Human Nature and the Dark Triad

This rings true to me. Due to instability in childhood, I compensated with a grandiose internal conception of myself that I expected the world would one day recognize. Accompanying this delusion, I found it easy to treat people as means to meet my needs. In other words, I did the best I could at the time with the tools I had, but I was not always an asset to be around.

It seems possible to me that this childhood instability may have an affect that is not 100% gene dependent. On the other hand, I am sure the same amount of childhood instability will have varying effects on varying people.

In my experience, religion and spirituality has the potential to change people for the good, but more often it just changes how people express who they are.

I converted to Judaism in my twenties because I thought it was a step-by-step detailed system for making better people. In my fifties, I’ve switched to a view of human decency as largely the product of connection. People who connect with others will be less likely to irrationally blow things up. People who aren’t connected to others will make more bad decisions to unnecessarily hurt themselves and others.

Prior to the last ten years, I went through life often thinking about what would be the most inappropriate thing I could say or do in this situation? That’s not a formula for happiness or goodness, but it did produce a lot of laughs.

In my experience, there is no correlation between any type of religiosity (and the lack thereof), therapy, spiritual practice, tribe, uniform, rhetoric and basic human decency. No system consistently produces good people.

In Rob Henderson’s latest newsletter, he writes:

The correlation between unpredictability in childhood and criminal behavior in adulthood is particularly striking (r = .40, p < .01). This correlation is roughly the same size as the correlation between socioeconomic status and SAT scores. The educated class loves to talk about the effect of wealth on test scores. Seldom do they discuss the effect of instability in childhood giving rise to harmful behaviors in adulthood...

Researchers found that instability in childhood was associated with all three dimensions of the Dark Triad in adulthood. The strongest link was with psychopathy (r = .23). Across the entire Dark Triad scale, the correlation was r = .20. Not huge, but still noteworthy. Roughly equivalent to the link between grades and future earnings.

The effect was especially large for men, relative to women. That is, boys raised in unstable homes were particularly likely to have high Dark Triad scores in adulthood.

Interestingly, childhood socioeconomic status had no assiocation with Dark Triad traits in adulthood.

Being poor doesn’t have the same effect as living in chaos.

As the researchers conclude, “All people may have the potential to be high or low on the Dark Triad traits…exposure to specific conditions is the precipitating factor, which determines people trait activation and position on the Dark Triad continuum. Experiences (or at the very least, recollection of) of childhood unpredictability may be some of the prerequisite conditions to active the dormant selfishness, competitiveness, and antisociality found in the Dark Triad traits.”

The psychologist and author Tamás Bereczkei has written that, “Although genetic factors may have a certain role in the development of the Machiavellian lifestyle and thinking, Machiavellianism is primarily a result of environmental effects.”

Others have suggested that environmental factors can affect the behavioral expression of psychopathy.

Robert Hare, the foremost expert on psychopathy, has written, “social factors and parenting practices help to shape the behavioral expression of psychopathy, but have less effect on the inability to feel empathy or develop a conscience. No amount of social conditioning by itself will generate a capacity for caring.”

Hare is saying that the psychology of psychopaths can’t be changed.

But the behavioral expression of psychopathy can be shaped by parental and environmental factors. For Dexter fans, this was the reasoning behind “the code of Harry.” Dexter’s adoptive father recognized that Dexter would always have the desire to kill. So he directed Dexter’s impulse away from innocent people.

To be clear, the Dark Triad is not a diagnostic tool for mental disorders. It measures subclinical psychopathy and narcissism. Though if someone scores at the uppermost end of those sub-scales, they might qualify for an official diagnosis.

In a real-life case of psychopathy, a few years ago, a neuroscientist named James Fallon discovered that he himself is a psychopath. He was once a self-proclaimed genetic determinist, but changed his mind. He considered how his warm upbringing constrained his darker impulses. And said, ‘I was loved, and that protected me.’”

Fallon believes that had he been raised in a different environment (i.e., not in a stable middle-class family), his life would look very different today.

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Rethinking Jewish Philosophy: Beyond Particularism and Universalism

In my experience, Jewish philosophy and Jewish theology play no role in the lives of 99.9% of Jews (equivalent to the role of jurisprudence in the lives of Americans). It is rare that I recall real Jews (as opposed to professional Jews) discussing what Jews must believe.

A friend says: “A lot of activities that are quite different from each other are classified under the heading “philosophy.” I suppose that systematizing ideas about values and rules–and attempting to justify them–would normally be considered a kind of philosophy. Though if the philosopher’s premises supposedly come from divine revelation, maybe it’s better to call it theology. A lot of contemporary analytic philosophy, especially in ethics, is apologetics for liberalism. I’d just call it bad philosophy.”

Here are some highlights from this 2014 book by Aaron W. Hughes:

* Like many others in my field, I have spent most of my life reading Jewish philosophers as shining exemplars of the universalizing tendencies within Judaism. Juxtaposed against the forces of obscurantism, so the master narrative of Jewish philosophy goes, these individuals articulated a Judaism that was as rational and inclusive as it was open to the cosmopolitan trends of the civilizations in which Jews historically found themselves. This narrative has performed a great deal of intellectual work as Jewish thinkers in the modern period have used it—and indeed continue to use it—in order to show that Judaism, as a religion not unlike others, can be integrated within and respond to the demands of the modern nation-state.

Jewish philosophy, in other words, has been used to normalize Judaism, to demonstrate the tradition at its most rational. Jewish philosophy— in its many guises and forms—has been perceived to have taken the particular elements of Judaism and subsequently translated and constructed them into universal terms in ways that show potential filiations between a Judaism deemed authentic and an external standard imagined as universally binding. Yet the potential counterpoints between the particular and the universal risk masking the instability of both. Each requires the other for its determinacy, just as each is simultaneously undermined by the indeterminacy of its opposite.

* How can philosophy be philosophy if it is particular and apologetic? Jewish philosophy may well prove to be a category error in which a property is ascribed to something that could not possibly have that property.

[LF: Jewish medical ethics, I assume, is a subsection of ethics, which is a subsection of philosophy. So Jewish medical ethics looks at medical ethical issues through the framework of the Jewish tradition. So perhaps Jewish philosophy looks at the traditional questions of philosophy through the framework of the Jewish tradition? If there is Jewish literature and Jewish movies and Jewish history, why would there not be Jewish philosophy? I assume there is Jewish jurisprudence?]

* Appeals to the universal risk the effacement of the particular, just as appeals to the particular risk the reification of the idiosyncratic. The result is that Jewish philosophy has proved largely inflexible and rigid in its ability to negotiate these pitfalls. It is inherently conservative and apologetic. Despite the best intentions—offered by the likes of Maimonides, Franz Rosenzweig, and Emmanuel Levinas—configuring Jewish philosophy becomes an imaginary act by which the universal is necessarily envisioned through the semblance of the particular.

* [Jewish philosophy is] a form of rhetoric in the service of manufacturing truth claims.

* [What] is the goal of Jewish philosophy: Is it to think Jewishly about philosophy? Or is it to think philosophically about Judaism? Is it to address concerns for living Jews? Or is it to show how Jewish philosophy can speak to philosophy, whether
faith based or not?

* Judaism—like philosophy—cannot become the privileged cultural resource or position, because once this happens, the result is violence, whether physical or metaphysical.

[LF: Is Judaism more than anything else that is privileged likely to lead to violence?]

* My hope, in other words, is to rethink Jewish philosophy using a language that avoids stability, hegemony, and occupation.

[LF: No hegemony and no occupation and there is no nationalism and no strong in-group identity. Is not monogamous marriage a type of stability, hegemony and occupation? Everybody thinks their in-group is the best and should rule a domain.]

* Unless done so in a pejorative sense, we tend not to speak of Jewish mathematics, Jewish physics, or Jewish sociology. All the nouns in these compounds imply a discipline that, for the most part, is agreed upon by all who engage in it; yet, when the particularist adjective “Jewish” is added, the result is nonsense… Even if a particular mathematician happened to be ethnically or religiously Jewish, he or she would ostensibly engage in the same activity as his or her non-Jewish colleague.

If we are not comfortable with coupling particularist adjectives and universally recognized disciplines, why do we insist on thinking that it is okay to refer to something as “Jewish philosophy”? Can one philosophize from a Jewish perspective? Does Judaism provide some sort of insight into philosophy that those who are not Jewish lack?

* Jewish philosophy, it is assumed, takes place in history and largely examines dead thinkers. It involves sifting through their ideas, contextualizing them, and showing their contribution to (non-Jewish) philosophy. This, however, is not really what we are accustomed—at least non-Jewishly—to think of as philosophy, but, as I just argued, is something that borders on historicism at best and necrophilia at worst.

* One of the tasks of Jewish philosophy is to mediate between these temporal coordinates by creating a retrievable, pristine past that can be upheld as the criteria by which to mark authentic Jewish existence and thinking.

* What we are accustomed to calling “Jewish philosophy” is, in many ways, an oxymoron since it does not engage in truth independent of religious claims.

* If philosophy is about what is, …then theology is about what ought to be.

* it might well be better to label Jewish philosophy as “Jewish theology” since it is unwilling to undo the major claims of Judaism (e.g., covenant, chosenness, revelation), even if it may occasionally and creatively redefine such claims.16 So, although medieval Jewish thinkers may well gravitate toward the systematic thought of Aristotle and his Arab interpreters, and although modern Jewish thinkers may be attracted to the thought of Kant and Heidegger, the ideas of such non-Jewish thinkers are always applied to Jewish ideas and values. Hermeneutics thus becomes the primary activity that seeks to smooth over the tensions or impossibilities when the so-called Jewish and the so-called non-Jewish intersect.

* Indeed, it is perhaps possible to argue, following Jacques Derrida, that Judaism functions as a disruption that causes a tear in the tradition of Western philosophy. Juxtaposed against Novak’s confidence in the possibility of philosophical reflection, Derrida sees an impossibility, a reminder of the inherent homelessness and indeterminacy of the human condition.

* Whether in its medieval or modern guise, Jewish philosophy upholds the stated and received truths of Judaism, albeit often in new and original ways. Although Jewish philosophy may well use non-Jewish ideas to articulate its claims, it never produces a vision that ends in the wholesale abandonment of Judaism.

* Even though critics of Jewish philosophy might argue that philosophy introduces “foreign” wisdom into the heart of Judaism, those scholars we are in the habit of calling Jewish philosophers do not perceive themselves to be tainting Judaism, but rather to be perfecting it or teasing out its originary meaning.25 Nevertheless, the fact remains that Jewish philosophy seems not to be engaged in the pursuit of truth for truth’s sake, but in the quest for an authentic Judaism that exists nowhere other than in a past and a set of texts that are deemed to be authentic and authoritative.

* Philosophy, with its emphasis on reason and universalism, would seem to signify the opposite of “Jewish” (i.e., Judaism), which, at least in theory, is defined by revelation and the particular.

* [Franz] Rosenzweig argued that Jewish thought is by nature apologetic because it takes place on the “border” [die Grenze] of Judaism and what lies beyond it.

* Since organic Jewish thought, using Rosenzweig’s language, which takes place within Judaism, tends to be legal and systematic, it becomes apologetic only when it approaches the border of Judaism and non-Judaism. This border is responsible for making Jewish philosophy apologetic, because it is largely responsive to “external” voices. Apologetics, on this reading, potentially lacks the self-consciousness necessary for introspection.

* Jewish thinkers, from Saadya Gaon to Emmanuel Levinas, have held on to the belief that they have uncovered Judaism in its pristine, timeless, or originary form. The approach taken in this study, on the contrary, is that Jewish philosophy should not be about asking what truth says Judaism should be or what Judaism says truth should be. Rather, we ought to ask how truth is imagined and manufactured, what role an activity named “philosophy” plays in that act of truth making, and how, in the process, it creates Judaism.

* Whether in the teachings of Maimonides or in the construction of Rosenzweig or others, Jewish philosophy has a nationalist and a totalitarian aspect to it—one that is grounded in the commitment to an organic community in which the individuals that compose it, both past and present, are perceived to be united together through ethnic, cultural, and religious ancestry.

* philosophy has been a tool with which certain Jews have imagined Judaism to be compatible with the larger cultures in which Jews have lived.

* “The Jewish people did not begin to philosophize because of an irresistible urge to do so. They received philosophy from outside sources, and the history of Jewish philosophy is a history of the successive absorptions of foreign ideas which were then transformed and adapted according to specific Jewish points of view.”

* the goal of Jewish philosophy is to articulate Judaism, to make it into something that can be defended against the attacks of non-Jews and to rationalize to Jews what it is that they do… Philosophy comes from the outside and is subsequently forced inside.

* This means that there is always something apologetic about Jewish philosophy as it seeks to smooth over the tensions inherent to the cohabitation of its two constituent parts. And thus there is always an intrinsic apologetic desire to create an aesthetically or intellectually pleasing form of the tradition—one that is attractive to Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals
alike.

* the study of medieval Jewish philosophy in North America is all but moribund. Perhaps this is the way it must be now that a new generation of Jewish studies scholars, one that no longer feels the desire for inclusion within the non-Jewish scholarly world,9 can gravitate to more particularistic topics, such as Jews and film, or Jews and food, to name but a few topics currently in vogue. In Israel the study of Jewish philosophy still limps along, but largely on specialized philological ground that is primarily involved in the production of critical editions of texts. In the study of modern Jewish philosophy, the field tends to follow its Central European ancestors by arguing that the West needs Judaism in order to reach its aims and evade dogmatist dangers.

* It remains at stake today when bioethics commissions and councils in the United States or Canada need Jewish “representation” in order to determine the right course of action with respect to hot-button cultural issues (e.g., stem-cell research).

* philosophy represents and upholds the will of the status quo, that which seeks to divest, often violently, the particular of its particularity. Because it is just as embroiled in rhetoric and in the will to power as any other ideology, philosophy is problematic whether one puts the adjective “Jewish” in front of it or not.

Judaism, then, does not compromise philosophy. Philosophy is quite able to do this for itself. From its emergence in antiquity, philosophy has always possessed a totalitarian dimension that is threatened by diversity. In Plato’s Republic, for example, there is the assumption that individuals reap their own maximal good only when the city is most unified (e.g., 462a–b), and anything that compromises the city’s unity is not to be tolerated by the rulers. Such notions, however, leave little or no room for those,
like Jews, whose very existence impinges upon the religio-ethnic status quo. The particularism of Judaism, still left undefined, threatens philosophy because of the former’s unwillingness or inability to be absorbed into the universal concerns or pretenses of the latter.

* If Plato’s ideal republic was threatened by diversity, Kant’s Prussia was even less hospitable to the particular, now fully embodied as Judaism. German idealism, for example, is heavily indebted to the language of Christianity and recycles many of the latter’s supersessionist assumptions about the nature of Judaism…

* If the case can be made that Judaism is bad for philosophy, the opposite claim can also be made: philosophy is bad for Judaism. Philosophy affords no space for revelation in general and revealed morality in particular. If Judaism prides itself on its chosen status based on the observance of a set of divine laws, it can make no room for a universal and universalizing system that, in theory, not only minimizes but actively subverts concepts such as chosenness. Jewish philosophers from the time of Philo onward have always been accused, thus, of misreading their own tradition, forcing it artificially into the terms and categories supplied by an “alien” system that makes a mockery of that which it seeks to describe.

* A corollary of Jewish philosophy’s universalizing tendency is its largescale engagement in the project of manufacturing “good religion.” As a result, the study of Jewish philosophy has played a formative role in the North American academy.23 When Jewish topics were first being introduced into the university curriculum, it enabled scholars to demonstrate that Judaism could be normalized.

* Many of the earliest scholars of Jewish philosophy in North America—for example, Nahum Glatzer and Emil Fackenheim—used their university positions to solve problems they considered to be plaguing Jewish communities in the West.

* What are its goals? Are they—as nineteenth-century German-Jewish scholars claimed—to demonstrate the towering heights to which Jews could rise if they were politically and legally emancipated? Or is the goal of the study of Jewish philosophy—as the earliest practitioners of the field in America claimed—to solve problems facing contemporary Jews and Jewish life? If the latter is overtly theological, then the former is decidedly apologetic. In both cases, we return to the notion that Jewish philosophy may indeed be little more than theological articulations of a threatened minority in the guise of universalism.

* Does “philosophy” sound better because it lacks the christocentric overtones of the term “theology”?27 Rather than inquire into how truth claims are constructed and disseminated, Jewish philosophers— like any subset of theologians—tend to take them for granted.

* The great majority of Jewish philosophical works, both in the past and in the present, essentially amount to an apology for (a particular form of) Judaism. Strauss is not far off the mark when, for example, he refers to Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed as a Jewish book and not a philosophical one:

“One begins to understand the Guide once one sees that it is not a philosophic book—a book written by a philosopher for philosophers—but a Jewish book: a book written by a Jew for Jews. Its first premise is the old Jewish premise that being a Jew and being a philosopher are two incompatible things. Philosophers are men who try to give an account of the whole by starting from what is always accessible to man as man; Maimonides starts from the acceptance of the Torah. A Jew may make use of philosophy and Maimonides makes the most ample use of it; but as a Jew he gives his assent where as a philosopher he would suspend his assent.”

* Philosophy, which is grounded in the autonomy of independent reason, would seem to be diametrically opposed to a discipline—theology—that involves commitment to the authority of a particular religious tradition.

* While Rosenzweig certainly uses philosophical principles and methods to arrive at an unphilosophical or indeed anti-philosophical position, his claims are apologetic in the extreme.

* Jewish philosophy risks becoming little more than state philosophy that upholds, but never criticizes, the ideology of the status quo.

* There can be no uniform or authentic Jewish voice (or authentic voice of any other kind, for that matter), precisely because authenticity is ideological as opposed to historical, and invented as opposed to natural.

* The problem with suggesting that Jewishness has not been handed down to us through the ages in a pristine and immutable form, however, is that it is not what people want to hear. In times of crisis or rapid change, there is a desire to hold onto something permanent. Students and adults alike are accustomed to think of themselves as passively ascribing to a set of religious, cultural, and ethnic characteristics that are eternal and, because of this, never undergo transformation.

* Topoi such as Jews introducing ethical monotheism to the world, functioning as a holy nation of priests, being a light unto the nations (or ha-goyim), or providing a particular model of universal ethics are, ultimately, little more than rhetorical devices that function apologetically.

* Jewish philosophy manufactures truth claims for Judaism, articulating what is “good” Judaism and how it differs from “bad” Judaism.

* Can the particular claims of Judaism be rationalized using the universalist categories of non-Judaism?

* “How may we account for the possibility of philosophy, of universalism in thinking, without denying that all thinking is also idiomatic and particular?”

* Since the universal seeks to impose its will on others, to flatten or level the idiosyncrasies of the particular, it both promotes and justifies violence over that which it occupies.

* Using nonphilosophy as a metonym for the particular, we might claim that philosophy, as a universalizing and totalitarian discourse, has situated itself in violent opposition to numerous species of minority constructions, all of which threaten or impinge upon its hegemony.

* Jewish philosophy risks becoming too universal for the particular voices within Judaism and too particularist for the universal ones external to it. Pulled in radically and often diametrically different directions, Jewish philosophy exists in a fragile and a dislocated space where it risks being co-opted, as we shall see in the following chapter, for various ideological
projects.

* Whereas Maimonides emphasized the unaided human intellect as the best path toward God, Halevi located this path in the biological and religious superiority of the Jewish people.

* Mendelssohn’s construction of Judaism is no less fanciful and wistful than Rosenzweig’s. Both imagine a pristine Judaism that exists somewhere in Judaism’s ancient history and that functions as an antidote to contemporaneous problems. For Mendelssohn, the original, ancient (and by extension, authentic) faith confirmed nothing other than rational truths. This pristine faith was subsequently sullied—and here Mendelssohn follows in the footsteps of Maimonides by numerous historical and sociological forces that impeded this original monotheism, which is something that must be returned to in the present.

* [Hermann] Cohen, [Abraham] Geiger, and many other reformers were involved in the task of redefining Judaism along rationalist lines. Many of their constructions involved recalibrating Judaism not only as a religion, but as a religion of ethical monotheism that would lead to political emancipation for Jews in Europe by showing the universal significance of the tradition. This is certainly a new interpretation of Judaism, one that—to paraphrase the preceding quotation from Cohen—finds very little precedent in the traditional sources.

* non-Jewish philosophy tends to take little or no notice of Jewish philosophy. A non- Jewish philosopher, for example, would find the claim that Judaism reminds the rest of the world of its mission, whether ethical or otherwise, as nonsensical.

* …claims of Judaism’s superiority, its election, its chosenness, or whatever we want to call it, are ultimately grounded in apologetics, in the need of the particular to both justify and legitimate its particularity in universalizing language. The so-called universal, the rest of the world, does not need the particular to remind it of its task, but the particular needs an imagined universal to define itself, to articulate simultaneously both what it is and what it is not.

* For all the individuals discussed in this chapter, Jewish particularity becomes necessary for the world’s existence and redemption. Yet, as I have tried to demonstrate, the many attempts to justify this position create as many problems as they attempt to solve. Is it truly the case that what we possess is a particular community pointing beyond itself, invoking the universal as an illusory idea, but all the while invoking it in its own idiom? This is the true paradox of Jewish philosophy, that which sustains it and that which, ultimately, limits it.

* The invention of Jewish philosophy as both an object of study and as an academic discipline began, for all intents and purposes, in the nineteenth century and was largely associated with the movement known as Wissenschaft des Judentums (the Science of Judaism).3 From its beginnings, the academic study of Judaism has largely been bound up with the apologetic desire to show that Jews and Judaism possess normalizing tendencies. At the epicenter of this imagining was the perceived rationalist agenda of what has now come to be called “Jewish philosophy” or the “Jewish philosophical tradition.” What better way to show filiations between a monolithic Europe and a monolithic Judaism than in articulating their mutual investment in the Enlightenment project? From its inception in the nineteenth century until today, the study of Jewish philosophy has been heavily invested in the existential, the apologetic, and the political…

* The overwhelming majority of scholarship in these formative years of the academic study of Judaism was concerned with improving the lot of Jews. If Jews could be made to be more “European” in the sense that they, too, were seen to possess an essence and a history, it followed for these scholars that Jews could be emancipated.

* Despite the cloak of scientific objectivity, giving Jews and Judaism a history was largely motivated by both the necessity and the urgency of political emancipation.6 Although it would certainly be mistaken to assume that the ever-expanding circle of Wissenschaft scholars represented a monolithic school or program of research, the overwhelming majority did share the belief that the secular study of religious texts—making critical editions of them, translating them, contextualizing them—could facilitate
such emancipation. Their use of history and other scholarly methods was both chronistic in the sense that they desired to produce a past, and anachronistic in that they sought to uncover a latent present—the seeds for future renewal—in that past.

The academic study of Judaism thus had its origins in a highly charged political environment and consequently emerged as an apologetic enterprise. Scholarship was used to discover and unlock, or alternatively to unlock and discover, an essence of Judaism that fitted well with the larger European context in which these scholars found themselves. Since the essence of Judaism was located in the historical record, not in a timeless and authoritative set of religious texts, it was the job of the historian or philosopher to manipulate the disciplines of history and philology in order to bring this essence to light. Once unlocked, this essence could be used to articulate a path toward future renewal. This idea of a Jewish “essence” played a crucial role in some of the earliest attempts to write something that came to be referred to as “Jewish history.”

* The great orientalist and father of the modern academic study of Judaism, Moritz Steinschneider, was once reported to have remarked that “the task of Jewish studies is to provide the remnants of Judaism with a decent burial.”

* There was, paradoxically, very little difference between [Gershom] Scholem and his predecessors: both used the tools of philology and history to produce Judaisms crafted in their own image. The result is that the two major competing visions of secular Jewish scholarship to emerge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—that of Wissenschaft des Judentums and that of Scholem—were both grounded in the regeneration of Jewish peoplehood. Both Scholem and the earlier generation of Wissenschaft scholars created Judaisms—rival Judaisms—that fitted their vision of the tradition’s place within the modern world. For the latter, it was a liberal Judaism that would lead to emancipation in Europe; for Scholem, it was a sound historical, philological, and taxonomical reading of Kabbalah that would sow the seeds for contemporary renewal in the land of Israel.

* Whether we like it or not, we all live with the ghosts of Wissenschaft’s creation. Their categories, their taxonomies, and their canons, for the most part remain ours. Rather than take them for what they are—various constructions produced in the workshops of ideology—we continue to assume that they exist naturally in the world. Rather than interrogate them, we have largely taken them over en masse. A quick perusal of any given program for the Annual Meeting of the Association for Jewish Studies (AJS), for example, bears this out. There we witness all the taxonomic divisions developed in the second half of the nineteenth century: Kabbalah, medieval Jewish philosophy, medieval Jewish history, medieval literature, modern Jewish philosophy, and so on. These divisions have been and continue to be responsible for slicing up Jewish intellectual life into distinct, often hermetically sealed, categories that are taken for granted as opposed to queried. Our intellectual capital, in other words, is largely derived from the problematic bequest of our predecessors.

* Wissenschaft des Judentums was obsessed with history and the historicization of Judaism.34 It arose in the period of empire when German and French historians fed the fuel of nationalist causes by both creating and contributing to romantic notions of peoplehood.35 If other nations possessed a national history, so the claim went, then Jews must also do so. In this respect, Jews were no different than other Europeans: a magnificent past was imagined and subsequently constructed. It was a past from which all infelicities were neatly excised and one that would in turn provide the seeds for contemporary renewal and the creation of a future nationalist redemption. This led to the creation of the modern university and the programmatic creation of all the modern sciences to make the past accessible.36 Jewish fascination with the tools of creating national histories was certainly connected to an emancipatory need: the desire to show Germans and other Europeans that the Jews, like them, possessed a rich history and thus qualified for equality. The creation of something now referred to as Jewish history could also show others the important
role Judaism played in history, functioning, for example, as the midwife that produced Christianity and Islam.

* Jewish thinkers are made to occupy a set of historical and historicized philosophical “schools,” from Neoplatonic to Aristotelian to Kantian, in which they function as tokens of perceived universal applicability. A chapter in a history of philosophy textbook dealing with medieval Aristotelianism, for example, might cite near its end the work of the Jew Maimonides (and the Muslim Averroes) in order to show that this “school” was not simply the product of Euro- Christianity. Having a Jew in the mix shows that these philosophical schools are of universal significance and that their categories can be used to articulate particularist cases.

* Just as every Jewish philosopher— from Saadya Gaon to Emmanuel Levinas—has been guilty of constructing a pristine Judaism using the rhetoric of authenticity, the scholars of Wissenschaft des Judentums did something similar: they established an unbroken line of premodern and modern thinkers reflecting their own understanding of what proper Judaism should be.

* I prefer to see reason as an ideological construct and to see the rational understanding of Judaism as an authoritarian impulse to force Jews to submit to reason, often using the threat that if they refuse, they will have “no place in the world to come.” Or, to quote from Maimonides’s Thirteen Articles of Faith found in his commentary to the Mishnah, tractate Sanhedrin:

“If a man gives up one of these foundational principles, he has removed himself from the Jewish community. He is an atheist,
a heretic, an unbeliever who “cuts among the plantings.” We are commanded to hate him and destroy him. Of him it is said: Shall
I not hate those who hate you, O Lord?”

* Although they claimed that rationalism was their standard of legitimacy, the medieval Jewish philosophers ultimately produced a totalitarian version of Judaism that was predicated on what they considered to be an authentic and uncontaminated past. Certain aspects of their vision would appeal to a generation of rationalists in the nineteenth century who likewise upheld rationality as the authentic and true form of Judaism. For them, as for the canon of medieval Jewish philosophers that they largely created in their own images, anything that did not fit their reading of Judaism could be written off as legal, obscurantist, or mystical.

* “It would be futile to attempt a presentation of Judaism as a philosophical system, or to speak of Jewish philosophy in the same sense as one speaks of American, English, French, or German philosophy. Judaism is a religion, and the truths it teaches are religious truths. They spring from the source of religious experience, not from pure reason.”

* Maimonides warns all those who are inclined to matters philosophical to avoid the ignoramuses—the majority of Jews within the tradition. He writes that whoever does not engage in the pursuit of philosophy “is not a man, but an animal having the shape and configuration of man [al-ṣura al-insaniyya]. Such a being, however, has a faculty to cause various kinds of harm and to produce evils that are not possessed by other animals. For he applies the capacities for thought and perception, which were to prepare him to achieve a perfection that he has not achieved, to all kinds of machinations, entailing evils and occasioning and engendering all kinds of harm. Accordingly, he is, as it were, a thing resembling man or imitating him. In this passage, Maimonides states that those who do not engage in philosophical activities are mere shadows of humans, creatures that occupy a lower rung on the great chain of being than animals. … Most individuals, on Maimonides’s account, are quite simply incapable of engaging the higher states of thinking that are required for theoretical or philosophical analysis. This is especially the case when it comes to women, who according to Maimonides, “are prone to anger, [are] easily affected, and have weak souls.”

* Although the medieval Jewish philosophers have been celebrated for their reliance on non-Jews in order to develop and articulate their perceived universalism, it is worth pointing out that many of the these philosophers did not see themselves as “relying” on anyone. On the contrary, they believed that philosophy was not a Greek invention at all, but rather a Jewish birthright that was subsequently plagiarized by the Greek tradition.22 This trope of “Greek theft” is problematic. Do we pass over it as a Straussian fiction, something that Jewish philosophers mentioned in order to protect their endeavors but did not really believe?23 Or, do we assume that Jewish philosophers actually believed it in some act of religious or ethnic pride?
If the latter is the case, then the so-called universalism of the medieval Jewish philosophers was in many ways a fiction, because these thinkers saw themselves not as borrowing “universal” principles from the Greeks or the Arabs, but as re-particularizing that which had been stolen from them and subsequently corrupted.

* For him, the overwhelming majority of his fellows Jews worship God incorrectly, and he is quick to label them as polytheists.

* Maimonides actually implies that all those who do not abide by the tenets of the philosophers—here symbolized by the “seven nations” that threatened ancient Israel—should be exterminated. …All who deviate from the way of truth, according to Maimonides, deserve to be put to death because they have the potential to lead others astray.

* Whereas Maimonides sought to keep the majority of noneducated Jews away from philosophy, post-Maimonideans see it as their duty to introduce such Jews to philosophy. Ibn Tibbon and other such thinkers are so convinced of the truths of philosophy
and the ease with which they might be found within the pages of scripture, that they insist there is only one authentic reading of scripture: that supplied by rationalism imported from the Greeks and Arabs.

* To establish the superiority of Judaism is to set up a highly problematic (and faulty) comparison that is powered by a dubious juxtaposition between an essentialized “eternal people” (das ewige Volk) and an equally essentialized “peoples of the world” (die Völker der Welt). An early twentieth century philosophical system that is grounded in racial and religious superiority, and that seeks rejuvenation based on an acknowledgment of shared ancestry, culture, and blood should immediately alert us to its implicit and explicit fascism.

* All that is bad or worrisome in Rosenzweig’s world—Zionism, Reform, assimilation—arise when Jews look to the outside world for political solutions to their problems. Political solutions cannot eradicate these problems, according to Rosenzweig, because they ignore the core of Jewishness and overlook the fact that Jews are essentially—in the very core of their beings—not like others. The Jewish people, whom he frequently refers to as “the eternal people,” are distinct from all others, and they must maintain this distinction at all costs, for their existence is ultimately predicated on it. Despite his criticism of one form of political nationalism, then, Rosenzweig was very much a religious nationalist—an ardent and zealous one—albeit of a different stripe. This type of nationalism, to use the words of Ernst Geller writing in a different context, “is not the awakening of nation to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.”

* Rosenzweig’s desire to articulate a pristine and authentic community that exists outside the bonds of history in the ahistorical domains of eternal chosenness reminded Scholem…of “fanaticism.”

* In book 2, part 3, of the Star, Rosenzweig provides a portrait of the Jewish people that is grounded in religious nationalism. He defines the Jews as the only people that possess “a connection to eternal life” (Zusammenhang ewigen Lebens).30 What makes this connection possible is that the same blood “runs warmly through [the eternal people’s] veins” (warm durch die Adern rollen).31 This blood, the defining element of the Jewish people, is what makes them eternal and thus removes them from history’s shackles. Jews, on Rosenzweig’s reading, are ontologically different than all other peoples: “Whereas every other community [ jede andre Gemeinschaft] that lays claim to eternity must make arrangement in order to pass the torch of the present on to the future, only the community of the same blood [Blutsgemeinschaft; literally, “blood community”] does not have need of making such arrangements for the tradition; it does not need to trouble its mind; in the natural propagation of the body it has the guarantee of its eternity [die Gewähr ihrer Ewigkeit].”

* Whereas Christianity comes together spiritually in the future hope of redemption, Jews share the same genetic relationship with one another, which makes redemption always potentially present in the here and now, the eternal present. In making this claim, however, Rosenzweig dangerously transfers Romantic notions of modern, secular nations onto a religious register. His argument for the eternity of the Jewish people would seem to differ little from contemporaneous German nationalism, itself grounded in racial theory and “blood” purity.

* Non-Jews again become a straw man against which Rosenzweig can foreground imagined categories of blood and religion that are subsequently reified as natural categories. Jews become constructed as unique in ways that exaggerate not only their eternality but also the quotidian dimension of non-Jews. Read on one level, this is racialism in the guise of philosophy.

* Rosenzweig’s conception of “blood community” derives from the German Romantic tradition responsible for the creation of a reified and pure-of-blood German people. In like manner, his philosophical methodology that seeks to locate this Jewish blood community in a distant past draws on the archaic modernizing trend of his non-Jewish contemporaries.51 Rosenzweig’s attempt to articulate a notion of Jewish superiority, it should perhaps not surprise us, is powered by non-Jewish categories.52 In this, he is no different than Maimonides. This similarity, however, neither excuses nor defangs the exclusionary nature of Rosenzweig’s thought. He uses an idiosyncratic and racially-charged definition of Judaism to occupy philosophy. His system, especially that involving the artificial construction of Jewish peoplehood, is grounded in ideology, is highly exclusionary, and potentially leads to dangerous consequences. It is a position that in certain modern hands—most directly, in the hands of certain religious Zionists—easily lends itself to its own set of racist and xenophobic attitudes toward non-Jews in the modern State of Israel.

* Rosenzweig, as we have just seen, spends a considerable amount of time creating a highly stylized and essentialized category, “the Jews,” alternatively referred to as the “eternal people” or the “holy people,” and then differentiating it from an equally artificially constructed category, “the nations of the earth” (die Völker der Welt). Whereas the latter is transitory, the former is eternal; whereas the latter is focused on temporal greatness, the former lives beyond time and is thus protected from historical decay. The Jewish “body and blood” (Leib und Blut) is what secures this eternal permanence, for “this rooting in ourselves and only in ourselves guarantees our eternity for us.”

* From a historical or even a sociological perspective, Rosenzweig’s argument is very difficult to maintain. It is impossible to ascertain what he means by these “other peoples,” because he never provides us with any concrete examples. His comments would seem to imply a set of godless and irreligious peoples who desire nothing other than their own greatness. Do these “other peoples” have religions? Are they really so tied to plowing their own land that they lack the tools for a self-perceived eternal renewal? Are their religions tied simply to various national and nationalist aspirations?

Rosenzweig overlooks that fact that many peoples have languages that are reserved solely for liturgical purposes. Catholicism has Latin; Islam has Koranic Arabic. Many religions, moreover, imagine lands that they construct as holy, but in which they do not dwell. Malaysian Muslims, for example, think of and include in their prayers the holy cities of Arabia and Jerusalem. Because Rosenzweig seeks to flee from history, he also flees from the nuance it can supply, and he instead presents us with a highly essentialist set of readings based on what we would today refer to as identity politics. The Jewish people anticipate the ultimate redemption of the world within the closed, communal life they forge out of their intimate experience of relation with the divine. This communal life is both racially and religiously constructed by Rosenzweig to be at odds with the modern nation-state, its non-Jewish inhabitants, and even world history.

* Rosenzweig locates Islam, as we have already witnessed, in opposition to both Christianity and Judaism. Whereas the latter two religions are predicated on love, Rosenzweig argues that Islam is predicated on war…

* [B]oth thinkers [Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Heidegger] betray a fascist impulse in their systems that is grounded in
their respective commitments to an organic national community.

* Rosenzweig’s thought…look[s] longingly to the ancient past to find arguments for the racial and religious superiority of the Jewish people as an antidote to the ills of modern degeneration. He seeks the rejuvenation of this people based on a common and deep-rooted connection of ancestry, culture, and blood. Any ideas, peoples, systems, and so on that threaten the purity of this people must be removed, because they permit decadence and degeneration to exist in their midst… Rosenzweig’s is a Judaism that has little use for the pluralism of the modern age, preferring the heavily romanticized era of an organic and holistic community that remains closed to outside forces.

* For Maimonides, philosophy controls the meaning of Jewishness; whereas, for Rosenzweig, Jewishness controls the meaning of philosophy.

* Even Levinas, the great ethical philosopher of the other, remarks that one of the greatest threats to Jewish thought today is “non-Judaism” or, as he prefers to call it, “non-Judaic-Christian”: “the arrival on the historical scene of those underdeveloped Afro-Asiatic masses who are strangers to the Sacred History that forms the heart of the Judaic-Christian World.

Posted in Aaron W. Hughes, Judaism, Philosophy | Comments Off on Rethinking Jewish Philosophy: Beyond Particularism and Universalism

Fairness and Freedom: A History of Two Open Societies: New Zealand and the United States

Here are some highlights from this 2012 book by David Hackett Fischer:

* When one compares these many accounts, one notices that the same language of description tends to occur. Karl Popper described New Zealanders as “decent, friendly and well-disposed.”

* In 1977, an Australian journalist wrote, “While we don’t exactly hate New Zealanders, we’re not exactly fond of each other. While they regard us as vulgar yobboes, almost Yank-like, we think of them as second-hand, recycled Poms.”

* After 1974, annual immigration from Great Britain fell from more than 90 percent of all arrivals to less than 10 percent, and other ethnic groups rapidly increased.

* Another explanation of New Zealand’s culture has stressed physical factors of distance, remoteness, isolation, and insularity. Its nearest neighbor is 1,200 miles away—a geographic condition that is unique among nations. Many visitors from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century described New Zealanders as an “insular people, isolated from the world,” as one observed. A leading example was political scientist Leslie Lipson, who wrote in 1948, “The mental world of New Zealand has been, on the whole, as self-contained as its insular geography.”

Since 1960, New Zealand’s place in the world has been transformed by a continuing revolution in global communications.

* Since 1984, New Zealanders have dismantled large parts of their welfare state with the same energy that they brought to its construction. While preserving a safety net, they led the world in privatizing public institutions and in a great wave of restructuring.

* At first sight, much of New Zealand’s history seems familiar to an American. Both nations were founded by English-speaking people in distant lands. Both began with a heritage of the English language, law, and customs. Both entered into complex relations with native populations, Indian and Maori. Both developed what Frederick Jackson Turner called frontier societies, received large numbers of immigrants, and became more diverse in ethnicity and religion. Both industrialized and urbanized, and had reform movements in the Progressive Era and the era of the Great Depression, and in the restructuring of the late twentieth century. Both were allies in the great wars of the twentieth century and underwent comparable processes of restructuring in the 1980s.
The people of these two nations are also similar in some of their most cherished beliefs. Erik Olssen, our colleague and friend at Otago, had some of his schooling in the United States and knows America well. He told us with a laugh of his discovery that both countries cherish exactly the same sense of national uniqueness. The classic example was one of New Zealand’s great characters, Richard “King Dick” Seddon. On a voyage home in 1906, he sent a radiogram: “Just returning to God’s Own Country.” The next day King Dick died at sea, but his message traveled on. New Zealanders began to call their country “God’s Own,” or “godzone” as it would be written by another generation who stridently mock this idea even as they secretly believe it. Americans think the same way. The slums of New York were “God’s Crucible.” Even the desolate plains of West Texas are called “God’s Country”—by West Texans.
Both people also share the attitude that H. G. Wells called optimistic fatalism. In the United States, this is the teleological idea that history in general—and American history in particular—is an inexorable march of progress that no mortal power can arrest, though many have tried. On another level, optimistic fatalism also appears in the “American Dream” of individual improvement. Even in eras of economic disaster, American strivers continue to be optimistic fatalists. It is a source of our striving. 38 New Zealanders share this optimistic attitude, and express it in another way. “Never mind!” they often say. “She’ll be right!”
Most important for this inquiry, New Zealand and the United States are both what Henri Bergson and Karl Popper called open societies. They share democratic polities, mixed-enterprise economies, pluralist cultures, individuated societies, a respect for human rights, and a firm commitment to the rule of law. In all these ways, the United States and New Zealand are very much alike.

* Then suddenly it dawned on us that Selwyn’s many candidates had little to say on the subject of liberty and freedom. In the United States, the rhetoric of a free society is heard everywhere. Liberty and freedom were the founding principles of the American republic. Through many generations, public discourse in the United States has been a continuing debate over contested meanings of those great ideas.
Selwyn’s candidates had more to say about another value, which is not so prominent in American politics. Most of them talked urgently about the idea of fairness. It was discussed by politicians of every major party and analyzed by journalists and scholars who were looking on. “Fairness may not be everything,” Jonathan Boston wrote during the Selwyn campaign, “but it is an extremely important value—and one which has been in short supply for too long.”
The Selwyn election became a sustained debate on the subject of fairness, and in a very large-minded way. Candidates did not merely demand fair treatment in particular ways for themselves and their supporters. They discussed fairness as the organizing principle of an open society, which happens rarely in the United States.

* Fair dinkum or square dinkum or straight dinkum means an honest, fair-minded account, as in Frank Sargeson’s short stories in the Listener : “Everybody always said the butcher was exaggerating. … The butcher would say no, it was the fair dinkum truth.” Fair dinkum is very common in Australia and New Zealand, but rare in Britain and unknown in America.

* Another example is the New Zealand idiom Yankee start , which is defined as an unfair start in a race, or any unfair advantage. Yankee grab is a disreputable gambling game played with cards or dice, where players seize whatever unfair advantages they can obtain. A Yankee tournament is a pell-mell sporting event where contestants compete not in teams but individually, each against all, and anything goes. A Yankee shout is a party where the host refuses to pick up the tab and guests are forced to pay their own way. These expressions betray a belief on the part of some New Zealanders that Americans suffer from a chronic condition of ethical impairment. It is a prejudice that is reciprocated by some Americans toward New Zealanders in regard to liberty and freedom.

* In regard to fairness as the organizing principle of an open society, two countries are similar to New Zealand: Canada and Australia. Australian writer David Malouf observes, “The one word that sums up what Australians demand of society, and of one another, is fairness, a good plain word that grounds its meanings in the contingencies of daily living. It is our version of liberty, equality, fraternity and includes everything that is intended by those grand abstractions and something more: the idea of natural justice, for instance. It’s about as far as most Australians would want to go in the enunciation of the principle.”

* In America, liberty and freedom were the founding principles of the great republic. Most Americans today agree on the central importance of those ideas, even as they understand them in different ways—sometimes in opposite ways. New Zealanders went another way. They gave central attention to values of fairness and “natural justice,” which explicitly appears in their Bill of Rights. Ideas of freedom and liberty were never absent from New Zealand’s culture. Ideals of fairness and justice have long been present in the United States. But priorities have been very different in these two countries for many generations.

* Every major group in America’s great colonial migrations shared a particular concern for liberty and freedom, and those founding purposes are still a national obsession. New Zealand’s British colonists had a special concern for justice, equity, and fairness—three ideas, not one.

* The people of New Zealand had a very different imperial experience, mainly because the second British Empire (that part of it with British colonists) was founded on new principles and managed in a different spirit.

* It was one of the very few colonies in any empire that had no system of race slavery, no penal settlements, no plantation serfdom, no encomienda, no indentured servitude in the eighteenth-century sense, and no contract bondage, which was spreading widely through the world in the nineteenth century. This new tendency was not a function of New Zealand’s climate, terrain, or any material condition. It was a deliberate act of moral choice by British statesmen. Systems of forced labor never developed in New Zealand, because by the time it was colonized, slavery was strongly opposed by British governments in general, and by Sir James Stephen in particular. New ideas of nationalism also made a difference in the administration of the second British Empire. In its youth, nationalism was more liberal than conservative. It was often linked to ideas of democracy and self-determination. A policy of the second empire was to encourage unification or confederation of British colonists into incipient English-speaking nations. This happened in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand during the nineteenth century, but not in India or Africa until the mid-twentieth. Before 1776, imperial leaders in London had opposed attempts at colonial confederation in America, even resisting the Albany Congress, which was an attempt to support the empire. After 1783, British leaders acted very differently. Economic attitudes in the second British Empire were also different from those in the first. In the nineteenth century many British statesmen turned away from the dogmas of mercantilism on which the first empire was founded. They were converted to the economic gospel of free trade and embraced the principles of classical economics.
Perhaps the most important change was a new idea of social justice that was developing in Victorian Britain, despite the harsh and cruel reality of British society in that era, and in some ways as a reaction against it. These ideals took many forms. One version was utilitarianism, an idea of social justice as the greatest good for the greatest number. Another was an ideal of fairness and decency and social justice, which was all the stronger for its contrast with the unfairness of social conditions at the same time. An ideal of fairness was deployed in the novels of Charles Dickens, mainly by the method of harrowing descriptions of unfairness in England.
Those ideas of fairness and social justice were put to work in New Zealand by men such as Sir James Stephen, even as he never went there. They were both substantive and procedural ideas. In the administration of New Zealand they appeared most clearly in the character and acts of the men who were sent to govern the colony and to shape its institutions. The result, for better and for worse, was an imperial system in New Zealand that became a school of natural justice and fairness during the second British Empire.

* “When you see a man who is exactly like an Englishman, but who abuses the English, you may know he is from New Zealand or Australia.”

* In Britain’s first empire, the great ethical questions centered on power, liberty, and freedom. In the second British Empire, they were about power, justice, and fairness. Many generations later, the people of the United States are still actively engaged in the pursuit of liberty and freedom. The people of New Zealand are still absorbed in problems of fairness, equity, and natural justice. In large measure, two very different British Empires helped to make them that way.

* In New Zealand, Maori have thought of themselves as an immigrant people, and they did not regard the arrival of others as illegitimate.

* By the time that Captain Cook explored New Zealand in 1769–70, a thought-revolution had occurred in the Western world. The values of the Enlightenment inspired a universal idea of humanity. Before New Zealand’s great colonial migrations began in 1840, the Evangelical Movement also overswept the Protestant nations.

* The first encounters between Europeans and Indians happened in America before the spread of humanist ideas from the Italian Quattrocento, and long before the Enlightenment and the Evangelical Movement. First encounters between Maori and British explorers came after these great ethical events.

* Where Americans made many Indian treaties and forgot them, New Zealanders made one treaty and remembered it: the Treaty of Waitangi, February 6, 1840. Since 1974, that day has become New Zealand’s national holiday.

* More than half of the land in New Zealand has a slope greater than 30 degrees. But the surface area of the United States also includes vast areas of mountain, desert, tundra, swamp, and inland seas. In 2001, after many centuries of settlement in the United States, only 5.5 percent of its surface area had been developed.

* New Zealand’s independence happened in another way. Historian David McIntyre writes, “When and how their country gained their independence is not a question New Zealanders ask themselves. If they did, few would have an answer. Unlike Americans with the Declaration of Independence, or Indians with the ‘transfer of power,’ New Zealand was a British colony which became an independent nation very gradually. … The landmarks are not dramatic and the process is suffused with paradox and ambiguity.”

* Many individual New Zealanders told us that a sense of national independence did not fully emerge until the late twentieth century. Some believe that the major break came on January 1, 1973, which James Belich calls “a black-letter day in New Zealand history.” It was the date when Britain entered the European Economic Community and unilaterally ended long-standing economic relations with her colonies. 25 As late as 1950, Britain had bought nearly 70 percent of New Zealand’s exports. After Britain joined the European Community in 1973, that number fell to 7 percent. New Zealand farmers found themselves competing at a disadvantage for markets in the “mother country” as Britain and other European economies aggressively subsidized their own farmers.

* Colonists came early and their numbers were few. Immigrants came later and their numbers were many. Colonists founded new societies and established cultural hegemonies in new worlds. Immigrants joined societies in being and adapted themselves to established cultures. In English-speaking settlements, colonists largely controlled the flow of immigration, but not just as they pleased. At the same time, immigrants changed the colonial societies, but not always as they wished. All of these things happened in New Zealand and the United States, but not in the same way.

* America’s political parties have always divided on immigration policy. In general, Federalists, Whigs, and Republicans tried to keep people out, or stop them from voting. Democrats wanted to let them in, and marched them to the polls.

* Immigration as a process of social filtration had other important consequences for both New Zealand and the United States. In some ways its effects were diametrically opposed. In New Zealand, Megan Hutching did a survey of assisted immigrants and found that “in the end, people often chose New Zealand because it seemed non-threatening.” One woman explained that she selected New Zealand because it was “small and comfortable.”

All of this was very different from American immigration. In the United States, a voluntary and largely self-driven process selected immigrants who were restless, autonomous, ambitious, aggressive, entrepreneurial, and highly individuated. They tended to be more tolerant of risk, in the hope of greater profit. America’s open and voluntary system of immigration selected a population that lived for liberty and freedom.

In New Zealand, fairness was a frequent theme. Programs of assisted migration were founded with the explicit purpose of giving people a fair chance that was denied to them in Britain.

* In one of the great ironies of modern history, the first sustained argument for innate racial differences appeared in 1776, when Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine proclaimed that all men are created equal. That same year Johann Friedrich Blumenbach published On the Natural Variety of Humanity, which argued that all were unequal. He divided humanity into five races, which he was the first to call Caucasian/white, Mongolian/yellow, Malayan/brown, African/black, and American/red. His thesis was that skin color and skull size correlated with variations in mental intelligence and moral judgment.

* In New Zealand, capital and labor shared the same culture and ethnicity. They thought of themselves as one people. In America, labor violence was compounded by racial hatred, ethnic jealousy, and religious strife, and deepened in the South and West by ingrained folk traditions of regional violence. Kentucky’s “Bloody Harlan” County was violent in ways that had existed in the American backcountry for two centuries, and the British borderlands for a thousand years before. All this makes a dramatic contrast between the two nations.
Another great question is to understand why workers in New Zealand, Australia, Britain, and western Europe formed strong socialist movements and “mass-based parties of the Left,” while workers in the United States did not. To this classic problem, many solutions have been suggested: (1) the divisive effect of ethnicity, region, and race on class consciousness and labor movements in America; (2) the impact of individualism on American workers; (3) higher rates of mobility and internal migration in the United States; (4) American abundance and higher standards of living—the idea that socialism foundered on “shoals of roast beef and apple pie”; (5) America’s middle-class majority; (6) the strength of opposition; and (7) the violence of repression in the United States.
Another approach to this problem is put forward by Erik Olssen and Jeremy Brecher, in a close comparison of American workers in the brass factories of Connecticut and New Zealand workers in the railway shops of Otago. Mainly it is a tale of two factories, the Hillside Railway Workshops in Dunedin and the Scovill Manufacturing Company in Waterbury. In the American case, Olssen and Brecher found evidence of fierce competition in a large market, which put a premium on productivity gains. Corporations moved rapidly toward labor-saving devices and a reduction of labor costs. Layoffs were widely and increasingly used. “In the United States,” the historians write, “they transformed the old factory system and destroyed shop culture; in New Zealand, by contrast, shop culture survived and enabled skilled men to preserve key elements of the old factory system.”
Olssen and Brecher observe that in New Zealand “under the old system the skilled men planned the work to be done and decided who would do it; they hunted up their own tools, borrowed them if necessary, or even made them; they drove their planes and lathes at the speed they deemed appropriate; and left their tools where they last used them when they finished a job.”

* New Zealand led the world in four areas of social legislation: gender rights, land reform, social insurance, and compulsory arbitration. Here it built upon its values of fairness and equity. In at least three areas the United States led the world: schools, public libraries, and national parks. Where the Progressive movement in America worked to expand liberty and freedom, it won; where it found itself in conflict with these ideas, it lost.

* The trouble came to a head in 1985, when the U.S. Navy proposed a routine “goodwill” visit to New Zealand by the aging destroyer USS Buchanan . In 1979, Buchanan had been welcomed there. Everyone knew that she was not equipped with nuclear weapons, but the U.S. Navy (like others) refused to make public statements about the armament of individual ships or aircraft. The radical wing of the Labour Party, led by Helen Clark and Margaret Wilson, seized that issue as a way of shattering the ANZUS alliance and driving their party and the nation to the left. After a large demonstration in Auckland, Prime Minister Lange yielded. The Labour government refused to admit USS Buchanan to New Zealand ports on the entirely fraudulent ground that she was “nuclear-capable” and might possibly be carrying nuclear weapons. 92
The United States was caught by surprise. President Ronald Reagan and Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger believed that the Cold War was approaching its climax, and that American efforts to destroy the Evil Empire of Communism were undercut by peace movements in Western nations. Their responses were as passionate as the attacks upon them. Only in New Zealand did the peace movement gain control of a national government. When its ruling Labour Party continued to exclude American warships from New Zealand ports, the United States announced that New Zealand’s actions had breached the terms of the ANZUS treaty. It terminated military relations, stopped exchanges of intelligence, ordered New Zealand officers to leave the United States, and reduced diplomatic relations to low-level contacts. The Reagan administration virtually broke relations with New Zealand. 93
Australia, Japan, and other Pacific nations supported the American position, but New Zealand’s Labour Government was unrepentant. It enacted its antinuclear policy into law and banned all nuclear-armed or nuclear-powered ships. New Zealand’s antinuclear policy symbolized a diplomatic revolution. In the 1980s, New Zealand had developed a new unilateral approach to international affairs.
Lange’s Labour government did not only break fundamentally with the United States under Reagan. It also moved farther apart from Britain under Margaret Thatcher. New Zealand troops were withdrawn from Cyprus and Singapore after a presence of thirty years. For many decades, big New Zealand warships had been built in British yards, as sister ships of vessels in the Royal Navy. In 1988–89, New Zealand decided to purchase two new ANZAC-class frigates of Australian construction and signed an option for two more—a heavy loss to Britain’s shrinking shipbuilding industry.
Part of this policy arose from a deeply felt objection in New Zealand to the habitual bullying of small nations by big powers. People who believe deeply in fairness and justice do not take kindly to bullies of any persuasion. Even moderate and conservative leaders were outraged by the actions of the Reagan administration, and not thrilled by Margaret Thatcher. Sir John Marshall, who had long been supportive of the American alliance, observed that the United States adopted “a high-handed and uncompromising attitude, which has antagonized many New Zealanders who were in other respects pro-American.”
On the other side, Mr. Reagan and Mrs. Thatcher believed that New Zealand leaders had betrayed the cause of liberty and freedom, disrupted a system of alliances that was vital to world peace, and attempted to destroy the American policy of containing of Communist aggression through nuclear deterrence. They complained that New Zealand’s freedom was protected through military alliances and that Labour leaders were happy to enjoy the benefits of peace but unwilling to pay the cost. Prime Minister David Lange was perceived as weak, duplicitous, and vacillating.
The nuclear issue was itself urgently important to both sides. It was deepened by another conflict between two sets of ethical principles. America’s militant and uncompromising defense of liberty and freedom in the world clashed fundamentally with New Zealand’s ideals of equity and justice in international affairs and its antipathy to bullies even of a friendly persuasion. By the late 1980s, New Zealand’s formal alliance with the United States had gone the way of its special relationship with Britain. In 1986, New Zealanders were asked what nations posed a “military threat” to their country. To the amazement of many Americans, one in six mentioned the United States.

* American foreign policy was driven by two great purposes: to promote its national interest, and to serve the cause of liberty and freedom in the world. New Zealand has steered its policy by another constellation of guiding stars. Its conduct of external relations is guided by powerful values and purposes: national interest and regional hegemony, independence and collective security, a strong antipathy to bullies of all persuasions, and a continuing attachment to ideas of justice, equity, and fairness in the world.

* In combat, New Zealanders tended to be highly aggressive, but in ways that limited casualties. One method was a distinctive use of mobility, which played a major role in their tactics, with sudden advances by sea or land, swift retreat in the face of superior force, and then another advance. Another was a tactical doctrine long used by British forces from Clive and Wellington to Montgomery and Slim: advancing into a strong defensive position, then drawing the enemy upon them. This was done repeatedly in North Africa. A third method was to make use of surprise attacks at night with the bayonet, a weapon rarely employed in combat by American armies in World War II. “We almost always attacked at night,” Major-General Sir Harold Kippenberger wrote. Americans almost always attacked in daylight, when their material resources could be deployed for maximum advantage. 46 New Zealanders were also proficient in infiltration and improvisation, as at Cavendish Road in the Cassino campaign, where they managed to create a tank track through mountainous terrain that was thought to be impassable. A British officer who served beside them observed that New Zealand troops were exceptionally “self-reliant and able to act independently … natural improvisers, and improvisation is fifty per cent of infantry fighting.” 47
The New Zealanders, like the British Army, were not so successful at integration of arms. Colonel Hans von Luck observed that “as almost always with the British they carried out their tank attacks without accompanying infantry.” Communications in the field were a chronic deficiency, with grave consequences in many campaigns from Crete to Arnhem. But the infantry was superb.

* When Americans and New Zealanders met, they were surprised by differences in their systems of command. American leaders were no less brave and loyal, but in World War II they operated differently. Once, Kippenberger was quartered with an American regimental commander and was amazed by the distance of senior officers from the men under their command. “It was plain that none of them had been forward or were at all in touch with their men,” he wrote. The American commander of the 143rd Infantry told Kippenberger that “his divisional commander never came forward as far as regimental headquarters, that he never went farther himself than to his battalion headquarters.” Kippenberger concluded, “All this revealed a very different system of command.”

* What European officers called good order and discipline, New Zealanders derided as “swank” and American GIs called “Mickey Mouse” and “chickenshit.” The two nations were similar that way, New Zealanders more so. Even officers expressed a casual and good-humored contempt for the rituals of military order, and woe to a commander who stood on ceremony. Officers received little deference to their rank; they had to earn the esteem of their men. Many did so and were remembered with high respect. Too many were killed or wounded before their men got to know them and were replaced by others. Some of the best officers rose from the ranks with battlefield commissions, a practice that became increasingly common.

Freyberg strictly enforced rules of fairness among officers and men, in a way that happened in no other army. In Italy he made a point of ordering that in hotels and rest areas all New Zealanders should have equal access to the same facilities without regard to rank. Once again, an idea of fairness was linked to a spirit of belonging and a sense of cohesion. This was one of the greatest strengths of New Zealand’s infantry, and a source of its legendary status.

* In 1939, [Captain Charles Hazlitt] Upham went to war, not because his friends did so but “out of conviction that the Nazis had to be stopped.” 77 He enlisted as a private, and rose through the ranks to become captain and company commander. Always he thought of his men as his mates and lived close to them. Jock Phillips writes that he “called his men by their Christian names, he swore at them, he even got drunk with them,” and “was noted for his extreme almost obsessive modesty and his insistence on transferring credit from himself to his men.” 78
Upham always led from the front. At Crete he stayed with his men even after he was wounded twice and came down with jaundice, dysentery, and pneumonia. He was known not only for his valor but for his kindness, even to animals who were also the victims of war. At one desperate moment in the long retreat in Crete, he went back over the rugged hills to set free some mules that had been tethered without water or forage.
In Africa, at the bloody infantry fight on Ruweisat Ridge, Upham’s company suffered heavy losses from a German 88 assault gun. He led his company against the German gun, destroyed it, and killed or wounded its entire crew. In combat he fought with a blood-lust that sometimes appalled his men, but after the fight they were astonished to find him moving among the German wounded. One remembered that “Charles was bending over the wounded men, one after another, and was giving them a long draught from his own water-bottle. The Germans drank gratefully.”
Upham was never a parade-ground soldier. He could not remember the proper commands at drill, or get his uniform quite right, and he became a legend for showing up to receive the Victoria Cross wearing a mismatched pair of yellow socks. He is remembered for many things: two Victoria Crosses and his mismatched yellow socks, his bloodlust in battle and chivalry to his enemy, his courage as a child, and his “modesty of a natural gentleman.” He represented a New Zealand ideal of manhood: hard but gentle man, and fair.

* The most prominent American warriors were portrayed as heroic loners, often far beyond the fact.

* In 1942, the Afrika Korps captured a famous character in the war, New Zealand’s Brigadier G. H. Clifton. He was taken to the German commander, General Erwin Rommel, who found the New Zealander to be “a brave man and very likeable,” but the German officer could not understand why Clifton had come halfway around the world to fight a German army in the middle of an African desert. “Why are you New Zealanders fighting?” Rommel asked. “This is a European war, not yours. Are you here for the sport?”
Clifton was amazed by the question. Later he wrote, “Realizing that he really meant this … I held up my hands with the fingers closed and said, The British Commonwealth fights together. If you attack England, you attack Australia and New Zealand too.” Rommel was as baffled by that answer as Clifton had been by the question. He made no comment, except to wish his prisoner the best of luck. Immediately after the interview, Brigadier Clifton politely excused himself and escaped from a lavatory window (much to Rommel’s amusement), made his way back to his unit, and went on to other adventures in the war. 84
The same questions that Rommel put to his New Zealand captive were also asked of Americans who were fighting far from home. Their answers tended to be similar in spirit but very different in substance from those of Brigadier Clifton. Somebody asked Sergeant York why he kept fighting in France. He said, “Liberty and freedom are so very precious that you do not fight to win them once and stop.” Americans and New Zealanders both explained their acts by appeals to principle, but even on a battlefield those principles were not the same.

* We discovered one of them when a friend suffered an injury in an athletic event. To our amazement, she was compensated by the government. New Zealand’s Accident Compensation Act is a system of no-fault compensation and rehabilitation for all New Zealanders. It was proposed in 1967, enacted in 1972 by the ruling National Party, and expanded in 1973 by a Labour government to cover all accidents, no matter how or why they happened. The program is run by a public agency called the Accident Compensation Corporation and funded by taxes on employers and employees according to the danger in their work, from a low of 0.2 percent for teachers to a high of 8 percent for professional rugby players. The cost of injury in automobile accidents is covered by a share of revenue from gas taxes and registration fees. In the period from 1994 to 1999, the program paid out approximately NZ$1.4 billion on 1.4 million claims. About one-third were work-related. Roughly 6 percent were motor vehicle accidents. More than 10 percent were sporting injuries. 82
As part of this program, the right to sue for damages was limited.

* In the United States accidents are also compensated, but in a different way—mainly by private insurance, and sometimes by protracted tort litigation. The American system yields large payments to a few accident claimants. In 1987, for example, a railroad tank car filled with a dangerous chemical caught fire in New Orleans, and a cloud of vapor passed over a nearby neighborhood. Residents were evacuated in time, and nobody was killed or seriously injured, but a small army of lawyers appeared, and the neighbors brought suit against five transportation companies, not for physical injuries (there were none) but for punitive damages. Ten years later, after much extravagant legal maneuvering, a jury awarded eight thousand plaintiffs the sum of $3.5 billion for “mental anguish.” Lawyers stood to gain one-third of that amount.

* New Zealanders are appalled by the American system of tort law. Americans in turn are astonished by New Zealand’s system of public accident compensation. They believe that if people are paid for having accidents, they will have more of them. New Zealanders reply that their system is rarely abused. Whatever the truth may be, it is clear that the American and New Zealand systems were grounded in different ethical principles. The American system rests on an idea of individual freedom. The New Zealand system is based on an idea of fairness.

* In 2010, for example, public debt as a proportion of gross domestic product was 65 percent in the United States and 11 percent in New Zealand. Annual public deficits in national accounts by the same measure were 11 percent in the United States and 3 percent in New Zealand. In 2010, American unemployment rates were near 9 percent and slow to improve; in New Zealand they were below 6 percent and improving more rapidly. In terms of inequality, the United States achieved the highest level of income concentration of any developed nation. New Zealand had among the lowest, though inequalities were rising there as well. In surveys of political corruption, New Zealand achieved one of the best records of 188 nations and in 2008–9 rose to first place for honesty in government; the United States was well down the list, and falling. Similar contrasts appear in trends and measures of political partisanship, legislative stalemate, judicial dysfunction, infrastructure decay, home foreclosures, family stress, drug consumption, and social violence.

* The ethical idea of fairness, with all its many virtues, has sometimes been corrupted into a set of attendant vices. One such vice has been so widely perceived in New Zealand that it has its own name in common speech. New Zealanders call it “the Tall Poppy Syndrome.” It might be defined as envy or resentment of a person who is conspicuously successful, exceptionally gifted, or unusually creative.
More than that, it sometimes became a more general attitude of outright hostility to any sort of excellence, distinction, or high achievement—especially achievement that requires mental effort, sustained industry, or applied intelligence. All this is linked to a mistaken idea of fairness as a broad and even-handed distribution of mediocrity. The possession of extraordinary gifts is perceived as unfair by others who lack them. Those who not only possess them but insist on exercising them have sometimes been punished for it. 22
New Zealand lexicographers believe that tall poppy is an Australian expression, which appears in the Australian National Dictionary with examples as early as 1902. It is also widely used in New Zealand, where it has given rise to a proper noun, an adjective, and even a verb. Successful people are called “poppies,” and when abused for their success they are said to be “poppied” by envious others. In 1991, a Wellington newspaper reported that successful businessmen “are being ‘tall-poppied’ by other New Zealanders.” 23
We were told by many people in New Zealand that the Tall Poppy Syndrome is not as strong as it used to be, and that it never applied to all forms of achievement. One New Zealander observes that “there’s no such thing as a tall poppy playing rugby.” 24 Nearly all New Zealanders take pride in the music of Dame Kiri Te Kanawa and in the mountaineering of Sir Edmund Hillary, who were rarely tall-poppied. 25
But other bright and creative New Zealanders have been treated with cruelty by compatriots who appear to feel that there is something fundamentally unfair about better brains or creative gifts, and still more so about a determination to use them. This attitude is linked to a bizarre and destructive corruption of fairness, in which talented young people are perceived as tall poppies and are severely persecuted. Perhaps the most deleterious work of the Tall Poppy Syndrome is done in schoolyards and classrooms among the young. In any society, nothing is more destructive than the persecution of children because they exercise gifts that others lack. 26 It discourages not only excellence itself but the striving for excellence.

* Another vice sometimes appears in a society where fairness and justice are thought to guarantee everyone a steady job and fixed wage without regard to merit or achievement. One result is that there is no reward for industry or penalty for sloth. Another is that some lazy people ride on other people’s backs. In the mid-twentieth century this pattern was observed repeatedly in New Zealand by visitors from other countries.
Evidence appears in survey research and interviews of emigrants from the United Kingdom who settled in New Zealand in the period from 1946 to 1975. They were amazed by attitudes toward work that they found in their new country. Megan Hutching did the interviews. She writes, “Many recall being told to slow down because they were working too hard.” One immigrant said to her, “English people were used to working harder,” and in New Zealand “my day’s work was done by lunchtime.” Another commented on the “slower pace of life.” A third remembered that New Zealanders worked very slowly at their regular jobs, then hurried home and toiled at a terrific rate in their “leisure” hours. 27
Others from abroad made similar observations. American servicemen in World War II were astonished by work habits of New Zealand “wharfies,” stevedores who worked in Wellington harbor. In the summer of 1942, United States Marines were frantically preparing for their assault on Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands and were combat-loading their supplies and gear in transports and cargo ships. Lieutenant Colonel Merrill B. Twining, the division operations officer, remembered that even in this moment of high urgency the Wellington wharfies worked very slowly, and often not at all. Twining wrote in his memoir that the wharfies were “a likeable, manly group,” but “there was a constant series of strikes, or work stoppages, as they called them. None were serious or of long duration, but in total they had the effect of slowing unloading operations to a snail’s pace. ‘Raining’ and ‘they hadn’t got their mackintoshes’ were favorite reasons for ceasing operations. The ships furnished refreshments to the night shift. They enjoyed the way we made our coffee. Then came the night I was notified, ‘They’re off the job again. They want tea instead of coffee.’ We had none. More time lost. The highest daily record was fourteen strikes in twenty-four hours.”

* many studies show that Americans work very hard at their jobs, harder than most people, too hard for their health and happiness. They work longer hours, take shorter vacations, and often do it by choice—most of all when they are working for themselves. A British visitor who stayed with us was appalled by what he called the American obsession with work. “Why is everyone so driven?” he asked.

* Attitudes were different in New Zealand during the mid-twentieth century, where visitors observed that striving was “not on.” People who tended to strive hard to get ahead were not admired. It ran against the grain.

Posted in America, Australia, England, English, New Zealand | Comments Off on Fairness and Freedom: A History of Two Open Societies: New Zealand and the United States

Auburn

I don’t think I ever heard the terms “redneck”, “cracker”, “white trash” and “white flight” until we moved to Auburn in the fall of 1980. I had to have them explained to me by middle class neighbors. We were surrounded by people fleeing from blacks.

Michigan Wave tweets: “Get the sense that films like Deliverance, Easy Rider & tv such as the Geraldo Rivera, Maury Povich, & Jerry Springer shows helped to propel this term. They certainly boosted the archetype of the cruel White, backwoods lowlife into pop culture.”

David Hackett Fischer writes in Albion’s Seed:

Another term for this rural proletariat was redneck, which was originally applied to the backsettlers because of their religion. The earliest American example known to this historian was recorded in North Carolina by Anne Royall in 1830, who noted that “red-neck” was “a name bestowed upon the Presbyterians.” It had long been a slang word for religious dissenters in the north of England. A third word for this rural proletariat which also came from Britain was cracker, which derived from an English pejorative for a low and vulgar braggart.

I’m trying to figure out why I associate Auburn and Sacramento with sadness. On the rare times I’ve been back (1999 and 2000, I think were the last times), I get distinctly melancholy driving north on I-5 from Los Angeles, particularly once I start to smell the farm land around Sacramento. Once I turn around and head south, I get increasingly happy. LA is the place where I will make my dreams come true. Auburn, there’s nothing wrong with you, but I wasn’t at ease with myself when I was with you.

I met a new type of white in Auburn in 1980. They were rougher, tougher, meaner, and more ready to fight than the previous white people I’d known (who tended to be the children of Seventh-Day Adventist professors).

High school was not unpleasant, but to be honest, I had the overwhelming conviction up through the fall of 1988 that my life hadn’t really taken off yet, that it would only take off once I got to university. Then, when I finally made it to UCLA at age 22, I was hobbled by Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, spent most of the next six years in bed back home around Auburn, and then upon making a partial recovery, I lit off for Los Angeles in March of 1994.

If I was to chart an emotional history of my life, I would say that my years up to age 11 (in Australia and England) were sad and mad, that from 11 to 14 at Pacific Union College in the Napa Valley I experienced some times of sustained happiness (particularly in the first six months of 1980, the end of 8th grade, I felt normal), then 9th grade was miserable (the transition out of Seventh-Day Adventism), by tenth grade (my first time in public school) on through age 25 I was striving but insecure, and that Los Angeles was a paradise that even I couldn’t completely spoil, with happiness settling in for me from 2016 onwards.

(Between 1980 and 1993, the smog steadily thickened and climbed up I-80 from Sacramento and enveloped us in the foothills. My primary view of Sacramento was as smudge seen from our deck. In Los Angeles, by contrast, the air seems to keep getting cleaner from my first residence in 1988. Back then, the air burned. I rarely feel that now.)

So I think I associate Auburn as the intermediate stage between my happy years at Pacific Union College before and Los Angeles after.

The biggest cause for how I feel about a place, I think, is the quality of my relationships there.

Posted in Auburn | Comments Off on Auburn

Talking Nationalism With The Rabbi

00:00 Rabbi Judas Maccabeus, https://twitter.com/JudasMaccabeus7
02:00 Rabbi’s Youtube channel, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLgG…
04:00 Sephardic Jewry, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sephard…
05:00 Jewish Day Schools, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_…
09:30 Attitudes toward America
10:40 Average IQs among Mizrahim, Sephardim, Ashkenazim
11:00 Judas believes IQ is primarily the result of genetics
14:10 Syrian Jews in Brooklyn
16:00 Reform Judaism’s gay pride
25:00 Brooklyn Jewish attitudes towards homosexuality
27:30 East Asians
31:00 Rav Kook, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham…
37:00 Zionism, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zionism
38:00 Da’as Torah, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Da%27as…
43:00 When the Torah commands genocide
51:00 Haavara Agreement, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haavara…
1:02:00 Judas vs Syrian Girl, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-5M_…
1:03:00 Syrian Girl, https://twitter.com/Partisangirl
1:04:00 Black Hebrew Israelites, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_H…
1:07:00 The kernel of truth in the Alt Right
1:14:00 The funniest members of the Alt Right
1:19:00 Adam Green
1:21:00 Thirteen Principles of the Jewish Faith, https://www.chabad.org/library/articl…
1:22:00 Rambam, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maimonides
1:27:00 Rambam’s view of revelation
1:29:00 Judas views Chabad as idolatry
1:30:00 The Rebbe, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menache…
1:32:00 Kabbalah, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabbalah
1:44:00 The Guide for the Perplexed, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gui…
1:48:00 Scholar of Religion John Z. Smith, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonatha…
2:10:00 The Dean’s Craft of Teaching Seminar, Winter 2013, with Jonathan Z. Smith, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRDLB…
2:38:00 The Judeo-Christian tradition
2:50:00 Jason Kessler’s UTR Charlottesville trial, https://youtu.be/iDrwmUQxAdU?t=8232
2:52:00 Unicorn Riot (anti-fascists) published Alt Right discord chats from League of the South, Identity Evropa
2:54:00 They cry persecution as they sell illegal drugs
2:56:00 Rethinking Jewish Philosophy: Beyond Particularism and Universalism, https://newbooksnetwork.com/aaron-w-h…
3:23:30 E. Michael Jones on CRT, https://youtu.be/1lrIY98fOmI?t=2449
3:27:00 The rise of Russian nationalism and Stalin’s show trials

Posted in America, Israel, Nationalism | Comments Off on Talking Nationalism With The Rabbi