Holy Poverty: Finding the Language for Religious Asceticism

Holly is a homeless woman who used to station herself on the corner of Lake Ave. and Green St. in Pasadena. There, she would spend the day sitting in her chair, reading, telling people that God loved them, and that they were going the wrong way down a one-way street. (For those readers unfamiliar with Pasadena, Green St. goes east and Union St. goes west.)  I used to regularly stop to chat with Holly on my 3.5-mile walk to the Chabad of Pasadena on Shabbat. As a conservative libertarian, I learned a lot from Holly as she failed to fit into the usual stereotypes of the homeless. She was always polite, never yelling at anyone. Also, she never struck me as anything less than perfectly sane. She was not some kind of lazy parasite living off of society. On the contrary, she gave more to us who interacted with her than we ever gave to her.

It is important not to glamorize Holly. There was nothing easy about her existence. Furthermore, from what I could piece together from what she told me about her life, she came to her situation through a combination of unfortunate circumstances and poor life choices. Doing her justice requires that one keeps from either pitying her or making her into some kind of saint. She deserves respect on her own terms as someone who actively chose to be where she was, seeing her daily routine on the street corner as having value.

It speaks to our spiritual poverty that it is difficult to categorize Holly. My model would be the apostolic poverty of the medieval Franciscans, combining extreme asceticism with community engagement. The Franciscan rejected personal property but instead of living in a monastery would go out into the world to live on alms, modeling himself on Jesus' first followers. Critical to Franciscan success was that, while apostolic poverty proved to be a hand grenade in the face of the Church, one should not think of the friars as a straightforward rejection of the growing middle class of lay Christians from whom they drew most of their members. On the contrary, by supporting the friar as the embodiment of true Christian living, one could take part in the life of Christ in a way that most could never accomplish themselves. (How many people can ever literally take up the Cross and follow Jesus, suffering as he did?)

It should be clear that this model of holy poverty is distinct from Haredi poverty. For one thing, holy poverty can never be the basis for a society but only the free choice of individuals. As an extension of this, holy poverty, as a charisma granted to individuals, cannot involve marriage or children. What kind of monster could inflict such poverty on a child?

The medieval world would have known how to appreciate Holly. Medievals could understand that the poor were blessed as incarnations of godliness. Holly could receive a habit so that anyone who saw her on her corner would immediately know that she was doing important religious work and was not simply a bum leeching off society.

We moderns have to overcome not only the wall of secularism but also the Protestant Reformation. Secularism affects even people who consider themselves religious by getting them to think in terms of religious and secular spheres. Religion is something you do at home or in Church. Where can Holly fit in except as an object of pity and charity? It is not as if she was a missionary for some denomination. She was engaged in her own spiritual project of embracing the poverty God granted her with love.

It is Protestantism that bears the ultimate blame. Luther, the Augustinian friar, declared war on religious orders in the name of the equality of all believers. He could not stand the notion that some people were better than others and that there could be spiritual heroism that we regular mortals can only stand in awe of. Everyone had to be equal in their inability to perform works and their complete dependence on grace. The irony is that Luther wanted to bring the sacred out of the cloister and elevate everyone to the level of priest. What he brought about was the wiping out of the kind of sacred space that could illuminate the mundane. The fact that the post-Vatican II Catholic Church has effectively ditched the notion of special sanctity for those in religious orders means that Catholics today are also spiritual orphans.

I do not know what happened to Holly. I hope that she got into some housing program and is off the streets. That being said, the selfish part of me misses her. Some people are too valuable to waste on something other than sitting on street corners, informing drivers about God's love and that they are moving in the wrong direction.

Teaching Latin at a Chabad School

Dr. Jacob Ackerman attended a Chabad grade school in Newark, NJ during the 1950s where he served as the editor of the school newspaper. As an example of what he wrote about he mentions, "Mr. Posner, the Latin teacher, was out for three days because of a cold." So it used to be acceptable for a Chabad school to teach Latin. I am curious as to what texts they read. There is not a lot of Latin literature left if you exclude sex, violence and the gods. For me, that was what made Prof. Feldman's Latin classes fun.

Can the Benedict Option Survive Nationalism?

Previously, I discussed Yoram Hazony's defense of nationalism as an alternative to a universal empire. I believe that people in the liberty movement should take Hazony seriously as someone working within the classical liberal tradition. From my perspective as a libertarian anarchist, I fail to see where the dividing is between a tribe and a nation or between a nation and a universal empire. If Mormons in Utah wished to leave the union, would that be tribalism or a nation trying to break free of an empire? Clearly, our Mormons have less in common with liberal New Yorkers than liberal New Yorkers have in common with liberal Canadians.

Rod Dreher is another writer I respect who has joined with the New Nationalists. As someone who, like Hazony, attempts to pursue a non-authoritarian live and let live form of nationalism, Dreher is vulnerable to similar lines of attack. Moreover, as the author of The Benedict Option, Dreher's embrace of nationalism seems particularly suicidal.

A foundational premise of classical liberal political theory is that you should assume that any system of government you create will be taken over by your opponents. In a similar vein, Dreher's starting point is that it is the other side who has the power. Christians and other religious conservatives have lost the culture wars and are facing a society that is actively hostile to them. Because of this, Christians should abandon politics, as not even the Republican Party will save the situation, and concentrate on building strong local community institutions such as private schools so that their children will have a chance at resisting the lure of secularism.

I am reminded of the anarchist criticism of Ayn Rand. How is Galt's Gultch not an anarcho-secessionist state? Galt and his followers reject the United States government for its interference with private enterprise so they build their own community in complete defiance of federal and state law. Similarly, I fail to see how any Benedict Option community can avoid being stridently anti-nationalism and even pro-secessionism.

I could understand if Dreher was a conventional social conservative activist warning of the need to stop liberals by appealing to a "silent majority." Under such circumstances, there would be a nation to appeal to. For Dreher, though, the real America consists of liberal elites who see Christian sexual ethics as the moral equivalence of Nazism and conservatives who reject the left but have already become untied from their heritage. In a battle between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, Christianity will lose. Dreher reluctantly supports Trump on the logic that he gives Christians several more years before Democrats can point-blank ban them from openly working in the public sphere.

I can understand if Dreher wants to support Hungary as a nation-state as there is a plausible case to be made that there really is a majority of Hungarians who identify with Hungary's Christian past. Even if they are not active churchgoers, they can be rallied, under the right leadership, to resist being turned into a mere province of the European Union. (To be clear, as the grandson of Hungarian Holocaust survivors, Hungarian nationalism terrifies me.) Whatever Dreher's hopes for Hungary as a conservative Christian nation-state, this is not an option for the United States as a whole (as opposed to individual states if they seceded). Where are the Christians inspired to bring about a new great awakening built around Calvinist republican virtue or Methodist evangelical populism and not merely the desire to "own the libs?"

A Benedict Option community can only survive if it rejects not only nationalism but even the very identification with the country itself. If your children think of themselves as Americans, what are you going to tell them when National Pride Day becomes a Federal holiday? One thinks of the example of Haredi Jews in Kiryas Joel or New Square. They do not think of themselves as Americans. They live in the United States and are grateful to God that they are not persecuted but the outside world is "goyish" and is to be ignored. Keep in mind that, historically, Jews were not citizens of their host countries. Instead, Jews belonged to semi-autonomous kehillot, which negotiated with and paid taxes to the non-Jewish authorities in exchange for protection. One is on far better ground, Jewishly, advocating for the return of kehillot or the Ottoman millet system than Hazony is when engaging in apologetics for nationalism.

On a side note, let me add that I hold little hope for Modern Orthodox Judaism to survive under Benedict Option conditions. Modern Orthodoxy has always been the dream that one could be a doctor, lawyer, and even a public intellectual (like Yoram Hazony) and still be an openly practicing Jew. The moment that Modern Orthodox kids are no longer accepted in the Ivies, Modern Orthodox schools will be discredited as the teachers will have failed to deliver on their promises to students. The only options left will be the abandonment of Judaism or Haredism.

Once you no longer identify with the state, either intellectually or even emotionally, it is hard to avoid falling into the "heresy" of secessionism. What is Dreher's plan for when the government (or Google) makes the Benedict Option illegal, say by demanding that all children attend LGBTQ-approved schools? If he intends to pursue civil disobedience, he will implicitly be accepting the anarchist premise that one's personal conscience is more important than the Law. The only reason why the American Civil Rights Movement never came to advocate the kind of anarchism that is explicit in writers like Thoreau and Tolstoy is that it was still premised on the notion of sympathetic white Americans who could be reached by rhetoric couched in American terms. This is something that a Benedict Option community, by definition, could never do as the whole reason we are pursuing the Benedict Option in the first place is that we no longer believe that our ideas can get a fair hearing in general society.

I agree with Hazony and Dreher, perhaps too much. The problem is that it seems as if I am willing to take their conclusions in the opposite direction. This has troubling implications. As someone who still identifies emotionally with conservatism, I wish to believe the best of the New Nationalists that they still fundamentally believe in personal liberty and in markets. I am a big tent kind of person, who believes in allowing many different kinds of projects to operate even if they seem at cross purposes. This is only possible as long as all parties accept the right of everyone to pursue their own good in their own way as long as they are not engaging in physical violence. I do not want to believe that the New Nationalism is a conspiracy to force conservative values on other people. For a non-authoritarian nationalism to work, at some level, it must reckon with secessionism. The New Nationalists are free to follow their path as long as they are willing to grant me the freedom to follow mine.

Does the YMCA Objectify Women?

The sign at my local YMCA features a woman in a tank top and a bra with the caption: "free motivation with every membership."

Let me start by being charitable to the Y. I assume the intention of this ad is that the Y offers professional trainers to help you reach your fitness goals. Of course, I am enough of a heterosexual man to consider an alternative explanation. Come to the Y where you can find motivation by staring at beautiful women who are just slightly underdressed so you do not have to feel guilty about it. (Unless you are of a prudish disposition. In which case, the sight of such a picture bothers you enough that you feel motivated to write a short blog post.)

The problem here is that I have a hard time believing that no one at the Y involved in this promotion considered the latter interpretation. If this were really about the first interpretation, the point could have been made with a sweating fat guy. So the Y cannot play innocent here. I am not so naive as to believe that, in the 21st century, the Young Men's Christian Association cares whether young men have sinful thoughts. I would have thought, though, that they cared about objectifying women.

The Epicureanism of the Good Place's Finale

(Spoilers Ahead)

As much as I love The Good Place, its ending struck me as anti-religious in much the same way that Charles Dickens' Christmas Carol is anti-Christian. At first glance, it sounds preposterous to consider a Christmas Carol anti-Christian. What could be more Christian than a greedy miser having his soul saved through the power of Christmas? This is true until you realize what is missing from the story, Jesus. We can assume that the mean Scrooge at the beginning of the story has not accepted Jesus as his savor. The kindly Scrooge at the end of the story does not seem to have accepted Jesus either. In keeping with the Victorian era, Dickens subversively offered a Christianity stripped of anything actually Christian.

Likewise, on the surface, Good Place sounds like a straightforward religious tale. It is about the afterlife in which people are judged based on how they lived on Earth. From the beginning, it is made clear that we are dealing with a non-denominational heaven where no one gets in simply for having been a member of the right religion. This is a minor issue compared to the absence of God.

When our heroes finally get to the real Good Place, they are faced with the problem that this heaven is actually not much of an improvement over the Bad Place. A world in which every wish is granted and every pleasure instantly gratified becomes mind-numbingly dull and its own form of torture. Eleanor's solution is to allow the residents the option of ending their own existence when they have had enough. This sets up the inevitable final episode (one of the finest in the history of television) where the characters, after however many Jeremy Bearimys, come to that state of peace with themselves where they have done all they could ever want and make the decision to walk through the door and move on.

What we have here is the standard argument against pleasure, all pleasure is ephemeral, simply applied to the afterlife. The show's solution is merely the Epicurean solution to not having an afterlife. By accepting that you will cease to exist, you can find meaning in your limited lifespan and even cease fearing death; if death is merely a natural part of life, it is not evil to be rejected but a good to be embraced. Jason's going away party for himself, in fact, reminded me of David Hume's last few months. Even though he knew he was dying, Scotland's most infamous unbeliever remained in good cheer and dining with friends. He wanted his death to be a model of serenity even without the hope of an afterlife.

What is missing here is the existence of a deity and the possibility of having a relationship with him. To believe that God created human beings means that humans can only truly be happy in him. This does not mean that material pleasure is bad. On the contrary, as God also created the world and everything in it as a means of bringing us to him, nothing worldly can be, in of itself, bad. The problem comes the moment we value something, besides God, for its own sake then it becomes an idol and needs to be smashed.

The same problem that applies to earthly pleasure also works for heavenly pleasure. Jason wanting to play the ultimate game of Madden Football receives no elevation when it is carried out in heaven. The same applies to Tahani wanting to make a Nick Offerman-approved chair or even to Chidi wanting to become a great moral philosopher, teaching the ultimate class of Ethics of the Afterlife to a room full of philosophy professors. All of this will eventually become meaningless without God, leaving suicide as the only option.

In truth, this makes sense for a show about ethics as ethics is fundamentally in conflict with theism. As we know from the Euthyphro dilemma, ethics can only be meaningful if it is a system outside of God that God is answerable to. Anything else is simply God's will. The more repulsive the action, the more we are being "truly" ethical by submitting our will to his (think the Westboro Baptist Church). The show referenced Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling and that it is about taking a leap of faith. What bears mentioning is that this leap of faith is precisely the rejection of the ethical.

This conflict is at the heart of the Old Testament. Abraham is morally superior to Noah precisely because he challenges God's morality in destroying Sodom. The prophets challenge the sacrificial cult under the banner of justice for the downtrodden. This raises the question of the purpose of ritual. A God who values righteousness should not care at all about ritual. How do you build a religion around such a God?

Come to think of it, perhaps this could have been the basis for a good continuation of the show. Our characters, having nothing meaningful to exist for, walk through the door and meet God, who offers himself to them now that they have exhausted all alternatives. (God should not be depicted. Instead, we should have a place of supreme beauty and the people living there should describe voices in their heads as if the place is speaking to them.) Chidi goes full-blown Lucifer because he cannot submit himself to a force outside of his ethical framework. He then recruits Sean to help him create an alternative heaven for those whom God has cast aside. By the end of the show, this alternative heaven will have turned into the Bad Place with the inmates being tortured with philosophy lectures and extreme ethical conundrums.

Liberal Lisa and Shylock’s Dilemma

In an earlier post, I talked about Shylock's dilemma that the very act of pursuing Antonio makes Shylock vulnerable even as he is right on the facts and is justified in demanding a pound of flesh to be cut from Antonio's body. Here I would like to consider the implications of this concept for our contemporary political discourse. I would argue that Shylock offers us a lesson on how to attack modern liberals.

The prototypical modern liberal has very little obviously in common with a bitter old vengeful Jew like Shylock. Instead, we should think of Lisa Simpson. What makes her tick is that she is a child who is not only smarter than the people around her but she is also aware of this to the extent that it forms the basis for her self-identity. As both the town of Springfield and the Simpson family are both highly flawed, it is not difficult for Lisa to articulate a critique of her society and even suggest ways to improve things. That being said, it is hardly obvious that a Lisa-run Springfield would be an improvement and there is even an episode in which Lisa is part of a triumvirate of the town’s smartest people with disastrous results. Despite this fact, Lisa sees herself as morally superior. Her intelligence and her support for change become the equivalent of if she really is making the world a better place. Since she believes that her ideas would improve things, it is the fault of those people not submitting to her genius that things have not worked so it should count to her credit as if she had done what she imagines she can.

This self-righteous confidence, above any particulars of her arguments, makes Lisa a formidable opponent. Like Shylock, she has the moral advantage of being right in her essential claim. No one can seriously defend Springfield as any kind of ideal. Unlike Shylock, she has the advantage of it not being obvious that Lisa getting her way will lead to cold-blooded murder. Ultimately, Lisa is likable and charming; the kind of person others might submit to of their own free will.

This Lisa model explains how many people come to the left as teenagers who believe that their ability to criticize society not only makes them right but also grants them moral superiority even if they do nothing productive to combat the ills they see. It also explains the left's veneration of literal teenage activists like David Hogg and Greta Thunberg and the widespread belief that such people are going to change the world despite the dismal historical record of child-led crusades going back to the literal Children's Crusade. This is how the world is supposed to work so it must be true.

Students are supported in such thinking by liberal teachers whose belief in the mythical child remains untainted by their daily interaction with actual children. Thus, students can enjoy the anarchic thrill of taking on the establishment while enjoying the full protection of that establishment, fostering the morally dangerous habit of believing in one's righteousness without ever having to pay the price for it.

What can Shylock teach us about the vulnerabilities of Lisa Simpson? Like Shylock, Lisa's moral power lies in our willingness to allow her to play her game of justice advocate with house money. If we agree with her policies all the better. If we disagree with some of the specific policy details, we are supposed to still admire her fierce idealism.

What happens to Lisa's moral credibility if we not only refuse to count her idealism as a virtue but even turn it against her? A person who is quick to pass judgment on others should be held to the strictest standards of rectitude without charity. Shylock is ultimately trapped by his very claim to justice. The more he claims that his side is just to the point that he should be able to take Antonio's life the more Portia has cause to examine him with all the ruthlessness of justice. The slight problem of shedding Antonio's blood is enough to bring down the entire edifice of Shylock's cause. Similarly, Lisa's very idealism puts her on trial. The moment we disagree with Lisa about anything, we become justified in rejecting her in totum. She is someone who has dared to consider themselves wise and righteous enough to claim authority over others without ever having paid the price to make such claims meaningful.

Imagine a world in which idealists were held to such a strict standard that they could be rejected for even minor mistakes. For example, human rights activists would have to either make no mistakes relevant to their cause or be a hostis humani generis. Under such circumstances, no sane person could ever risk taking up such a cross. Our political discourse would essentially be left as a struggle between Burkean conservatives and libertarians. Both sides take, as their starting point, that they lack the personal righteousness to be entrusted with revolutionizing society. Burkeans would argue that we should follow tradition as something less morally corrupt than themselves. Libertarians would counter that, while they are also too corrupt to be trusted with power, it is their right to be left alone to suffer the consequences of their own flaws.

The Secret Surprise Ending to the Good Place: They Accept Jesus as Their Savior

Critical for this fourth and final season of the Good Place has been the discovery at the end of last season that no one has managed to get into the Good Place for hundreds of years. As society has grown more complex, it has become impossible for humans to calculate the full consequences of their actions, inevitably leading to mistakes. While the show has avoided directly talking about Christianity, this revelation fits well into a Christian critique of the Pharisaic model of reward and punishment in which one attempts to perform good deeds and avoid sins in the hope that, in the afterlife, one will have earned enough points that God would owe them an eternity in heaven. Once we admit that all of us are sinners and can never earn our way into heaven, it becomes pointless to talk about being righteous. Critical for Christianity is that it is impossible to be a good Christian. There was one good Christian in all of history and he was crucified on Calvery. If another such good Christian existed, Christianity would be refuted as Jesus' death could no longer be justified. All of humanity would have to be told that, in theory, they could have been perfect like this one human and must be damned for failing to live up to this livable standard.

With this in mind, it would be fantastic if the show could end with a Christian twist. The attempt to rewrite the rules of the afterlife fails and the Bad Place people convince the judge to let them have control over humanity with the promise that if some human managed to achieve some impossibly high score then they would agree to renounce their right to torture all the humans in their clutches.

Eleanor: If only there could be a perfectly righteous man (or woman), who would lead a totally perfect life and save all of us.

Chidi: That is impossible. No human could possibly be so perfectly righteous. Someone that righteous could no longer be considered a person. He would be God.

Jason: Oh, I know. God should totally knock up some chick. That boy would then also kinda be God and a dude at the same time. So he could then do stuff like be perfect for all of us. I mean, I tried once to be good one time back in Jacksonville. It was hard.

Tahani: Don't be ridiculous. That would be like the time my friend Harry married some American and moved to Canada. "Look at me, I am just a common millionaire like the rest of you."

Michael: How much love would God need to possess in order to give over his only Son so the world could have forgiveness?

Janet: I know everything and not even I know the answer. It is clearly a lot.

Sean: I would just love to see God try. We will make his Son live in a Middle Eastern country for thirty-three years among lepers and tax collectors. Then we will have the humans betray him and hammer nails into him. By the end, he will be calling out "my God, my God. Why have you forsaken me?" Let's see him love those humans torturing him and pray for their forgiveness.

Eleanor: I love you. But if someone were to be tortured to death and go to the Bad Place for my sins, I would totally accept them as my savior.

Chidi: You know, I actually agree with you.

Not that I expect any of this to happen but it would certainly surprise people.

Please Take My Wallet: I Do Not Want to Kill You

This post is in honor of my sister and her husband at Masada Tactical in Baltimore.

I prefer markets to government action not just on the practical grounds that markets usually produce better results but on the moral principle that there is something inherently violent about government, even liberal-democratic ones, in ways that markets are not. Arguing from principle is important here because, for most things, I really have no idea what would happen if markets took over from the government. If the FDA were abolished tomorrow, all drugs were legalized and all people in jail for drug-related offenses were released with their records expunged, what would happen? It very well might fail. If that is the case I would still want to try as a noble, if Quixotic experiment, because not threatening to kill people over what substances they put in their bodies is the right thing to do. We will learn from our mistakes in order to do better next time.

This idea that markets are non-violent while governments are inherently violent goes against the hard left which sees the actions of democratic governments as inherently peacefully as they represent the will of the "people" in contrast to markets which offer people the "liberty" of sleeping under a bridge and starving. From this perspective, the Soviet Union, despite murdering millions of people, was a noble experiment whose mistakes should be learned from in order to try socialism again. 

A further argument can be made that markets certainly can make use of literal violence. Shylock demanding his pound of flesh for Antonio's failure to return a loan, made under free-market conditions, is threatening violence. So what makes government actions inherently tainted by violence to the extent that even a politician wanting to raise taxes to fund education for children is the moral equivalent of a gangster because he risks having to use violence when businessmen can also find themselves having to use violence to enforce market agreements.

It occurred to me that my sister and her husband provide an answer. They teach martial arts to both police officers and civilians. You might think that the purpose of their training is that you should go around trashing bozos. Certainly, you should beat up a mugger who demands your wallet as it is your moral duty to defend your property, right? On the contrary, students are explicitly told to hand over their wallets. If someone tries to abduct you that is something else but for a wallet, it is not worth you getting killed or you killing the guy. Keep in mind that the legal right to self-defense is not any kind of blank check. As a private individual, you are obligated to not be a vigilante looking for trouble and when trouble finds you, you are supposed to try to back away.

Being in the market allows you to step back and not demand your full "pound of flesh" rights. You have the option and even the imperative to let the mugger have your wallet even though he is a thief. Similarly, if someone cheats you, the solution is not to do business with them in the future. Now, this is important; you are not trapped into needing to make higher moral points. We are not concerned that if thieves are allowed to get away their crimes people will lose their respect for property. It is alright to be "selfish" and only be concerned with the fact that blood feuds are bad for your bottom line.

This is different from government action where police officers are obligated to risk violence even to stop petty crimes. A private citizen can and should walk away from a situation before it degenerates into violence even at a financial loss. A police officer has no such choice. He must be willing to stop unruly motorists even knowing that such a confrontation may lead to killing that person. This concern is particularly true when dealing with secession. A government that is not willing to gun down unarmed children in order to stop a secessionist movement is not really a government. Government officials do not have the option of saying we disagree with secession and we wish you stayed with us, and we are really in the right, but keeping the country united is not worth killing for.

This distinction was made particularly clear to me with the recent attack on the American embassy in Iraq. If it were a private corporation like McDonald's under attack, no one would question the reasonableness of McDonald's simply shutting its doors in Iraq as the country is simply too dangerous to do business in. Why can't we close the embassy and pull out all American personnel from Iraq? Whether we should or not, staying clearly means killing and not just people attacking the embassy but bombing the Iranian backed militias and possibly even Iran itself. Yes, the United States can pull out instead of pursuing mass retaliation, much as Reagan pulled out of Lebanon, but the political price is real. This is not the case with McDonald's which can operate in Iraq, despite the danger, without any assumption of failure if it pulls out its staff instead of going to war.

My point is not to bash the police and the military. They do a necessary job by putting themselves in harm's way and, for that, they deserve the respect of society. But it is the fact that their job is defined by them placing themselves in situations where they may have to kill that needs to always be kept in focus. We must always be willing to ask the question of "why" to those members of the political class who put our servicemen into danger.

I am not a pacifist. I am willing to defend myself when backed against a wall. That being said, I can interact with other people without the subtext of threatening to kill them because if you choose to not cooperate I will back away and let you win even when I am right. The government does not have that moral luxury. It can never back down. It must always assert its right even at the cost of human life.

Anti-Semitism as a Plot to Kill Jews: Two Counter-Arguments

In the previous post, I made the argument that to be an active anti-Zionist, in practice, means to be complicit in a plot to kill Jews. As such, anti-Zionism should be deemed a form of anti-Semitism. I would like to consider here two counter-arguments. The first is that Israel really is guilty of genocide and ethnic cleansing. Therefore, it cannot be anti-Semitic to tell the truth and stand up for human rights. The second is that I should hold myself to the same standard. If I wish to consider myself self a Zionist who is not anti-Palestinian I should be willing to distance myself from Jewish supremacist Zionists.

What is interesting about the argument that Israel is, in fact, a genocidal regime and therefore it is not anti-Semitic to say so is that, like Princess Leia calling the Empire evil, it is not an argument but a confession. Of course, anti-Semites believe that they are right. The Nazis believed they were right and their logic was unassailable. If you believed that a Spectra-like organization was plotting to take over the world and that the leadership of this group consisted primarily of Scotsmen, you should kill all Scottish people, including little children. Anyone who objects to such genocide is not a humanitarian but a hostis humani generis (an enemy of the human race). Clearly, a definition of anti-Semitism that rested on whether we honestly believe that Judaism is a conspiracy to destroy the world is going to be pretty worthless. We need a definition that is practical and to the point. For example, are you trying to kill Jews?

Readers may recall the dramatic courtroom climax of A Few Good Men in which Tom Cruise's character cross-exams Jack Nickolson's Colonel Jessup as to whether he ordered a man to be Code Reded, hazed.

The scene relies on the idea that there are two conversations that we could have about Code Reds. The first is whether it is sometimes necessary for soldiers to do things that violate conventional morality like torturing fellow soldiers for violating military protocol. It is quite possible that the Colonel is right. In an actual war, we would probably wink and nod at charges of physical abuse and we would not be having this trial in the first place. In an ideal world perhaps, even in peacetime, lawyers who have not been in combat would be grateful to real soldiers and not question how that protection is provided.

The problem for the Colonel is that he is being baited into having this conversation in a military court where this such talk is absolutely counterproductive to his cause. The relevant conversation for the court is the simple fact of whether or not he ordered a Code Red. If he gave those orders, however right he may have been, he is going to jail. Sometimes, one can be right and still lose. Thus, the Colonel's defense becomes his confession.

There is a further lesson in all this. We know that the Colonel is guilty the moment he makes it obvious that he approves of Code Reds regardless of their legality. Even the prosecutor, early in the film, seems to acknowledge the likelihood that the Code Red order was given. This is why he offers a very generous plea bargain that the soldiers only turn down because they refuse, as a matter of principle, to admit they did anything wrong.

In truth, it would not have mattered if the Colonel had actually given the order or even if that order was ever followed. The moment, he allowed his subordinates to believe that Code Reds were acceptable, he was already guilty as even his order not to do Code Reds would be interpreted as ordering one with a wink and a nudge.

If you say that Zionists control the government you are guilty of murdering Jews even before a member of your audience carries out the act. To be guilty of conspiracy, you do not have to actually order anyone murdered.

The second argument is much more challenging. Should I not admit that I am an anti-Palestinian, plotting to kill Palestinians in alliance with Jewish Supremacists? The tempting defense is that the Palestinians are trying to kill us. As we have seen, this is not a defense but a confession.

The only solution is to plead guilty. I may quibble with parts of the Israeli right-wing agenda, such as the nation-state laws, travel bans against BDS supporters, and keeping Netanyahu in office, as I think they are counter-productive. At the end of the day though, I honestly believe that, at present, ending Israel as a Jewish State would, in practice, mean the mass murder of Jews. Similarly, giving the Palestinians an honest state, one in which they could receive weapons from Iran and stop the Israeli army from pursuing terrorists across the border, is also an invitation to make Jewish blood cheap again. This means that our options are the mass expulsion/murder of Palestinians or the continuation of some form of occupation.

Because of this, I readily acknowledge that Palestinians have good reason to hate me and even to kill me. I have entered into a conspiracy to kill them. Make no mistake about it, a world in which people like me are left alive is a world in which Palestinians will have to choose between giving up almost all of their aims of national liberation or dying.

In my defense, I can still claim to be different from most of my anti-Zionist opponents in that I am honest about the moral cost of my Zionism. I do not claim to be some kind of humanitarian. There are some important implications to this. Because I recognize that I am talking about killing people, you can expect me to hesitate and question myself as the consequences of being wrong are nothing less than damnation. Also, because I accept that we are talking about killing because I do not see any better options, I can empathize with the Palestinian who turns to terrorism because he feels his back to the wall. This makes peace possible. You can sign an agreement with your enemy as long as you recognize his fundamental humanity.

Why Is the Rebellion Justified?

In honor of the new Star Wars movie, I would like to pose a question to my non-anarchist readers; why is the Rebellion (whether the original one or the Resistance) justified? Specifically, why are you willing to defend the Rebellion and not the Separatists of the prequels? If you think about it, the Separatists have a much stronger case. The goal of the Separatists is to create a separate government from the Old Republic and live in peace with it, not destroy it. The Rebellion seeks to destroy the Empire.

The tempting argument is to say that the Old Republic is simply incompetent while the Empire is evil. The problem is that this argument actually strengthens the imperial position. First, by making a pragmatic argument you throw away the principled high ground. If the Rebellion is a matter of utilitarian calculus then it is hardly obvious that getting billions of sentient brings killed in a galactic civil war on the off chance that the Rebellion wins and manages to create a functional government is justifiable.

Second, clearly neither the Separatists nor the Empire necessarily accepts this premise of the moral standing of the Old Republic and Empire. Separatists would argue that the Old Republic is bad. For example, it is being run by a Sith Lord. An imperial apologist would point out that the Empire is being run by the same Sith Lord so it cannot be worse than the Old Republic. Therefore Separatists and Imperials would be able to fight their wars and believe they are right.

These two arguments set up the third argument that the very act of Rebel propaganda (the opening crawl) calling the Empire evil undermines the Rebellion's case and justifies every imperial counter-measure. Imagine an alternative New Hope in which the Rebellion captures the Death Star instead of blowing it up. The Rebel leadership meets to consider two choices. Either defeat the Empire by using the Death Star against Coruscant or give up the fight against the Empire. Anyone who seriously believes that the Empire is evil and that the Rebellion is the only hope for the galaxy must choose the first option.

Any Rebellion “moderates” looking at the ruins of Coruscant and wishing to Pontius Pilate themselves by claiming that they support human rights and not mass murder must be a liar or an idiot. The moment the Rebellion called the Empire evil and these people did not turn on the Rebellion, they had signed a pact in blood to blow up planets.

This does not mean that the Rebellion is wrong. If Rebels honestly believe that the Empire is evil and they are willing to follow the logic of their convictions to their Hobbesian conclusions then so be it. As all we know about the Galaxy Far Far Away's politics comes from Rebel sources, we can have no opinion about the Empire. We must proceed on the assumption that the only reliable facts are those harmful to the Rebellion.

Once we accept that the Rebellion is morally tainted by the very nature of their claims against the Empire, the ironic conclusion is that the Empire gets a moral blank check to crush the Rebellion to the extent that it is difficult to plausibly argue that the Empire is evil. Imagine that the blast helmet people object to Grand Moff Tarkin’s “you may fire when ready” order against Alderaan. (This is assuming that we even accept the Rebel claim that the Empire is responsible for the destruction of Alderaan.) Tarkin asks Leia about the intentions of the Rebellion. She would not be able to deny that the Rebellion is a conspiracy to murder billions of people including every person on the Death Star, even the blast helmet people trying her (which is what happens at the end of the movie). The moment she responds, by attacking imperial policy, she is confessing. Whether or not Leia is right or not in killing billions of people is irrelevant to the fact that she is trying to do so.

It is not as if Alderaan and the other Rebel planets are trying to secede from the Empire. On the contrary, they seek to overthrow the Empire even at the cost of murdering all supporters of the Empire. The fact that most people on Alderaan might not be Rebels is irrelevant. The fact that Leia and her father have been so reckless as to endanger the galaxy and their home planet means that they are the ones who are truly responsible for Alderaan’s destruction. Thus, the blast helmets can fire when ready with a clear conscience as they are not required to make martyrs of themselves.

To be clear, this is not a defense of the Empire overall as a political institution. Again, I am neutral in regard to the facts of Star Wars. This is simply a demonstration of the Hobbesian logic of calling the Empire evil and how it damages the Rebel case. I can only conclude that the Separatist cause is justified as it does not require the initiation of violence against the Old Republic. The Rebellion is not justified as it is premised on initiating a war with the Empire. This makes all the atrocities of the war, including the destruction of Alderaan, the fault of the Rebellion. So much for fighting for justice in the galaxy.

Is Anti-Zionism Anti-Semitism? My Response to Mehdi Hasan

Here is a recent Intelligence Squared debate about Israel in which the pro-Israel side loses badly. The problem here is that the motion on the floor is whether anti-Zionism is a form of anti-Semitism. Clearly, it is at least hypothetically possible to sincerely oppose Israel without being an anti-Semite. The pro-Israel speakers, Melanie Phillips and Einat Wilf, never adequately address this issue. What they try to do is argue that anti-Zionism itself, as an ideology, is anti-Semitic even if not all anti-Zionists are themselves anti-Semites; such people simply fail to fully understand their own beliefs.

To make things worse, we have Mehdi Hasan in the opposition. Hassan’s chief strength is that he is a Muslim who is clearly not an Anti-Semite despite being opposed to Israel. He understands that there are lines not to cross and he acknowledges that many people on his side cross this line. Paired with Ilan Pappe, whose Jewish identity allows him to be the rabid one, Hasan gets to sit back and be the "moderate," assuring the audience that opposing the Israeli government and even wanting to replace it with a secular Jewish-Palestinian State does not make someone an anti-Semite. Perhaps I am too easy on Hasan due to my dismally low expectations for Muslims when it comes to anti-Semitism. The fact that he does not foam at the mouth is so surprising as to make him a model of reasonableness.

And this leads to one of the reasons why anti-Zionism, in practice, is anti-Semitism. What I never cease to find so shocking about the anti-Zionist movement is the extent that they do not even bother to seriously pretend that they are about anything other than killing Jews. This is different from the contemporary liberal discourse on hate speech where anything said by anyone who is not part of the "woke" set will be interpreted as hateful through a series of increasingly arcane hermeneutics even if it was perfectly acceptable even for Democratic politicians to say the exact same thing just a few years ago.

I am not asking anyone to be on board with Netanyahu or like Zionism. You do not even have to be an expert on Jewish thought or what bothers Jewish activists. All I am asking is that you do not say things that used to be obvious, only a few years ago, that you should not say. I am reminded of the Simpson's episode in which Sideshow Bob is able to be released from prison despite having tattooed "Die Bart Die" onto his chest.

 

This also is a reason to focus on leftist anti-Semitism, which tends to operate under the banner of anti-Zionism, as opposed to right-wing anti-Semitism even though both are legitimate threats. I expect people on the left to have absorbed political correctness and with it a certain caution with how their words might be interpreted by others. With conservatives, there is much more room to interpret them charitably as speaking in anger. If someone from the left says something that implies murder, they should be taken with complete literalness.

Let us acknowledge two non-contradictory truths. Palestinians have good reasons to not be happy with Israel and even have plausible justifications to use violence. That being said, anti-Zionism, despite its theoretical merits, has come to serve as cover for killing Jews. To be clear, our concern is not people who dislike Jews or say politically incorrect things but people who are actively trying to get Jews killed.

One might argue that when we are dealing with plots to kill Jews we should only focus on those who are literally firing rockets at us or trying to stab us. The reality is that the justification for mass murder is part of the action itself. For this reason, not even J. S. Mill thought speakers egging on angry mobs were protected by free speech. We have the example of Julius Streicher, the editor of the Nazi tabloid Der Sturmer. He was hanged at Nuremberg as a conspirator in Nazi crimes despite the fact that he never was in a position to order anyone killed. The Holocaust required the propaganda efforts of people like Streicher. Thus, he was not a martyr to free speech but a mass murderer as guilty as the people who ran concentration camps.

By this logic, we should not treat apologists for Palestinian terrorism as morally any different from the terrorists themselves. If you call for "Zionists" to be murdered and people kill Jews, you have entered into a conspiracy to murder Jews. It does not matter if you are not a Hamas officer and have never been in contact with them. You have helped to create an environment in which terrorists have reason to believe that their actions will not harm their cause. This makes it more likely that attacks will happen. Thus, you are an enabler of terrorism. If we allow either the enabler or the terrorist to operate freely Jews will die.

So what about the honest anti-Zionists out there like Mahdi Hasan? Ideas do not exist in a vacuum. There can be ideas tainted by their historical associations and the people who use them. For example, I believe that making voters pass a civics test could be a positive reform and would support it in any country besides the United States. In this country, literacy tests for voting played an important role in segregation. That history cannot be pushed under the rug. This thinking extends to conservatives and libertarians who wish to talk about state rights. It can be done but you have to be careful.

Let us be clear, this is not the genetic fallacy. I am not saying that tests for voting are bad because of their racist past nor am I suggesting that all people who support them are racists. (Again, I think, in theory, they might be a good idea.) That being said, it is reasonable for blacks to be on the lookout for people who wish to kill them. If the only way you can think to reform elections is through voter tests then it is a signal that you are not a friend of the black community. It does not matter if this is true or not. Blacks would still be justified, as a practical matter of self-defense, in treating you as if you had entered into a plot to lynch them.

Similarly, I would argue that, once we admit that there are anti-Zionists who wish to kill Jews and that these people are more than just a fringe element of the movement, at a certain point the whole concept of anti-Zionism becomes tainted. It reaches the point where, even though a person accepts the essential argument of anti-Zionism as a theory, operating a non anti-Semitic anti-Zionist movement becomes almost impossible.

Every movement, whether libertarianism or anti-Zionism, had its share of deplorables. The key issue is whether it is possible to disassociate oneself from them. This means that you do not praise them, you do not share a platform and do not act in a way that benefits them. For example, as a libertarian, I have disassociated myself from Ron Paul and the Rothbardian wing of the movement because they are tainted by racism and anti-Semitism. This is the case even though I mostly agree with them in terms of policies. It is not even that I think such people are necessarily bigots. Defending them, even though intellectually doable, simply distracts from the legitimate libertarian message of transcending the right and left partisan divide to open our borders and cut government spending on the drug war at home and nation-building abroad.

We might imagine our non anti-Semitic anti-Zionist spending months organizing a rally to denounce Israel’s blockade of Gaza. You better screen the speakers. It is ok if some of them have made inappropriate remarks in the past as long as no one has been party to murder either directly or rhetorically. You want to memorialize Palestinians killed by Israel; fine, just as long as you make sure those people were not members of terrorist organizations. And if Hamas or Islamic Jihad start launching rockets the day before the rally, you need to cancel it. Anything less and you can no longer Pontius Pilate yourself. You are a party to a conspiracy to kill Jews.

In a similar fashion, terms that may be innocuous by themselves can become tainted. Take the terms, for example, "intifada," "jihad," and "from the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free."

While it is possible to use these terms in ways that do not imply violence. Since they have become code words for violence, you do not get to claim your own particular understanding of the term. You use these terms and I have the right to assume, as a matter of self-defense, that you are plotting to kill Jews. 

In this matter, it is important to bend over backward to demonstrate non-hostile intent. Remember that it is your enemies judging you. As a Jew and the grandchild of Holocaust survivors, I am not obligated to wait until I am completely sure that you are plotting to kill me. If you choose to call me a Nazi and cooperate with people who are trying to kill me I will assume that you are trying to kill me and wash my hands of any responsibility for your blood.

Shylock’s Dilemma: To Judge Is to Be Judged

In Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, the Jewish moneylender Shylock demands a pound of Antonio’s flesh as payment for a debt. Considering that Shylock is the villain and a rather unpleasant character (whether or not he is also an anti-Semitic caricature), it is easy to lose sight of how formidable a challenge Shylock presents. His argument is unchallengeable. Antonio freely entered the contract knowing the risks and failed to pay back the loan. Shylock has every right to his pound of flesh and no power on Earth can stop him. Not even the Venetian Court can refuse Shylock as to do so would undermine the very notion of contract, the foundation of the State. To say no to Shylock would simply be to destroy the State and leave Shylock’s right to revenge unharmed. This is similar to the White Witch’s claim to kill the traitor Edmund. For Aslan to deny her a kill would be to go against the Emperor’s magic and destroy Narnia. 

Antonio’s flesh was valuable to Shylock as an excuse to kill Antonio but also to strike at the Christian society around him. It was not be enough for Shylock to knife Antonio in a dark alley with the authorities privately deciding to not pursue the matter. Shylock needed to kill Antonio in public with the court’s full agreement that he was right and that they were powerless to stop him. Thus, any attempt to argue with Shylock or ask for mercy simply demonstrated that he was right and brought him ever closer to his moment of glory when he would be able to sink his knife into Antonio's body with the full consent of a defeated court. This enflamed Shylock's desire for revenge and made him less likely to compromise. 

Portia is able to defeat Shylock, in the end, precisely because she refuses to fight him on his chosen ground. She acknowledges that he has the right to cut a pound of flesh from Antonio’s body. The catch is, of course, that Shylock cannot shed a drop of Antonio’s blood. Portia’s insight is that Shylock, by pursuing Antonio, has also made himself vulnerable to the charge that he is trying to murder Antonio. If Shylock is going to put Antonio on trial for his pound of flesh there is no reason why Shylock should not be on trial for attempted murder, particularly as it was Shylock who decided to initiate this case in the first place. Here lies Shylock's dilemma. He might be perfectly justified in claiming Antonio's flesh but he cannot do so without convicting himself of murder. Thus, it is not enough that Shylock is right. He still loses. (My father should take note that I am conceding a point he has long tried to make to me that sometimes being right is not enough.)

One could ask, how foolish is Shylock to believe that a Christian court was actually going to let him kill one of their own. Of course, they were going to find an excuse to turn this around and punish the Jew. Shylock was blind to this possibility because he thought that Venetian society simply hated him as a Jew even as they needed him as a moneylender, demonstrating their hypocrisy. Since he believed that Venice had no intellectual case against him, it made sense that all he needed to do was come with facts and logic and he would smash through any opposition. No amount of prejudice could deny that Antonio freely entered this grisly bargain and that the State needs contracts to be enforced even unpleasant ones.

What happens, though, once we acknowledge that Venice was not run by hateful Christians, who deep down had a guilty conscious for their intellectually indefensible prejudice? What if it was something far more dangerous; people with a well-worked out narrative in which Shylock the Jew was a harmful outsider and that Venice was better off without him? All of a sudden, Antonio's murder was not an incidental part of Shylock's quest for justice, but the primary issue as it fits into that preexisting narrative about the Jew. Now Shylock was no longer someone who offered a necessary service, but a devil who tricked good Christians into mortgaging their very flesh. Such a Shylock cold be denied his bond with a clear conscience. One could even rob him of his wealth and threaten to kill him if he did not convert and believe that one was righteous for it. On the contrary, it was the people who thought that Shylock had a point and should be shown mercy who were guilty of murder and the moral corruption of the city.

Here the issue of whether Shylock was part of Venice or an outsider becomes important. If Venice could operate without him then Shylock, even if he was unpleasant and disliked, was part of the society no different from, if not the heart, perhaps the large intestine within the political body. As a part of Venice, all promises to him were sacred and must be followed even to the point of death. If Shylock was a foreign parasite then all promises were null and void and he could be lied to much in the same way that, except for radical Kantians, we accept that it is ok to lie to Nazis. Nazis are outside the web of moral responsibility so there never was an obligation to be truthful with them in the first place. By pursuing his pound of flesh, Shylock reminded Venice of why they might consider him an outsider in the first place. Thus, Shylock's argument, though correct, created a catch-22 and was invalidated by his very act of making it.

Shylock is important to our political discourse because all claims of absolute justice amount to a demand for a pound of flesh. The danger of demanding a pound of flesh is that, even when you are right, you are placing yourself on trial with your enemies, those who already possess a narrative to justify killing you, as the judges. To pursue such justice, therefore, requires a mind-blindness to not see that your enemies honestly believe that they are right to kill you and are not simply haters whose prejudices can be overcome by your carefully selected facts. 

The Curriculum: Education’s MacGuffin

In literature, a MacGuffin is an object or goal that motivates the characters, setting the plot in motion. For example, the plot of New Hope centers around the Death Star plans stored in R2-D2. Without the Death Star plans, Luke, Han, Chewbacca, and Obi-Wan do not team up to rescue Princess Leia. The fundamental weakness of MacGuffins is that, almost by definition, they are narrative ploys. We do not actually care whether the Rebels get the plans and save the galaxy just as long as our beloved heroes get into cool space battles and use the Force.

This does not mean that MacGuffins are bad; they are unavoidable. It is not even necessary that a character never abandon their MacGuffin. As a character changes, it can only be expected that their goals change along the way. The boy who spends the entire story trying to win a girl may decide that he does not want her after all as in the case of Stardust.

The trick is to find the right balance in which the MacGuffin does not become too important that we lose sight of the fact that it is the characters that are more important. This is the problem with just about any story where the hero has to save the world. The point of James Bond is not that he saves the world but that he should find himself in extreme situations involving some combination of sex and peril and make pithy comments. This was Sean Connery’s insight into the character and every subsequent portrayal of Bond has succeeded or failed depending on how well the actors understood this. On the other hand, a MacGuffin needs to be taken seriously as something more than a plot device. It is this latter problem that presents the greater challenge.

The real problem with MacGuffins comes when the author blatantly abandons the MacGuffin when it is no longer convenient, demonstrating that the MacGuffin was nothing more than a cheap ploy by a lazy writer. For example, most of Phantom Menace is spent trying to get our heroes to Coruscant so that the Republic can send a fleet to save Naboo from the Trade Federation when it should have been obvious to the characters, from the beginning, that the Republic lacked the resources and political will to go to war with the Trade Federation. A Republic that cannot enforce its own laws against slavery and whose currency is flat out rejected in the galaxy cannot be of much military use. Thus, Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan should have never left Naboo. Act II of the film should have been them fleeing the Trade Federation on Naboo and trying to put together a resistance army. Along the way, they could have no recruited an adult Anakin as a fighter pilot.

We see a similar problem with the Star Wars sequels. The first part of Force Awakens centers around the MacGuffin of a map to Luke stored in BB-8. All of a sudden the plot switches to Star Killer (Death Star III). Having wasted the later part of the film blowing up this new Death Star and with moments left in the film, R2-D2 wakes up and, deus ex machina, hands over the critical information to find Luke. How much better it would have been if the film had continued with the quest for Luke. Kylo Ren could have still killed Han (the best scene in Star Wars since the originals). Force Awakens could have then ended with Star Killer blowing up a planet. This would have better set up Last Jedi by explaining why the New Republic simply surrenders without a fight.

Last Jedi offers a master class in how not to use MacGuffins. Luke proves useless and not worth the search. Canto Bright serves no other purpose than to allow the dreadfully boring Finn to suck the film emotionally dry. This sets up the Last Jedi’s ultimate sin of deciding that the backgrounds of Rey and Snoke didn’t matter when they were the central questions of the film. Ultimately, a bad MacGuffin amounts to the writer, much like the post-modern professor, mocking the audience for caring about a work of fiction while still intending these same fools to continue to offer their financial support.

This balancing act for MacGuffins is useful for understanding the role of curricula in education. Recently, I have begun homeschooling Kalman for kindergarten. We are using the K12 online curriculum and he has several live online classes a week with a teacher through iQ Academy California. I think the teacher is fantastic and we have developed an excellent relationship. The irony here is that our communication is far more frequent than if she was a conventional teacher. Since the foundational assumption of our relationship is that I am the teacher who needs the guidance of a professional, communication becomes a necessity. If she were a conventional classroom teacher, we likely would fall into the moral hazard of saying that it is her job to teach and my job to be grateful to her for taking Kalman off my hands during the day.

I do not think there is anything impressive about K12’s curriculum. It is highly paint by the numbers. This is perhaps necessary as an essential part of the system is that it needs to be idiot-proofed for parents. I am reminded of the joke from Herman Wouk’s Cain Mutiny that the Navy is a system designed by geniuses to be run by idiots. K12’s program is also way too easy for Kalman and I have needed to make things more challenging for him. In essence, they want to teach him phonics, while I am trying to teach him to read; they are teaching counting when I am teaching addition and subtraction.

What I admire about Kalman’s program is not the curriculum but the support staff, as I mentioned. In addition, the system gives us a list of things to check off every day. This has the advantage that even when Kalman is not into the material, he just has to get through his assignments and he is done for the day. Furthermore, having specific things to check off keeps us grounded.

In essence, the K12 curriculum works well when treated as a MacGuffin. It gets the ball rolling for our lessons and gives us structure as we try to check everything off in our daily lessons. As with any good story, it is the side things that are of true importance. One of the hardest lessons in teaching I have found is that you cannot teach anyone anything. You cannot teach someone who does not want to learn. If someone is interested in something they will learn it regardless of you. Teaching is really about facilitating, creating the right conditions for students to teach themselves.

What I hope Kalman takes away from his time homeschooling with me (whether it lasts through kindergarten or 12th grade) is that I value academics. I could inform him of this fact and even preach passionately about it but teaching does not work. Instead, what I offer is that every day I am willing to spend several hours with him, going through the curriculum and any side adventures. He sees my excitement and knows, good day or bad, I am with him. Succeed or fail, we are a team. What Kalman might learn that can be presented on a transcript is simply a MacGuffin that should not be ignored but not taken too seriously.