This week’s Torah portion tells the story of “Joseph’s interpretation of Pharaoh’s dreams, Joseph’s rise to power in Egypt, and Joseph’s testing of his brothers.”
* My cohost Dennis Dale asks: Is Judaism a proposition religion?
* The story of Joseph illustrates why Jews have rarely been popular with non-Jews but have often been useful to gentile rulers. Joseph was the first court Jew. He became second in power to the Pharoah and he took on, to some degree, an Egyptian point of view. He accuses his brothers of being spies. An ethnocentric group is quick to view outsiders as spies. Jews have sometimes accused me of being a spy in my conversion to Judaism. Anglos, being the least ethno-centric group around, are unlikely to view outsiders as spies.
* Joseph did not learn much from his experience. In Gen. 43:34, he gives Benjamin portions five times as large as the portions given to the rest of his brothers.
* Joseph is ruthless in the way he exercises his power. I can’t imagine greater cruelty in the way he treated his brothers. When I converted to Judaism, I was shocked by how ruthless rabbis were in the way they exercised their power. Great powers are ruthless in how they use their power. Bosses are ruthless in the way they exercise their power depending upon how much power they have over you. If they feel like you could leave for another job at any time, they will treat you better than if they feel they own you.
The more confident Jews and non-Jews feel, the more ruthless they will be in wielding their power.
* How does it help America to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital?
* How does white nationalism compare with Jewish nationalism?
* John J. Mearsheimer’s three recent lectures at Yale on liberal hegemony.
* What is the basis of morality? God, the state, evolutionary biology?
I asked Greg Johnson (Editor Counter-Currents.com) on Sunday.
Luke: “Do you believe in objective morality and objective good and evil?”
Greg: “Yes. I think that morality and good and evil and things like that are based on nature. I follow the classical Greek notion of Natural Law and Natural Right. I believe those are reasonable views, that we can come up with an ethics that is based on nature, that’s not based simply on social convention or simply on revelation and appeals to religion. Science and socio-biology gives us a lot of useful information for constructing this ethic. Larry Arnhart has written a book called Darwinian Natural Rights. He’s influenced by classical political philosophy and natural rights thinking and yet he shows that socio-biology supports a lot of the naturalistic ethical ideas that you find in classical Greek and Roman political philosophy. That is the outlook that I think is most promising. By appealing to science and to classical philosophy, we can come up with a moral consensus and political consensus that is reason-based and science-based and that allows us to sidestep inherently contentious and sometimes violence-inducing things like appeals to religious revelation.”
On November 26, 2017, I asked Richard Spencer: “What is the source of morality?”
Richard: “That’s a very deep question.”
“Morality and theology are ways of building a group consensus without using direct force so that people feel like they are… There’s an evolutionary origin of morality.”
