The Classical Liberalism of Wheelock's Latin

Here is my copy of the sixth edition of Wheelock's Latin textbook that I used in Professor Louis Feldman of blessed memory's class as a Yeshiva University undergraduate during the 2003-04 school year. If you want to get a sense as to how long Feldman had been teaching Latin to nice Jewish boys at YU, the introduction to the second edition thanks "Louis H. Feldman of Yeshiva College." Here is a sample of the kinds of sentences you have to translate in Wheelock, parsing Latin's beautifully intricate logical and maddeningly difficult grammar (answers at the bottom of the post)):

Officium liberos viros semper vocabat.

Pericula belli non sunt parva, sed patria tua te vocabit et agricolae adiuvabunt.

Propter culpas malorum patria nostra non valebit. 

Sine multa pecunia et multis donis tyrannus satiare populum Romanum poterit.

Ratio me ducet, non fortuna.

Bonum virum nature, non ordo, facit.

Reges Romam a principio habuerunt; libertatem Lucius Brutus Romanis dedit.

Iste unus tyrannus se semper laudabat.

Civitas nostra libertatem et iura civius conservabat.

I cannot say I ever came close to competency with my Latin but I still learned loads of important things like how to properly play the frack, marry, or kill game. You frack Lesbia, marry the patria and kill Catiline. All joking aside, what did I really get out of Latin? I cannot, over the years of my education, think of a textbook, not even in American History, that was so unapologetic in its classical liberalism. I would be tempted to count the Hertz Chumash but it was never used in any of my classes. 

Obviously, a Latin textbook is not a political manifesto and one could easily use Wheelock and be oblivious to its politics. That being said, Wheelock's reading and translation exercises took classical liberal assumptions as a given. Studying Latin with Wheelock meant entering a discourse on the relationship between liberty and moral discipline. Would a people love virtue enough that they would be willing to resist the temptation to sell their liberty for the promise of wealth and luxury? Reason is the ultimate virtue as it is what allows a person to control their passions. From this perspective, the state becomes a mirror that reflects its people. A virtuous people will keep their government in check. A people without virtue, who cannot rule themselves will be only too happy for someone to rule over them.  

What orients the free person is his love for the patria (fatherland). This is not fascism where whatever the government orders is, by definition, legal and moral. On the contrary, the patria is something that transcends the particular leaders who come to power at a given time and whatever laws they pass. Think of how the British monarch is supposed to be the head of state as opposed to the prime minister who is the head of the government. In the Aeneid, the mythological hero Aeneus turns down the opportunity to help Dido build Carthage. He might love Dido and Carthage might be a nice place to live but it is not Rome, a city destined by the gods to bring law to the world. Hic amor, haec patria est. (This is love, this is a fatherland.) Aenaeus is the perfect Roman precisely because his Romaness is not rooted in geography or time. He is the model of someone willing to subdue his passion in order fulfill his duty to Rome even though he was a Trojan and Rome would not exist for hundreds of years. 

When Marcus Brutus killed Julius Caesar, he was being a patriot. It did not matter that Caesar was the head of the Roman state and was backed by the majority of Romans. (For this reason, the conspirators declared that Caesar's social reform programs were legally binding even though, by their own logic, these programs should have been just as legal as Caesar making himself dictator for life.) Brutus, like his uncle Cato the Younger, obeyed the laws of the Roman patria, which was unchanging in its demand of sic semper tyrannis (always thus to tyrants).     

It is important to keep in mind Benjamin Constant's distinction between the liberty of the ancients and that of the moderns. From the perspective of the Romans, liberty meant that they were free men and not slaves. This was due to their Roman citizenship as opposed to universal principles. Because of this, the Romans, like many of the American founding fathers, saw no contradiction between republican government and the owning of slaves. Furthermore, the Roman model left no room for personal liberty. What made you a free man and not a slave was your status as a Roman citizenship. To blaspheme against the Roman gods in the privacy of your home was not to practice your freedom but to undercut the very basis of what made you a free man. I should also add that the Romans were not much into markets. In fact, one of the major motivations for Roman aristocrats to free their slaves was so that they could serve as fronts to operate businesses. Making money through trade was considered shameful and members of the Senate were forbidden from doing so. My praise of Rome is not for Rome as it was. I am simply enthralled by certain aspects of Roman ideals, mainly its ability to reconcile liberty with personal discipline.   

Why are Wheelock's classical liberal values important and what are the consequences of the fact that this is not the norm among textbooks? C. S. Lewis had an essay where he asked readers to imagine what it might mean to live in a society where the literature was produced by people who took Hinduism as their starting assumption. The challenge of arguing with someone who holds the cultural high ground is that even the opponent is likely to still be under the sway of the dominant assumptions without even being aware of it. It gets even better if the opponent has managed to undergo the rigors of liberating their minds from cultural givens. Such action is almost guaranteed to alienate them from the public and render them unable to communicate their alternative ideas. Think of the libertarian argument that government is violence and that taxation is theft. The logic of it is unassailable. At the same time, it cuts against how we have been trained to think about government. Applying the same moral categories that we apply to individual humans to that of the government may be defensible in the abstract but does not reflect how people live their lives.    

Recently, my son's school had an online field trip to a museum devoted to the history of voting. The guide devoted almost his entire presentation to the United States' very real failings when it comes to women and blacks. What bothered me was less the history that he was presenting and more the simple fact that I never got the sense that this person was ever caught up in the romance of voting that you, the average citizen, and not the politicians should be in charge of this country. There is a moral drama at play. Will the citizen use his reason to research policy and act in a way worthy of a patria, those transcendent values that truly make up a nation, by rejecting both his personal interest and what is popular or will he fall to his passions and become a tool to be manipulated by those in power? 

What subconscious structural narrative do elementary school students pick up from how American history is taught? If the United States is a fundamentally racist endeavor that needs to be radically changed, as tolerant beings, students can consider themselves morally superior to the founding fathers. Thus, the American political tradition has nothing to teach them and they can feel free to promote whatever changes they wish. Such people are never going to develop the sensibility that politics is about making difficult moral decisions and to even get to the starting point they are going to need an incredible level of self-discipline. The recent leftist wave of iconoclasm is a physical manifestation of this thinking. If today's youth can topple the authority of traditional American heroes along with their statues and be hailed as civil rights activists for their actions then they can hope to create a blank slate upon which they can write themselves as the new moral authorities. Having never had to live up to the expectations of others, they can never be found unworthy.    

The United States, like ancient Rome, is a deeply flawed entity. That being said, these flaws can only properly be appreciated by someone immersed in its ideals. If the Roman republic was just another ancient civilization, there would be no sense of its tragic failure. It had its moment in the sun and then it passed on. But Rome was not just another civilization, it was the product of free men who submitted themselves to fulling their duty to their patria. This allowed Rome to conquer the Mediterranean world but also corrupted its people with heroic generals parading slaves and gold through the city. This killed the spirit of liberty and made the empire possible. I cannot say that we Americans are really better than the Romans but I am enthralled by the opportunity to attempt to prove myself worthy of liberty. 

Duty always calls free men.

The dangers of war are not small but your fatherland called you and the farmers will help.

Because of the faults of bad men, our fatherland will not be well.   

Without a lot of money and many gifts, the tyrant was not able to satisfy the Roman people.  

Reason leads me, not fortune.

Nature, not rank, makes a good man.

From the beginning, Rome had kings; Lucius Brutus gave to the Romans liberty.

That one tyrant used to always praise himself. 

Our state used to protect the liberty and rights of citizens.

A Bill of Rights for Nazis

 

One of the challenges in promoting liberty is that defending liberty, in its truly principled sense, means defending the rights of not only the people you moderately dislike but also those who you truly believe are a threat to society. Most people support rights for themselves and those within their rather narrow Overton Window. Modern leftism has only helped in this regard as it allows people to take this position and feel morally superior for doing so. From this perspective, there is no reason not to expand the definition of liberty to include not only negative rights like protection from physical violence but also positive liberty to make other people maintain your sense of dignity so you do not suffer any microaggressions. As long as it is only your side that has such a right to dignity, making such demands is simply playing with house money. There are few people willing to defend the rights of their enemies. For this reason, I have a suggestion that would greatly clarify discussions about liberty. When we say that people have rights, we mean Nazis. If you are not willing to defend Nazis enjoying a right, it is not really a right and should be disregarded. (If there are any actual Nazis reading this blog, feel free to substitute black gay Jews.) 

What might a bill of rights for Nazis look like? The foundation for all rights is property. Nazis have the right to own homes, with printing presses in their basements, which they can use to produce leaflets. By extension, they are allowed to own computers and make use of the internet to present their ideas to a wider audience and win converts to their ideology. They are allowed to enjoy such rights even when they are able to use them to make life less convenient for others. Protecting the right of Nazis to make anti-Semitic jokes in my presence is more important than my dignity.   

I accept that Nazis have the right to have an ideology. In this case that would mean racial supremacy. They can also believe in the inferiority of groups like blacks and Jews and oppose interracial mixing. They even have the right to raise their children in their ideology. While their ideology violates the Constitution and Nazis would be forbidden to enact their vision for society on a national level, this is no different from any other kind of religion. Most religious people recognize that liberal democracy involves a bargain. In exchange for surrendering the right to take over the country, they are promised the right to practice their religion and raise their children in it without interference from the government. In theory at least, there should be no difference between a Nazi believing in the inferiority of non-whites but that he is obligated to respect their political rights and the idea that unbelievers are doomed to Hell but Natural Law still obligates believers to accept the political authority of the ungodly. 

Even though Nazis do not have the right to overthrow the Constitution or reinterpret it in keeping with their moral assumptions as a living document, Nazis should still have the right to form small enclave communities to practice their chosen lifestyle. Because of this, it should be legal for there to be Nazi towns in which discrimination is legal. (If this Nazi town wished to secede from the United States to form its own white supremacist country, I would say good riddance to them.)

You might be tempted to argue that Nazism inherently involves some kind of conspiracy to overthrow a free society and that the government has the right to take proactive actions to protect the public. The problem is that you have to realize that I already believe that socialism is an inherent conspiracy against the Constitution and a free society regardless of whether the word democratic is attached to it. Hence, I am very open to the idea of murdering socialists if given an excuse. If you wish to avoid a genocidal left vs. right civil war, you have no choice but to tolerate all non-violent Nazi activities even though their actions cause real psychological harm.  

The main limitation to these rights is the Non-Aggression-Principle. Nazis do not have the right to initiate acts of violence against their opponents. This includes conspiring to commit acts of violence. For example, while Nazis have the right to pass on their beliefs to their children, the moment a teacher actually tells Nazi children that Dylan Roof is a hero to be imitated, the lives of everyone in that school become forfeit. This would be no different from Israel having the right (distinct from being a good idea) to bomb a Hamas school. Alternatively, you can imagine the United States government having the right to bomb schools in Mexico that teach their students that Pancho Villa was a hero for raiding across the American border and killing American citizens. This is simply the logical conclusion of the right of self-defense enlarged to a national scale.  

One might be tempted to argue that Nazis are different from other groups in that they "hate." That is a misunderstanding. Nazis, like everyone else, have something that they love, like their mythical Aryan race. They fear that something, like Jews, threatens what they love and are willing to take action. By this definition of hatred, everyone is guilty, particularly those who believe that hatred is somehow a damaging charge unique to their opponents. What is relevant is whether or not someone is a party to a conspiracy to commit violence. From this perspective, charges of hatred are merely a distraction. You can choose to accuse someone of plotting to murder you, risking the possibility that people will think that you are mistaken and kill you in order to protect the social contract or you can shut your mouth and learn to live with the fact that there are people out there who do not like you.   

I admit to being torn as to whether there is a constitutional right to march in the streets. As long as the government owns the streets we have to accept that they are going to be used to promote local prejudices. This is better than leaving roads in control of the federal government and the prejudices of whatever party is currently in power. Local prejudices are less of a problem as they can be countered by people moving. Let us be very clear, if you wish to claim that Nazis do not have a constitutional right to march through black or Jewish neighborhoods then you have to be consistent and admit that cities should have the theoretical right not to allow gay pride marches if it is deemed offensive to local sensibilities. 

Do you really want there to be laws against discrimination? If a company hired a person unaware that they were a Nazi and that person came to work with a swastika tattooed on their forehead, the company should have the right to fire the person on the spot. The same logic should apply to someone who gets a sex change operation without notifying a company about their orientation. Granted, I personally am not inclined to make an issue out of gender identity but that is my personal preference.

Saying that you only oppose discrimination for things that are intrinsic to someone and which they cannot control does not help you very much. It is not so obvious that Nazis are able to help themselves in their ideological preferences any more so than homosexuals. If you accept critical race theory assumptions regarding race, consistency would demand that you acknowledge that white people cannot stop themselves from becoming white supremacists and, therefore, cannot be held responsible for their actions. Furthermore, our society regularly discriminates based on things people cannot control. There is not a whole lot about intelligence that can be decoupled from a person's genetics or how they were raised yet college admissions still make use of academic test scores.   

It should be understood that the purpose of rights is not to create a truly just society. That is impossible and any attempt to do so will lead to mass murder. Part of the problem is that while we can easily imagine people wanting to kill us out of greed, we have a harder time imagining people who want to kill us because they honestly believe that we are maliciously standing in the way of making the world a better place. It is not even that such people are ignorant. On the contrary, the more they know about us, the more they might be likely to believe that we need to be eliminated. Do you really want to risk living under my version of a "just society" and accept what I might be willing to do to get there or do you say "over my dead body?" What you need to understand is that I am likely to want to lay down my life to stop your "just society" because I believe that yours might be paved with even more bodies. 

The real goal of acknowledging rights is to avoid full-on Hobbesian civil war where we burn down civilization in the hope of killing off the "bad guys" and being able to rebuild a better world from the ashes. (Think Germany or Japan in 1945.) The price you pay for leaving society standing is that there are going to be all kinds of pathologies that will never be rooted out. If you are not willing to kill a child over some problem you are not truly serious about solving it. 

How do you get as many people as possible to give up on attempting to create their version of a just society? Alternatively, how do you convince the losers of culture wars not to blackmail society by threatening that, if they are going to be defeated, they are going to go down fighting and try to kill as many of their enemies as they can? You promise them that, in return for not burning down the country, they will be able to live their lives and raise their children in peace from everyone else's "just society." Hence, the underlying philosophy of rights is to live and let live. Leave me alone and do not do anything that I might interpret as you plotting to kill me and I promise to not kill you to forestall any chance of you carrying out your plan.   

Whenever you demand protection for yourself as some kind of right, you open the door for your mortal enemies to claim that same right and use it against you. Therefore, it only makes sense to ask for the bare minimum of life, liberty, and property in order to allow yourself to stay alive and raise your children as you see fit. Make no mistake, the price you pay for these rights is obscenely high. It means that Nazis get to enjoy these same rights and use them to ruin any chance that we can have a society free of racism. Think of what they can do if allowed a more expansive set of rights.

I Am Traditionally Observant, Not Orthodox: My Religious Evolution (Part III)

(Part I, II)

As someone committed to traditional practice while still interacting with Western thought, it should come as no surprise that I would eventually find my way to Maimonides' Guide to the Perplexed. Taking Alan Brill's class on the Guide introduced me to the writings of Leo Strauss and the possibility of reading Maimonides in a highly "unorthodox" fashion. On the flip side, I came to recognize that, if we were to take Maimonides doctrinally seriously, we would have to condemn most Haredim as heretics. This, along with Marc Shapiro's Limits of Orthodox Theology got me to start questioning whether there was anything particularly authoritative about Orthodox beliefs. My high school self, if asked about Orthodox beliefs, would have recited Maimonides' Thirteen Principles as something accepted by all traditional Jews going back to the Bible. Now I had to consider the possibility that these were the creation of the Middle Ages and that Maimonides himself may not have believed them. 

The Slifkin affair helped give these issues practical weight. Much as with the Republican Party, I could identify as Haredi for a long time after it stopped making logical sense because I convinced myself that most Haredim were like me. For example, I assumed that most Haredim really were ok with evolution even if they liked to take potshots at it. Haredi outreach literature assured readers that evolution was not a problem for Judaism. The ban on Rabbi Natan Slifkin changed that. It quickly became clear that the opponents of Slifkin were not some fringe group but mainstream Haredi society itself. It was not just evolution at stake, what was being rejected was the entire Jewish rationalist tradition itself. In essence, either, over the course of less than a decade, Rabbi Avigdor Miller, reaching out from his grave, had taken over Haredi Judaism or I had been deluding myself as to what Haredi Judaism was really about. 

As with my conservativism, leaving Yeshiva University for Ohio State in 2006 affected my Judaism. I was isolated without a strong sense of community. Living inside my head without the feeling of being answerable to anyone else, it could only be expected that I would put together a Judaism to suit me. Readers may be surprised to learn that I continued to wear a black hat and jacket through my first year at OSU. Even though it was several years since I had identified with the Haredi community, I continued to wear a black hat as a matter of habit. During the summer of 2007, I fractured my clavicle. For several weeks, it was not practical for me to wear a jacket. If I was not going to wear a jacket, I might as well not wear a hat either. Now that I had stopped, I had the perfect excuse not to take it back up again. 

What led me to stop identifying even with the Modern Orthodox community was biblical criticism and women in the rabbinate. The funny thing about these issues is that I am actually pretty conservative on both of them. It is not as if I believe that biblical criticism refuted the Bible. I know enough Orthodox apologetics to defend against the obvious attacks. Furthermore, as a historian, I know to be skeptical as to what we can say for certainty about the ancient world as well as to the agendas that people bring to interpreting evidence. 

As with many religious scientists confronting evolution, I recognize a distinction between methodological and ontological naturalism. History and science are both games played by rules, one of which is to do research as if the supernatural does not exist. While this means that neither history nor science can ever be used to directly attack religion, it does force one to go about one's day to day studies sounding distinctly irreligious. 

That being said, as the historical method became critical to how I navigated the world, I felt I needed the freedom to go where the historical method might take me even when it might go against orthodoxy. There was a tipping point where I decided that I was not going to stretch orthodoxy just far enough to say that I was just ok but anyone to the left of me was a heretic. From this perspective, it no longer mattered if I had really crossed any lines or not. As long as I believed that one needed the moral legitimacy to do so, I might as well consider myself not Orthodox. 

My opinion as to women rabbis followed a similar course. I am of a very conservative sensibility. I believe that society benefits from having distinct concepts of men and women and can therefore accept that this can even spill over to men and women having distinct roles, including women being excluded from the rabbinate. If pressed, I might employ some version of G. K. Chesterton's anarchist argument against women's suffrage. The moment you give women the vote, you are admitting that government has full legitimate authority over them. As opposed to recognizing the existence of a women's sphere of existence which is outside of politics by virtue of the fact that women cannot vote. Similarly, putting women in the rabbinate means that rabbis are the only legitimate religious authorities. 

It is one thing to acknowledge that if it was up to me to vote on whether to have women rabbis, I might allow myself to get distracted by other issues that might assume greater importance. It is another matter entirely to make the essence of Judaism about opposing women rabbis to the extent that this would be an issue worth throwing people out. If you are putting more effort into denouncing women rabbis than Haredi claims about the power of gedolim, as exemplified by Kupat Ha'ir, then you clearly lack proper monotheist zeal and might even be an idolater. 

The reality of Orthodox Judaism today, including Modern Orthodoxy, is to denounce biblical criticism and women rabbis at the same time as it winks and nods at gedolim worship. That is not me. So I am ok with being considered not-Orthodox. It simplifies things for me not to be tied down by that label. I prefer to think of myself as a traditionally observant Maimonidean Jew. If there was an intellectually serious Conservative community in my area, committed to halakha and untainted by modern leftism or tikkun olam rhetoric, I would join them. I do not have that so I am stuck doing the best I can without a community in which I really feel comfortable in. 

People who have met me sometimes comment as to how shocked they are when they see how I look and live my life and hear what I sound like when I start talking about religion. One friend, after knowing me for several years, found out that my  father is an Orthodox rabbi and commented: "oh, that explains so much about you." Hopefully, these pieces I have written, will help readers confused about where to place me religiously and offer some context for understanding this blog. 

Live Not By Godwin's Law: A Book Review

 

According to Godwin's Law, as an argument continues on the internet, it becomes inevitable that someone will accuse their opponent of being a Nazi. There are two important implications for this. The first is to recognize that the moment that reductio ad Hiterlum arguments are put into play, all hope for civilized discourse ends. One thinks of the infamous example of the William F. Buckley Gore Vidal exchange in 1968, decades before Godwin's Law or the internet. 

The second implication is that whoever makes the Nazi comparison first loses. This is a necessary outgrowth of the first principle. Once you recognize the destructive nature of implying that your opponent is a Nazi and how tempting it is, it becomes necessary to heavily penalize anyone who goes down this path.   

I bring up this issue because it gets at the problem of Rod Dreher's otherwise excellent new book, Live Not By Lies. Following up on his earlier work, The Benedict Option, Dreher continues to develop the idea that conservatives need to recognize that they have lost the culture war and that they face a society that is increasingly actively hostile to them even to the point of not being willing to show them traditional liberal tolerance. Dreher's particular concern is the potential for corporate soft totalitarianism. What is to stop corporations from using online data to create their own version of China's social credit system? One could imagine that the fact that I bought Dreher's book and listened to it in a day might put me on a blacklist. Amazon could send their information about me to my bank, which then drops my credit score. 

Under these circumstances, religious people, if they want to pass on their faith to their children, are going to need to form small close-knit communities with fellow believers. Voting Republican is not going to help as this corporate soft totalitarianism does not require government assistance.  Your local mega-church is also not going to save your children. On the contrary, it likely is already taken over by people under the influence of woke ideology and will cave the moment it finds itself under pressure. 

The problem with Dreher is that he allows himself to get trapped comparing this soft totalitarianism to the Soviet persecution of Christians. To be fair to Dreher, he acknowledges that these situations are not identical. His point is that there is a lot that Christians in the United States can learn from former Soviet dissidents. That being said, he is left in a bind. Without being willing to violate Godwin's Law, at least in spirit, the book loses its coherency. If Soviet persecution really was something different then there is little point in putting Soviet dissidents at the center of a book about contemporary leftist persecution. 

I feel that Dreher would have been better served writing one of two alternative books. He could have written primarily about Soviet dissidents based on his interviews. I certainly would have loved to hear more about reading Tolkien from behind the Iron Curtain. The fact that many of these interviewees believe that some form of leftist totalitarianism is coming to the United States should be left as a point to take seriously with readers asked to imagine how their local church might handle being declared a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, let alone if Soviet tanks drove into town. If nothing else, this should help Americans appreciate the truly impossible dilemmas that people under Soviet rule faced.  

The second book that Dreher could have written might have been about leftist soft totalitarianism. Instead of talking about Soviet dissidents, he could have used examples of people who stayed religious on college campuses by forming small social groups with fellow believers. The spiritual challenge of college for many people is that they arrive on campus at the age of eighteen and find themselves, for the first time, in a setting in which the basic assumptions of their faith community are not taken as a given. To survive, a student needs to find a network of fellow believers and be willing to be part of an underground counter-culture. If campus extremists have gone out into the world and taken over corporations, turning the entire country into a college campus, the solution is to imitate small campus fellowships.   

Even here, there is room to bring in the example of Communism. One of the major surprises in the recent collapse of conventional liberalism in the face of woke ideology has been the willingness of people to confess to the most absurd charges. One thinks of the recent example from my alma mater, Ohio State, where a professor apologized for writing positively about college football in a way that does recall Soviet-style confessions.

Why would someone confess to something that they knew was false? Perhaps they were threatened with torture and death. Another possibility is that they were trapped by the logic of their own belief. Imagine that you are a good believing communist who supports the party and Comrade Stalin. You are accused of treason. There are two possibilities. Either you are innocent and the party is really just a scam to allow men to seize power by falsely accusing their fellow comrades or you are guilty and the party is right. A true believer would accept that it is not possible for the party to be wrong even if that meant that he was guilty. It must be that he really committed treason, perhaps even just subconsciously by not submitting himself thoroughly enough to party discipline.  

I could imagine the professor who defended college football making a similar calculation. Here he is, a man who probably spent his life verbally supporting civil rights and denouncing racism. Now he finds himself in a situation where civil rights leaders are calling him racist. If he were not a true-believing leftist, it would be easy to ignore his accusers. He did not intend to suggest that blacks should be sacrificed for the entertainment of whites. Anyone who thinks otherwise should be locked away for psychiatric treatment, not given an apology. The problem is that this man probably is a true believer. Either he could admit that civil rights, despite its lofty moral goals, is a scam used to blackmail people and seize power or he could confess that he really is a racist. Perhaps he is not consciously racist but, by failing to sufficiently educate himself, he fell prey to his white privilege and subconsciously allowed himself to indulge his fantasy of sacrificing blacks for his own entertainment.

This professor was vulnerable the moment he accepted that campus civil rights activists had the legitimate right to judge him and that he needed to live up to their standards. Since these activists control the university system, he would have needed to accept the fact that the university, as a whole, no longer held any moral authority, undermining his own authority with it. Because of this, denouncing these activists was never an option. If they accused him of racism, it must be because he really is racist and should apologize. 

Religious people are going to have to be willing to avoid getting ensnared by this line of reasoning no matter the cost. I used to think that Haredi objections to college were absurd and hypocritical. What is the difference between going to a secular college and getting a job in the secular world? Furthermore, many Haredim go to night school to get a degree. As I have lost faith that our university system reflects even my secular values, I have come to realize that going to college, particularly pursuing elite schools as opposed to taking some classes to get a degree, implicitly grants moral authority to the system. You are saying that you care what they think about you and that they have the right to judge you. Do that and they already have your soul even before you walk on campus. Part of what makes the Haredi system effective is that it has its own standard of judgment that is not connected to getting a degree and a respectable job. The secular world has no ability to blackmail them into giving up their children freely. If you want those kids, you are going to have to send in the government to seize them. 

Don't Worry If You Are Saved, Just Do a Mitzvah: A Thought for the High Holidays

 

The following should be read less as an attack on Christianity than as a defense of prax-based religions. Much of what I say could be used by Muslims or even Catholics. It should be taken as a given that those better read in the intricacies of Christian theology should feel free to correct my explanations of how different Christians understand justification. 

One of the big surprises for me, when I began to seriously study Christianity, was the discovery that Christianity is actually a much more difficult and demanding religion than Judaism. Obviously, it is very easy to be a casual Christian. It is not a challenge to go to church for an hour a week and mumble platitudes about loving your neighbor. The picture changes once we start dealing with committed Christians. Catholicism does place serious demands upon the minority of its practitioners who take the Church's teachings as obligatory as opposed to mere suggestions. Where things get really interesting is when you turn to various branches of Protestantism, which is premised on the rejection of any demand for works and instead relies on faith. (The Arminian tradition can be seen as an attempt to smuggle works back into Protestantism.)  

Eliminating works for faith does not make it easy to be an intellectually serious Protestant. On the contrary, not being able to point to ritual practices to demonstrate that you are a good Christian means that you are completely reliant on your ability to gain the precisely correct frame of mind in order to be saved. It seems simple to claim that all you need is to have faith. The problem is that faith, within Protestantism, does not only mean that you believe that Jesus is the Son of God and part of the Trinity. Having faith means that you believe that Jesus dying on the cross and nothing else is the only way you are saved. You cannot even believe that your good deeds play a role in salvation. Jesus is not going to say: that person performed a few meritorious actions and so I will save him as opposed to the really bad people in the world like the thieves crucified next to me. Everyone is completely depraved and unable to perform even the smallest act of righteousness by themselves. 

This sets up Martin Luther's contrast between faith and works. If you are going to believe that doing the right actions can save you, there is no end. No matter how much a person minimizes their pleasure, there is always a more extreme form of asceticism. What is really devious about this is that the more one practices asceticism the less one is thinking about God. The logical end of asceticism is for a person to turn themselves into an idol. Can you believe how righteous I am? For Luther, faith and works contradict each other. If you believe in works, even a little bit, then you do not have genuine faith. 

Keep in mind that Luther started off as a highly ascetic Augustinian friar before he left Catholicism for marriage, kids, and beer. More important than possibly nailing 95 theses to a church door was Luther's spiritual crisis as a friar. Did being a friar really save him? Did the fact that he had doubts about whether he was saved prove that he did not really believe and was therefore not saved? The human mind has a particular talent for turning in on itself. Do I really love God or am I just using him to get into heaven? Am I subconsciously trying to convince myself that I love God because I know that I could never fool God into believing that I am sincere? Luther may offer an effective counter to asceticism by eliminating works from the process of salvation but he only makes the problem of internal mind games worse.  

Luther's position is only going to drive believers into moderate levels of insanity. According to Luther, faith in Jesus requires that you hold two conflicting beliefs at the same time. You must believe that you really are a totally depraved sinner incapable of doing any good deed and, at the same time, that it does not matter because Jesus is willing to save you as long as you have faith. You must simultaneously feel guilty for your sins and serenity for your salvation. Of course, how does a person stop himself from thinking, even subconsciously, that if Jesus is so willing to save him perhaps his sins are not so terrible and he can be saved through his own merits? On the other hand, if his sins really are so terrible, perhaps Jesus will not save him unless he earns his forgiveness with good deeds. If you ever step out of this Lutheran box, you lose your salvation and need to start over. The terrifying reality for Lutheranism is that even if you are saved now, you can lose everything in a few minutes with just the wrong thought. Lutheran religious practice is an ongoing exercise of using humility to constantly get back to that proper balance necessary for salvation and hope that you die at the right moment before you lose your faith again. 

All of this makes Calvinism look downright healthy by comparison. If you are willing to accept supralapsarian double predestination that God decided before creation who was going to be saved and who was going to be damned, the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints logically follows. This means that, if you are one of the lucky few elect, you cannot possibly lose your salvation and, therefore, do not have to worry. If you are not one of the elect, you also do not need to worry because it will not help. God decided even before you had a chance to sin to send you to Hell for all eternity.

I have recently learned how to descend to new levels of insanity with Protestantism. In his work Fear of God, John Bunyan (of Pilgrim's Progress fame) argues for the existence of two kinds of "ungodly fear of God." The first is that one believes that he is such a terrible sinner that Jesus would never agree to save him. In this, Bunyan's choice of emphasis differs from Luther's. With Luther, the primary concern is that a person might believe that they are righteous enough that they do not really need Jesus. It is probably not a coincidence that Luther started off as a friar while Bunyan started off as a lay Christian who liked to have a good time on Sunday. 

So far so good. Bunyan's second kind of ungodly fear, though, is that, once you have accepted Jesus and have been saved, you might go back and question if your conversion was sincere and really valid. According to Bunyan, before a person is saved, he certainly needs to believe that he is not saved but after being saved one is not allowed to doubt their salvation. To do so commits the ultimate Protestant crime of not having faith. 

Imagine Bunyan's Christian. He realizes that he is a terrible sinner, who needs to accept Jesus as his savior. Christian prays to Jesus to save him, acknowledging that he has no other means of salvation, not even a lifetime of good deeds. Christian realizes that he is saved and rejoices in this knowledge. Five minutes later, though, Christian begins to think to himself: did I really accept Jesus as my only possible savior or, miserable sinner that I am, simply pretend to accept him? 

If Christian was not sincere the first time then he is obligated to question his salvation as he is not yet saved. But if he was sincere the first time, he is not allowed to question his salvation and, by doing so, has thrown himself back into the category of being unsaved. This would mean that Christian needs to accept Jesus a third time unless he was right the second time that this first time was not sincere. Clearly, a doctrine designed to stop people from obsessing too much about whether or not they are saved actually makes the problem even worse.   

From this perspective, Judaism is remarkably reasonable in that it avoids this agonizing over whether one is saved with the inevitable question of "Are you really truly saved?" Judaism can do this precisely because it embraces a doctrine of works wholeheartedly. Judaism does not ask "Are you saved?" Instead, Judaism asks what mitzvah can you do right now. It does not matter if you are righteous or wicked; there are always mitzvot to be performed. From this perspective, asking whether or not you are saved is a question that one has no business asking. It has nothing to do with fulfilling your purpose in this world so it wastes time better spent doing mitzvot. Since Protestantism does not have an endless stream of mitzvot to perform every minute of the day, committed Protestants have no choice but to spend their time thinking about their salvation until they drive themselves up a wall going in circles wondering if they really have faith.  

Belief is still important to Judaism but you come to faith by performing mitzvot. They teach you what to believe and grace you with the ability to persevere in your belief. Furthermore, the very nature of mitzvot precludes radical asceticism. For example, you are obligated to eat a good meal on Shabbat and are not allowed to fast. You must get married and have children. You are not allowed to practice celibacy. You are not allowed to give more than 20% of your wealth to charity so apostolic poverty is forbidden. Anyone who says otherwise is a heretic and can be ignored

It is Judaism's emphasis on ritual as opposed to theology that allows it to avoid the pitfalls that will send Christians, if they take their religion seriously, into either the insanities of asceticism or of trying to think their way to salvation. Jewish practice both protects it from trying to earn salvation through asceticism or from trying to simply gain the right beliefs ungrounded in deeds. As much as I find Chabad's theology objectionable, they do get one thing right. They do not care what kind of Jew you are. However religious or not religious you are Chabad will tell you that Hashem loves you so why not thank him by doing a mitzvah right now? 

Boruch Learns His Brachos: A Horror Story

My kids love Boruch Learns His Brochos, the seemingly innocent tale of a little boy who, uncertain of what blessings to make on his sugar-heavy lunch, walks into a grocery store that mysteriously opens up across the street from him on the assumption that the owner knows something about what blessings to say. One might be forgiven for thinking that a story about ethnically diverse foods singing about what blessing to make on them is all good clean educational fun. That is until you think about the horrific implications of sentient food. When you eat food, it feels your teeth rip into it. The food is aware of itself dissolving in your stomach and cries out for revenge.  

What is really going on is that all the different foods have secretly taken over the store and are plotting to eat every human on Earth. The owner of the store, Tzvi, has kept himself alive by convincing the foods of a cargo-cult argument. Humans have power over food because they know how to make blessings. If the foods could figure out what blessing to make over humans, God would switch his allegiance to the foods and allow them to take over the world from the humans. Boruch enters the store, unaware that he is walking into a trap. As you can see, a gang of lip-smacking wine bottles is attempting to sneak up on Boruch while he talks on the phone. 

Having been raised as an Orthodox Jew, Boruch not only was never taught about diabetes but also never saw Saturday morning cartoons like Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. As such, he is unprepared for food that might try to eat him. 

Finding himself surrounded by killer food, Boruch uses his reason to figure out the proper blessings, tricking the food into believing that he has magical protection against them. Unfortunately, Jake cannot remember his blessings and is consumed head-first by a vicious happy birthday cake.

After figuring out all the blessings, Boruch then challenges the food as to whether they know the blessing to say over humans. The foods are all ignorant of evolution so they fail to realize that the proper blessing is Shehakol. Utterly defeated, the foods agree to let Boruch go. Until they discover the secret of the proper blessing for humans, the foods will only prey on people who do not know their blessings. Since eating food without a blessing is like theft, it is clearly worse than extra-marital sex. Thus, people who forget their blessings are the legitimate prey for horror monsters.  

Before he leaves, Boruch reveals that he is really Boruch Spinoza. What other nice yeshiva boy could have defeated man-eating food through nothing more than his reason? He explains that it really does not matter who eats whom as we are all part of the pantheist circle of life.  

Mourning Over Spilled Milk: A Lesson From Inside Out

As a Maimonidean, I make no secret of the fact that I have no desire to resurrect a sacrificial cult. In this day and age, there are going to be few people who would spiritually benefit from the killing of animals. This does not mean that rebuilding the Temple has no value as a symbol of a spiritually renewed Jewish people nor does this mean we should not be sad on Tisha B'Av as we contemplate the fact that such renewal has not occurred this year. Every generation in which the Temple is not rebuilt it is like it is destroyed.

A reader recently asked me: "As a rationalist, what is the point of mourning? Instead of "crying over spilled milk", isn't a better use of our time to work on improving things?" This question gets at Zionism's fundamental critique of rabbinic Judaism. Rabbinic Judaism could cry over the Temple, wish for the Messiah and then do absolutely nothing for two-thousand years. Instead of attempting to restore Jewish power, the rabbis were content to live a Miss Havisham existence in the darkness of their study halls, brooding over the wrongs done to Jews as an excuse to never offer a positive program. I think there is an important distinction between a backward-looking mourning that uses mourning as an excuse not to get past itself and a forward-looking mourning that seeks to come to terms with something genuinely terrible happening precisely so that we can move forward. For this, I turn to Disney/Pixar's Inside Out.

Part of what is so impressive about Inside Out is that, like Lion King and Coco, it is one of Disney's few "conservative" films. The fundamental narrative of Disney is the main character being held back by their family and society and finding the courage to break away, be "true to themselves," and find happiness. There is even a trope in Disney where the characters sing about this precise dilemma. Think of Ariel breaking out into "Part of Your World" or Belle's "Provincial Life." If Inside Out stuck to the Disney script, Riley stealing from her parents to buy a bus ticket to run away back to Minnesota would be considered a good thing. Riley's primary duty is to herself to be happy. She would meet up with some funny hobo animal spirits (voiced by Eddie Murphy, Nathan Lane, and Billy Joel) who teach her to go her own way. Her parents would realize that it was wrong of them to move to San Francisco in order that the father could make more money. Instead, they would agree that Riley's happiness is more important and return to Minnesota so that by the time Riley's bus pulls up at her old house, her parents are there to greet her. I am sure this could have made for an entertaining movie and would have saved studio executives any sleepless nights trying to figure out how to make it work as a theme-park attraction.

What is really radical about Inside Out is that it is an apology for sadness. Joy wants Riley to be happy and she assumes that the best way to do that is to keep Sadness from infecting Riley. This makes logical sense. If happiness and sadness are opposites then the less sadness in Riley's life the happier she will be. This parallels the utilitarian dream to achieve the maximal preponderance of pleasure over pain. The problem is that Riley has real problems to deal with. The new house is a wreck, she is lonely and misses her old life. Joy is not able to change these facts. All that she can do is try to distract Riley, which only works for brief periods. The solution is to accept that Sadness has an important role to play that none of the other emotions can fulfill. Riley needs her moment to be openly sad so that she and her parents can be honest with the difficulties they are facing and do it together instead of slinking off to stew in their own heads.

It is important to note that Inside Out does not have a clear-cut happy ending where the problems are solved. Instead, even after the truly poignant self-sacrifice of Riley's imaginary best friend, she is stuck in the difficult process of adjusting to living in a new city. But life moves on with new challenges and opportunities for joy.

Effective mourning benefits from strongly ritualized components. This accomplishes two things. First, it creates a space for other people to take part as they are able to recognize the motions of mourning and they can be given their particular parts to act out. Second, ritualized mourning has a set limit. There is going to be a time when, even though you can still be sad, you are expected to move on with your life.

Traditional Jewish mourning for the dead is a great example of this. Daily life does not prepare a person for the death of a loved one. How should one respond? There is no way to answer that question. In Judaism though, the moment a person dies, this detailed checklist kicks as to what their relatives should be doing over the next seven days. They sit shiva which demands certain moderate ascetic practices like tearing clothes even as it forbids extreme ones like cutting oneself. The community is brought in as people are supposed to visit and listen to the mourners talk about the deceased. Finally, mourning is supposed to end after a year. There is no playing Miss Havisham allowed.

Tisha B'Av is modeled after sitting shiva and it is our chance to mourn for Jewish History. This serves the purpose of not ignoring the real tragedies in our past. That being said, the purpose of mourning on Tisha B'Av is not to dwell in sadness for its own sake but to give it its place so that we can move forward. Parents know that it is frustrating when their children spill milk on the kitchen floor. One is allowed that sigh but then one needs to tell the kids that they need to own up to what they did and clean the mess they made.

I Am Traditionally Observant, Not Orthodox: My Religious Evolution (Part II)

(Part I)

It should be understood that the fact that I was emotionally invested in Judaism did not mean that there was no intellectual component; there certainly was. It is just that I never would have developed that intellectual side unless I was already strongly motivated to do so. My high school self was influenced by the essays of Samson Raphael Hirsch, the Hertz Chumash, and the biblical commentary of Isaac Abarbanel. (The latter was due to the influence of Rabbi Aaron Lopiansky.) While I had no interest in studying Gemara, I was eager to study Tanach. If only I had a school system that replaced morning Gemara study with Tanach. 

The consistent thread between these religious interests of mine was that I wanted a religion that embraced classical liberalism and the encounter with the secular. Keep in mind that high school me, despite being more conservative than present me both politically and religiously, was someone who loved reading about the Civil War and World War II as well as large helpings of science fiction and fantasy. I supported democracy and not a theocracy. I had no intention of going into the rabbinate. I wanted to be a history professor. I needed a theology that validated interacting with the secular world. 

From Hirsch, I got Torah im Derech Eretz that to be a Mensch Yisroel was to be able to succeed in secular terms and to be an observant Jew. From the Hertz Chumash I took the notion that the Torah was the source of classical liberal values. It was the Torah that could save liberalism from decaying into the modern left. Abarbanel's life was a model (even if a tragic one) of a Jew who could succeed politically in the outside world. His commentary integrated the Jewish exegetical tradition with philosophy, offering a world in which they could co-exist. 

With this in mind, it should not be surprising that I read Tanach much in the way as early Americans. What I found was a source for a personal connection to God unconnected to the rabbis in school, most of whom I did not care for, as well as a model for politics that was infused with religious values while respecting individual liberty.    

If my father carries the blame for trapping me in a Haredi school like the Yeshiva of Greater Washington, he does deserve the credit for getting me into Yeshiva University. Several days before school started in the fall of 2001 (right before 9/11), I was back from Israel and floating from day to day. My father called a friend of his in admissions, drove me up to New York and I suddenly found myself accepted. My five years at YU were the best in my life. YU was a great place for me because over there I made sense. I was not just a weird kid hiding behind a pile of books but the embodiment of what the school stood for, embracing secular studies as a religious enterprise. 

Academically, I was privileged to study with Rabbi Shalom Carmy and Prof. Louis Feldman. I have written here before about Feldman. Carmy was the ultimate academic jack of all trades, teaching anything involving the bible or philosophy. (He also was the resident Jew on a Catholic think tank.) I believe it was Carmy who got me interested in the non-Narnia C. S. Lewis. The really great thing about being in Carmy's classes was that he would host his office ours in the cafeteria during lunch and students would gather around him and discussions would go all over the place. As a tutor, what I aspire to offer is some version of that experience with Carmy. I have read and comprehended only a small fraction of what was in Carmy's head but I do my best. 

At a social level, I benefited from being part of the YCDS theater group under the direction of Dr. Anthony Beukas. This gave me a group of cool kids who liked me and took an interest in my welfare. Theater is useful for the maturation of geeks as it offers a bridge to take the geek, with his ability to consume information, and turn that talent into a means of self-expression. I often advise students, going into college, to make sure that they are involved in some kind of a club like a theater group. The great challenge of college is that no one is looking after you. You can sleep all day and no one will lift a finger to stop you or tell you that you are doing anything wrong until the moment you discover that you have failed your classes. You need someone who is going to make a point to look after you and the best way to do that is to be involved in something they care about like their club.    

Beukas was the kind of teacher every student should have once in their life. More than once may be a little too much because, and let me be very clear about this, Beukas was an SOB. Now he may have been a perfect gentleman in his private life but, as a teacher, he subscribed to the drill sergeant/tiger mom method of teaching and it was frustrating and often downright emotionally abusive. Having said that, Beukas was certainly a great teacher and I am grateful for what he did for me. 

Beukas operated on the theory that we all suffered from what he liked to call "the yeshiva shuffle." In essence, we had gotten by with everyone thinking we were wonderful because we were nice and nothing more was ever expected from us. No one had ever demanded excellence from us. It was his job, even if he had to make himself the villain and cause us to hate him, to make us hold ourselves to a higher standard. One could respond that this is also the problem with modern liberal education. So what, Judaism should aspire to something higher. 

What Beukas offered was one of the most important critics of Orthodox Judaism I had ever encountered. Was Orthodoxy simply a deal in which one agreed to go along with the system and, in return, you can be considered a success without putting in a true effort? This was not something that could be countered through clever apologetics.

     

Imagine: The Nazi Version

I recently got into an argument regarding John Lennon's classic song, "Imagine."  Like most conservatives, I find the song to be dishonest precisely because it simply assumes that if we got rid of things like religion and property, society would become a happy place. What makes me a Burkean Conservative is that I can imagine very well what the world might look like if the song was ever carried out and it is a nightmare that terrifies me. The person could not imagine that I could find the song objectionable because it supported wonderful things like the end of greed and the brotherhood of men.

 One of the tactical advantages that liberals have in the war on ideas is that they get to be judged on their good intentions and never their practical results. As if being an idealist was some kind of blank check to do whatever you want. As a satirical thought experiment, I decided to rewrite the lyrics for "Imagine" in a way that holds on to its dream for a better world. The song now simply serves a different ideology. 

 

Imagine there's no afterlife

It's easy if you try

No damnation below

Just the nation above

Imagine all the people embracing the common good

 

Imagine no rigged elections

It’s easy to do

No need to be divisive

And no more Jews

Imagine all the people embracing the common good

 

You may say I'm an idealist

But I'm not the only one

I know someday you'll join our party

And the leader will make us one

 

Imagine no individuality

I wonder if you can

No need to be selfish

A bond of blood and soil men

Imagine all the people working harmoniously

You may say I'm an idealist

But I'm not the only one

I know someday you'll join our party

And the leader will make us one

 

As I hope readers have figured out, my new version of the song is now Nazi, instead of socialist, propaganda. Since all that most people know about Nazism is a strawman caricature fed to them in school, it is easy to forget that the Nazis were idealists, motivated not by hatred for non-Aryans but love for the German race. As Hayek understood, it is precisely the people who believe that they are building a better world who are most likely to commit mass murder. If you honestly believed that all that was standing in the way of a better world were a million people acting out of spite and greed. The only truly humane thing to do would be to kill them. It would be the height of selfishness to let the world fall into darkness because you do not want to get your hands dirty.

The fact that I have included "no more Jews" should no more disqualify the song from being about peace and love than Lennon's "no religions too." It should be understood that by Jews I mean Zionists, capitalists, and communists. In truth, anyone who tries to oppress other people.

As my song proves, Nazism is about people coming to work together through their mutual love of the leader. The only reason why anyone could be against Nazism is that they are selfish and do not want to work for the common good. Alternatively, they are clinging to the superstition that there are such things as free will and morality. If you fail to understand this, it is probably because you are a hateful Jew. I am not asking you to accept that Nazism is true. I just want you to broaden your mind and imagine that Nazism is something wonderful.

Frederick Douglass Needs to Go

Frederick Douglass, as part of his post Civil War career advocating for blacks to be granted the vote, said some problematic things regarding Native Americans and burned some bridges with former suffragette allies. For example, he argued that blacks were eager to embrace American culture as opposed to Native Americans, who he saw as inherent outsiders. These were not innocent comments as the 1870s were the height of the American government's attempt to destroy Native American culture everywhere on the continent. In regards to woman having the vote, Douglass argued that it was not a priority as women were already covered by their husbands and fathers. This was in contrast to blacks for whom the vote was a literal matter of life and death.

It seems that Douglass did this on pragmatic grounds. He recognized that there was a large segment of American public opinion that could be brought around to supporting blacks voting as long as it was decoupled from rights for Native Americans or votes for women. Even better, you could convince such people that blacks were natural allies against Native Americans or women's suffrage.

To my friends back in Silver Spring, MD. There is a statue of Frederick Douglass at the University of Maryland College Park campus. Douglass grew up as a slave in Maryland before he escaped to freedom. He did not return until after the Civil War. If you are not charging down this very moment to College Park to tear down that statue, you implicitly endorse the genocide of Native Americans and patriarchy. If you do try to tear that statue down, you are endorsing slavery.

My advice is to take counsel from Martin Luther and John Calvin. There is no way that you can truly be anti-racist here. No matter what you choose, you are a Nazi. I know that many of you, brought up to believe that you could be a good tolerant person through your own efforts, will find this thought disturbing. Once you can get past your initial horror at the idea that you are just as bad as Hitler, there is a great comfort. First, your attempts to be tolerant were always doomed to fail anyway. Worse, all that they were ever going to do was add the sins of hypocrisy and self-deception to your racism. Now that you know that there is nothing you could have ever done to make yourself a less racist person, you can save yourself a lot of heartache by not trying. This has the advantage of making you a less annoying self-righteous Pharisee to everyone around you. 

If you are a Lutheran you still have to work having faith in Jesus. You do this by openly admitting that you are such an irredeemable racist that only Jesus can save you. You must go so far as to be bold in your racism because you have full confidence that it does not matter as Jesus has already atoned for you. If you are a Calvinist, your job is much easier. You can completely relax as God has already decided, before creation, whether or not he was going to send you to Hell for all eternity for your racism. 

On a serious note, the social contract begins when we recognize that all of us are truly terrible people who have been complicit in mass murder. Justice demands that all of us should be executed for our crimes. The social contract allows everyone to be forgiven for their crimes. You will not get equality. There will still be systemic racism and all kinds of privilege. The good news is that you will be able to keep your lives. Those who claim "No Justice, No Peace" have never seriously considered what justice truly means. The only way to have peace is to reject justice.

Burn the Heretic

Some of you might think Tucker Carlson is a racist. I am afraid to tell you that he is something much worse.

At about the eight-minute mark Carlson states: "No child is born evil. Sin cannot be inherited. That's insane." What kind of Christian is Carlson? Of course, children are born evil and inherit sin. That is literally what Original Sin is. As a descendant of Adam, Carlson is tainted by Adam's sin. From the moment Carlson was born (or possibly since the sexual act of his parents in conceiving him), even before he ever told his first lie or lusted after a woman in his heart, he was a sinner. The only thing that is keeping Carlson from burning in Hellfire for all eternity is if he accepts the fact that Jesus Christ died on the Cross for him. This means surrounding all hope or pretense that he could ever deserve salvation through his own merit.   

The moment Carlson allows himself to reject Original Sin and believe that children are good even for one second of their lives, he must admit the possibility that there could have been someone, besides Jesus, who lived their entire lives without sin. For example, someone who died as an infant. This negates Jesus' sacrifice. Why should God have sent his Son down to die? God should simply have told regular people that they should have been perfect like that infant who died and, therefore, are now going to Hell.

This rejection of Original Sin endangers the salvation of all. Think of all the conservative Jews who watch Carlson. Having been told, by a supposed Christian no less, that non-sinful humans can exist, they will still hold on to a shred of hope that they could be saved through the Law and will not accept Jesus as their Savior, delaying his Second Coming. 

Good Christians cannot stand back and allow Pelagian heresy to destroy this country. There is no need to boycott his show. Unless Carlson confesses and repents from his heresy, we should do to him what our forefathers from Geneva did to his spiritual ancestor, Michael Servetus.  

The Logic of Confessing To Be a Racist (or a Witch)

Here is an example of the kind of thing that scares me about the current state of racial discourse in this country. On the surface, these celebrities are coming out for important issues, sensitivity to others, opposing racism, and stopping police violence. I agree with them on all of these issues. One might even say that I agree with them so much that I should ignore objections to some of the wording. These are clearly, passionate people whose hearts are in the right place.

What I see, though, is an attempt to confess to racism as a means of protecting oneself from the charge of racism. This is not taking responsibility for injustice in our society. If it were, these actors would be donating the vast majority of their salaries to charity. This looks like Pontius Pilating oneself and allowing other people, not as privileged, to take the fall for an absurd charge, mainly that if you told a joke that did not go over well or refrained from denouncing someone else, you are responsible for cops shooting black people in the street. What makes this line of thinking so convincing is that these privileged white celebrities seem to be admitting to their own role in this process and confessing. One might think that if they are admitting that they used to be at least a little bit complicit in racism then it must be true and this country must be awash in racism.

Any attempt to counter this argument by saying that it is ridiculous to claim that "black people are being slaughtered in the streets" opens one up to the accusation of covert racism. A true anti-racist would know not to get caught up in semantics in the face of the larger important truth that American society is racist. These celebrities care so much about racism that they are willing to say things that racists will jump on as factually incorrect. If they were interested in looking good, they would have been more precise with their words. Of course, only a racist would try to question whether some of the rhetoric is over the top in order to cause people to doubt whether racism is really a problem.

This line of thinking becomes significantly less convincing when you realize that it is the basic model of confession from witch trials. You are accused of something absurd like having sex with the Devil. Of course, the real charge is not a satanic orgy but whether or not you support the witch-finder's claim that eccentric and difficult old ladies are really witches in disguise. From this perspective, not only are these people really satanic but anyone who questions this fact is also with Satan. Witch-finders are such godly men that they open themselves to the mockery of skeptics, who are also always secret Satanists. If the witch-finders were in it for themselves, they would have moderated their claims to make themselves sound more reasonable even at the price of not baiting the true witches into revealing themselves.

The fact that a witch trial is not really about factual guilt but about supporting the right team allows the witch-finder to argue that even innocent people should confess. Either you are guilty of witchcraft or you are not. If you are guilty then obviously you should confess and name other people. We will then forgive you as we are good Christians. If you are not guilty, you should still confess and name the people we tell you to name because that is what a truly innocent person who is really on our side would do. Denying that you are a witch is actually worse than being a witch. A witch who confesses at least is showing remorse. Claiming you are innocent simply means that not only are you a witch but an obdurate one at that who deserves to die. Your plan, even if it costs you your life, is to cause people to question whether or not there really are witches, allowing Satan to act unchecked. This is in contrast to the confessed witch who offers "undeniable" proof that witches exist. Why would someone confess to being a witch if they were innocent?

If this sounds implausible to you that the modern people untainted by superstition could operate like this understand that the Stalinist show trials ran on this logic. The Party, under the leadership of Comrade Stalin, has accused you of betraying the Revolution and of being a foreign agent. You deny this? Are you claiming that the Party made a mistake? That is even worse. You are denying the very essence of revolutionary solidarity and not just giving in to momentary treason out of greed and pride.

It has been suggested that many of the victims of the Stalinist purges consciously martyred themselves by confessing to ludicrous charges. They confessed and died rather than provide ammunition to opponents to anti-Communists who claimed that the Soviet Union was a tyrannical state that arrested innocent people. Instead, these former Communist leaders died to help strengthen the people's faith in the Party that it was always right even when it appeared to be wrong. Ultimate faith is when you declare your belief in something that so defies reason that only a person who has totally submitted their mind to the authority of a particular institution could successfully do it. You may have a difficult time believing that revolutionary heroes could be traitors but you know to have faith in the Party. And then, lo and behold, the accused confess. It must be true. Why would innocent people confess? You see, the Party is always right.

One of the signs of a witch hunt is that it quickly becomes clear that the issue at stake is not about particular facts on the ground but whether or not you are on the right side of some Manichean struggle. Unlike those on the Left who literally believe we are in danger of falling into a Fascist state and that if you disagree with their approach to handling racism, you are guilty of racism, I do not believe that Leftists are necessarily crypto-Stalinists nor do you have to agree with me on much of anything to not be a mass murderer. I believe that the world is a lot more complicated than good people who are on my side and the bad people who are not. There is no pledge of allegiance that you can say that will make you one of my good guys nor is there a confession you can offer that will take away the taint of being one of my bad guys. The good news is that you are not in danger of suddenly falling from my good graces. You are allowed to be a person doing the best you can with the limited amount of information and attention you have.

I Am Traditionally Observant, Not Orthodox: My Religious Evolution (Part I)

In discussing how I went from being a conservative to being a libertarian, the critical subtext was my religious identity, which itself changed in ways that mirrored my political journey. It seems worthwhile to explicitly set forth that side of the story. Just as my high school self did not realize that he was not a conventional conservative, he did not realize that he was not Haredi. As he moved left religiously as he did politically in college, he was no longer able to ignore this fact. That being said, much as I never made a clean break with conservatism and my libertarian turn was an attempt to rebel without any desire to leave, my religious thinking has been dominated by the simultaneous intellectual rejection of Haredi Orthodoxy and emotional desire to remain within the fold.

In retrospect, I was precisely the kind of kid one would expect to abandon the observance of Judaism. I did not fit in with yeshiva schools. Whether it was the Chabad Yeshiva of Pittsburgh in middle school or Torah Vodaath and the Yeshiva of Greater Washington in high school, I had a terrible relationship with my classmates and was actively bullied. Granted, this likely had more to do with my then undiagnosed autism than with Haredi Orthodoxy. (I first heard about Asperger Syndrome from my father at the end of high school but did not get a diagnosis until graduate school.)

Furthermore, I was an academically gifted kid with no interest in Gemara. Worse, by the time I reached high school, I developed a mental block for the subject to the extent that the several hours a day, I was forced to spend on the topic were a complete waste of time for me that I spent mostly starring into space and twiddling my thumbs. 

It was not as if the idea of abandoning observance was unthinkable. I had ready examples in my older brother and my mother, who both stopped being religious during this time. It was not as if this poisoned my relationship with them. So, why did I not end up like them? One factor was that neither of them had the kind of influence over me as my father, who stood for me as a model for me as to what it meant to be a sane and reasonable religious person. I saw the Haredi world through the lens of my father and never considered that he was a highly sui generis individual. 

With my mother, one could say that not being religious was good for her emotional health. For this reason, I never held a grudge against her for her actions. That being said, I never really imagined that I would be happier if I were not religious. The reason for this, and this is the crucial point here, is that I never felt wronged by the system and bore no grudges. Even if I was bullied by other students, the rabbis were always good to me. 

This marks a major difference between me and my brother. His yeshivas refused to allow him to consume secular media and threw him out when he did not comply. He was wronged by the system and was, therefore, justified in outright rebelling. By contrast, I was treated with great leniency. For example, when I was at Torah Vodaath, the dorm counselor wrote me a note to allow me to get a library card at the Brooklyn Public Library. No one stopped me from reading books like The Godfather, Exorcist, and Pyscho. And it is not like I even had to hide the books. I had them out openly to see. An older friend objected to my reading a biography of Mother Teresa. Beyond that, no one said a word to me or tried to confiscate any of these books. 

I honestly had no idea that I was doing anything wrong even from the perspective of the school administration. This gave me a sense that there were different kinds of Haredi Jews. Some preferred to avoid secular books. I could understand why secular knowledge might not be good for everyone. And then there were Haredim like me whose strength was precisely in secular matters. We were all working together as part of the Torah camp. 

Even now, I do not think I was completely wrong on this point. The Haredi world is perfectly equipped to tolerate eccentric individuals with peculiar interests, including secular books. For example, a Haredi relative once told me that he thought there was something about my soul that I needed to read things like Shakespeare. This position works as long as the individuals in question are personally observant and never organize themselves around any kind of movement with an ideology. 

So, I could have been an eccentric Haredi with an autodidact's academic education. As long as no one kicked me out or made me feel unwelcome, I was going to try to work within the system. If I had intellectual disagreements and doubts, I was going to work through them. Listening to Rabbi Avigdor Miller tapes in my room so I could yell at him did not challenge my faith because I honestly believed that I was the mainstream Haredi Jew and he was a lunatic cult leader. Haredim were people like my father. He did not raise me with Avidor Miller Judaism so it could not really be Haredi. I readily grant that it is the mark of insanity to insist that everyone else is driving on the wrong side of the road and that I, to this very day, have a particular talent for such arguments. Clearly, I was not looking for a reason to leave. On the contrary, I was set on finding a reason to stay.  

It probably helped that the Torah Vodaath dorm was not designed for policing the actions of a non-post-high school kid, from outside of New York who never had been made to feel guilty about reading books. Almost by definition, if you were a post-high school student there, you already bought into the school's ideology and did not need to have the rules explained or be forced to follow them. It probably also helped that, as both my father and grandfather were alumni of the school, the name Chinn commanded a certain respect. My brother had the misfortune of going to schools with no connection to the Chinn family, designed to police the actions of high school students and expel those who refused to comply.

There are two important lessons, I believe, that Jewish educators should take from my story. First, there needs to be a track for academically gifted kids that does not involve Gemara. You cannot have this sense of Gemara for every boy unless they are drug addicts in danger of falling prey to the streets. Second, do not underestimate the importance of making kids feel that Judaism is their home in which they are loved and accepted for who they are. I would even say that this is even more important than offering apologetics. I was a pretty intellectual kid but if my teachers had tried to convince me that Torah was true, I would have rebelled. Instead, I was offered a place in which I felt accepted. I did not need anyone to defend Judaism for me because I was already prepared to do it myself. Of course, Haredi Judaism was true. I was a good smart kid and I was Haredi so how could it be wrong? 

(To be continued ...)