I spend a lot of time with intellectuals—writers, thinkers, social scientists, etc. If I had to sum up their worldview in one sentence, I could hardly do better than this one: “Everything that’s wrong in the world is caused by misunderstanding.”
Political polarization? Misunderstanding. If only people could get over their primitive “tribalism” and “confirmation bias,” they could have reasonable discourse and work together to solve humanity’s problems.
Misinformation? Misunderstanding. If only people knew how to “vaccinate” themselves against the “virus” of fake news, they’d stop being such gullible idiots and vote for the Democrats.
Bigotry? Misunderstanding. If only people realized that members of other ethnic groups were normal, decent human beings like them, there would be no bigotry.
Stereotypes? Misunderstanding. If only people knew that stereotypes were false and pernicious, there would be no stereotypes—and no bigotry.
War? Misunderstanding. If only people knew that war is pointless and evil, a product of bigotry and misinformation, there would be world peace.
Capitalism? False consciousness. If only people knew how much greedy corporations were exploiting them, the workers of the world would unite.
David Pinsof writes against the Enlightenment intellectual, the man who holds that ignorance is the root of evil and education the cure. The Bible got there first, and it came down on Pinsof’s side.
Cain knows. He speaks with God before he kills his brother, and God warns him that sin crouches at the door and he can master it. He does it anyway. Pharaoh hardens his heart through ten demonstrations, and the plagues add information without moving him. The men at Babel are not confused. They are ambitious. After the flood God says the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth, and the sentence locates the trouble in the will, not the understanding. So the biblical picture and Pinsof’s picture shake hands. Both throw out the rationalist story. The problem is bad motive, not bad belief.
The Talmud sharpens this. The rabbis build their law around the man who knows and sins anyway. They separate the inadvertent sinner from the deliberate one and treat them as different creatures, because the deliberate sinner is the normal case and the inadvertent one the exception worth marking. They never imagine that a man transgresses because no one told him. He was told. The whole apparatus of warning, witnesses, and rebuke assumes a knowing agent who wants the forbidden thing.
The yetzer hara carries the rest of the agreement. The rabbis do not treat the selfish drive as a defect. They treat it as the engine of the world. The midrash has them capture the evil inclination and the world goes dark, no eggs laid, no houses built, no marriages made, until they let it back out. Were it not for the yetzer, a man would not build a home or take a wife or father a child. The drive that ruins is the drive that creates. This is Pinsof’s line that the biases are savvy and not broken, arriving two thousand years early and stated with more nerve. You cannot cut the thing out. You can only harness it.
The divergence comes over what follows from all this. Pinsof collapses the high motive into the low one and stops there. Altruism is status display, the mission statement is cover for the profit motive, and the man who claims to love mankind is climbing a hierarchy and calling it virtue. The tradition holds both at once and refuses the collapse. It has a word for the deed done with impure motive and a word for the deed done for its own sake, and it makes the surprising claim that a man should act even from the low motive, because from the act done for the wrong reason he comes to the act done for the right one. The practice trains the heart. The mission statement, said and said again and lived, reshapes the man who says it. Pinsof reads the gap between word and deed as permanent fraud. The rabbis read it as the space where a man is made. That is closer to Aristotle than to either Pinsof or the rationalists he fights.
So the law is not an effort to inform a confused creature. It channels a knowing one. You do not fix the heart by telling it the facts. You bind it, fence it, and give it habits, and over a life the binding does work that argument cannot. The greater the man, the rabbis say, the greater his yetzer, which is the opposite of the comforting belief that wisdom dissolves appetite.
Pinsof ends in the hole. You can study the dirt to the last molecule and remain stuck. The world does not want saving. The tradition agrees the creature is what he is and will not be argued into goodness, and then it draws a different conclusion. It ends in the yoke. The difference is between despair and obligation. Job sits in the hole and his friends explain the hole to him at length, and God answers from the whirlwind without explaining the hole at all, and re-obligates him. Both Pinsof and the tradition reject the ladder out through education. One man sits down in the pit. The other takes on a commandment.
The sharpest place the essay lands is the charge it never aims at the rabbis. Pinsof’s case against intellectuals is self-flattery and denial. They cast themselves as healers, suppress the findings that make them look bad, and never write down their own status crimes. Now turn to how the Talmud is built. It preserves the losing opinion next to the winning one and lets both stand as the words of the living God. In the story of the oven of Akhnai, the academy overrules a voice from heaven, tells God the Torah is no longer in heaven and goes by majority, and excommunicates the great dissenter. A reader trained by Pinsof sees a guild protecting its monopoly against a charismatic rival, and the reading holds. But the guild writes down what its action cost. It records the dissenter’s tears, the damage that his grief brought, the death tied to how the majority treated him. The text indicts its own honor economy in its own pages.
That is the contrast that favors the tradition on Pinsof’s own terms. His intellectuals deny and embellish because denial and embellishment are weapons. The Talmud’s form is anti-denial. It keeps the record of the rivalry, the loss, and the punishment, and hands that record to its own students to study against itself. The modern intellectual class, the target of his essay, does not do this. The savvy coalitional animal Pinsof describes built, in the rabbinic academy, a literature designed to catch itself in the act.
