Different groups have different interests. When you believe your enemy threatens your existence, as Israelis believe about Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas, no cards are taken off the table.
What people are happy with the existence of enemies within them and beside them? I’m talking “enemy” in the Schmittian sense of one who is seeking your destruction.
The normal reaction of any living thing is to create an environment around it most conducive to its thriving.
John J. Mearsheimer says 45 minutes in: “The United States does not want escalation in the Middle East. The United States would like to see Israel win in Gaza, whatever that means, and end that war so that we have a stable Middle East. The Israelis are a different matter. I believe the Israelis wouldn’t mind a general conflagration because that would facilitate ethnic cleansing.”
If I lived in Gaza, I’d want to leave. If people I cared about lived in Gaza, I’d want them to leave. Gazans are suffering horribly. Given that Israel is not willing to live with Hamas dominating Gaza, I don’t see life improving in Gaza any time soon.
Ethnic cleansing is horrible, but there are degrees of awfulness in ethnic cleansing. Moving a people ten miles to a country with their same religion and language (which is what would happen if the residents of Gaza and the West Bank left for a neighboring Arab country) and adequate financial support (the Arabs have the money to take care of their Palestinian brothers) is not the same as moving people hundreds of miles through hostile territory to a place where they are alone and have few resources.
Most people would prefer to be ethnically cleansed to a place ten miles away rather than be murdered. Right now relations between Palestinians and Israelis are so bad, that many people on both sides want ethnic cleansing as the least of two evils.
John Mearsheimer: “I think the Israelis are interested in cleansing not only Gaza, but also the West Bank. A general conflagration would make it easier for them to do it. The other reason [Israelis] want escalation is that they have a huge problem on their northern border. About 200,000 Israelis have been displaced from their homes… How do they move those people back to northern Israel until the conflict with Hezbollah is settled and Hezbollah stops firing rockets into northern Israel. As long as the war in Gaza goes on, I believe Hezbollah will continue to target northern Israel. The Israelis want to escalate because they think they have escalation dominance here. They’d like to inflict massive punishment on Hezbollah and Lebanon and reach some kind of modus vivendi with Hezbollah that allows them to move those 100,000 Israelis back into northern Israel.”
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A decades-old fight about the direction of one of New York’s most prominent Hasidic Jewish groups tipped into chaos this week, when one faction clashed with the police over a tunnel that had secretly been built to the movement’s main synagogue.
The tunnel, a passageway between the headquarters of the group, the Chabad-Lubavitcher movement, and at least one adjacent property, was first discovered late last year, according to local news reports. But on Monday afternoon, after a cement truck was brought in to fill it, some Hasidic men attempted to block that effort.
The police were called, and officers said they found a group of men breaking through a wall of the prayer space that led to the tunnel. After a resulting confrontation, which included skirmishes with officers, nine people were arrested, according to the Brooklyn district attorney’s office.
Rabbi Motti Seligson, a Lubavitcher spokesman, described those who had created the tunnel as a group of “extremist students.”
“This is, obviously, deeply distressing to the Lubavitch movement, and the Jewish community worldwide,” he said in a written statement.
The conflict took place at 770 Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, the movement’s global headquarters, which is often referred to simply as 770 and is one of the most significant religious sites in the city.
What these “extremist students” were tunneling for primarily was meaning and purpose and a sense of importance. They were filled up by their love for the rebbe and they wanted to make his dream a reality, and in doing that, they felt like they were carrying out God’s will on earth.
I get it. I too tunnel for meaning. Outside of my writing and videos, my life is ordinary. It is only when I enter these two domains, which are not a major source of income for me, that I get filled up with meaning, purpose, importance and excitement. In my little worlds of writing and video, I get to feel like the star. In the rest of my life, I’m just another bozo on the bus.
We all want to feel special. Most people feel special by building a family or developing a career. For those of us who haven’t succeeded in the normie world, we seek out another world, perhaps an online world or a tunneling world, where we can feel important and forget about the humiliations of daily life. Everybody prefers to do what they’re good at, whether it is dunking a basketball, leading a prayer service, or volunteering for the homeless.
Normally, religion is not exciting and therefore it doesn’t make the news. On those rare occasions when religion becomes exciting, it usually becomes disturbing. A normal part of Orthodox Judaism, for example, is the requirement to pray with a minyan three times a day. That’s rarely exciting. Somehow, these tunnelers made a prosaic religious practice fascinating.
Let’s face it. Even the most religious among us live in an increasingly secular world where we have increasingly secular explanations for more and more things that happen that we used to attribute to divine forces. Earthquakes used to be understood as God’s wrath. Now even Orthodox Jews understand that earthquakes are the product of tectonic plates grinding against each other.
When clergy claim there’s no conflict between religion and science, that’s usually because they’ve recognized the prestige and power of science and know that religion can’t compete with that.
In our secular world, it’s hard for any non-believer to sympathize with religious beliefs. Usually, you are either raised with religious beliefs or such beliefs seem silly to you at best, if not downright evil.
Most Lubavitchers who believe distinctive things about the Messiah lead happy, productive lives. Their beliefs don’t drive them into gross anti-social behavior. Unbalanced people, however, in Chabad will seize on opportunities to act out, and messianic beliefs will act on them as a fire. Not everyone can handle Moshiach talk in a productive way just as not everyone can handle abortion politics in a moderate way.
Religion is a form of connection for people in a frequently disconnected America (if you don’t have friends in a church or synagogue, you won’t last long there) and that connection usually makes us happier (and therefore better). Religion matters for about half of Americans but it is rarely the decisive factor for how they live. My dad taught me that religion in America is a mile wide and an inch deep.
It is usually considered uncouth in America to insist on the exclusive claims of your religion. A Christian who says that non-Christians are going to hell is outside the mainstream of American life. On December 22, 1952, future U.S. president Dwight Eisenhower said: “Our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.” That’s a good summary of the public role of religion in America.
It used to be that people got their news from the pulpit and bima (the Jewish pulpit) and so clergy could shape what people knew about the wider world. Now that the news is secular, it’s harder for rabbis to spin disasters such as these 770 tunnelers.
Today, even though the Church is able to use the means of mass communication, it does so only marginally—marginally to its own total communication, which still relies on the nexus of pulpit and pew and on religious literature, and marginally to the total content of the mass media as a whole. Compared to the amount of entertainment, music, news, drama, secular education and all the other types of item carried by television, radio, Press and cinema, religious information has become a very tiny part indeed. Nor are religionists as good at using the media as those who are instructing or entertaining. They have developed few, if any, new techniques for its use, and they use it by courtesy and on sufferance. They tend to be older and middle-aged men using media increasingly dominated by the young. It might not be untrue to say that they are the deference note of the mass communicators, ‘employed’ to whiten the image of an industry which is frequently charged with subversive, immoral and deleterious presentations.
As long as the Church connives in using the media, the media controllers can use this fact in their own defence, as evidence of their social responsibility. But, given the religionist’s necessary assumption that religious truth is pre-eminent and that it ought to take a dominant place in our minds, the relegation of religious material to a marginal place in the programmes of the mass communications is itself a derogation of the religious message. In using the mass media the Churches permit their own material to be reduced to the level of the medium, to be put forth without much differentiation of presentation from a wide variety of highly heterogeneous and at times incongruous material. This in itself must detract from the high claims to pre-eminence which—of necessity—religion makes for itself.
Some beliefs are adaptive (e.g., my choices matter even if nobody sees them) and some beliefs are maladaptive (e.g., the world hates me). The rationality of a belief does not determine how adaptive it is. For example, believing that you your decisions today are important might not be rational or realistic due to your insignificance, but it may well give you the strength to do the things you need to do. For many people, believing in a God who cares about them and their behavior has a positive effect (though the most profound forces shaping behavior are connection and genetics). For many Jews, believing that God will send the Messiah to usher in peace on earth provides some inner peace. For a tiny number of Jews, such as these tunnelers at 770 Eastern Parkway, their belief has tipped into maladaptive and illegal behavior.
Every group, including stamp clubs, have cult-like elements. Ties bind and blind, notes Jonathan Haidt. Religion tends to become habitual and we’ve evolved to live within specific tribes and so we usually don’t question our hero system. One way to maintain a grasp on reality and to also enjoy a strong in-group identity is to periodically ask oneself what would outsiders think about what you’re saying and doing. I don’t think these 770 tunnelers paused to consider that question.
I grew up a Seventh-Day Adventist. It’s a female dominated, nurturing religion with a wild side. Most Adventists are decent people, but in the Rwandan genocide, many Adventists were mass murderers (though it’s hard to link their Adventism to their murdering).
The only thing that appeared to characterize Adventists was their marginality to the mainstream of society. They are presented as just one amid a host of deviant orientations…
[Black novelist Richard] Wright found the Adventist vision incompatible with what he saw around him. “While listening to the vivid language of the sermons I was pulled toward emotional belief, but as soon as I went out of the church and saw the bright sunshine and felt the throbbing life of the people in the streets I knew that none of it was true and that nothing would happen.”
…Like the Millerites, Adventists are portrayed as adherents of a bizarre religious system expressed in lurid, apocalyptic symbols. Their beliefs are perceived to alienate them from, and to be incompatible with, a normal, healthy appreciation of the world. Wright emphasizes that while forced to live as an Adventist, he was trapped within a deviant subculture so strange he could not even risk explaining his predicament to his friends. He presents Adventism as an enclosed world of dark delusions, which evaporate when brought into the clear light of day.
The other thing that Adventists are known for is health. There are many Adventist doctors and hospitals. So the Adventist public image is complicated — there’s a dark and sinister on the one hand, and an uplifting and healthy on the other.
I noticed a far higher percentage of California Adventists enjoyed a “normal, healthy appreciation of the world” compared with the more traditional Australian Adventists I knew.
In Jewish life, I notice that most Modern Orthodox Jews seem to enjoy a “normal, healthy appreciation of the world” while many Haredim do not. Lubavitchers consistently appear to me as the happiest and most well-balanced Hasidic sect but they have their nut jobs. It makes sense that if you are not awesome at the normal tasks of living, you’ll find a niche where you can be awesome such as building a tunnel under a synagogue. These tunnelers are no longer leading anonymous lives of no significance. They’re leading the news with their bizarre behavior.
Most people who have kids or otherwise have a flourishing life don’t need to chase excitement. I wonder if these tunnelers have kids or rewarding careers? I suspect that if they were devoted to their families, or to their jobs, they would not have acted in this way.
David Voas says the secular transition is an ongoing generational replacement of religious people by secular people. People don’t tend to change vis-a-vis religion. Only a tiny percentage of people who are raised secular become religious. People with no religion have great difficulty in acquiring one. Think about a religion not your own such as Hinduism. Here are some Hindu deities and Hindu worship. For most of you, this seems exotic and scary. This is how most secular young people react to religion. You have to be raised with religion to find it natural.
Immigration brings people from more religious countries into secular industrialized nations, but despite this, religion is dramatically in decline in the West.
Modernization has effects. Norway is the most modern country and Niger is the least. The most developed countries are the least religious and the least developed countries are the most developed. Religious decline comes relatively late in the process of modernization.
Most of the world is religious. Yes, because most of the world is not developed. Prosperity brings choice and a reduced willingness to abide by secular authority. Secular and scientific worldviews displace religious worldviews. Mobility brings people into contact with different cultures and beliefs and reduces the hold of traditional ties. Physical security reduces the need for the solace of spirituality.
Religion is a matter of custom and culture. It was the norm at one time. Now secularism is the cultural norm. To the extent that people have contact with religion today it is often in news stories about extremism and abuse. Most Westerners are not rationalists and naturalists, they just have little interest in religion.
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* What makes Friedrich of special interest is not only the texts but also the role he and his thought played in forming the self-conception of Harvard faculty and leadership as it emerged during the late Roosevelt administration and World War II as the academic arm of the federal government, where it played the role of an elite and as the academic wing of the national elite. Friedrich was a member, by any standard, of the elite, both German and American. Moreover, he was a major participant in the successful political Griff nach der Weltmacht (Grab for World Power) of Harvard during the period from the mid-1930s, when Harvard celebrated its tercentenary by inviting scholars from all over the world, to the 1960s, when the Kennedy Presidency was dominated by the “thought brigade” (Stuart 1963), overwhelmingly from Harvard. His comments on elites were therefore descriptions and implicit justifications of his own status-or denials of it. This lends his texts and thoughts a special historical interest, notably in relation to Pareto’s own account of elites, and points to reasons to be cautious in interpreting them.
The temporal background of the rise of this new elite is important. Bronislaw Malinowski confided in an unpublished text written shortly after the First World War that “the basic principle of democracy as we find it now is wrong [ and] hence real advance lies in government by detached experts” (quoted in Coleman 2021, p. 99). This was a common perception at the time, promoted in the American public sphere by Walter Lippman. It came to be combined, in the 1930s, with the enthusiasm from intellectuals for the expansion of state power and liberation from a strict interpretation of the constitution under Roosevelt, his “brains trust,” and the expansion of federal regulatory agencies with expert leaders. These were developments the Harvard community generally applauded, and in some key cases, such as the appointment of Felix Frankfurter to the Supreme Court, participated in. But they often did so by treating these developments not as anti-democratic but as the fulfillment of genuine democracy. Friedrich’s writings of the period and indeed throughout his career reflected this climate of opinion, as well as his active membership in this group.
Nor was Friedrich’s role merely intellectual. Not only was Friedrich a prominent figure in the movement to involve the US in the European war, which characterized itself as defending democracy, he played a prominent role in Harvard’s participation in the war effort, especially in the training of officers for the expected occupation, along with Talcott Parsons who used this role as a way of expanding his own power…
“Hitler’s rule was legal, but it was not legitimate; it had a basis in law, but not in right and justice.”
* Pareto was an elitist and therefore anti-democratic, whereas Friedrich defended democratic institutions; Friedrich embraced Kantianism and genuine authority, whereas Pareto ridiculed doctrines, especially Kantianism and Natural Law, that embraced the idea of genuine authority rooted in reason; Friedrich had a rich and humane Kantian view of reason, which included values, whereas Pareto had an odd and narrow view of logical action and scientific method that excluded the rationality of values and exposed their emotional basis and was therefore a form of irrationalism. Friedrich was open and honest, as shown by his various public confessions, while Pareto was disingenuous, elusive, and cynical, as shown by the contradictory and opaque character of his political statements; Friedrich embraced the idea of representation, whereas Pareto dismissed it as “poppycock”; Pareto believed in the inevitability of the rule of the few based on his account of history, whereas Friedrich affirmed the possibility of a future politics of a different more egalitarian kind; Pareto regarded the law as an instrument in the hands of the powerful, whereas Friedrich granted it an intrinsic purposiveness and rationality apart from the aims of its creators; Friedrich believed in universality, emancipation, and the power of reason to bring them about, whereas Pareto celebrated the dark, irrational, and particularistic side of humanity; for Pareto, bureaucracy was a stage of elite decadence, whereas for Friedrich, bureaucracy represented reason itself. The summary is this: Pareto was a Machiavellian who saw ancient and modem regimes as all governed by the rule of the few and their underlying power motivations and regarded this not only as unavoidable but good; Friedrich celebrated the modem state and the superior rationality of its bureaucratic and representative institutions governed by the rule of law and looked forward to more political equality.
* when one encounters an ideology, look for the underlying sentiments and at the group which shares them.
* Pareto is closer to Freud or Jung: he categorizes a long list of residues, or sentiments, drawn from the historical and anthropological literature with an eye toward finding the common features among superficially different ones, with the aim of identifying and grouping them into a systematic classification scheme. He treated the ideologies that derived from these sentiments as more variable responses to transient situations and treated political structures as even more variable results of sentiments and ideologies. This conflicted with the holistic, relativistic view of culture that became fashionable in the interwar period: for Pareto, residues were fundamental and persisted, ideologies and explicit cultural beliefs-that is to say “reasons” other than those of science-were transient and derivative.
* “through the dexterous use of such ambiguous terms as ‘functional’, ‘pragmatic’, ‘realistic’, ‘progressive’, [Carl Friedrich] invests the American ideal of democracy, equality and freedom, with a content which reduces the role of the common man to his status in medieval times.”
* Kantian reason was prone to slipping into overt authoritarianism in the name of reason.
* These governing classes tended to be overthrown; in time, they came to be populated by people he likened to foxes, people who mastered the art of getting their way without force. They lacked, however, the talent and capacity to defend themselves or their rule with force. The people who overthrew and replaced them had those talents. He likened them to lions. History was a graveyard of elites. Through the process of succession, one elite replaced another.1 An elite could prolong its rule by co optation, bringing forceful types into the ruling class. But there was a tendency for this not to happen and for the lions to replace the old governing class. Both were examples of “circulation.” The governing classes did indeed have special talents and capacities. But the capacities of foxes were different from those of lions (Pareto [1935] 1963, vol. IV, §2178, pp. 1515-1516). The theory implied that the governing class would become corrupt and be replaced if they were not open to outside talent of a different kind, which would have to, by definition, come from outside the governing class. Normally, the governing class became closed, fox-like, and vulnerable to challenge from below.
* Lincoln was an outsider to the foxes who dominated late antebellum American politics and had failed to solve the slavery question. He came with a following that transformed the federal system after his death-a transformation carried out not by the foxes but by the pride of lions who had risen to prominence through their military service in the Civil War and the radical Republicans, who took over and expanded the Federal government-only to be themselves followed by foxes.
* A sovereign or parliament “occupies the stage. But behind the scenes there are always people who play a very important role in actual government.”
* Bureaucrats operated in this way. They were the ones who carried out the law by taking “measures,” a concept Friedrich emphasized, in contrast to legislation, as the place where governance happens. They did so with discretionary power, which he also emphasized, but always with a sense of the limits imposed by the potential reactions of others. The picture we get is this: politicians propose, bureaucrats dispose, and in the way they want, unless they provoke a reaction…
Fascism is defined, not by rabid nationalism as such, but by a set of emotional or instinctual impulses that fuel an uncompromising quest for community, the “urge to ‘get beyond’ politics, a faith in the perfectibility of man and the authority of experts, and an obsession with the aesthetics of youth.”21 Fascism calls upon man “to lay aside the anachronisms of natural law, traditional religion, constitutional liberty, capitalism, and the like and rise to the responsibility of remaking the world in his own image.”22 To this end, it sanctions an all-powerful state led by “an enlightened avant-garde who would serve as the authentic, organic voice of the ‘general will.’”
Was Carl Friedrich pushing a kind of liberal fascism? Does not liberalism want to get beyond politics by rendering neutral as much of the political as possible (initially that meant neutralizing the ability of religion to set men at each other’s throats, and then liberal neutralization came for the politics of race, sex, immigration and other hot button issues), and hence under the rule of experts rather than voters? Does not liberalism believe in the authority of experts? Does not liberalism reject “the anachronisms of natural law, traditional religion, constitutional liberty, capitalism, and the like”? Liberalism does not abide the “uncompromising quest for community” because that tramples on human rights. It does not worship the aesthetics of youth. Different types of liberalism react differently to the idea of “an all-powerful state led by an enlightened avant-garde who would serve as the authentic, organic voice of the ‘general will.’”
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"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
