the difference between a “top-down” and “bottom-up” strategy? Give an example of each.

5. Was Erasmus an opponent of the Catholic Church? What happened at the end of Erasmus’ life to make him appear so “dangerous?” Why did this event change how Erasmus was perceived?

6. According to Norman Cohn, what attracts people to “apocalyptic” beliefs? Do modern day Christian apocalyptics in the United States fit into Cohn’s model?

7. What were some of the popular beliefs in the mid 14th century as to the cause of the Black Death?





III. Essays (Pick 1) – 60 pts.



1. Giordano Bruno was a philosopher who believed in heliocentrism and was executed by the Catholic Church as a heretic. Yet at the same he was also very much a man of the sixteenth century. What elements in Bruno’s character make him different from modern people? Do you see Bruno as a scientist or as a magician? Was Bruno a skeptic trying to bring down Church dogma with reason or was he, like many in his time, a person of faith trying to work his way out of a religious crisis brought about through the Reformation?



2. Imagine that you are trying to interest either a powerful film producer or a mad king, who might chop off your head in the morning because he thinks that all women are naturally traitorous, in a story about Spartacus. Give me a summary of the story you would choose to tell. Feel free to take all the historical liberties you desire as long as you justify your decisions in terms of “narrative thinking.”





Bonus (5 pts.)

Why, since the 1960s, have many religious people (such as my aunt) begun wearing longer sleeves and skirts? Are they leading a revival to bring things back to the way they once were?

Haredi Sex and the City

Hat tip to Dasi Schnee.





This video is about Chaya Suri, a Haredi woman, who takes off from her husband to go on vacation to Miami. She goes on a shopping spree for shoes and finds herself at a pool sipping an alcoholic drink. The moral of the story though is that it was a good thing she had her shvim kleid on when a man stepped into view and that it is always good to dress modestly.

Apparently this video is satire. Watching it again yes it is very funny. The problem is that I, at first, thought it was real. I do not think this is because I am an Asperger and do not get jokes. I know too many people who fit this Chaya Suri character. I guess this goes once again to prove the Poe Law; you can never do satire on religious fundamentalists because somewhere out there is someone who is really like the joke. (See also I Have Had Real Conversations Like This.)  

Ban Circumcision and the Orthodox Will Finally Realize That It was Wrong All Along

I have a friend who is a Yiddishist, an atheist and a hardcore opponent of circumcision. I sent him an article about the attempt in San Francisco to ban the practice and he responded:

It's a good start that hopefully will lead to other bans until it is just illegal everywhere. Really, a consenting adult shouldn't be allowed to get himself circumcised for the same reason we don't just let consenting adults get their legs or ears or any other part cut off. Every part is equally important even though American culture doesn't respect the male genitals. Mentally healthy, un-brainwashed adults don't desire to get pieces of their bodies cut off or mutilated.

...

When circumcision is about to become illegal, there will be a period of angry, hostile opposition from the Orthodox Jewish community. Then they will finally calm down and acquiesce to the fact that it is wrong and it will disappear.


I bring this up not to attack my friend. He may be delusional in his hubris that not only is he right in opposing circumcision, but that it is so obvious he is right that if only Orthodox Jews were to get past their biases and seriously consider his position (say if offered the mental clarity that having a gun pointed at you provides) that they will come to accept this obvious truth, but it is the same hubristic delusion that infects everyone who seeks to use coercive force, such as the government, to advance their own personal values. Some people wish to force people to study creationism; others want to force evolution on the public. Some people want to make sure all speech is "politically correct" and that no one is insulted or demeaned. These arguments are only strengthened in the public mind when used to "protect children."  

What they all have in common with each other and my friend's desire to ban circumcision is the rather odd belief that you can threaten people with violence (and note that all government action involves the threat of violence) and expect people to simply comply. They are not afraid that those coerced will turn around and murder them in their beds. The reason for this is that people like my friend so believe that they are the good guys who want to help others that they cannot conceive that anyone might actually see them as the villains in this story, who are using violence and respond with violence in turn. 

Perhaps I could take such people more seriously if they followed Augustine in his position that, while open coercion in matters of religion was bad for society, it could be useful to see heretics ever so slightly humiliated and denied certain public privileges. This serves to open the minds of the heretic to seriously consider the orthodox position. This view formed the bases of medieval Church "tolerance," particularly as it related to Jews.  

I oppose coercion as a matter of self-interest. I am not so delusional as to believe that I can point a gun and force my values on people and not expect them to slit my throat when my back is turned. The only people I am willing to use coercion against are those people who are already threatening me with physical harm. By definition, in such cases there is no reason to "fear" violence; the violence is already very present and real. I therefore leave it to others to live their lives and raise their children as they see fit. If they wish to baptize them or induct them into any covanants of Abraham, let them. Let them cut off the foreskins of their children. Just as long as they do not point any knives at my privates; I had my circumcision when I was eight days old and I have no desire for a repeat thank you very much.        

Madlik on Jewish Education

On the topic of interesting blogs discussing in Judaism in ways that break down some of the traditional ideological boxes, I would like to point my readers to Madlik. The author, Geoffrey Stern, is a graduate of Yeshiva Torah Vodaath, got a degree in philosophy and now considers himself post-orthodox.

This week Stern has a post on the potentially corrupting influence of "high holiday" Judaism. The usual objection, when discussing the high holidays is that for so many that is their entire Judaism. For Stern the danger is in how the high holidays can become, despite it only being three days a year, the model for Jewish education.

But as anyone who has experienced the whole scope of the Jewish calendar knows, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur do not represent the mainstream of our tradition. By far the historical – experiential holidays of Sukkot, Shavuot, Purim and most of all Passover trump, or should trump the service – pietistic bend of the so-called High Holidays.



So too with education… The educational philosophy manifested by the four sons/children of the Passover Seder, their questions and sometimes snide comments remind us of what Jewish education is at its best. A noisy, rambunctious and irreverent endeavor in which each participant finds his/her own place and stakes his/her own position. ...


The vigorous, in-your-face debate of the Study Hall (Beit Midrash) of any traditional Yeshiva, where every point is debated, every premise questioned and every issue remains unresolved.. this is what is preserved at the Seder and is the bulwark of Jewish intellectual curiosity and vitality.



Just as the High Holidays have insipiently penetrated and monopolized the Jewish calendar, so too, a focus on sacrifice, service, ritual repetition (aka “continuity”) and blind-pure devotion to our beliefs, have sadly permeated Jewish education. With regard to an emphasis on Holocaust studies and the “They died in Service” mentality, it’s ironic (or is it?) that the word Holocaust comes from the Greek ὁλόκαυστος holókaustos: hólos, “whole” and kaustós, “burnt” and is ultimately a Leviticus term for a wholly burnt offering.

Stephen Brush on the Whig Narrative of Science

In response to my post yesterday about Dan Brown and early modern science, Lionel Spiegel pointed me to a piece written by Dr. Stephen G. Brush on the Whig narrative of science in the introduction to his book, Nebulous Earth: The Origin of the Solar System and the Core of the Earth from Laplace to Jeffreys. In regards to the back and forth shift in scientific consensus between the monistic dualistic theories of whether planets evolve with or without the aid of stars, Brush notes:

For the historian of science, this uncertainty about the correct answer does have one important advantage. It undermines the tendency to judge past theories as being right or wrong by modern standards. This tendency is the so called "Whig interpretation of the history of science" that one usually finds in science textbooks and popular articles. The Whig approach is to start from the present theory, assuming it to be correct, and ask how we got there. For many scientists this is the only reason for studying history at all. ...
But Whiggish history is not very stisfactory if it has to be rewritten every time the "correct answer" changes. Instead, we need to look at the cosmogonies or planetogonies of earlier centuries in terms of the theories and evidence available at the time. (Pg. 4)

This tendency to judge by modern standards unfortunately goes far beyond science and infects the entire stream of popular history, particularly all discussions about women and the interactions of people of different races or creeds. It is meaningless to talk about whether women in different societies were more free or less free or whether certain societies were "tolerant." The real questions that should be asked are what circumstances lead to more hierarchical or egalitarian relations with the underlying assumption that there are no better or worse system just different equally reasonable reactions to different circumstances.

Oh Nuts Winner

The winner of the Oh Nuts Purim raffle is Shala Darkstone.

Thank you to everyone who commented and to Oh Nuts for their kind offer. As this blog is free, the best way to show your support is to support this blog's sponsor. So please check out Oh Nuts for your Purim needs.

Thanks But No Thanks to Dan Brown for His Early Modern Science

Over this weekend I finally got around to reading Dan Brown's Lost Symbol, the sequel to the Da Vinci Code. I certainly expected a predictable plot with Robert Langdon spending several hours running around a city discovering ancient secrets with a female companion while being pursued by a creepy mystically inclined assassin while pontificating on all sorts of historical silliness. At this point, I have come to believe that Brown takes pleasure in mocking us historians and that he sticks in historical absurdities just to rub our noses in the fact that most of the public does not know, could not care less and would gladly accept his version of history over ours. This time around, though, Brown actually managed to offend me. Perhaps it was because he brought his brand of historical silliness to my area of history and makes claims that really do have the power to cause harm if taken seriously.

Take the following conversation between Langdon's mentor Peter Solomon (Peter is a Mason so the last name is a play on the Temple of Solomon, an important Masonic symbol) and his sister Katherine, who ends up serving as Langdon's female companion in this adventure, for example:

[Katherine's] brother [Peter]  ran a finger down the long shelf of cracked leather bindings and old dusty tomes. "The scientific wisdom of the ancients was staggering ... modern physics is only now beginning to comprehend it all."

"Peter," she said, "you already told me that the Egyptians understood levers and pulleys long before Newton, and that the early alchemists did work on a par with modern chemistry, but so what? Today's physics deals with concepts that would have been unimaginable to the ancients."

"Like what?"

"Well ... like entanglement theory, for one!" Subatomic research had now proven categorically that all matter was interconnected ... entangled in a single unified mesh ... a kind of universal oneness. "You're telling me the ancients sat around discussing entanglement theory?"

"Absolutely!" Peter said, pushing his long, dark bangs out of his eyes. "Entanglement was at the core of primeval beliefs. Its names are as old as history itself ... Dharmakaya, Tao, Brahman. In fact, man's oldest spiritual quest was to perceive his own entanglement, to sense his own interconnection with all things. He has always wanted to become 'one' with the universe ... to achieve the state of 'at-one-ment.'" Her brother raised his eyebrows. :To this day, Jews and Christians still strive for 'atonement' ... although most of us have forgotten it is actually 'at-one-ment' we're seeking."

...

"Okay, how about something as simple as polarity - the positive/negative balance of the subatomic realm. Obviously, the ancients didn't underst -"

"Hold on!" Her brother pulled down a large dusty text, which he dropped loudly on the library table. "Modern polarity is nothing but the 'dual world' described by Krishna here in the Bhagavad Gita over two thousand years ago. A dozen other books in here, including the Kybalion, talk about binary systems and the opposing forces in nature.

...

The showdown continued for several more minutes, and the stack of dusty books on the desk grew taller and taller. Finally Katherine threw up her hands in frustration. "Okay! You made your point, but I want to study cutting-edge theoretical physics. The future of science! I really doubt Krishna or Vyasa had much to say about superstring theory and multidimensional cosmological models."

"You're right. They didn't." Her brother paused, a smile crossing his lips. "If you're talking superstring theory ..." He wandered over to the bookshelf again. "Then you're talking this book here." He heaved out a colossal leather-bound book and dropped it with a crash onto the desk. "Thirteenth-century translation of the original medieval Aramaic."

"Superstring theory in the thirteenth century?!" Katherine wasn't buying it." Come on!"

Superstring theory was a brand-new cosmological model. Based on the most recent scientific observations, it suggested the multidimensional universe was made up not of three ... but rather of ten dimensions, which all interacted like vibrating strings, similar to resonating violin strings.

Katherine waited as her brother heaved open the book, ran through the ornately printed table of contents, and then flipped to a spot near the beginning of the book. "Read this." He pointed to a faded page of text and diagrams.

Dutifully, Katherine studied the page. The translation was old-fashioned and very hard to read, but to her utter amazement, the text and drawings clearly outlined the exact same universe heralded by modern superstring theory - a ten dimensional universe of resonating strings. As she continued reading, she suddenly gasped and recoiled. "My God, it even describes how six of the dimensions are entangled and act as one?!" She took a frightened step backward. "What is this book?!"

Her brother grinned. "Something I'm hoping you'll read one day." He flipped back to the title page, where an ornately printed plate bore three words.

The Complete Zohar.

Although Katherine had never read the Zohar, she knew it was the fundamental text of early Jewish mysticism, once believed so potent that it was reserved only for erudite rabbis.

...

Katherine didn't know how to respond. "But ... then why don't more people study this?"

Her brother smiled. "They will."

I don't understand."

"Katherine, we have been born into a wonderful times. A change is coming. Human beings are posed on the threshold of a new age when they will begin turning their eyes back to nature and to the old way ... back to the ideas in books like the Zohar and other ancient texts from around the world. Powerful truth has its own gravity and eventually pulls people back to it. There will come a day when modern science begins in earnest to study the wisdom of the ancients ... that will be the day that mankind begins to find answers to the big questions that still elude him." (Pg. 58-60.)


First, let us deal with that little howler about the Zohar. The Zohar was not written until the late thirteenth century. It was not printed until the mid-sixteenth century. Christian Knorr von Rosenroth's Kabbalah Denudata, which translated large segments into Latin, was not until the seventeenth century. You have to wait until the nineteenth century for an English translation. I thought string theory dealt with eleven dimensions but I will leave that one to the science people. 

At a more fundamental level, I am concerned with what Dan Brown is doing to science. Now do not get me wrong, as an early modern historian I think it is important that people understand the odd paths that created modern science. Contrary to the standard Whig narrative, science did not come about from people waking up after a thousand years in the Renaissance and deciding to be rational once again. As Frances Yates argued, the scientific revolution came about as an extension of renaissance magic which turned to texts such as the Codex Hermeticum and the Zohar in order to "recover" the "true" religion of the ancients and their magical secrets. In my 111 class, I certainly enjoy teaching my students about Giordano Bruno and how he was and was not like a modern scientist. Under no circumstance though do I wish for the science people in my class to turn around and try to be like Giordano Bruno. There are good reasons why science evolved away from turning toward ancient texts and it should stay that way.  

I do not care if Mary Magdalene carried Jesus' baby. Trying to bring back early modern science does concern me.