Critical Anti-Semitism Theory: The 33 Project

 

Growing up with one foot in the Haredi world, I was surrounded by a particular narrative about Jews and gentiles. The non-Jews around us might appear, at first glance, to be decent people but, in reality, they are all vicious anti-Semites ready to murder us at the first opportunity. "Esau hates Jacob" was a historical metaphysical fact much the same as the notion that Jacob and Esau were twins. To be clear, it is not as if we ever had a hate non-Jews class that demanded that we recite some catechism about the diabolical nature of gentiles. What we had was something subtler and more pernicious. We were surrounded by songs and stories that took this assumption as a fact. You can never argue with a story because stories do not make arguments to be responded to. Things are even trickier when we are not even dealing with things that are not even said but merely assumed. For example, Father Schmutz is a scumbag by virtue of his name in much the same way as the Malfoys in Harry Potter are literally people of bad faith.  

This negative view of the outside world was an essential part of keeping us within the fold. If we were going to be hated no matter what then assimilation could never be an option. We were fed a diet of stories where assimilated Jews were rounded up by the Nazis while attempting to deny that they were Jews. The fact that Jews have managed to survive living among such dangerous enemies was an argument for the Truth of Judaism; it could only have been through divine providence. We have a deal with God, going back to the Bible; follow his commandments or he will allow the nations of the world to murder us as they are naturally predisposed to do. Therefore, our only chance of survival was by being as religious as we could while reaching out to irreligious Jews to make sure they learned to carry their weight and not get us all killed.

It is worth noting that this narrative flipped the script on anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism was not caused because Jews made themselves stand out with their strange clothes and customs. Being like gentiles and even intermarrying with them would not cause them to like us. On the contrary, it was the secular Jews, who caused anti-Semitism. While gentiles cannot help themselves but hate Jews, it is the secular Jews who truly rouse them into a murderous rage as such Jews violate the natural order of things.    

My academic training in history has served to tone down and add some nuance to how I view non-Jews. This is particularly the case for how I relate to Christianity. At the time time, it has also made me more dangerous as I can better monologue on the particular details of crimes against the Jews if I so choose. Alternatively, this can all be used for some ridiculous fun. In this cause, a new weapon in my arsenal is critical race theory with its assumption of structural racism and privilege. This allows for the condemnation of Western Civilization as a whole as being fundamentally racist as opposed to merely containing racist elements to be purged. At a practical level, critical race theory allows us to convict individuals of racism even without being consciously motivated by any hostility toward people of color. Merely not actively trying to tear down established culture makes you complicit in racism. As Kendi argues, it is not enough to not be racist, you have to be an anti-racist.

In order to help my readers become anti anti-Semites, I should write a history of anti-Semitism that uses the logic of CRT against Christianity, Islam, modern secularism, and ultimately the contemporary left. We could call it the 33 Project. The essential points of the book would be as follows. 

Anti-Semitism is the foundation of both Christianity and Islam and by extension all of Western Civilization. The true foundation of Christianity may be the year 33 C.E. but it is not the Cross but the accusation of deicide where Jews were supposed to have forced Pilate to crucify Jesus, claiming that his blood would be on their hands and that of their children. In truth, it has been Christians who have been the crucifiers of Jews. The Jews are the Christian Other, who are to be implicated and ultimately even murdered for Christian vices in order to allow Christians to claim to be virtuous. 

At a fundamental level, Christianity is an act of cultural appropriation. The vast majority of Christians today have no ethnic connection to Judaism and yet they have no objection to taking Jewish scriptures as well as the narrative of choseness reinterpreting it not only to make themselves God's chosen but to cast Jews as the ultimate other, the people who God rejected. 

In a similar fashion, Islam was founded not only upon Mohammed's mass murder of Jewish tribes in Arabia but also his appropriation of Jewish choseness, replacing Isaac with Ishmael as the chosen son of Abraham. Today Muslims have the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount. Here we are going beyond cultural appropriation to outright cultural eradication. The idea here is to eliminate Jewish history by denying the existence of the two Temples. 

What this means is that anyone raised within a Christian or Muslim environment is, by definition, an anti-Semite. Christians and Muslims simply cannot help themselves, it is who they are. In fact, anti-Semitism is so infectious that anyone who believes there is anything valuable about Western civilization becomes tainted with anti-Semitism. Considering the ubiquity of Western Civilization today, even seeming non-Christians and Muslims (such as Indians, Chinese, and the Japanese) should assumed to be anti-Semites as well. 

As a Christian or a Muslim (and therefore an anti-Semite), you have an obligation to educate yourself about the history of anti-Semitism. This does not simply mean that you should acknowledge the existence of the Almohads or the Inquisition but that you should actively declare that all Christians and Muslims are inherently guilty of structural anti-Semitism by the mere fact that they are Christians or Muslims. (Obviously, when pressed, I will pretend, using Motte and Bailey tactics, that all that I am trying to do is teach about the Almohads and the Inquisition and I will accuse my opponents of trying to cover up these historical facts.)  

Even people who try to help Jews are really anti-Semites. Such anti-Semites believe that it is possible for Jews to improve themselves by reading anti-Semitic works like Aristotle and Kant or even the Old Testament. This implies that Jews are not perfect and that any seeming imperfections are not the fault of non-Jews. As we know from the doctrine of converging interests, whenever non-Jews look like they are helping Jews, it is only to better serve their own interests. For example, non-Jews might wish to pretend to not be anti-Semites and therefore avoid having to reckon with the anti-Semitism inherent within themselves and their civilization.  

Secular people might wish to congratulate themselves on not being anti-Semites on the assumption that they have distanced themselves from the anti-Semitism of their ancestors but this is not so. As we can see from Shakespeare and Dickens, Western literature is inherently anti-Semitic. If you have ever read Shakespeare or Dickens you become an anti-Semite much as you would from watching a passion play. It does not help if you try to censor any offending material. Doing that simply proves that you know that they are anti-Semitic but simply want to cover it up. This makes you not only an anti-Semite but a dishonest one at that.  

Obviously, Christians and Muslims who do not abandon their faiths are guilty of anti-Semitism. That being said, if you abandon your religion, you are still an anti-Semite. Anti-Semitism is so ingrained in Christianity and Islam that not even apostasy will be able to cure Christians and Muslims of its taint. In truth, a true gentile anti-anti-Semite would recognize that they can never be cured of anti-Semitism and would not desire that his Jewish allies should have to demean themselves by pretending he is not an anti-Semite. (It is psychological violence enough that Jews should even have to be in the same room as an anti-Semite so gentile anti-anti-Semites should do their best not to spend any time with Jews.)

Since Jewish victimhood is the foundation of Western Civilization, only Jews can ever be victims of bigotry. Anti-Semites (a category that includes all non-Jews) can never be victims. If they appear to be victims, it is merely their anti-Semitism coming back to harm them. In a world in which anti-Semitism did not exist, there would be no oppression. Because of this, any discussion of oppression, say, for example, the Trail of Tears, outside of anti-Semitism is anti-Semitic. Obviously, the reason why the Cherokee were forced off their land was because they failed to make an intersectional alliance with Jews to fight against the anti-Semitic United States government. Clearly, the reason anti-Semites would wish to cover up this anti-Semitic facet of Native American history is that, as anti-Semities, they wish to pretend that anti-Semitism is not the foundation of all oppression. 

Because Jews (assuming that they are not anti-Semites) are inherently victims, it is not possible for them to ever be oppressors. This applies even when Jews do things like use the N-word. When Jews use that word they are simply reacting to being oppressed and are bravely standing up to anti-Semitism. Anyone who objects to Jews using the N-word is really an anti-Semite as they are implying that there can be a type of oppression besides anti-Semitism and are trying to rob Jews of their moral high ground as inherent victims.  

It should be noted that most Jews are anti-Semites. This is hardly surprising considering that Jews have lived for more than a thousand years within the structural anti-Semitism of the West and have imbibed its hatred for Jews. When we think of Jewish anti-Semites, it is not enough to point out Jewish Voices for Peace or If Not Now. Any Jew who refuses to recognize that Western Civilization is inherently anti-Semitic and believes that it is possible to interact productively with Western Culture without becoming tainted with anti-Semitism is an anti-Semite. Even for Jews, it is not enough to refrain from active anti-Semitism. One must be an anti anti-Semite by working to tear down all structures of non anti anti-Semitism. 

As one of the world's only true anti anti-Semites, it is a lonely task. I bear the weight of so much oppression and it is the fault of all you anti-Semites. Maybe corporations can hire me to offer seminars to help cure their workers of anti-Semitism (or at least to make them feel really guilty about it). This will include classes on why you are an anti-Semite for thinking that I am a greedy Jew taking money from anti-Semites in exchange for moral cover or why you are an anti-Semite if you found this piece funny. (Since anti-Semites have no sense of humor, if you did not laugh at this piece, you are also an anti-Semite.) 

Am I to Blame for Killing Your Lord (or for Racism)?

 

As a principled classical liberal, I believe in the importance of reading things that one disagrees with the goal of being able to pass an Ideological Turing Test. This means being able to talk about a position in such a way that people will not be able to tell the difference between your description and the words of genuine supporters. I do read plenty of things that I disagree with. That being said, recently I find that a large percentage of that reading is being taken up by contemporary Christian conservatives like David F. Wells, and Voddie Bauchman. This is to say nothing of my great love for classical Christian writers like C. S. Lewis, who I have been reading since my Yeshiva University days, and G. K. Chesterton, and John Bunyan. All of these are writers that I can listen to for hours at a time with great pleasure. By contrast, I have a difficult time with Woke writers such as Robin DiAngelo, and Ibram X. Kendi to the point that I cannot listen to them for more than a few minutes without getting annoyed. The reason for this, I suspect, has much to do with my annoyance, as a teenager, with Rabbi Avigdor Miller; I take their criticism personally.

By contrast, I do not take Christianity as a personal threat to me. As I once explained to my students, I am privileged to be able to read the New Testament in a post-Vatican II world where the Catholic Church has denounced anti-Semitism and specifically the charge that the Jews are responsible for the death of Jesus. This means that I can read the New Testament, and by extension the wider corpus of Christian literature, without getting hung up on whether someone is blaming me for killing their Lord even to the point of wanting me dead. I am well aware of the historical reality of Jews shuddering in fear on Easter Sunday from drunken peasants who had just been told by their priest that the Jews murdered Jesus. This only highlights the fact that this is not the world in which I live. On the contrary, as far as I can tell, conservative Christians are far more likely on Easter to contemplate how fortunate they are that the Jewish people gave them their Savior and that it is a wonderful thing that the Jews have returned to the land of Israel just like in the days of Jesus. 

I am particularly grateful to the Protestant tradition with its emphasis on total depravity. From this perspective, the Jews, as a group, can never bear particular responsibility for crucifying Jesus. All human beings are equally depraved in their sinfulness. This means that Jews cannot be worse than anyone else. Furthermore, since Jesus died for the sins of the entire world, the sins of both Jews and Gentiles equally serve as nails in the Cross. 

Conservative Christians may wish that I convert to their religion and even believe that I will be condemned to Hell for all eternity for not accepting Jesus. That being said, I do not believe that they take my failure to convert personally. It is not as if I am, in some sense, torturing Jesus with my Jewish practices, beyond all the other eight billion sinners on the planet, showing that, if I had lived in the first century, I would have been crying out for Jesus' crucifixion just as loudly as my ancestors. 

When I read Woke literature, the essential point that I cannot ignore is precisely that I am being personally held responsible for American racism (or sexism, homophobia, or economic inequality). It does not matter that I do not feel any ill will towards black people, particularly as this group includes members of my family. Nor does it matter that none of my ancestors lived in the United States before the 20th century so none of them were owners of African-American slaves. The mere fact that I hold ideas they deem racist (mainly anything they strongly disagree with), makes me racist even if I never had any racist intent. The mere fact that I have white skin means that I have, in some sense, benefited from racism. By not getting on board with their plan to end racism, I fail to be an "anti-racist" and this, according to Kendi, makes me a racist.

The claim that I am responsible for racism has much in common with the traditional Christian anti-Semitic charge of deicide. My ancestors were never threatened by Christians out of a belief that my ancestors personally crucified Jesus. The assumption was that my ancestors, by remaining Jews, showed that they would have crucified him. As such, it was like they crucified him. As long as there were people, like Jews, exposed to Christian teachings but who stubbornly still rejected it, Jesus, in some sense, would continue to suffer on the Cross. From this perspective, the only solution would be to eliminate Jews either through conversion or through violence. 

Similarly, from the Woke perspective, I am guilty of racism simply because I am white. This is possible because, as with the Christian notion of sin, racism is assumed to be systemic. It is not about what you do but about who you are. In Christianity, this notion of sin is countered by the doctrine of total depravity. Since all humans are equally guilty of sin, no person can set themselves over anyone else in judgment and demand that they atone. No one can claim that they have committed the sin of lust in their hearts fewer times than me and are therefore less guilty of fornication. By contrast, for Wokeness, being marginalized means that you can lecture others about their privilege. For example, a black person can lecture me about my racism on the assumption that the mere fact that they are black means that they are less guilty of racism. It should be noted that, from the Woke perspective, it is impossible for a black person to ever be guilty of racism against whites, no matter how hateful their words are, while white people are guilty of racism simply by being white. The black person, it is assumed, does not wield power, while the white person, by virtue of their skin color, does. 

Something that I find fascinating about DiAngelo is that she specifically targets Jews as one of her main examples of whites trying to deny their complacency with racism. The white Jew tries to claim that they cannot really be guilty of racism because, as a Jew, they have also experienced oppression. This is parallel to the traditional Christian anti-Semitic argument that Jews bear a unique kind of guilt for the death of Jesus because Jews claim that they are saved through their works in following the Law and do not need Jesus. Just as Jews present a challenge to Christianity by opening up the possibility that some people might not really be tainted by Original Sin and therefore do not need Jesus, the white Jew challenges people like DiAngelo with the possibility that skin color might not be the best prism for understanding oppression. As such, white Jews bear a special guilt for racism. Since the Woke definition of racism is built around power. 

I can read conservative Christian writers, whose theology is premised around the doctrine of total depravity (distinct from Christian white nationalists) because I do not have to worry that they want me dead or that someone might "misunderstand" their words and try to kill me. When it comes to Woke writers, I have a difficult time interpreting them as anything other than dog-whistling calls to kill me as a white person who refuses to own up to the fact that I am responsible for most of the evil in the world today. For example, there is the wide support for the Palestinian cause and the willingness to tie it to American civil rights movements. If members of Black Lives Matter openly proclaim that their cause is simply another side of the Palestinian "fight for justice," I have no objection to taking them at their word and concluding that they are a terrorist organization committed to violence. Let us assume that, at the very least, they consider the murder of millions of Jews in Israel as an acceptable price for making Palestine free from sea to sea. I should also assume that they support something similar here in the United States where whites pay their "reparations" by accepting that it is only just and right that they should be robbed and even murdered. The fact that whites include Jewish whites and even Holocaust survivors will not cause them to pause. On the contrary, white Jews are particularly guilty of racism in that they have served to bring "Zionism" to American shores. 

From this perspective, no reasonable dialogue is possible. This certainly makes it harder to justify reading their books. It is not as if I am going to be sitting down with the Woke to show them that I have taken their concerns to heart and it might be possible to reach a compromise. If Wokeness is simply a plot to offer intellectual cover for mass murder then the only reason to read Woke literature is to convince the non-Woke of this fact and to warn the Woke that we know that their claims regarding social justice are a sham and are not going to submit to their moral blackmail.              

Who Gets to Be the Equity Box Czar?

In the previous post, I discussed the question of what might be considered equality. Here I would like to turn to the question of who gets to make that decision. 

The popular image of equity is of the child who gets the box to stand on to look over the fence and watch the game. I find it interesting that this image specifically looks at a situation where there is a clear problem and solution. The child cannot see over the fence to watch the game, so he needs to be given a box to stand on. Because of the simplicity of the situation, we do not need to concern ourselves with who is going to be the box czar. It would not be a problem if she were a vaccine-denying, transphobic MAGA Republican. She is being asked to do a simple job with clear parameters. If she steps out of line, it will be clear to the public, who can then remove her. Truth be told, the stakes are pretty low anyway so it would hardly be a catastrophe if she did abuse her position. As we move, though, from a simple situation, like giving kids boxes to see over a fence, to something complicated where neither the problems nor the solutions are obvious, the critical question becomes less what the problem or solution might be and, instead, becomes who is going to decide what the problem and solution even are.

Consider the example of education. In a school setting, there are going to be students who struggle for a variety of reasons. For some, the problem is that they have special needs that require support. Other students come from different backgrounds from the teacher and require a more culturally relevant education. Finally, there are going to be students whose problem is that they are brats who require a non-literal spanking so that they get with the program and not take up resources that rightfully should go to members of the first two groups. I readily admit that it is not always obvious which students belong in which category and what should be done with them. Part of the problem is that, on the surface, the different students might be engaged in violating the same rules and officially deserve the same punishment. Teachers are going to need to rely on their intuitions, less charitably known as prejudices.  

It is because I recognize that I am not qualified to stand in perfect judgment on this issue that I am mostly concerned with who is placed in the position to make this call. I would wish to make sure that whoever is in charge shares my fundamental values, specifically that the person has an identical scorecard as mine as to who is privileged and who is oppressed. The moment I begin to doubt this fact then all cooperation ends. For example, imagine that there were administrators who believed that Jews were privileged and that Muslims were victims. What if the administrator believed that if a Muslim student punched a Jewish student and the Jewish student responded by muttering a slur that the Muslim student should be acquitted as someone striking out against oppression while the Jewish student, as a privileged oppressor, should be charged with a hate crime. From my perspective, this would not be equity, it would be the vilest form of oppression, one that satanically robbed the legitimately oppressed not only of their physical right to protection but also of their moral authority as victims.   

When faced with the possibility that a system in charge of allocating funding and punishments might fall into the hands of my ideological opponents, I have no choice, but to support brute legalism. The people making the decision must be chained with clear rules that must be mechanically applied without room to maneuver. That is the only way to stop those who wish to use equity to oppress me with their version of justice. 

Slicing the Equality Cake

 

Legal equality, or something reasonably close to it, is a real possibility. There should be one set of laws that apply to rich and poor alike and regardless of skin color. Whether a person accused of murder is rich or poor, black or white, there should be the same legal process. I readily grant that such legal equality is far from actual equality. The O. J. Simpsons of the world will be able to buy themselves better lawyers and will stand a better chance of getting off. This makes economic equality sound rather attractive, recognizing that, as long as people are born with different amounts of wealth, society will never be equal in the ultimate sense. 

On the surface, economic equality sounds fairly simple. We live on a planet with resources. Every person should be given an equal amount. Equal should mean equal; nothing more and nothing less. In truth though, the simple-sounding socialist adage "to each according to their ability and to each according to their need" hides enormous complexity. Who decides what each person is capable of contributing to society and what resources each person can rightfully demand from society as their need? 

Consider the relatively simple example of dividing a cake for a classroom of students. On the surface, there does not seem to be a problem. You take the cake and divide it equally based on the number of students. Where things get interesting is when you consider that this is not the only way to divide the cake nor is it obvious that dividing the cake into equal portions is really the most equitable solution. 

Here are some other possibilities:

- The weight of the students 

-  Their parents' tax returns

- How much do they like cake

- Grades 

- Likelihood of contributing to the student's self-esteem 

- Belonging to a marginalized group

What makes this issue really tricky is that one can easily justify contradictory positions. Should students who weigh more get more cake because they require more to not feel hungry or should they get less cake to protect their health? 

Furthermore, the moment we claim to be distributing the cake fairly then the stakes are raised to an infinite degree. Obviously, it is not a big deal to not get one's "rightful" share of the cake and a student can forgive the teacher for not using a measuring tape (queue the Marvelous Midos Machine song) or for failing to achieve ultimate social consciousness. The moment that the teacher claims to be distributing the cake in an equitable fashion then to get less cake is a moral judgment on a person's ultimate value. Anyone who supported a different distribution of the cake must assume that either they were wrong and therefore they are unjust people or that the teacher was wrong and therefore an unjust person. From this perspective, we now have something worth complaining about. For that matter, we very well might have something worth killing for. One simply cannot allow injustice to triumph so utterly as to pretend to be justice. 

Recognizing that there can never be an equal solution and any attempt to do so risks Hobbesian warfare, the only practical solution is to acknowledge that, however the cake is distributed, it will not be fair in any ultimate sense. Every student will have a moral argument as to why they should have gotten more but agreeing to not push that argument is the price to have any cake in the first place.

If we are not capable of discovering an objectively just way to divide a cake among classmates, how ill-equipped must we be to handle the vastly more complex question of dividing the world's resources among eight billion people? With the stakes being literal life and death, we have even less reason that people will accept less than what they think is their fair share. Furthermore, our eight billion people have little in common with each other to facilitate compromise. Most of them have absorbed historical narratives that place themselves as the victims and every other group as oppressors. How can groups that mutually see themselves as victims and the other as oppressors ever reach an agreement? The only solution is to recognize that there can never be a just distribution.       

Legalizing Discrimination: A Liberal Solution to the Recent Supreme Court Rulings

 

Last week, the Supreme Court offered two rulings along 6-3 ideological lines that upset many liberals, which I would like to discuss here. In Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, the court ruled against the affirmative action programs of Harvard and North Carolina, arguing that they discriminated against Asian students. In 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, the court ruled that a Christian website designer could refuse to design same-sex wedding websites. I empathize with liberals and recognize that liberals deserve to live in states and have institutions that reflect their values. I would like to propose a solution that would give liberals the opportunity to rule parts of America according to their desires without interference from conservatives; we should eliminate the 1964 Civil Rights Act and limit the power of the Fourteenth Amendment so that it does not mean that constitutional rights apply to states. 

At first glance, liberals may be horrified by the thought of eliminating the legal foundations of modern civil rights law and suspect that I am trying to bring back segregation. This is not my intention. I honestly want to help liberals on the principle that people should be able to come together to form social and political institutions based on their particular values. By definition, such institutions must discriminate against someone. In the name of intellectual consistency, I am willing to defend the right to freedom of association even for my political opponents and even for those people who intend to use that right to discriminate against me. 

Eliminate laws that prohibit the federal government from funding institutions that practice discrimination and Harvard will be able to practice "affirmative action" to its heart's content. There will be no need to find clever workarounds. Harvard will be able to openly put a cap on the number of Asian students they will accept. If Harvard also decides that there are too many Jews, well that was why Brandeis University was created in the first place. To be clear, I do not support any government funding for universities or any kind of education. In fact, it is my hope that allowing universities to engage in discrimination will serve as a valuable step toward abolishing federal funding for education. If my proposal leads to federal funds going to whites-only colleges then hopefully liberals will join me in working to establish a wall between government and education. If they do not then they will be the ones propping up discrimination.   

Similarly, the First Amendment should not apply to states. Were it not for an expansionist reading of the Fourteenth Amendment, only Congress would be forbidden from establishing a religion. Liberal states like Colorado should be allowed to establish a tax-payer-funded LGBTQ+ Church, with inquisitors to hunt down and arrest anyone who fails to actively affirm the Sparkle Creed. 

It should be understood that while it is possible for there to be a wall separating education and state, there can be no consistent wall between church and state. Religions do not require any beliefs regarding gods or the supernatural. Any group that comes together will be motivated by a set of values and those values will be a religion of some kind. Anyone who says otherwise can be assumed to be attempting to force their values on the rest of society by pretending that their values are not really a religion. I prefer to deal with honest theocrats.  

Part of bringing back actual federalism is to recognize that different states are going to operate as different social and political experiments. Different states are going to establish different kinds of religions. It may be that they will also make different judgments about which groups have been oppressed and which groups have been privileged. They will then attempt to make their state more "equitable" by creating affirmative action programs to help those groups deemed to be historically oppressed. Some states might decide to focus on helping Jamaican immigrants while other states might focus on people who fled Red China. Finally, other states might want to help rural Appalachian whites. Those who belong to the wrong religion or to a group deemed to have unfairly benefited from privilege can either continue to live under a dhimmi status or they can emigrate to a state where their god is not a symbol of hate and where their skin color does not mark them as systemic oppressors.  

Passing a Loathsome Test: The Case Against the CalTPA

 

I have just completed my work on my California single-subject teaching preliminary credential. This allows me to teach middle or high school. (If you know of any schools in the Los Angeles area looking for a history teacher, feel free to contact me.) Work on this credential involved classes, four months of unpaid student teaching, and the completion of both cycles of the CalTPA (California Teaching Performance Assessment) exams. I passed both parts of the exam with plenty of wriggle room so I can say without accusation of sour grapes that the CalTPAs are models of how not to design an assessment. This is ironic as the CalTPA Cycle 2 exam is specifically about constructing assessments. 

The CalTPA exams consist of two parts (Cycle 1 and Cycle 2) and are meant to be taken during student teaching. They include large writing sections as well as videos of the perspective teacher in action in the classroom. (Yes, you need to get students to sign permission forms in order to film them.) Cycle 1 centers on a particular lesson that you teach and how you adapt that lesson with three focus students in mind. One student should have some sort of special need. A second should be an English learner, and a third should face some kind of challenge outside of school. (This could be, for example, an immigrant student or someone who is homeless.) Cycle 2 deals with a sequence of lessons and assessments. Furthermore, one is supposed to evaluate how students did on the exam and, based on the results, either offer an extension of the lesson or reteach some part. It should be emphasized that the CalTPAs are not something that you can simply complete in an afternoon. Each of them requires weeks of planning and writing. Together, they serve as the dominant assignment of the four months of student teaching. Furthermore, you have to wait at least three weeks between the time you submit until you get back your results. 

Each Cycle is graded based on a series of rubrics. (Cycle 1 has eight rubrics and Cycle 2 has nine.) Each rubric is graded on a scale of 1-5. To pass Cycle 1, one needs to score at least a 19 and to pass Cycle 2 one needs to score at least a 21. If you score a 1 on any two rubrics in a Cycle, you fail. In practice, the goal of each of the Cycles is to score a 3 on at least three of the rubrics, assuming you get 2s on everything else. Scoring a 4 or a 5 on a rubric requires a whole new level of work so it does not make sense to pursue it. Instead, one should focus on getting as many 3s as possible. (For Cycle 1, I got all 3s for a score of 24 and this was considered exceptionally good. For Cycle 2, I got seven 3s and two 2s for a score of 25.) 

There are a number of purposes for an assessment. A pre-assessment tells the teacher what students already know. This allows the teacher to modify the lesson to better cover what students are unfamiliar with. Furthermore, the teacher now has a baseline to compare future assessments and decide if students have actually learned anything. Next, there are assessments as learning, where students answer questions or practice doing the material as a means of gaining mastery. These usually have a strongly informal quality to them. Finally, there are formative assessments where students demonstrate what they have learned. A crucial concept underlying all three of these forms of assessment is that they are not about judging students. If anything, they are about seeing if the teacher has done their job and figuring out how they can improve. Furthermore, assessments are not supposed to be high-stakes affairs. There should be lots of assessments over the year. Students are going to do well on some and not so well on others. Everyone has the right to the occasional bad day without suffering serious consequences.    

In addition to these three kinds of assessments, we should acknowledge the existence of qualification assessments to sort out those with a particular ability from those who do not. By definition, such assessments do judge students and it is inevitable that they will be high stakes with actual consequences for failure. In the real world, we require such assessments. There is a place for the SAT, the AP, and even the CalTPA. That being said, when such assessments are employed the burden of proof should be on the testers to show that their assessment legitimately is about whether the student has mastered the material and is qualified for a particular position as opposed to merely being well suited to pass the test. For example, the flaws of the SAT and AP exams can be measured in terms of how they have inserted themselves into the curriculum and are being consciously taught.  

On the surface, the CalTPA exams test prospective teachers on material that is important for teaching. Teachers should be able to craft lessons and units with the needs of students in mind. Furthermore, assessments should be given as a means to generate useful data about what students are learning as opposed to teachers simply imagining that students have learned material because it was taught.    

The fundamental problem with the CalTPAs is that, because they contain such lengthy instructions and detailed rubrics, the tests, in practice, are not about how well prospective teachers understand lesson design and assessments but how carefully they have read and comprehended the CalTPA instructions and rubrics. It should be noted that many of the rubrics have a number of different parts and messing up even one of those parts will get you a lower score. This is the kind of assessment that a well-meaning and competent student teacher can easily fail simply because there was an honest misunderstanding on a few minor points. What makes this possibility frighteningly plausible is that about half of the rubrics on each of the Cycles center around the video clips that you send of your teaching. Did you demonstrate exactly what they were looking for? Even worse, did you get the students to show what was needed and to speak loud enough for the filming equipment to pick up? While lesson and assessment design is important for teaching, I do not want prospective teachers judged on their ability to film their classrooms. 

As you need to pass both exams to get a teaching credential, the stakes are high. This creates particular stress if, like me, you do student teaching in the winter semester. I ended up submitting my Cycle 2 exam at the beginning of May and then had to wait until June to get the results. If I had not passed on my first attempt, I would have needed to resubmit my material to try to pass in July, jeopardizing my chances of getting a job for the Fall.   

In truth, the CalTPA exams could easily be fixed. My solution would be to divide the test down to the individual rubrics and allow for the evidence used in the rubric (whether written or filmed) to be submitted one at a time. You would still need to score a 40 on all the rubrics together, but now the stakes and the stress would be lowered. As you finish gathering the evidence for each rubric, you submit it. If you get a 3, you are fine and should move on to submitting the next piece of evidence. If you do not get a 3 then you should either resubmit the evidence or simply make sure that you do better on the next rubric. By the time the final rubrics come around, the stronger students will have already passed and will not need to spend a month worrying.

With such a design, there will be much less reason to worry about having misunderstood something as such misunderstandings will be picked up quickly and rectified without serious consequences. This is how we handle major assignments in school. Students hand in drafts for particular parts of the assignments. This makes it practically impossible for a student acting in good faith to fail as problems will be picked up early on and fixed.   

Jewish Capitalism and Religious Liberty

 I would like to follow up on my previous post and consider the implications of what I wrote for Judaism. Does not Judaism have its own tradition of religious liberty, independent of Protestantism? For an explanation, let me turn to the example of Max Weber and Capitalism.

Much as I argued that Protestantism is a crucial ingredient for religious liberty, Weber famously argued that Protestantism played a critical role in the development of Capitalism. For Weber, Protestantism allowed for a “worldly asceticism.” Traditionally societies had operated on the assumption that labor was a curse. Most people were fated to be peasants with only a few having the opportunity to be aristocrats leading lives of leisure. The implication of this was that one worked only as hard as one needed to with the goal of having as much leisure as possible. If you managed to get some money, you should stop working.

In the Protestant model, work became the natural state of affairs for human beings. As such, even rich people, in no danger of starvation, should work. If you managed to get ahold of some money, you should not take an extended vacation. You should not even donate the money to support the Church. Instead, you should invest that money back into your business as capital. Instead of being saved through good works like charity, you are saved by being one of the Elect. A possible sign of being one of the Elect is that God causes you to be successful in business. From this perspective, being a capitalist is not contrary to the Protestant faith. On the contrary, capitalism is the logical fulfillment of Protestantism.

To be clear, Weber recognized that people engaged in capitalist-type behavior long before Protestantism. What Weber was arguing was that Protestantism created an ethical revolution where trade was seen as a principled moral good. Think of it this way, the medieval Church accepted prostitution as a necessary evil. This did not mean that being a prostitute was ok. On the contrary, being a prostitute was something that someone was ashamed of and only did for as long as it was absolutely necessary before trying to get out. Similarly, one was not proud to be a merchant and engage in something as “sterile” as trade. Instead, one made some money from trade before retiring and trying to “atone” for having resorted to such base activity.

In regards to Jews, Weber argued that they were “emergency” capitalists. There is nothing inherently capitalist about Judaism. Ancient Jews were not particularly involved in trade. It was only circumstances in Christian Europe, not anything within Judaism, that caused Jews to develop a capitalist element. Medieval Jews were cut out of most professions, so they turned to money lending. As such, Weber did not believe that Jews provided a model of principled capitalism to say that being a capitalist was a positive good.

In response to Weber, I would argue that it is possible for principles to evolve out of pragmatic necessity. For example, Isaac Abarbanel, living right before the Protestant Reformation, rejected the Aristotelian claim that money was sterile and therefore argued that usury was a positive good. Clearly, Abarbanel did not come to this position from an “objective” reading of the Hebrew Bible. This may have been self-interest, but that should not matter. Abarbanel, presumably, honestly believed that money-lending Jews like himself were morally superior to the Christian nobility responsible for the expulsion of 1492. If claiming that Jews were morally superior to Christians required one to believe that capitalism was a positive good, then we can add capitalism as the fourteenth principle of the Jewish faith.

To be clear, Jews never were in a position to bring about a capitalist ethical revolution by themselves. It is not as if, capitalism ever became acceptable just because the Jews did it. Furthermore, the Jewish experience with capitalism remained linked to their place within Christian society.

Much as Protestantism created the grounds not simply to engage in capitalism as a practical necessity, but as a matter of principle, Protestantism helped lay the groundwork for a principled support for religious liberty. This should be distinguished from a pragmatic tolerance where you refrain from murdering members of another faith because you fear they will murder you back. I would see the Jewish tradition of religious liberty, much like the Jewish tradition of capitalism, as being rooted in the Jewish experience as a persecuted minority. It can be argued that the fact that Jews have needed to support religious tolerance for pragmatic reasons, does not preclude the development of a principled belief in religious liberty that it is better for people to persist in their freely believed error rather than be coerced into the truth. An example of this can be seen in the Jewish disdain for missionary activity. Jews in the ancient world tried to convert non-Jews. During the Middle Ages, Muslim and Christian authorities did not allow Jews to try to convert Muslims and Christians. Today, Jews do not try to convert non-Jews and have even developed theological reasons to justify not trying to “save the souls” of non-Jews.

This does not change the fact that Jewish support for religious liberty came out of a distinct experience with non-Jewish cultures. If you are going to have Jews who support religious liberty on principle rather than as a simple matter of deeming non-Jews as beneath even missionary activity, then it will require someone with positive interactions with non-Jewish religions. An obvious candidate would be some kind of Philo-Semitic Protestantism that acknowledges some legitimacy to the Jewish experience.    

The Protestant Balance for Religious Liberty

 

Historically, there have been few principled defenders of religious liberty and, in truth, there are few today. To appreciate this, it is useful to consider the various factors needed to render religious liberty as something sensible. There is a balancing act here. One needs to believe that religion is important but that, at the same time, there is a value to having a personal conscious.

The obvious threat to religious liberty has been traditional religions themselves. If you believe in capital T TRUTH and that you are in possession of it, then why should you tolerate people who are in error? Worse, what if these people are not only obstinate in their heathen and heretical beliefs, but insist on passing their errors on to their innocent children or uneducated neighbors? From this perspective, working for the Spanish Inquisition can be seen as a humanitarian gesture. Your main job is to explain to people how they are in error. The only people who are going to be tortured or killed are those obstinate heretics who refuse to admit that they are wrong and have, therefore, brought their calamity upon themselves. 

To say that religion has often been a threat to religious liberty does not mean that secularism offers any protection. Keep in mind that to desire to protect religious liberty, one needs to still assume that religious beliefs and practices are actually important. One thinks of the example of Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes was a materialist if not an outright atheist. This did not mean that he supported religious liberty for atheists or anyone else. On the contrary, it was precisely because Hobbes rejected all religious dogma that he had no problem allowing the king of his Leviathan state to enforce whatever religion he chose. Since no religion is true, the only legitimate purpose for a religion is as a signaling device to demonstrate one’s loyalty to the regime. The king should make an official religion, the more ridiculous the better. The people who are willing to say that they believe this nonsense show that they understand the importance of everyone submitting themselves to the authority of one person as the only solution to the war of all against all. Those people who insist on maintaining their loyalty to some other absurdity, presumably because they actually believe it, are a threat to public order and need to be killed. For example, Charles I had to deal with English Puritans who cared about priestly vestments as well as incense and candles in church. Before long, these Puritans were also objecting to Charles’ right to tax. They then plunged the country into a civil war and chopped Charles' head off. All of this could have been avoided if Charles had been willing to properly crack down on religious dissent.

The confused association between secularism and religious liberty comes about because secularists have hijacked the term “religious liberty” in an Orwellian fashion and have used it to mean something quite different. The secularist version of religious liberty is a rigged “heads I win, tails you lose” game in which the State is not neutral regarding religion but actively secular. Religion is then banned from the public sphere to the privacy of the home. Parents may be allowed to personally be religious but with few resources to prevent their children from exercising their “religious liberty” and leaving the faith. If the metaphysics of gender ideology can be supported with public funds more easily than the metaphysics of the Trinity then you do not have religious liberty. 

In truth, religious liberty is an accidental outgrowth of the Protestant Reformation. While Luther and Calvin were not proponents of religious liberty and in fact were, in many respects, worse than their Catholic opponents, Protestantism personalized the process of salvation. Either one needed to affirm that only Jesus (and not the works of the Church) can save or be one of the Elect, chosen from before creation for salvation. If people are saved as individuals and not as members of any established church then forcing people to follow the dictates of even the “right” church is useless for actually saving souls.

The Protestant focus on individual salvation is crucial here because it allows for both components of religious liberty to simultaneously exist. Clearly, religion is important and people need to be allowed to practice the “right” kind in order to save their souls. That being said, since God has his own highly circuitous route to how people might come to believe the right things, people should be allowed to persist in their false beliefs until God, and not the State, shows them the light. To be clear, one does not have to be a Protestant, to be a friend of religious liberty. That being said, there are grounds to suspect the religious liberty bona fides of anyone who has not been influenced by Protestant thought.     

Racism or Confession as a Social/Political Skill

 

The beginning of Home Alone 2 offers us an excellent example of a well-handled confession on the part of Kevin's older brother, Buzz. One would think that Kevin has the moral high ground against Buzz, who instigated the fight during the staged Christmas pageant. What Buzz understands, though, is that this is not about what either he or Kevin actually did but about the legitimacy of the McCallister family as a social unit. What the rest of the family cares about is the fact that they were humiliated by Kevin and Buzz fighting, which showed everyone in the theater that the McCallisters are not a real family but a collection of individuals who place their petty egos over the common good. As such, the point of Buzz's speech is to acknowledge the authority of the family and apologize primarily to them. The fact that Buzz is insincere actually benefits his cause as it demonstrates his willingness to follow the rules of the family game and place them above any personal morality. 

Kevin makes the mistake of thinking that this is about personal morality. Buzz wronged him so he had the right to respond. Buzz was insincere with his apology so he is not obligated to apologize to Buzz. Since the family, is not about to punish Buzz, they are all in league with Buzz to humiliate him so he has no obligation to apologize to them. To bow to the authority of the family would mean giving up his moral claim of being wronged by Buzz. Kevin cannot place the family's interest over his personal hurt and, therefore, falls into Buzz's trap. It is Kevin ends up being seen as the wrongdoer in the incident and is sent to bed. In the end, Buzz, despite his dubious morality, wins because he has superior social skills. One might even say that his lack of morality has helped him develop superior social skills in the sense of making the Machiavellian jump of recognizing the existence of a political mindset that is distinct and often contrary to conventional morality. 

In defense of the McCallister family, one could argue that they are right to punish Kevin. As a kid, Kevin is incredibly self-centered and focuses on his personal dignity. He needs to learn the importance of family. (This is Kevin's emotional arc that is crudely shoehorned into both movies, in between having the Wet Bandits comically walking into his booby traps.)   

Let us now move to a scenario inspired by Bill Cosby. Imagine two students caught smoking in the bathroom. Both students are brought before the school administrator and asked to confess and apologize. It would seem that, as the students have both committed the exact same action, they should receive the same punishment with the confessional and apology being mere incidental parts of the story. In truth, the response of the student to being caught is actually more important than the infraction itself. As such, even minor differences in how students respond to being caught will have a greater effect on how they are punished than even their actual deeds.  

As we have seen with the case of Kevin and Buzz, when someone commits an infraction there are two wrongs committed. There is the action itself (whether fighting during a public recital, smoking in the bathroom, or first-degree homicide) and then there is the challenge to the legitimacy of the social unit (whether the family or larger units such as a school or even a country). The implication here is that the transgressor does not accept the right of the social unit to impose obligations. Since societies tend to rely more on the soft power of people not being able to even conceive of rebellion in order to function than on actual coercion, the belief that one is allowed to break the rules is an even graver threat than the actual rule-breaking itself. This is one of the reasons why it is so important for courts to get defendants to plead guilty. The convict who admits that they were wrong and throws themselves at the mercy of the court, affirms the court's and, by extension, society's legitimate authority to punish. The crime that initially struck at the authority of society now comes to strengthen that authority.  

What happens when one of the students has a better instinctual understanding of the social theory of crime and punishment particularly as applied to white middle-class people perhaps because they are themselves white middle-class kids? As such, they are able to assume the proper contrite pose and tone that the white middle-class administrators expect. Now, what if the other student is an inner-city black kid who lacks the training to handle white middle-class administrators? (Alternatively, what if the student is on the autism spectrum and struggles, in general, to strike the right tone with neurotypicals?) 

If the white middle-class kid gets away with a slap on the wrist and the poor black kid gets the book thrown at him, is that racism? the skin color of the students would not offer decisive proof as the school could point to a subtle but real distinction in how the students behaved. Furthermore, the fact that we are dealing with subtleties traps us into having to give the administration a lot of leeway to call things as they instinctually see fit. To say that administrators should not be attempting to force middle-class "white" values on students and to do so is racism is also far from obvious as the administrators can argue that part of their job is to teach students to function within a society run by middle-class white people. Even if we disagree with them, the fact that they sincerely believe this and see themselves acting for the benefit of the black students makes it rather difficult to say that they are racists. 

Coming Out of the Closet to Claim Group Rights

Essential for understanding African American history in this country is the fact that, for hundreds of years blacks were persecuted as a group. It was not just that blacks were disproportionally targeted for slavery, lynchings, and ultimately the system of Jim Crow, these things were part of an organized conspiracy against black people for the simple reason that they were black. By the end of the 18^th century, whites had developed the sense that the new United States was founded as a white man’s republic and therefore required a rigid distinction between whites and blacks that kept blacks in a subordinate position. This racism served a practical purpose in that it gave American whites, who otherwise did not have much in common with each other a sense that they were bonded into a common project. (This is not to defend American racism. On the contrary, this is a reason to take racists seriously and not as mere rhetoric.) This belief in America as a white man’s republic obviously existed in a dialectic with the belief in America as the country of “all men are created equal.” It is to America’s credit that, in the long march of history, the belief in all men are created equal has tended to win out over the white man’s republic.

The fact that African-Americans have been persecuted as a group is important because it establishes at least hypothetical grounds for blacks to make demands from white society that go beyond the elimination of laws that outright discriminated against blacks. The fact that I have personally never owned slaves and no African American alive today has ever been formally enslaved in this country does not mean that I do not owe something to African Americans. As critical race theorists would argue, I have benefited from systemic racism. Perhaps I should be willing to accept non-discrimination laws applied to private businesses, affirmative action, or even allow for my tax dollars to fund reparations?

To be clear, there is a risk in having blacks pushing the claim to be a distinct group as the traditional argument for their civil rights rested on the premise that blacks were not really a group. On the contrary, the idea was supposed to be that the notion that the color of a person’s skin could affect a person’s identity was a ridiculous notion invented by foolish racists. If blacks are going to be so reckless as to undermine the entire case for their civil rights and claim that they really are different from white people, they might be left to reap the consequences.

It is interesting to compare the case for black civil rights to LGBTQ+ rights as it is hardly obvious that LGBTQ+ people can actually claim to be a group let alone a historically persecuted one. For one thing, their opponents generally tend not to see them as members of a group but simply as people engaged in an action. It is that action that is the source of the opposition.

Furthermore, LGBTQ+ people are not, in any obvious way born LGBTQ+. We can say that black is a meaningful group in large part because we can accept that a newborn can, in some real sense, be classified as black. (We can go around a maternity ward and point to the black, white, Asian, and Hispanic babies and say that they are all beautiful in God's eyes and that it is wonderful to have such diversity.) What does it mean to say that a newborn is LGBTQ+. Think of it this way; how many black teenagers have undergone the experience of coming “out of the closet” to their parents? “Mom and Dad, I want you to know that I am black.” To which the parents respond: “Are you sure that you are black. Maybe, if you listened to more country music, you will become white.” LGBTQ+ people historically have not been raised by LGBTQ+ parents with an LGBTQ+ identity. It would seem that this is merely something that they decide for themselves. As such, it should make no wider claims on heterosexuals beyond the right to be left alone.  

Consider the consequences of coming out at an even later point in life. It is hardly obvious that a forty-year-old man who comes out of the closet has really discovered his “true identity” that he has been hiding, perhaps even from himself, all along. On the contrary, this sounds like someone going through a mid-life crisis that has led them to take on a "new hobby." Such behavior should be tolerated with amusement but there is no need to grant the person any kind of moral support for they have not done anything virtuous. Note that this all assumes that our middle-aged out of the closet gay person has not abandoned a wife and children to pursue his gay lifestyle. If he has then he is liable for social condemnation and possibly even legal penalties.

If LGBTQ+ people are not a group then they cannot make a claim to be persecuted as a group. For that matter, it would not be possible for them to be discriminated against. To be clear, I agree that anti-sodomy laws were wrong as they violated personal liberty. Then again, I believe with equal conviction that drug laws are wrong. This is not because they discriminate against potheads and keep them from becoming their true high selves. I do not accept that Pothead counts as a meaningful group. Human beings should have the right to ingest substances. Similarly, human beings should have the right to engage in consensual adult acts whether it is sodomy or incest. To be clear, in none of these cases should the right to engage in an action be confused with a right to a job or to social respectability.   

Something that I find fascinating about the LGBTQ+ movement is how they have managed to turn what should be an argument against them in their favor. It is argued that the fact that LGBTQ+ people are usually not raised with an LGBTQ+ identity is one of the ways that they are persecuted. LGBTQ+ people grow up "deprived" of their "authentic" selves. They have to struggle against a heteronormative society that tries to inflict heteronormativity upon them tempting them to live "inauthentically." From this perspective, even the progressive parent who never consciously attempts to stop their child from assuming an LGBTQ+ identity is still guilty of anti-LGBTQ+ persecution merely for raising the kid in an "inauthentic" fashion on the assumption that they are heterosexual or cisgender. This is sort of like the frum-novel trope where the Jewish kid is raised by Gentiles who try to keep the "truth" of his Judaism from him only for his "Jewish spark" to shine through in the end. (Note that the claims of an authentic LGBTQ+ self and an authentic Jewish self are both metaphysical claims. As such, the First Amendment would require that the government take them as equally valid.)   

A practical policy implication of this argument that LGBTQ+ people are a group even to the point of claiming that LGBTQ+ kids exist, is a push to bring LGBTQ+ material into schools. The goal is to teach kids about LGBTQ+ practices but, more than that, they wish to teach that LGBTQ+ people are a legitimate group with the moral high ground due to their "authentic" living earned by struggling against the constraints of a persecuting culture. This leaves children with an obvious question: might they really be LGBTQ+? If they come out as such, they will be praised for showing the "courage" to be their "authentic" selves. The more there are children who can be convinced to do this, the easier it becomes to argue that LGBTQ+ people really are a group. If children really are born LGBTQ+ and only needed adults to give them the language and the support structure to come out of the closet in ways that are in "no way manipulative," then being LGBTQ+ must be a legitimate identity. As such, society must not only eliminate all laws that ban LGBTQ+ practices but also "atone" for the crime of not previously recognizing that such an identity existed. 

Arguably, this would require greater government action than rectifying American racism. Consider, blacks have never had to seriously struggle against people who refused to accept that there was such a thing as black people in the genetic sense. For LGBTQ+ people to receive their full rights as a group, it might be necessary, regardless of the First Amendment, that everyone must be forced to acknowledge that they really are a group. 

E. D. Hirsch Jr.'s Cultural Literacy: A Secessionist Response

 

E. D. Hirsch Jr. is one of my favorite education theorists. I find that cultural literacy makes intuitive sense to me with its emphasis on things that children should know. While Hirsch often gets accused of trying to promote "white education," his goal has been to help children of color. If you live in a society founded upon European culture and you wish to function within it then you are going to need to know the things that members of the dominant culture take for granted. This does not mean that there is anything superior about European culture nor does it mean that American culture cannot or should not change to reflect the greater diversity of its people. One adapts to the world around oneself.  

Having a common set of cultural references functions in much the same way as language in allowing for a functional democratic country. A monarchy can function and even benefit from the fact that the peasants in different parts of the country speak different dialects and would not understand each other even if they were to meet. A democracy, on the other hand, needs a population capable of deliberation to at least come to the belief that they are one people with a mutually understood common good that all parties can be trusted to sacrifice themselves for. In practice, this requires that people have a common language that allows them to understand each other. 

In truth, it is not enough that people speak a common language; to avoid people simply speaking past each other, it is important that people also have a common set of cultural references. For example, being familiar with Star Wars to the point that you take being called "rebel scum" as a compliment, shows me that you have a deeply ingrained sense that it can be legitimate to oppose certain kinds of authority. This can serve as a useful foundation for political cooperation. From this perspective, it makes sense to teach Star Wars in school in much the same way that we teach Shakespeare. (Schools can even use Ian Doescher's Shakespearian adaptations of Star Wars.)     

Following Hirsch, I am skeptical of claims to be able to teach critical thinking as it is difficult to evaluate. If students are unable to say who the American Revolution was fought against, I am inclined to assume, barring evidence to the contrary, that they are incapable of coming up with coherent arguments in favor of democracy or monarchy. Furthermore, my cynical self suspects that the push by schools to teach critical thinking is a cover for their failure to actually teach. If schools can pretend that they are teaching critical thinking (and there is no easy to prove that they are not teaching it) then the fact that they objectively fail to teach basic facts about the American Revolution cannot be used to reach the obvious conclusion that the school is a waste of the students' time as well as the tax payers' money and should be dismantled.

Similarly, it is a dead end to try to teach reading in the abstract. Students can never become good readers in general but only good readers of specific subjects from which they have mastered the necessary vocabulary and references. To do this, students need to do extensive reading in those subjects. Along the way, they should be aided by teachers who are themselves well-read in the particular subject and understand the particular vocabulary and references that are necessary to make sense of the material.  

An area where I disagree with Hirsch is that Hirsch favors a highly centralized school system with a set curriculum that does not change from teacher to teacher and school to school. To be fair to Hirsch, he is not a libertarian and has no prior commitments to limiting government authority. Furthermore, there are practical reasons to support top-down curriculums. It simply is not workable to expect teachers to design their own curriculums that are going to effectively teach state standards. It is one thing if teachers are simply expected to offer courses on their eccentric selves (not necessarily a bad method of teaching) to allow them the liberty of teaching whatever they think is worthwhile. If we expect teachers to fulfill specific goals then they should be given PowerPoints, videos, and assignments to teach that information. 

From a social or political perspective, it makes sense to not only insist that teachers in the same school teach a common curriculum but that all schools in a city, state, or even country teach the same curriculum. If you want a unified society or country then students are going to need a common set of things that they can assume that everyone else knows as well such as the English language or Star Wars.

As a secessionist, I believe that the diverse people currently living in the United States would be better served if the country were to be divided. This would end the culture wars and allow everyone to live in a country designed to suit their particular tastes. As such, I believe in the importance of cultural literacy but it serves a different purpose for me. Instead of using cultural literacy as a normative claim that everyone should have a set of common cultural references to allow them to function as part of one country, I see cultural literacy in positive terms. Where should we draw the lines for the different "un-United States?" A useful place to start a discussion would be to privatize education and see what kinds of curricula different schools would create. Those schools that developed similar curricula based on similar cultural references should likely remain as part of the same country. Those populations that clearly have different cultural references to the extent that they would not want their children taught in the other group's school system should split up. 

It is obvious to me that the Hasidim of New Square or Kiryas Joel should be given their own country. One can see this simply from the fact that they want a different kind of school curriculum for their children based on making sure that these children grow up without cultural references like Star Wars. I am also willing to accept that people who want their children taught a 1619 Project or a Howard Zinn version of the American Revolution should also belong to a different country from me. All of this can be done peacefully and would actually help different groups live with each other. I can be perfectly tolerant of people with radically different political values from mine when they live in a different country. It is when we have to share a country that we are at risk of conflict.      

         

Fighting the Losing Battle

 

Here is an utterly fantastic fan-made Star Wars lightsaber duel. This is a great example of fans understanding Star Wars far better than the people who run Disney or even George Lucas. If only we got rid of copyright laws, we might actually get some decent Star Wars. 

What I would like to particularly call attention to is the moment where the Light Side force user has a vision that she is going to die. Her response is to sit and meditate upon the Force, which is how the Dark Side person finds her. This scene pays homage to the lightsaber duel in Phantom Menace where the fighting is stopped because of the energy shields. Qui-Gon sits and meditates while Darth Maul angrily paces. 

 

The idea here is that Qui-Gon is at peace with the Force as opposed to Darth Maul being consumed by his Dark Side-fueled hate. One gets the sense that Qui-Gon is indifferent to the outcome of this fight, whether he lives or not. He serves the Force and it is the Force that has brought him to fight Maul. If it is the will of the Force that he dies, then so be it. (The fact that Obi-Wan turns to anger to defeat Maul after Qui-Gon is cut down is one of the more subtle ways in which the Dark Side is the real winner of the film.) Similarly, in our film, the woman accepts her coming death as the will of the Force. The fact that following the light has led her to this position does not cause her to turn to the Dark Side in the hope that she can change her fate.  

As I have mentioned previously, the chief conflict of Star Wars, when understood properly is that the Jedi are not capable of truly fighting the Sith. While the Jedi might be allowed to protect themselves and their friends, the moment they attempt to save the galaxy from falling to the Sith, an inevitable part of an unending cycle, they have already implicitly fallen to the Dark Side by acknowledging the central assumption of the Sith that the Force needs to be used to "fix" the galaxy. This inevitably means taking over the galaxy and ruling over it as an emperor, killing anyone who gets in the way. As such, to defeat the Sith means to become the Sith lengthening the time that the Galaxy must remain under Sith dominion. The only way to defeat the Sith is to allow them to eventually destroy themselves as they turn on each other in their bid to be the Sith Master.  

The Socialist Ace: What If You Were in Charge?

As a free-market person, I am sometimes jealous of socialists. They seem to march from political success to success. Even the murderous failure of the Soviet Union seems, in retrospect, a minor pothole on the road as opposed to the cliff to cast socialism forever outside of the Overton Window of socially accepted opinions. By contrast, the horrors of Nazi Germany have made it impossible to be a respectable fascist. It does not matter if you claim that the Nazis were not "real fascists" and that you support "democratic fascism." 

An essential component of recognizing the evils of fascism is a refusal to distinguish between the ideals of fascism in theory and the horrors that actual fascists inflicted upon the world. This principle extends so far that, in practice, one is forced to teach a cartoon version of fascism in school where fascists are motivated simply by hatred and a feeling of superiority over all other groups. Teaching kids that fascists were motivated by the democratic ideal of the nation coming together under the leadership of a leader who would make everyone turn from selfishness and instead work for the common good would raise too many uncomfortable questions and cannot be allowed.

Socialism, by contrast, is allowed to be judged by its ideals disconnected from its mass murders which are attributed to the personal failings of leaders like Stalin and Mao. In truth, as with fascism, the crimes of socialism were committed not because people failed to live up to its ideals but because they followed them all too well. Understand that if you truly believed that you had the solution to the problems of mankind and could make the world a loving happy place and all that was standing in your way were a few million bad people motivated merely by spite, you would agree to kill them. To refuse to save mankind out of a personal desire not to get your hands dirty with a few homicides would be monstrous.

What makes the ideals of socialism particularly appealing is a very simple question. If you look around the world, it is obvious that it is an incredibly unjust place with the world's resources distributed in a way that can neither be defended on grounds of fairness nor for its ability to maximize utility for all of mankind. If you were in charge of distributing the world's resources, could you distribute them in a way that was fairer and optimized utility? For example, it does not take a genius to come up with the idea that the world would be a better place if we paid professional athletes less and used the money to pay for lunches for poor kids.  

If you answered yes to giving kids free lunches or to any number of the schemes that are likely running through your head, then it is very difficult to resist socialism in principle. We might still have to figure out a means to make sure that the right person, someone like us, came to the top. That being acknowledged, once we solve this problem, we should be able to make the world at least somewhat of a better place. Recognizing that the world's resources are not distributed justly, it is the job of all moral people to work to redistribute resources in a way that is more equitable. From this perspective, it is hard to resist dividing the world into socialists, the good guys who work to better mankind, and opponents of socialism who want the world to be unjust presumably because they either are too ignorant to recognize that the world is unjust or because they are part of the oppressive class who are responsible for all the oppression.

Historically, most people, particularly if they have had some education, have believed that the world would be a better place if only they were in charge. One thinks of the example of Plato and his philosopher kings. It is not a coincidence that Plato was essentially a socialist who believed that the rulers of his republic should hold everything in common including wives and children. 

A partial defense against the siren call that socialism would lead to a better world if only your people were in charge is to recognize that it is unlikely that your people will ever get to put their plan for a better world into practice. Imagine that you had to choose between accepting the political/economic order that we have or agreeing to live in a world in which a random individual was allowed to redistribute resources according to their sense of justice. How many people would chance socialism then? Make no mistake that one person's version of justice is, to others, a nightmare worth forstalling even at the cost of their lives. I can imagine that certain ex-girlfriends and advisors would rather kill themselves than take a chance on living in my "just" world.    

A higher-level defense against socialism would be Hayek's "Why the Worst Get to the Top," which essentially argues that we do not even have the opportunity to take our chances with the moral sensibilities of an average person. Choosing socialism will mean submitting ourselves to the sort of moral monster willing to do what is necessary, even mass murder, in order to place themselves in a position where they can refashion a country according to their notion of justice. 

To truly break free of the spell of socialist ideals, one has to instinctually believe to the core of their being that if they were the benevolent dictator and had the power to redistribute resources according to what they believed was right, the world would not be a better place. Consider the example from earlier of using a socialized athletic system to fund education. We already have a version of this with college athletics where the millions that some athletes are worth are redistributed to universities that work for the "public good." I have a hard time accepting that the NCAA is really more just than the NBA or the NFL but I am sure readers could tweak the system to make it fairer. 

I confess, even after being a libertarian for more than a decade, I still cannot shake the fantasy that I would make a pretty good world ruler. Granted, my fantasy of being the Messiah includes a lot of telling people that they are all individuals and can think for themselves. As this is a fantasy, everyone is able to think for themselves while simultaneously doing what I would have wanted them to do anyway, saving me the effort of even having to think what orders I should have given in the first place.