Religious Narrative: Medieval Catholicism, Communism and Islam

One of the surprises of the modern world has been the continued persistence of organized religion. Despite several centuries of Enlightenment criticism, religion remains a powerful force within society. Certainly, within the United States, the vast majority of the population subscribes at least formally to some religion. I would argue that much of this is the result of the inability of secularism to present overarching narratives. Make whatever criticism you want about religions, they tend to be quite good at formulating narratives that allow people to make sense of their lives and all the various parts of their universe. This is important not just for regular people living their social lives, but for intellectuals and in a sense especially for them; it is the people who live in the realm of ideas who need things to click together in a larger whole.

I will start by giving an example from what may be the most intellectually successful religious narrative in history, medieval Catholicism. Take the view of a Catholic living in say 1491; he benefited from living in a world that made sense in ways that we can hardly relate to. In this medieval world, we have Aristotle to explain the natural world. This Aristotelian universe, with its prime mover and essences and accidents, fits neatly with Church teaching, solving the conflict between faith and reason. This system also has political implications. We are in a hierarchical universe were everything from plants, animals and people up to the planets, angels and God have their place in a natural order. Therefore it is only reasonable that human affairs should mirror this reality with a king, nobles, the Church, peasants, men and women each having their place. How does one explain and give meaning to suffering, whether the threat of Islam, schisms in the Church, war, political chaos or simply having to bury a wife and child? Mankind fell to Original Sin, giving Satan power over the Earth. That being said, there is reason to hope; Christ died for our sins so we can go to heaven. If the world looks like it is falling apart we can still look forward to the imminent coming of the apocalypse and the final judgment.

Say what you want about this medieval Catholicism; call it unscientific, anti-democracy, sexist and anti-Semitic. Yes, over the next few centuries, this worldview was rocked by numerous intellectual, and political shifts so that, even if there are still Catholics today, that particular creature the medieval Catholic is now extinct. All this may be true, but medieval Catholicism was an internally consistent system and fit well into the known facts of the world at that time. I would add that this system also proved quite attractive to Jews, particularly those in Spain. (Here is a dirty little secret about pre-modern Judaism. The majority of people who left did so freely out of a desire to assimilate and not due to force or persecution.)   

In the history of modern secularism, there has been only one movement to produce a narrative that could compete with organized religion and that was Communism. Try to look at the world, this time from the perspective of a Russian Jew in 1891. Traditional Judaism does not have much to offer, but to be poor, get killed in a pogrom and wait for the Messiah. Now here is Communism. It may not offer a personal God and an afterlife, but instead, it offers the forces of history to guide us and promise us a better world. Faith versus reason? Science has refuted religion, but Communism is the logical extension of evolution applied to human affairs. How should we order our political and social systems? Communism replaces superstition and religious dogma with scientific rationalism, allowing us to create a just system where everyone is equal. How do you explain and offer meaning to human suffering? The problems of this world are the products by the class oppression by the aristocracy and bourgeois. This, though, simply serves to highlight the iniquities of the present systems and hasten the imminent coming of the people's revolution which will create a paradise on Earth in which everyone will work together for the common good and there will be no prejudice nor anti-Semitism.

Again, one can make all sorts of intellectual arguments against this Communist worldview. Ultimately it was undone by the Soviet Union itself, whose blood-soaked history is a better refutation of Communism than anything else. This should not obscure the power of the Communist narrative in its time. Say what you want about Karl Marx, but he has to be viewed as one of the greatest thinkers of all time simply in terms of his ability to craft a system of thought that allows you to discuss not just politics, but history, art and science as one coherent whole. We in the United States fail to appreciate the Communist appeal largely because it failed to ever gain much traction here, but the Communists nearly did win. Forget about the Cold War. After World War I and in the wake the Russian Revolution Communists, without question, had both the intellectual and moral high ground. With that, they nearly took the entire European continent without a single shot being fired. As for Jews, they walked away from traditional Judaism in mass to follow this Communist dream. (See Clarissa for a further discussion about the religious dimensions of Communism.)

Where does this leave our modern world? Try seeing things from the view of an Arab in 1991. Communism, which was a tremendous secularizing force in the Arab, has come crashing down with the fall of the Soviet Union so now what? Well, there is Islam, not the watered down variety, but a "purified" form from its original source in Saudi Arabia. What is wrong with the world and how do we fix it? The West has dominated us politically, first through direct imperialism and later through the dictators they support and corrupted us culturally through secularism. Only Islam can unite the Arab peoples so they can take back what is rightfully theirs. As for science, we Arabs invented science before it was stolen from us by the West.

This narrative may lack the comprehensive elegance of either medieval Catholicism or nineteenth century Communism but, for those with no better narrative options, this will likely do. I cannot say that fundamentalist Islam will likely prove a spiritual threat to Judaism but, as a physical threat, it certainly is a match to either of the other narratives.        

Hayek Vs. Keynes

So here we have a remarkably intelligent presentation of the economic debate between Friedrich Hayek and John Maynard Keynes as a rap song and a boxing match. Hayek is assisted by Ludwig van Mises, Keynes by Thomas Malthus. I must admit I am not sure how Malthus fits with Keynes. I would think of Malthus more as being with Hayek in terms of being against government spending on welfare programs. I guess the connection to Keynes is that they both saw man in animalistic terms, motivated by the passions, instead of Hayek's rational producer and consumer.

Farewell Osama Bin Ladin, Nice Knowing You

As I am sure by now my readers are aware American, forces have stormed Osama bin Laden's "evil fortress of doom," which, it turns out, was not some cave but an urban compound. I was hoping for bin Laden to go down with a pair of Gatling guns Wolfenstein boss style. It is only fair that the closest thing to a comic book villain this country has had since at least the Cold War should agree to give us the full comic book villain ending.

In thinking back on bin Laden in the shadow of the jubilant celebrations going on around the country I find that I do not hate him nor does the prospect of him being tortured by his promised seventy "Virginians" hold much appeal. Bin Laden was an enemy true, but he was a political enemy and hate, like any other emotion, has no place in politics. This is something both the Left and the Right fail to understood that their rush to bring morality into politics only serves to defeat their own desired ends.

If Bin Laden really was a monster, a being who either lacked reason or simply chose to act from malice, then there could never have been a chance for peace. How could one ever hope to negotiate with such a creature? Thus we would be left with no other option, but unrelenting Hobbesian war to the death with all moral considerations left to the wayside.

I like to believe that people, even Bin Laden, are rational and can be negotiated with. Bin Laden desired for the world to run a certain way, as a global Islamic theocracy. I do not judge him for that; I grant every man the right to want. Now it happens to be that the United States government also wanted things, such as global liberal democracy and capitalism, which conflicted with the desires of Bin Laden. Again there is nothing inherently wrong with this. It is inevitable that human beings, with their different wants, will come into conflict with each other. Now there are two ways to deal with conflict, negotiation or coercive violence. Rational beings have the advantage of being able to choose the former, unlike animals, which are limited to the latter. Bin Laden, through the act of 9/11, chose violence. An act that was surely not in my self-interest, but I am not saying that he was wrong for doing so; I never had any reason to expect Bin Laden to take my self-interest into consideration. For this reason, up until the day we killed him, I would have been open to negotiating some a peace agreement with bin Laden. He would not have even needed to apologize for 9/11; all he would have needed to do was offer me an agreement that gave me a more preferable set of options than war, backed by a rational reason for me to believe that he would actually keep such an agreement.

Let every man believe as he wishes as long as he accepts the full logical consequences of those beliefs. Bin Laden believed that it was in his rational self-interest to pursue war with the United States without keeping to the traditional rules of warfare such as only States wage war and war is to be limited to military personnel. So be it, but in turn that means that we will have no choice but to reply in kind, waging pure unrelenting Hobbesian warfare against him, his supporters or even anyone we might scare enough into waging against him for us.

Should we have responded to 9/11 by nuking Afghanistan, killing millions of innocent civilian Muslims, or even taking out the capitols of every Muslim country? If it would have made this country safer then yes. Considering that, as long as we are considered rational enough to be negotiated with in the future, such extreme actions would make anyone in the future think twice about attacking this country; it is not obvious to me that the mass killing of even innocent civilians would have been the wrong decision. What would the Muslim world look like if Muslims on the street believed that the actions of people like bin Laden would lead to the deaths of them and their families? Whether or not bin Laden was rational and desired to live, I respect Islam enough to believe that the more than a billion ordinary Muslims are rational and do want to live.

I do not hold it against bin Laden for attacking us. Of course, since I do not see anything intrinsically wrong with such behavior, I have no objections to behaving just like him. I believe in rational people working out their differences. In support of that goal, I am willing to be the worst monster in history; the sort of person that no rational being would ever seek to fight.            

At the Calvin College Symposium on Religion and Politics

I am writing to all my readers from Grand Rapids MI (my first overnight stay in the "State up North") where I am attending a symposium on religion and politics hosted by Calvin College's Paul B. Henry Institute. So to get some random thoughts in before Shabbos:

I got a ride up to the conference with another Ohio State student. I can't think of many other times where I talked to someone for nearly five hours straight, the entire car trip. He played Carl Reiner to my libertarian historian Mel Brooks. This was the perfect sort of conversation for me. I got to talk about the things that interest me such as the historical method and libertarianism and challenged by an intelligent person who disagrees with me and asks good questions leading to a conversation that I had not previously worked through every move for both sides in my head. Not that I mind questioning other people. The only problem is that I tend to turn more inquisitorial than most people would like. Not that it is personal; on the contrary, I do not care about people's lives, but only their views of life and whether they are coherent and consistent. Though failure to do so is something I take personally.

I gave a presentation this morning of a draft of my dissertation chapter on Joachim of Fiore and Isaac Abarbanel. Where else but a Protestant institution should a Jew go to talk about Catholics (as well as Jews)? I was the odd man out in my discussion panel in that I was not talking about Thomas Hobbes. (Who could resist at an institution named Calvin?) In general, this has been a very political science conference so it was probably the perfect place to announce to political science people that the study of political history is a political act in that it makes politics relevant and so historians like me are needed to make their academic lives meaningful. Then again perhaps my work will convince some of these political science people to not despair that even though the apocalypse might come, ushering in the end of earthly politics, their studies might still yet not have been in vain. 

At one of the sessions, there were two presentations that were open Christian apologetics. The first argued against non-theistic understandings of the moral imperative to obey authority figures. The second was a defense of Jonathan Edwards' understanding of Original Sin. Edwards argued that if every being was born independently and untainted by Original Sin then every person would be the equivalent of the prelapsarian Adam. Adam as an innocent being in total communion with God was incapable of having any knowledge of sin and evil. Because of this he could not identify evil and resist it. This leads to a cosmology of consistent decay where every person falls from grace when confronted with sin just like Adam. In the Edwardian cosmology, everyone is corrupt from the beginning, but we can then take a more upwards view of things as people at least try to improve themselves. 

This was my first conference hosted by a religious institution so maybe it should have been expected. As a historian, though, I take for granted the fact that my job is to describe "who," "what," "when," "where" and "why," but not "should." I write about messianism, but there is nothing in what I do that can suggest one way or another whether a messiah might be coming or when. My Carl Reiner friend pointed out that coming from a political science perspective there may not be such a simple bifurcation. That is an interesting point; does political science force one out of the neutrality of mere description and into actual advocacy?   

Have a good Shabbos everyone.   

History 111: How to Start Your Own Religion (Part II)

(Part I)

Having decided to begin my long and difficult task of telling over my divine revelation to the world from the comfort of a Starbucks, I must first recruit for myself followers. Such a task requires a charismatic personality. You see, most graduate students would not be cut out for being the Messiah as they are unable to keep the attention of a crowd of undergraduates even when backed by the force of course requirements and grades. How can they expect to hold the attention of people walking across the campus oval with just threats of hellfire?

Now one might think that the best place for the Messiah to go, in order to spread his message, is to established houses of worship, doing a weekend run of mosques on Fridays, synagogues on Saturdays and churches on Sundays. One assumes that these houses of worship are filled with people who believe in God and desire to hear God's message for them. The problem with this strategy is that such people can be presumed to be satisfied with their religion and are unlikely to be looking to exchange theirs for a new model.

It is the practice of Jewish Alcoholics, Chemically Dependents and Significant Others (JACS), a support group for Jews struggling with addiction, to offer, during their weekend gatherings, in addition to the variety of different denominational services, a session titled "Why I am not in synagogue." Rabbis attending these gatherings are often advised to attend those sessions because it gives them a chance to hear from the very people they would not normally hear from, those not in synagogue.

What is good advice for rabbis is also good for the Messiah. I need to find and reach out precisely to the people who might want to attend an establishment religious service but are not made welcome because they are not "respectable." They might be addicts, prostitutes, homosexuals, just plain liberal, or simply too poor to afford special clothing for weekly services.

To reach out to such people requires a message that vindicates them as outsiders. "Listen up all you people not in services, God sees into your hearts and hears your prayers. Do you think God can be worshipped in gilded churches built on stolen money, with hands dripping the blood of the innocent? God knows that, unlike all those people who pretend to believe in him and haughtily call out to him, it is among you, the dispossessed, that he is truly loved. God has therefore sent you, the true believers, Rev. BZ Messiah to receive his message."

Having vindicated these outsiders, it is important to offer them hope of a future world order in which the establishment will be overturned and your followers will assume their rightful places, which they have been wrongfully usurped from them in this world. "Behold days are coming, says the Lord, when I shall shatter the idols on all foreign-built cars. Those who awaken late to sip their non-Starbucks fair-trade coffee shall find that the whipped cream has run out. The barren ones who mourn for not being able to get married shall dance through the street."

As part of my war against the establishment, it is only reasonable that I denounce the government, which is a bastion of the established religions and refuses to grant me tax-exempt status. Thus Rev. BZ Messiah says: "God damn America, the nipple-ring of Satan's wardrobe malfunction, for it has robbed the Lord's house to fund its dominion over the Earth."

As the Messiah and only bringer of God's message to Earth, it is only natural that I assume a prominent role in my religion way above that of other religious leaders. I will tell my followers where to live and whom to marry and, the moment that any of them dare to challenge a single whim of mine, I will cast them out. Some outsiders might object and call me a cult leader, but they are missing the point; it is all about me. I am the entire religion so it is only logical that the religion moves and breathes in tune with my every personal quirk. Of course, these outsiders are irrelevant; they are too much part of the establishment to ever consider joining my religion anyway. All I care about is my small band of dedicated followers and making sure they are willing to die for me (or at least live with the day to day scorn of the unbelievers who make up the establishment).

History 111: Under the Black Flag

For our next book the class picked Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life Among the Pirates by David Cordingly. The golden age of piracy crosses over into the eighteenth century, my cut off line for 111, and largely was acted out in the Caribbean and along the North American coast. That being said piracy in this period, even if it took place outside of European waters, was an extension of European politics, particularly the Dutch and English challenge to the decaying Spanish empire. Furthermore, in this period of transition from pre-modern to modern politics, pirates present a mix of both the pre-modern and the modern. One the one hand piracy is the product of the absence of State power and established navies and as such representative of a time before the modern State. On the other hand pirates represent the break down of established authority, whether political or religious, so critical for modernity. (See also "Catholic Pirates and Greek Merchants.")

Ayn Rand as Inverse Marxism

Over on Newsweek, Jonathan Chait attacks Rep. Paul Ryan for "waging war on the weak" with his budget plan and for his allegiance to the philosophy of Ayn Rand. As Chait summarizes Rand:

[She] was a kind of politicized L. Ron Hubbard—a novelist-philosopher who inspired a cult of acolytes who deem her the greatest human being who ever lived. The enduring heart of Rand’s totalistic philosophy was Marxism flipped upside down. Rand viewed the capitalists, not the workers, as the producers of all wealth, and the workers, not the capitalists, as useless parasites.

John Galt, the protagonist of her iconic novel Atlas Shrugged, expressed Rand’s inverted Marxism: “The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time. The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all of their brains.”

The misinterpretation of Rand here is astonishing. I bring it up less out of a desire to defend Rand, but as an example of the unfair treatment liberals usually hand libertarians, throwing out nonsensical arguments designed to ignore the very real objections that libertarians have in reverse.

Workers are not the villains in Rand's novels. Those tend to be politicians, union bosses, public intellectuals, and "capitalists," who desire government handouts. In fact, for Rand, there is no worker vs. capitalist conflict in the first place. The conflict is between people who produce, whether the janitor sweeping the floor for dollars an hour or the visionary businessman with his millions, and those who do not produce and feel their lack of actual production gives them some sort of moral right to take from the producers in the name of some "public good." Finally, this entire comparison with Marx ignores the very simple fact that Rand's entire philosophy was built around the rejection of violence and coercion as opposed to Marx who was an apostle of violent revolution and coercive State action. This is not hair splitting when you consider the fact that the Marxist support for violence directly led to Communist governments killing millions of their own people. Until someone can come up with a plausible scenario in which an Objectivist government could plot the deaths of millions of people, any comparison of Rand and Marx must be rendered libel.

Chait's attacks on Rand demonstrate a number of liberal blind spots, allowing him to stand in judgment on the morals of libertarians while at the same not being able to even understand how a libertarian might see him as morally objectionable. Chait is clearly unable to think outside of the framework of class conflict. If someone is pro-capitalism then they must be anti-worker. The very possibility that someone might think that Chait is the villain for not even producing useful ideas and attempting to take other people's money is never raised. This leads us to the biggest liberal moral blind spot. Chait is incapable of conceiving that someone could morally object to government taking money and see it as a form of coercion.

I may have my objections to Ayn Rand's moral philosophy, particularly as she applied it to her own life, but she did not support violence or attempt to coerce money from others. This alone made her far more moral than any liberal on the planet (or conservative for that matter), who allows the government to coercively take money from people.        

George R. R. Martin on Fantasy and Historical Fiction

James Poniewozik of Time blog has a long interview with fantasy novelist George R. R. Martin, whose Game of Thrones is now being made into an HBO show. Martin discusses his view of J. R. R. Tolkien, balancing his respect for him with not slavishly imitating him. He makes the interesting point that when fantasy writers try imitating Tolkien what usually happens is that they simply pick up on the worst elements of his writing. Martin's favorite Tolkien character is Boromir so it is probably not a coincidence that they got Sean Bean, who played Boromir in the movie, for Game of Thrones.  

As a medieval historian I often struggle with political fantasy, finding it implausible. I can easily suspend disbelief when it comes to magic, but your political structure has to be coherent. The problem is that most writers do not understand the inner dynamics of a pre-modern society. Worse, coming to the issue loaded down with modern liberal biases, they either turn to polemics against the pre-modern society they are writing about or try to eliminate the most troublesome elements to the modern mind, without taking into consideration the logical underpinnings of the society.

An example that I often present to my students is that of women's rights. In a militarized society, where the primary issue on everyone's mind is not suffering sudden violent death, and in which women did not actively fight in the same numbers as men (in other words every pre-modern society that has ever existed) not only would women not have equal rights, but the very thought would be absurd. Any woman who complained about her second class position and demanded to be treated as an equal to men would rightfully be laughed at, told to pick up a sword and, until she could do that, to shut her mouth, get back to cooking, cleaning and children and be grateful for having a man to protect her. It would make no sense for a fantasy novel to both maintain a pre-modern militarized society and either equality of the sexes or plucky heroines giving proto-feminist speeches. (See "Toilet Training.")
        
I was glad therefore to see Martin confront this issue of plausible pre-modern societies

And then there are some things that are just don't square with history. In some sense I'm trying to respond to that. [For example] the arranged marriage, which you see constantly in the historical fiction and television show, almost always when there's an arranged marriage, the girl doesn't want it and rejects it and she runs off with the stable boy instead. This never fucking happened. It just didn't. There were thousands, tens of thousand, perhaps hundreds of thousands of arranged marriages in the nobility through the thousand years of Middle Ages and people went through with them. That's how you did it. It wasn't questioned. Yeah, occasionally you would want someone else, but you wouldn't run off with the stable boy.


And that's another of my pet peeves about fantasies. The bad authors adopt the class structures of the Middle Ages; where you had the royalty and then you had the nobility and you had the merchant class and then you have the peasants and so forth. But they don't' seem to realize what it actually meant. They have scenes where the spunky peasant girl tells off the pretty prince. The pretty prince would have raped the spunky peasant girl. He would have put her in the stocks and then had garbage thrown at her. You know.

I mean, the class structures in places like this had teeth. They had consequences. And people were brought up from their childhood to know their place and to know that duties of their class and the privileges of their class. It was always a source of friction when someone got outside of that thing. And I tried to reflect that.

Sucker Punch: Too Smart for its Own Good

A few weeks ago I attended a free screening of the movie Sucker Punch. As luck would have it I ended up sitting right behind Kevin Grimm the editor of Melt, a local free magazine, who was hosting the event. So taking the opportunity to engage in shameless self promotion I decided to introduce myself as a blogger and ask if he was looking for a writer. He took me up on the offer and asked me to write a review. I sat down to write a review and, as those here already familiar with my style of writing can well imagine, it quickly went off track from being a formal review to me engaging in some larger issues of our popular culture. Kevin was kind enough to simply let the piece run despite it being much longer than what he wanted.

The piece is finally out and I get to link to a real flesh and blood print piece of mine. Hopefully this could be the start of bigger and better things.

Of Jews and Prussians

(Werner Klemperer was a German Jew, who fled the Nazis in his youth and went on to play the the Nazi Colonel Klink to comic hilarity in Hogan's Heroes. Apparently he got the job due to his ability to do an over the top Prussian Junker.)


When I first was accepted to Ohio State and came for orientation I managed to make my advisor rather nervous when, in response to a girl telling me that her family originated from Prussia, I responded jokingly by asking her if she kept a pair of jack-boots. In my defense I would point out that this girl, a historian no less, specifically mentioned Prussia, that small State in northern German that took over the rest of Germany in the nineteenth century, creating the modern German State, and not Germany. Prussian militarism is cute, inoffensive and therefore a legitimate subject of humor, particularly among professional historians, that small minority of the population who have actually heard of Prussia.


Jews and Prussians are not known for having much in common. Sure they both wear funny hats and are stiff, legalistic and wish to take over the world. Prussians were interested in literal global power, backed by their unique genius for building armies, the statecraft to support them and the international diplomacy to reap the benefits of their military. Jews are more interested in banks and Hollywood.

And then one reads the following about the eighteenth century Prussian court:

A visitor from Saxony who resided in Berlin for several months during 1723 recalled that the great festivities of the courtly season were held ‘according to the Jewish manner’ with the women separated from the men, and observed with surprise that there were many dinners at court at which no women appeared at all. (The Iron Kingdom kindle 1844-45.)

I must admit to finding this piece intriguing as evidence of European Jews segregating by gender at public events and not just during prayer services to the extent that such practices would be labeled as “Jewish” as opposed to say "Prussian."

Book Review Blog Carnival

Welcome to the April 17, 2011 edition of book review blog carnival.


Let me start with a pair of reviews of books that are of particular interest to me.



Zohar of Man of la Book presents Book Review: The Instructions by Adam Levin, about a ten year old Messiah. The post also includes a video of an awesome 80s Israeli rock song. I am actually in middle of writing a dissertation on Jewish messianism and plotting my own mock messianic movement on this blog.















Jeanne presents In the Basement of the Ivory Tower posted at Necromancy Never Pays. This book attacks the present day mass college education system and asks if all the people who are admitted to college should be there. I teach a basic history course at Ohio State and often struggle with how to reach students or even whether all of my students should really be in my class in the first place.













Now to some of the other submissions.

Jim Murdoch presents Smoke Portrait by Trilby Kent posted at The Truth About Lies. Set in 1936 Smoke Portrait traces the development of an unlikely friendship between a young Belgian teenager who pretends he is a POW and a young English woman in her twenties. As their correspondence evolves, they both assume identities that, while false in many respects, remain true to their own selves in other ways. Gradually they come to depend on each other, and their pen friendship proves to be crucial when events in their real lives take on a darker, more threatening significance in the shadow of the impending world war.












Cheyenne presents Book Review: Delirium at The Chey Show. This book deals with a future dystopian America.


















Maureen O'Danu presents Fantasy Book Club: Among Others-- A Book Lover's Stroll in the Dark Woods at the Edge of Town posted at Am I the Only One Dancing? This is a YA fantasy novel about a young Welsh girl who lives her life immersed in books, primarily science fiction and fantasy, and lives in a world where fairies exist and magic is real, with sometimes dire consequences.

 

 

 

 

 

Kevin presents What Investors Really Want: Book Review and Giveaway! posted at Invest It Wisely. Among other things the book discuss the differences between paternalistic approaches and libertarian approaches to government.

 

Clark Bjorke presents An Object of Beauty posted at I'll Never Forget the Day I Read a Book! This is a new novel by Steve Martin. Need one say anything more.

















To end things off here is a recent post I did on the newly released Patrick Rothfuss novel, Wise Man's Fear, using the example of Harry Potter as a launching pad to analyze Rothfuss' style of writing.
















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The Settler Movement, the Temple Mount and Leon Festinger

Yesterday Dr. Mordechai Inbari of the University of North Carolina at Pembroke spoke at Ohio State about the attitude of religious Zionists to the Temple Mount. This lecture caught my attention for two reasons. First, it was about religious apocalypticism and politics, my dissertation topic even if Dr. Inbari deals with modern movements while I focus on medieval and early modern ones. Second, he discussed Leon Festinger and his model of religious cognitive dissonance. (See "Leon Festinger's UFO Group and the Spreading of Whedon's Gospel.") Here are my notes for the lecture. As always all mistakes are mine.



The Temple Mount is the holiest site to Judaism and the third holiest site for Islam. For Judaism, the Temple Mount is the house of God. One can think of it as a heart with many layers. The deeper you go the holier it gets. Muslims also see this site as holy based on a story in the hadith where Mohammad journeys at night to a place called Al-Aqsa. Thus the Temple Mount became a major center of conflict in the Israeli-Arab war.

As a scholar, Dr. Inbari is interested in the notion of “when prophecy fails.” For this, you have to start with Leon Festinger’s book. This book was based on the study of a group of people who believed that aliens would come and take them away. As these expectations failed a certain dynamic developed within the group. Festinger called this process “cognitive dissonance. Rather than abandon their beliefs as its claims failed, members of the group became more convinced as to the truth of the claims and made a greater effort to proselytize outsiders. From studying the religious Zionists and the settler movement one can make a case for modifying Festinger's claims. Instead of trying to bring in more believers in response to failed messianic expectations, we see an intensifying of messianic zeal in order to prevent a complete collapse.

From the beginning of Zionism as a major political power within Judaism, Orthodoxy had a mixed relationship with it. Traditional Jews see themselves in exile both physically and spiritually ever since the destruction of the Second Temple. Since God destroyed his house only God can restore it. Therefore Zionism was looked at with suspicion. An example of this was the fifth Lubavitcher Rebbe who argued that Zionism was forcing the end and therefore must stop short of perfection.

Other voices were Rav Abraham Kook, a traditional European rabbi who joined the Zionist movement. According to Rav Kook, one should not judge Zionists based on their actions but on their intentions and even their hidden intentions. God started a human process with Zionism even if the Zionists seem to have rejected rabbinic authority. Once secular Zionists return to their faith the movement will move to a second phase with the restoration of the monarchy and the Temple. Rav Kook even started a yeshiva in 1921 to prepare students for Temple service. This did not mean that Rav Kook and his students were going on the Temple Mount. That would still require a red heifer. Also, it is not clear where the Temple was located.

Rav Kook was preparing for the Messiah, but he was not trying to force issues. The Six Day War changed the status quo in that for the first time in two thousand years Jews controlled the Temple Mount. Gen. Moshe Dayan decided to maintain Muslim authority. Non-Muslims can go as tourists, but only Muslims can pray, thus making the Temple Mount possibly the only place in the world in which Jews are not allowed to pray.

1973 saw the formation of Gush Emunim under the leadership of the son of Rav Kook, Rabbi Zvi Yehudah Kook (1891-1982). He believed that living in post-1967 meant that this was no longer preparing for redemption but now in the actual beginning of the redemption. That being said, the Chief rabbinate declared that one could not go on the Temple Mount until the Temple was built. Obviously, if Jews cannot go onto the Temple Mount until there is a Temple they cannot build one to allow them to go on in the first place. Rabbi Goren, the chief army chaplain, dissented; he went on the Temple Mount and ordered the engineering corps to map the Temple Mount.

The Oslo Accords brought a major crisis to religious Zionism. How do you explain Israeli withdrawal? If Jews controlling more land in Israel brings us closer to redemption does the fact that they now control less mean that we are further away from redemption? This is where cognitive dissonance comes in. Immediately after the signing of Oslo, there was a major shift among the settlers. You have Rabbi Dov Lior saying that the peace process was a punishment from God from delaying the building of the Temple. The conclusion, therefore, was that Jews should go on the Temple Mount. The Council of Yesha rabbis began to encourage Jews to go on the Temple Mount in 1996. The logic being that since Jews do not go on the site the Israeli government became convinced that it could be given away. Thus going on the Temple Mount, even if it violates Jewish law, is permitted due to the emergency nature of the situation.

From November 2003 – October 2004 70,000 Jews visited the mount. The site had been closed with the starting of the Second Intifada. Thus we see a major shift within religious Zionists with them doing something that had before been seen as a major prohibition. This is not religion influencing politics but politics influencing religion. This also serves as a case study of how flexible religion can be.

Muslim doctrine has also been evolving with an acceptance of a Hamas doctrine. Since Mohammad left Mecca on his journey to Jerusalem these two cities are two sides of the same coin; Jerusalem and Mecca are thus the same place and non-Muslims should be forbidden to enter at all.

History 111: A Brief History of Robin Hood

For the second book of the quarter, the class picked A Brief History of Robin Hood by Nigel Cawthorne. This looks like an excellent opportunity to explore the relationship between history and mythology as it relates to the historical method. In keeping with my focus on the historical method, my primary question for the class is how does one use the historical method to deal with a legend like Robin Hood and make valid historical claims? Granted that the Howard Pyle stories and its Errol Flynn film descendant (to say nothing of the dreadful Kevin Costner movie) are fiction. That being said the legend of Robin Hood can still prove useful in discussing late twelfth century England. And if that fails then we gain an even better tool for understanding the later English culture that down through the centuries crafted this legend.