Many years ago I read Adin Steinsaltz’sThe Essential Talmud. Steinsaltz was a Charedi (Chasidic more specifically) rabbi who spoke about the text and work from the perspective of an insider. One of the major insights I recalled is that to obtain esteem, eminence and status, rabbinical scholars would engage in deep exegesis of Jewish law, and work to extend the purview of Halakah. Steinsaltz was very precise that the process always involved extension, not retraction. The law grew more ornate and restrictive over time, explaining why there is a pre-modern basis for the recent vogue for veganism among very pious Jews, as a plant-based diet is by definition kosher. Some observant Jews are skeptical that any contemporary form of animal slaughter can adhere to the letter of God’s law.
From the perspective of a devout Jew, as Steinsaltz was, there is nothing more important than the law handed down from God. He was quite dismissive of secular philosophical inquiry, reiterating that the most learned rabbis imbibed such wisdom only so long as it furthered their understanding of scripture and the commentaries of their predecessors. The quest for learning undertaken by religious scholars was the most important task in the whole world for Steinsaltz, with everyone else taking on a supportive role in supporting the scholars. The production of a more unwieldy Halakah was the price one paid for getting closer to the intent behind God’s law.
But from the outside one can observe other dynamics. Arguably Jewish law was essential for maintaining the cohesion of the Jewish people for thousands of years. With the exception of schismatics, after the rise of Christianity Jews all across the world were united by their adherence to the written and oral Torah, and the rules and regulations of Halakah kept them distinct from their gentile neighbors, more, or less. In this way, religious commentary served a functional role on the scale of the community. But competition between scholars occurred in the context of a zero-sum game. There could only be one most eminent rabbi in a city. Over time individual rabbis produced more and more ornate interpretations of the law that rendered Rabbinical Judaism somewhat an odd fit in early modern Europe. There was no way that a pious Jew could integrate into the social and professional world of the gentile, so there emerged Reform Judaism (which did involve retraction of Jewish law from the lives of Jews).
The moral of this lesson is that a functional characteristic that has a group-level utility, furthering cohesion and forwarding some collective aim, can produce perverse incentives when individuals compete among each other to be the more clever and devout of all and then impose their new norms on the whole population.
I did read The Essential Talmud. But my point isn’t about Orthodox Jews, it’s about American academics. As the high priests of the hall monitor caste like to opine, “this too is problematic.”
I’ve been doing my steppe series since the spring of 2021 and will be continuing it into 2022 (chronologically). But I thought some blog readers might have missed the podcasts
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has posted a reflection on her experience with ‘cancel culture’ and young people whom she helped who then turned on her immediately when the mob demanded it. This part is important:
There are many social-media-savvy people who are choking on sanctimony and lacking in compassion, who can fluidly pontificate on Twitter about kindness but are unable to actually show kindness. People whose social media lives are case studies in emotional aridity. People for whom friendship, and its expectations of loyalty and compassion and support, no longer matter. People who claim to love literature – the messy stories of our humanity – but are also monomaniacally obsessed with whatever is the prevailing ideological orthodoxy. People who demand that you denounce your friends for flimsy reasons in order to remain a member of the chosen puritan class.
I refuse to turn on people and denounce them on demand from the mob. You all know what I’m talking about. Some of my friends have been called on to denounce me, and some have. They are weak. Most people are weak. This period is useful because it will help us separate the true friends from those whose friendship is conditional on the winds of favor.
More generally, social media makes preening performance public and scalable in a way that it never was. The behavior described by Adichie is as old as humanity itself. The main difference is today it is produced and distributed on an industrial scale. As Ray Kurzweil likes to say, information technology is exponential…
Many years ago I had a friend who was from a Southern Baptist background, but who became an atheist as an adult. We were discussing religion and rationality, and he mentioned offhand that “of course Mormonism is more irrational than traditional Christianity.” This assertion reflected the fact that my friend grew up in a traditional Christian household, and continued to carry over some of his presuppositions even as he abandoned his old religion.
When people who didn’t grow up with, or as, Latter-Day Saints, are told God has a physical body and he lives on the planet Kolob in our universe, and that he has intercourse with the Heavenly Mother, they think this is insane. My friend, an atheist, certainly did.
But if you are an atheist is the idea of God as a superhuman creature, perhaps like Q from Star Trek the Next Generation, more insane than the God of Trinitarian Christianity? After all, the “real presence” of the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ, the God of Christianity, is a pretty insane concept. But billions of people believe in it. Even though my friend never believed in the real presence, he would probably find it less bizarre than the fact that the Mormon God has a physical body and lives in our material universe.
As I dug into the issue my friend admitted that his initial view that Mormonism was less plausible and more irrational than traditional Christianity was not thought-out, but a reflex, and he changed his view. As an atheist of course he thought the religion of the Latter-Day Saints and traditional Christianity were not fundamentally true, but he had to admit that the rejection of Greek philosophy by some Mormon theologians makes it more intelligible and comprehensible as a system of thought if you are a materialist. Mormons might find this offensive, but their conception of God ends up striking many atheists as if he’s a virtuous superhero with incredible powers. In contrast, traditional Christianity (and Islam and Judaism) tends to project an almost incomprehensible and inscrutable Lord on High (one reason Christianity argues for the necessity of the incarnation of God into a man).
This general tendency is not limited to religion. Rather, because religion is explicitly talked about we see these dynamics more clearly. It’s present all around us. Khan’s second law of culture: “any institution not explicitly pagan sooner or later becomes Christian.” Many people embedded within the regnant ideologies of the contemporary West dissent from new orthodoxies promulgated from on high. But sooner or later it becomes clear they have internalized the logic of that which they disagree, to the point that they are co-opted, slowly but imperceptibly. The question is not if they will profess the new faith, but when. This just seems to be what is happening to many people I know, even if they do not realize it.
The real presence is insane. It is against logic, against nature, against your deepest intuitions. But once you accept it as not insane, you open the possibility to its truth, and you will be received in the end. Even in your silence the believers will know you deny God, and they will demand confession and profession. You will do so.
Update: They removed the affinity groups from the public page.
I don’t write much about the culture war because it seems that one side won, and it’s not my side. If my side is going to win, it won’t be through arguing. In the early 9th century the Patriarch of the Church of the East in Bagdhad had to defend Christianity in the court of the Caliph Harun al-Rashid. Obviously, he had to tread lightly. This was not a debate he was going to win. The goal was not to lose too badly. This is where I feel the ‘non-woke’ faction among cultural elites is. Just not losing is the victory. But in the long run, the Church of the East went into decline. If you even feign the shahada, the punishment for apostasy is social death.
So I don’t try to argue in public. Resistance needs to be in private because public attention is an invitation to get targeted.
But sometimes something so ridiculous comes on my radar that it warrants public comment.
Recently, I raised questions about this ideology at a mandatory, whites-only student and faculty Zoom meeting. (Such racially segregated sessions are now commonplace at my school.)
This seems crazy to me. Racial segregation? I wondered on Twitter how common this sort of thing is. It must be an aberration, no? Well, a friend who is faculty at Michigan State screenshotted an email he received (this is on a public page too).
I’m going to blockquote a portion if you don’t want to click to enlarge:
We invite attendees to participate in an affinity group during the Student Success Spring Conference. Affinity (or caucus) groups provide spaces for people to work within their own identity groups. To advance racial equity, there is work for white people and people of color to do separately and together. For white people, an affinity group provides time and space to work explicitly and intentionally on understanding white culture and white privilege and to increase one’s critical analysis around these concepts. For people of color, a caucus is a place to work with peers to address the impact of racism, to interrupt experiences of internalized racism, and to create a space for healing and working for individual and collective liberation.
If you are “woke” you see nothing wrong with this I assume. And that’s fine, we understand each other. On the Last Day, we’re on different sides. There’s no possibility of meeting in the middle. No compromise. I’m marked as to who I am. You know me as an enemy or friend, and there’s really no ambiguity about that. And I will know some of you too! I call you friend now sincerely, but on the Last Day I’ll show you as much loyalty as I’ve received from you.
But what about the rest? There are many academics who find these racial affinity groups disturbing. But they are busy with research. Do they need the hassle of speaking out about these things? Enough. As my friend who sent me the screenshot said: this is being complicit. Other academic friends tell me there is a “hidden majority.” If there is, you are all weak cowards. You count for nothing. The insanity marches and you avert your eyes. Why are you devoting your life to truth, while not confronting the abomination suffocating your institutions? This is evil.
Evil is a strong word. Some of you who are not woke, but moderate, may argue like Abraham haggling with the angels that there is some righteousness in Sodom and Gomorrah. My feelings here are quite personal. I have small children of mixed racial backgrounds. Though the infractions are minor, we’ve encountered strange things in regards to the race of my children. Both my wife and I have been disturbed by requests to clarify our children’s racial identity by school authorities. The only way I can explain what’s going on is it’s like being a Jew in 1980’s Northern Ireland and being asked if your children are Protestant or Catholic. We’re not Christian, and race isn’t super important to our identities (unlike some people). Being asked even implicitly is an imposition and we don’t appreciate our children be asked to racialize themselves (I’m being politic, we were enraged).
But the real problem I have is the white affinity groups. I am not happy with the “people of color” affinity groups either, but in some way, these have been around since the 1960’s. The emergence of white affinity groups seems a nod to the re-racialization of society as the explicit text. The fundamental issue is simple: I do not want white people to think about their race. I do not want white people to think of themselves in racial terms. The history of white Americans thinking in racialized terms is not good for people who look like me. These fools are going to get us killed!
Taking activists who are nonwhite at their word rather than self-interest, they believe white examination and embrace of their racial identity will allow for true anti-racism and justice. My rejoinder is simple: you put far too much faith in the innate goodness of these white people. My wife’s grandparents were good people, yes, but I know for a fact they were opposed to integration. They were good people, but of their time. Most people conform and follow the spirit of the times. Don’t tempt fate to think you can tame the snake of racial identity. It’s evil among all races and all people. It is always with us, but it is sin. As a brown-skinned minority in a majority-white country, I do not want white people to think in racial terms.
More concretely I cannot tolerate resegregation in this country. It would separate me from those who I care about most in the world. It would possibly separate my own children from each other. Today their differences of complexion are matters of happenstance. Perhaps in the future, it would be more important? When on Sesame Street a character says “The color of our skin is an important part of who we are” I feel a cold wind blowing. The context is much more innocuous than some have made it out to be, but for some of us, skin color is an accident.
As a quick aside, this is where some white nationalists freak out and declare “see, his mask has slipped, he’s anti-white!” Fools, I’m brown. My opposition to your kind is on my skin. I was always against you, just like I’m against the Critical Race Theory Bolsheviks. I see you two as the same thing. I always have. I’m a brown-skinned man whose ancestors took the alien name Khan and adopted a foreign religion. I have relatives across the world as we scatter. My whole lineage screams cosmopolitan. It has for hundreds of years. This is my nature, constitutive to me. Since the Axial Age there have been symbol-manipulators who transcend nations and bind peoples together ideologically. That is me and my kind.
The way I differ from some of my kind is I do not expect most humans to be like this, nor do I think it is feasible that we should force others to be like us. Human societies need to operate at some sort of equilibrium so that extreme cosmopolitans (like me) and extreme localists can coexist. The liberal democratic compromises of the late 20th century were good. They established an equipoise for a pluralistic society. What is happening now is cultural radicalism is destroying the social capital and trust that liberalism needs to survive and persist. Once the capital is exhausted people will fall back on other identities. Religion is one possibility. But race is another.
And that is why I think complicity with racially segregated groups is horrible and evil. Most people have no deep beliefs. They have shallow conformities. It’s best not to reawaken affinities and identities that have been submerged and sublimated.
Finally, the universities need to account for themselves. The public fisc will face more stress in the near future. Those of us who feel persecuted by the radicalism bred on these campuses need to stop arguing with the new commissars and ask why we’re subsidizing their livelihood. We need change the course of history or it will run us over. This is not a plea. This is a fact.
Over 25 years ago I read Daughter of the Empire, a political fantasy that prefigured elements of the “grimdark” genre. The protagonist was involved in various machinations where she had to sacrifice aspects of her humanity so that she, and her house, could survive in an amoral game of competition between nobles in the Empire of Kelawan. One of the plot points is that she makes a “calls to clan,” the clan being a collection of noble houses united by notional descent from a common ancestor. Because she has to fight another house that is far more powerful, she makes the appeal to those who are part of her lineage group to come to her aid. The other houses normally are reluctant to intervene, and there are all sorts of manipulations required to prompt the other houses to show solidarity with her.
Nevertheless, the idea exists that a group of houses bound together by kinship, fictive or real, operate as a unit against common external threats.
This is not hard to understand in terms of why these phenomena develop.
Recently, one of my readers at Brown Pundits has been vocal on Indian political events, which have gotten heated. Though he is American, he has family in India, and there has been an instance of social media harassment (or at least contact) with his cousin in that country, relating to his political views (and apparently some accusations of anti-Sikh prejudice on his part). The motives here are not important. The point is that my reader spoke out as an individual, and that has triggered a collective and coordinated action.
One of the implications of The WEIRDest People in the World is that the individualistic social context of the West must rely on rules and norms, rather than interpersonal relationships that extend to lineage groups. But, this means that there must be some element of fairness in meting out punishment.
What if punishment and attacks are capricious? What if they come en masse from a group against an individual? Over ten years ago there were issues relating to Barack Obama’s relationship to Jeremiah Wright, and some liberal journalists on an e-list were thinking about how they should defend Obama. One journalist basically proposed going on offense:
I do not endorse a Popular Front, nor do I think you need to. It’s not necessary to jump to Wright-qua-Wright’s defense. What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a rightwinger’s [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear. Obviously I mean this rhetorically.
A decade out this seems high-minded as it serves some purpose. The reality is the way “cancellation” works today is that there is an element of capriciousness involved. There’s a positive feedback loop as major players send their “forces” against nobodies for no reason, except that the mob needs to feed. As an example of this senselessness, consider what happened to a college student in South Dakota, when a bunch of young adult fiction authors and various influencers attacked her on specious grounds. You Google her and this ridiculous controversy comes up, which basically struck her like lightning.
The problem is that people face these forces and coordinated attacks as individuals. What if that woman had a lineage group, a clan, who she could rely on that? The clan, in its turn, could seek out cyber and reputational revenge against those who attacked her. Of course, this sort of behavior erodes the norms and social capital which allows for a high trust society, but I don’t think it’s feasible for individuals to keep worrying that they’ll get sucked into the undertow and take reputational hits indefinitely. For example, I know an academic who is a conservative who donated to Donald J. Trump. Though passions have cooled, he found out last fall that some of his neighbors were thinking about making his political views an issue, likely attacking his reputation and asserting he was a racist and a fascist. Should he just accept this? The neighbors have numbers on their side and feel they can act with impunity. They won’t suffer any reputational damage or feel discomfort. But every action has an opposite and equal reaction.
Perhaps to maintain some semblance of our current culture we should take steps toward more explicit pillarisation.
Democrats’ Georgia Hopes Rest on Jon Ossoff, 33. How Did He Get Here? He’s rich. That’s it. No need to read the piece, that’s all it is. Yes, he has other attributes, but his main qualification is that he is from the leisure class. You knew that before you read the piece. This is not a huge ideological point. George W. Bush was from a wealthy and well-connected family. He had other attributes, but without the financial and social capital, he would have gone nowhere in life probably judging by his dissolute middle period.
It doesn’t really matter if you are a partisan. Ossoff will vote with the Democrats. That’s the reason to vote for him if you are a Democrat, and against him, if you are a Republican. For many years Nancy Pelosi has been one of the wealthiest members of Congress (#3 in 2018), and she’s led the Democrats without any problem.
The Democratic party is the party of the economic left. The base and the members of Congress are to the left of the average Democrat. But, as David Shor pointed out, the Democratic leadership and base are much further left in relation to the average Democrat on cultural issues. The Democrats have gotten some serious policies predicated on their economic liberalism (e.g., ACA). But, on the whole, that is small-ball in comparison to other left parties the world over.
Time’s up!
But on cultural topics things are different. Right now some stupid person is denigrating the classics as white male and worthless, etc. The usual. I still see academics use the term “Latinx” in places like The New York Times even though it’s ridiculous and opposed by the people who it purports to describe. Through the capture of media, academia, and in alliance with the corporate and governmental bureaucracy, the left is rearranging and modifying our language and categories. To be frank, I feel they are engaging in an inverted rectification of the names; attempting to make reality conform to names.
A left materialist critique of this pattern is that this is neoliberal co-option of the class struggle and transmutation of it into something that capital can control and leverage. It’s idealism. The people stay poor, but they are given the opium of the ideals of antiracism. I have right-libertarian friends who agree in some ways with this critique, but they look positively on it. They are more fearful of distortion of the market process that materialist leftists would engage in, rather than ransacking our cultural categories.
So what would you pick: Canadian single-payer healthcare with Shakespeare or no Shakespeare without single-payer? It’s a stupid contrast but it cuts to the heart of the issue. I think there are people on the right who are so well-off due to their position within capital that the rise of cultural barbarism does not concern them. They are in their gated community. What would you prefer, that they come for your tax bracket or your soul? Perhaps it depends on what bracket you’re in and if you can buy a soul.
Michael Lind has a piece in Tablet, The Revenge of the Yankees: How Social Gospel became Social Justice. As a trained American historian, Lind is always a good read and generally makes erudite and cogent arguments, whether you believe him or not. To me, the piece struck me as trying a bit too hard to fit facts into a thesis…but it foregrounds dynamics of American history that many modern Americans, being totally ignorant, are unaware of.
Knowing people in the D.C. nonprofit world, I recall being told by an old-line WASP that this is where all the WASPs went. So Lind is not seeing something that is not there when he says that WASPs retained control in the “Deep State” and nonprofits, while the white ethnic, Southern, and black, coalition dominated politics and culture between the 1930s and 1960s. The past few generations has seen a realignment of that configuration, but that is not the only thing that happened.
About 15 years ago I read many books on the history of American Catholicism, and the book that stays with me the longest is Catholicism and American Freedom: A History. In it, the author highlights the strong strand of intellectual anti-Catholicism that existed in the 19th century, and the victory of American Anglo-Protestant culture over the Catholic attempt to remain apart and distinct (one of the intra-Catholic stories is the erosion of German-language instruction due to the pressure put by the Irish dominated hierarchy).
One of the threads of Catholicism and American Freedom is the collapse of the intellectual alliance between Jews and Roman Catholics after World War II. Basically, American Jews who secularized and assimilated switched sides in the 1960s and aligned with secular post-Protestants in fighting the attempts of Roman Catholic thinkers to maintain a level of social conservatism informed by religious values on the Center-Left. Earlier, due to the nativism of early 20th-century Protestant progressives, Jews and Catholics had fit together as “white ethnics,” albeit with some disagreements (Jews never supported Roman Catholic attempts to gain support for parochial schools because they, on the whole, took to public education).
What does this have to do with Lind’s piece? Let’s grant his contention that modern-day social justice activism has its roots contingently in WASP Protestant culture, and particularly Yankee culture. Anyone who reads Curtis Yarvin or David Hackett Fisher will see the cultural genealogy here. But secular Jews, who are overrepresented in the Ivy League and institutions more broadly, have assimilated perfectly as well. And not just them. Indian Americans who grew up in this country in the last quarter of the 20th century are extremely well assimilated too.
One of the geniuses of modern social justice ideology is that it’s highly portable and deployable by people who are educated in the WEIRD way.