In direct contravention of my wife's explicit instructions, herewith I inaugurate my first blog. Long may it prosper.

For some reason, I think I have something to say to you. You think you have something to say to me? Email me at: gideonsblogger -at- yahoo -dot- com

 
I'm glad to hear from this article that Sharansky is not seriously considering leaving the Sharon government. He is still the figure whom I most admire in Israeli politics, and whose views most closely coincide with my own. Sharon should make him foreign minister and dare Labor to leave the government. (Wishful thinking, I know.)
posted by Noah at 11:03 PM

 
Not that anyone out there needs reminding, but 125 people were murdered in Israel in the month of March by Arab Palestinian terrorists. The toll is mostly Jewish Israelis, but includes some Jewish tourists, a few Arab Israelis, and a couple of foreign observers. Israel has about 6 million citizens. The United States has about 270 million. A comparable ratio of terror killings in the U.S. would yield over 5500 people, about twice the toll of September 11. And that's only one month of the Oslo war (albeit the bloodiest yet). And it doesn't include any injured, which are a multiple of the dead. Anyone still advocating restraint out there?
posted by Noah at 10:58 PM

 
Good piece from Rav Riskin on Pesach (this link is destined to go cold - sorry; that's the way they have it set up). I wonder if Maimonides reading - and his alternative haggadah text (leharot et atzmo versus lir'ot et atzmo; read the piece if you want to know what I'm talking about) - is the source of the Sephardic custom of acting out the Exodus as part of the seder (e.g. carrying a bag of matzah around the seder table, beating one another with leeks, etc.). As to the point on which he concludes: Rav Soloveitchik takes the opposite view. He points out that the bikkurim text is truncated in the haggadah - that whereas the text from Deuteronomy concludes with the entry into the Land, the haggadah quotation leaves that part out. Why? Because the next stop after the Exodus is the revelation at Sinai, not the entry into the Land. Freedom from slavery was the prerequisite for acceptance of the commandments. Acceptance of the commandments is the prerequisite for the entry into and possession of the Land. Another way to put this would be: our redemption from slavery is an absolute right given by God, which does not depend on our merit; but the completion of the divine promise to our ancestors does depend on our merit.
posted by Noah at 10:04 PM

 
Jaw still hanging open from this article from the Jerusalem Post. Not quite John Walker, but still, impressive how confused some people can get.
posted by Noah at 9:54 PM

 
The latest issue of Commentary isn't online yet, but I just thought I'd let y'all know that there's a letter of mine in it. Here's the text of the letter:

To the Editor:

Professor Levenson makes a number of telling points in his article, “How Not to Conduct Jewish-Christian Dialogue.” But while he clearly grasps the dangers inherent in the approach taken by the authors of Dabru Emet, it is not clear that he sees the importance of their effort.

As Professor Levenson correctly points out, the traditional Jewish understanding of other religions revolves around the seven Noahide laws that are binding on all of humanity. To the extent that other religions help more people to observe these laws, and to the extent that these religions do not also seek to undermine the Jewish people’s covenant with God, traditional Judaism would view them positively as institutions. But this is insufficient as a basis for cooperation with Christianity. Because we read the same book (albeit very differently), and because we make similar claims to a unique covenant with God, we cannot have the distant but un-fraught relations that institutional Judaism might have with, say, Buddhism. We cannot be strangers; if we are to avoid being enemies, we must perhaps endeavor to become friends.

There is a basis within Jewish tradition for a special relationship between Judaism and Christianity. The rabbinic trope for the Christian Church is Esau the brother of Jacob/Israel. Historically, this trope has been used to point out the sins of Christians in their abuse of the Jews. But it is also true that, in the end of days, Esau and Jacob will be reconciled. In this sense, it is not absurd to say that Jews do have a place for the Church in its eschatology, and it is not absurd for Jews to affirm that the Church will persist until that final reconciliation.

Moreover, it is not absurd for Jews to affirm that the Church may have an important role to play in bringing about the Messianic Age. Maimonides speculates that the reason God has allowed Christians (and Muslims) to dominate the world is that by this means knowledge of the true God and his Torah will be spread all over the world. In the end of days the errors of Christianity (and Islam) will be corrected, and their adherents will recognize the God of Israel as the true God. It should be possible to construct a doctrine on these foundations that sees the Church as a unique force for good, and potentially an important part of God’s plan, precisely because of its close relationship with Judaism.

An analogy might be made, perhaps, to Rav Kook’s effort to come to a religious understanding of political Zionism. Rav Kook did not stop with an agnosticism regarding the significance of Zionism - the mainstream view that Zionism should be deemed religiously significant to the extent that it allows or promotes greater observance of the mitzvot, and should otherwise be treated like any other mundane development. Rather, Rav Kook embraced a notion that the Zionists were acting as unwitting agents of the Divine Will, preparing the ground for the Messianic Age, and on this basis religious cooperation with secular Zionists was to be encouraged. Could we not see the recent efforts at reconciliation by the Catholic Church and many Protestant groups in the same light? Could we not understand these efforts as comparable in religious significance to the Balfour Declaration?

Even for those who, with good reason, want to avoid eschatological speculation, a dialogue with the Christian Church does have a dimension of religious obligation. To the extent that the Church has undertaken to purify itself of anti-Judaism, the Church has done Teshuvah. And if this is done sincerely - and I would maintain that, whether or not the process is complete, it is well-begun and in complete sincerity - then it commands a response of forgiveness from the injured, namely the Jewish people. The Church is not wrong, then, to expect more than expressions of satisfaction from the Jewish establishment, and the Jewish establishment is not wrong to seek to establish relations with the Church on a firmer and more intimate basis than it would with any other faith.
posted by Noah at 4:26 PM

 
So, just a quickie, I'm busy, but I want to understand something. As of this writing, the heads of state of Egypt, Morocco, Lybia, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates are not attending the summit in Beirut. Several of these leaders are staying away because they fear assassination. So remind me: why is it a foreign-policy priority of the United States to have Arafat attend this summit?
posted by Noah at 1:44 PM

 
More good stuff from the latest First Things. (Can you people believe I read that magazine? Am I outing myself as a loony right-winger? Or worse yet, a crypto-Catholic? Don't worry, Mom; keep reading, and you'll be reassured.) This article by George Weigel (Pope John Paul II's biographer) lays out the case for Aquinas' notion of freedom, as against William of Ockham (who, incidentally, Weigel blames for September 11. Interesting . . .). Since I'm sure you all know exactly what I'm talking about, I won't bother to summarize.

Oh, all right. Aquinas argued that freedom is both a means to and a result of virtue. We must learn how to be free, and the purpose of our freedom is to do good. All this sounds very Aristotelian, as it should, and Aquinas updates Aristotle mostly in his understanding of the good, which is Christian, not pagan. Ockham, meanwhile, argues that freedom is purely the exercise of the will, and doing good is allowing God's will to dominate over one's own, selfish will. With the death of God, Ockham's understanding of freedom becomes either Bentham's, which ultimately deteriorates into either Orwell's 1984 or Huxley's Brave New World; or Nietzsche's, which ultimately deteriorates into the likes of Hitler and Osama bin Laden - so says Weigel. So, we need to revive Aquinas (big shock, First Things coming out for Thomism) if we are to avoid either dystopian end-game.

Don't stop with my summary; the article is very much worth reading. Two dissents, one Jewish, one American.

First, the Jewish dissent. We're heading into Passover, the season of our liberation, so it's timely to talk about what freedom means in a Jewish context. The place to start is in God's demand of Pharaoh, and his refusal to grant it even in the face of plagues. The text is in parshat Bo, and I will have to digress for a while to discuss the text before I can return to Aquinas.

The opening lines of Parshat Bo are, on their face, paradoxical. “And the Lord said to Moshe: go in to Pharaoh, for I have hardened his heart and the hearts of his servants, that I might show these my signs before him; and that thou mayst tell in the ears of thy son, and of thy son’s son, what things I have done in Egypt, and my signs which I have done among them, that you may know I am the Lord.” Why do I say this is paradoxical? Apparently, the Almighty is declaring to Moses: go and ask Pharaoh to let me people go because I have hardened his heart – in other words, because he will say no. And why has the Almighty hardened Pharaoh’s heart? So that he can perform miracles for Moses and Israel’s to speak of to their children.

One would think that, as with the plague of frogs, the text would say that Pharaoh hardened his own heart; after all, it seems unfair to punish Pharaoh and Egypt if the Almighty Himself is on some level forcing them to behave as they do. This is an adolescent objection, and hence a commonplace of Sunday-school philosophizing. In adolescence, freedom is understood as the removal of restraint – primarily parental restraint - on one's own will. Behavior that outrages conformity is prized precisely because it seems to be the index of freedom. It doesn’t occur to a teenager – at least, it rarely occurred to me – that acting out or defying authority were no more “free” responses than obeying. After all, in each case it is authority that sets the terms of what I will do. The Torah texts suggests that, indeed, freedom is necessarily bound up with submission to authority, that these are not simply concepts in opposition. After all, the Israelites are to be set free not to do as they will, but to serve the Lord in the desert. To say that the Almighty hardened Pharaoh’s heart, then, can be understood to mean that, having set his heart in opposition to the will of God, the mere expression of that will was sufficient for Pharaoh’s heart to become hard. Before this, Pharaoh opposed the Almighty to protect his own interests. Now, he opposes for the sake of opposition.

God's purpose in sending the plagues is also revealing. Again, an adolescent would assume that God's purpose is to punish Pharaoh and the people of Egypt. But that is not the articulated purpose; rather, the purpose is to establish an oral tradition among the people of Israel that would tie God's intervention in history to their experience of freedom. In part, this is an articulation of Aristotle's recognition that freedom must be learned; if we are not taught how to be free, and what is its purpose, we will not be so. This teaches us that tradition, too, is not the enemy of freedom. But it also clarifies the nature of our freedom before the divine. For God's purpose is not to subvert our wills (through hardening our hearts) or crush them (by punishing us with plagues) but for us to marry our wills to His, as we might well do in gratitude for the wonders that He performed for us in setting us free from Pharaoh.

So, if we are necessarily subject to authority, what is freedom? Robert Frost once identified freedom as “moving easily in harness.” This sounds like a very Christian definition of freedom – freedom as an inner state of peace or grace. By this reckoning, a slave may be “set free” through faith even though he or she remains in chains. But this idea of freedom, while compelling, is not the idea of freedom that this parshah seems to endorse. Moshe asks that the Israelites be set free to worship the Lord in the desert. Pharaoh initially refuses outright, but relents on this matter well before the last plague. Pharaoh originally offers to allow the Israelites to make sacrifices in Egypt. This would seem to be enough if freedom consists of an inner state independent of external conditions, but it is not sufficient. Later, Pharaoh offers that the Israelite men may go and worship, but not take their children with them. But this is not sufficient. After Egypt is afflicted with the plagues of locusts and darkness, Pharaoh relents further, allowing that the children may go but not the cattle. This would seem even more clearly sufficient, but Moshe’s answer is that this is not sufficient, as they will need all their cattle for sacrifices, saying, “we know not with what we must serve the Lord, until we come there.”

From this sequence, I deduce that freedom has a purpose, and it has predicates. Pharaoh, once he understands that he is up against the will of God, is free only to decide whether to obey God's command or to set himself in rebellion against God. He realizes, then, that he is not truly free in the things that matter. There is a moral law, and that law defines the terms of action. All he can do is be loyal or rebellious; he cannot be free in the sense of being independent of the operation of that law. Once he realizes this, he attempts to limit the scope of the law. He will confine the freedom of the Israelites to their inner selves; he will confine it to one generation; he will confine it to their whole selves but deny them their property. But none of these are sufficient. The prior commitment to God's moral law cannot be interfered with by Pharaoh. In the words of the Shema, we must serve God with all our hearts, all our souls and all our means. Even if Pharaoh let the Israelites go without all their property, in effect Pharaoh would be dictating to the Almighty what was Pharaoh’s portion before the Almighty had taken His.

Here, then, is my Jewish dissent from Aquinas and Aristotle (and Weigel). They would correctly identify freedom as moral self-mastery, and Aquinas specifically would connect this with God and His revelation. This is the substantive content and purpose of freedom. But we cannot achieve this freedom without the experience of freedom. Contra the Christian view that we are called to God's service, I believe God intends for us to choose to serve him. That there is one right choice does not mean that it is not a choice but a compulsion. That our choice is defined by God, and therefore whatever we do is merely an expression of our relation to God's authority, still does not remove the element of choice.

And this, too is not the complete story, because this kind of freedom - Moses' as well as Aquinas' - is predicated on Isaiah Berlin's negative freedom. Without freedom from constraint, in one's person, one's family, and one's property, one is in no position to serve the Lord. We do need freedom from constraint, negative freedom - not because that leaves us free to follow our own wills but because it leaves us free to discern God's will. And we may indeed need Berlin's positive freedom - freedom from want, for instance - for the same reason.

And this leads directly to my American dissent. America is the land par excellence of negative freedom, and it is criticized for this in spite of the wonders of our civilization because it seems . . . well . . . negative. The pursuit of happiness sounds like the pursuit of pleasure, and pleasure is a very low pursuit. A nation should be dedicated to a nobler proposition. But I believe that the great genius of America is that we have separated the quest for the purpose of freedom from the state, with its monopoly of force that preserves that freedom. We do not lack for the liberty of the ancients, but we do not exercise it through government; we exercise it primarily through religion and the family, and through other organic forms that lack the monopoly of force. It is here that we try to understand the nature of the good, and pass this understanding on to our successors. And this quest both contains and is contained by the American institutions that are the guardians of that freedom - and, by association with that quest, become invested with a kind of content that they would otherwise lack.

So no, to answer Weigel's question, it is not happy hedonism for which we are prepared to make the sacrifices that will be required of us in our current war. Hedonism is the by-product of freedom, not its purpose, and no doubt First Things will continue, from a Catholic perspective, to struggle to contain that bi-product, as others will from other religious and even non-religious perspectives. And it is the right to engage in this struggle, the right to achieve self-mastery in the context of a communal quest for the good and true, that we will be defending, and for which we will make said sacrifices. This is not America as endless conversation, nor yet America as control-free experiment. But it is America as the canvas upon which meanings may contest to paint, and give content to the negative freedom that defines our liberal institutions.
posted by Noah at 4:24 PM

 
Book Review: What Went Wrong, by Bernard Lewis. A disappointment, one that I should have anticipated. What went wrong is that the Muslim world has been trying to catch up with the West for 500 years without success. That's made them angry and frustrated. But why are they having such trouble? Lewis is mostly silent on this. He articulates well the differences between Western and Islamic notions of government, economy, our perceptions of time, our appreciation of music - there's a great deal of interesting stuff here, presented clearly and concisely. But in the end, why has Japan developed a modern economy while Egypt has not? Why does India have a successful democracy and Pakistan does not? And an even tougher question: why did Islam's vibrancy end at around the same time that the West's took off? Why did the civilization that happily and successfully adapted Greek and Indian ideas and inventions fail to adopt "Frankish" ones? Why did the civilization that conquered and colonized as far as Indonesia in the Middle Ages fail to spread to the New World in the modern period? The title of the book tantalizes, suggesting that there is an answer somewhere to what happened to Islamic civilization to turn it from the most advanced in the world to what is possibly the most backward, the likely winners of a race to the bottom. But Lewis provides very little in the way of an answer, and he is skeptical of answers that have been provided by others - for example, those who blame the Mongol conquest. As this is a very important question, it is more than a little disappointing that Lewis has done so little to shed light on it.

posted by Noah at 1:40 PM

 
And I assume everyone has finished the piece in The New Yorker by Jeffrey Goldberg, about Saddam Hussein's war against the Kurds. Three things to point out: (1) the case against Saddam is vastly better than the case against Slobodan Milosevic, against whom NATO intervened militarily without outraging the congnoscenti of the world; (2) the Iraqi regime is clearly a direct threat to America, whether or not it was directly involved in the 9/11 attacks; (3) The New Yorker, voice of reasoned Upper East Side liberalism, has just published a major article making the former two points. Why exactly is there any opposition, domestically or among our European allies, for war against Iraq? What is the possible argument? It really does seem to me that the opposition to a war to overturn the Iraqi regime amounts to clear opposition to American self-defense. I hope the Administration agrees, and that the noises it is making about no action being imminent are just for public consumption.
posted by Noah at 1:18 PM

 
Everyone check out this article from The Spectator (British magazine). This is one of the more liberal churches in the world we are talking about that is trafficking in the kind of religious anti-Semitism associated with the pre-war Catholic Right. Is this the same England that gave us George Eliot, Lord Balfour and Winston Churchill? No, that place is gone, gone, gone.
posted by Noah at 1:10 PM

 
An extremely interesting article in First Things by Stephen L. Carter. The topic is liberalism and religion, a perennial topic but also a very specifically topical one. Carter's contention (correct in my view) is that liberal political theory is actively antagonistic to religion, and is inevitably going to lead to conflict with seriously religious people. The reason is simply stated. Contemporary liberalism, as Carter understands (correctly, in my view), is preference utilitarianism combined with a Rawlsian notion of equality. Human beings are monads. They are understood by the state from the perspective of the veil of ignorance - that is, we don't know who any individual citizen is, and therefore must construct our social and economic system on the assumption that we could be the worst off on the social scale. Worst off in what sense? Worst off in terms of our ability to exercise our preferences, since there is no agreed-upon notion of the good. Such a system is obviously irreligious. It comes into conflict with religion because actual citizens are not monads; we have, among other attributes, religious and other commitments that are prior to our allegiance to the state. Our preferences, then, may be for an order that is not so atomized. And we will exercise these preferences by, for example, trying to educate our children to replicate our commitments, and even by trying to change the liberal character of the state. This the liberal state cannot abide, and therefore it - very illiberally - tries to reconstruct the people (principally through public education) to better conform to the values that undergird the liberal state. In the end, by this process, liberalism hollows itself out entirely, loses sight of the meaning of freedom, and becomes a kind of imperial, totalitarian paganism.

All this is, I think, a very accurate representation of the conflict between the liberal state and religion. And I would agree with Carter that, if these are the lines of battle, I am on the side of religion and against the liberal state. But I do not think these are the inevitable lines of battle, and I think that liberal political theory has been of enormous benefit to mankind, and a tremendous advance over previous political models. I think that what is really the problem is that liberal theorists do not understand the foundations of the liberal state correctly. And I think that rather than resign ourselves to the decay and decadence of the liberal state, or move into a mode of religious opposition thereto, it behooves us to reconstruct those foundations on more stable ground.

"There is something chilling," Carter quotes Stanley Hauerwas as saying, "in the inability of liberal theory to give an account of why bearing and raising children is a positive good." I agree that liberalism, understood as Carter does, cannot account for this. But this is because liberalism properly understood pre-supposes a social structure that is prior to and creates the state. And, specifically, it presupposes the existence of families. Preference utilitarianism is a workable theory of how productive adults should get along with one another, but it is an obviously absurd theory for answering questions about how to educate one's children. Even Locke, is his account of the liberal state in his Two Treatises of Government, gets flummoxed on the subject of the family. He tries to explain filial obligations in liberal terms, and comes out sounding rather incoherent. Because, truth be told, Locke's liberal order of independently productive individuals agreeing, in the state of nature, to form a state to better secure their natural rights presupposes the traditional family structure: a husband who can be out there turning raw materials into more valuable products through in input of labor, a wife who will care for him and his children at home, children who will support him in his old age, etc. Even if we don't get into the emotional, moral and spiritual aspects of family life, simply as an economic matter Locke's account is incomplete because he fails to explain how these productive individuals are produced and what happens to them when they are too old to be productive. (This is a fundamental problem as well for the theories of our more extreme economic utilitarians today, the prime example being Richard Posner. Posner tackles sexuality, aging, and justice itself from an economic, preference-utilitarian perspective. He's not terribly convincing in any of these cases.)

Contemporary liberalism has undertaken these traditional responsibilities of the family because it cannot comprehend the family, and it cannot comprehend the family because the family is a corporate body, extending through time and space and making unshirkable demands on its members, and liberalism understands only monads. On some level, it knows that children are not monads, because it knows they lack the moral responsibility necessary to have their preferences accounted for. But if it recognizes this (and it tries to avoid doing so), it must change its own theory fundamentally. One possible direction of change - the direction in which liberalism has largely gone - would be to invest with content a theory that was intended to be procedural, declare that there is a notion of the good life where liberalism was supposed to stand above such deliberations. Liberalism views the citizenry from behind the veil of ignorance because this is a way to prevent the corruption of the state by particular interests; once invested with content, however, liberalism demands that all of us view each other from behind the same veil, and abandon our particular commitments to particular individuals, families, tribes, faiths, etc. in favor of an all-embracing commitment to humanity. Liberalism embraces preference utilitarianism because it is humbly agnostic on the subject of the good; once invested with content, however, liberalism demands that all of us embrace preference utilitarianism, and hold no absolute opinions about the good, and educate our children to have no such absolute opinions. Moreover, once the state acknowledges that children are not fully morally responsible creatures, and so must have their characters molded through education, the question arises: when does childhood end? There is nothing magical about the number 18. Are not all citizens who have failed to achieve characters that are compatible with the liberal state's ideology on some level children, in need of education? This is the logical path that leads to the soft Maoism of the nanny state that is the core ideology of the most committed of contemporary liberals (the prime example being Hillary "It Takes a Village" Clinton).

But there is another direction that liberalism can go, one which I think is more promising. Recognizing that human beings are only partly monads, but partly members of corporate bodies that have an independent reality, liberalism would, to some extent, endow these corporate bodies with rights (rights being the only thing that liberalism can properly comprehend), and balance these rights against those of individuals in the usual manner. The two corporate bodies most relevant are the family and religion.

Let's talk about the family first. A family is not just an association of individuals: it has its own reality. There is no human society without families, and attempts to destroy the family - whether through institutionalized inter-generational violence, as in the Chinese Red Guards, or through voluntary acceptance of radical communitarianism - have been drastic failures. The family, while its structure and scope may vary with time and from culture to culture, is natural. And, as noted, individuals cannot exist without families to produce them. All of this being the case, a reconstructed liberalism could view families not merely as voluntary associations of individuals but as real corporate organisms with their own rights. Family law is a morass of contradictions in the dominant liberal paradigm. Why do parents have visitation rights in divorce? What are these rights to - are children a kind of property, owned by parents who, if they divorce, must share that property in an equitable fashion? Why is divorce permissable at all, given the well-documented negative externalities it imposes on children, who do not have a vote in a decision that dramatically affects their lives, generally for the worse? At present, the state acts as the guardian of the rights of the parents and the interests of the child. This understanding biases the proceedings in the direction of equitable settlement of divorce rather than the preservation of the family. But what if, in some sense, the family itself had standing? What if the undertaking to divorce was something that had to be justified to the community? This would seem to be an illiberal position, but that is because the liberal order treats a family as a voluntary association with children as at least partly property, and this view of children is itself illiberal.

Of course, this raises the question of how a family's rights are to be articulated. There are various possible solutions. The patriarchal solution assumed in Locke's day - that there is one head of household, the father and husband, who speaks for the family - is unlikely to register much support today. An alternative would be for the adjudication of these rights to be embodied in convention - that is to say, there is a general community understanding of what a family's interests are, and a family will be presumed to exercise its rights in defense of its interests. And, indeed, this can be reduced to the single interest of self-preservation. It should be clear what I'm effectively doing. The liberal order is biased against the family, because it refuses to interfere with adults' rights to dissolve marriages and, in recognition that children cannot protect their own rights, intervenes in even intact families to protect the interests of children. These activities have profoundly illiberal consequences, in that this view of the family reduces children to property and this intervention on behalf of children interferes with the rights of parents to shape the moral lives of their children, and indeed risks reducing all of us to the status of children who lack the rights to make their own moral choices. My alternative order is biased in favor of the family, because it interferes with adults' rights to dissolve marriages and understands both adults and children to be partly independent beings with individual rights and partly components of a corporate entity that has rights of its own. The liberal order gives greater scope for the state to decide what are good values for individuals to hold, and to interfere with families in order to propagate these values. My alternative order would give greater scope for the community (and, therefore, the state) to decide what constitutes a healthy family, and to interfere with individuals in order to preserve such families.

Religions are the other corporate entities that could be understood by the liberal order to be real and to possess rights. Indeed, something of the sort must be lurking behind our first amendment free exercise clause, because while phrased as a matter of individual rights, it is unclear what the content of this right is independent of the rights of speech and association. I would argue that the real content of the free exercise clause is that it allows such corporate bodies to exist and operate freely without interference by the state (limited, of course, by the state's monopoly on force). I would draw a distinction between freedom of religion and freedom of conscience. The latter is purely internal and personal; one can have a free conscience as a sect of one. But the former is external as well, a matter of the submerging of the self in a corporate body with its own norms and values, which may or may not be shared by the state.

It is for these reason, indeed, that religious freedom serves as a bulwark of liberty. The freedom of religion carves out a particular kind of authority that is in a sense exempt from state authority. Freedom of speech is protected only by the state and can therefore be removed by the state. Freedom of religion allows an indepedent - indeed, as Carter points out, frequently subversive - center of power to develop, one with substantially greater resources (even though it lacks the recourse to force) than the lone persecuted individual. The importance of freedom of religion can only really be understood, then, with reference to religion's corporate character.

Carter articulates well how, in contemporary liberalism's formulation, religious freedom is little more than a special case of freedom of speech and association. As the latter freedoms come under restriction on basis of liberalism's egalitarianism, religion comes under similar pressure. It can be argued that many of these restrictions are themselves betrayals of liberalism. But things are not so simple. For example, take the conflict between anti-discrimination and freedom of association. Clearly, freedom of association means freedom to discrimination; a right to form associations with people means a right to form such associations with the people one chooses. Yet, when we retreat behind the veil of ignorance, it is clear that being a systematically excluded person is detrimental in terms of one's own ability to exercise one's preferences, and it is a reasonable argument that the loss involved in being a member of an outcast group is greater than the loss incurred by restricting the freedom of in-group members to form associations only with their own kind. Hence, in contemporary liberalism, anti-discrimination trumps freedom of association.

But applied to religion, as Carter points out, such a formulation would amount to the subordination of religion to the state. If, to choose an extreme case, churches were forbidden from discriminating in employment on the basis of religion, they would cease to function altogether. But even in less obviously central cases - for example, the employment of women - the application of liberal anti-discrimination law would mean forcing religions to structure themselves according to the moral rules of the state, which in practice would mean that the religions ceased to be independent sources of power at all.

We instinctively understand that religion is different. But why? Why should a right to be a member of a religion that discriminates against women be any different than a right to be a member of a country club that discriminates against women? Why should the latter be seen as rightly the subject of massive state efforts at extirpation while the former is viewed as untouchable?

The difference might be that religion is more fundamental because the state depends on religion for its legitimacy. This would amount to subordinating the liberal state to religion, which most liberals would stoutly oppose (see my ruminations on Peter Beinart's recent piece in The New Republic on this very topic). But another alternative would be for liberalism to view religion as, again, a corporate body with an existence and rights prior to the state. If religions are real, and not mere associations of individuals, then they may have rights that trump the preference utilitarian calculations of the state. I would not suggest that religious bodies might, for example, have the right to forbid members from leaving, on the analogy with my argument against no-fault divorce; religions, after all, do not cease to exist when members leave, and free exercise would be a pretty empty phrase if it did not mean the freedom to join the religion to which God wants you to belong. But it might mean, for example, that religious bodies have the ability to make the same claims with respect to discrimination that individuals do; a policy that privileged non-religious bodies in an area of religious competancy might be seen as wrong in this scheme. And it would certainly mean that religious bodies would be exempt, to some degree, from norms that would restrict other kinds of associations.

Again, what I'm doing should be clear. Carter points out the numerous ways in which liberalism actively works to undermine religion. In doing so, it is behaving illiberally, but it cannot help itself because it cannot accommodate the language and claims of religion within its own moral vocabulary. To avoid a head-on conflict between the liberal state and religion, the liberal state must be reconstituted. The two alternatives, it seems to me, are either reviving the religious roots of liberalism itself - the argument from natural religion that seems to be favored by the compassionate-conservative crowd that Bush is most associated with - or, in the alternative I have just outlined, recognizing the corporate reality of religions and endowing them with rights comparable to the rights of individuals or sovereign governments. In either case but in very different ways, the language and claims of religion would be readmitted to the public square.

This is a very important and current topic, not only because of its obvious relevance here in our own country, but because of our current war, which is certainly in part a war of liberalism against religious fundamentalism (specifically, Islamic fundamentalism). Fundamentalism is, I believe, the religious antithesis called forth by imperial liberalism. It is similarly highly abstract and logical, and similarly totalizing and aggressive. And it is absolutely incompatible with liberalism. In the Islamic world, there are four living models for how to construct a state: the Turkish, the Iraqi, the Moroccan and the Iranian. The Moroccan model - a traditional medieval monarchy - can be dismissed out of hand; no one thinks that such a state is anything more than a stage on the way to modernity. The Iraqi model - fascist, totalitarian and secularist - is generally and correctly understood as wholly evil. That leaves the Turkish model of a secularist, modernizing democracy and the Iranian model of a theocracy run by a clerical party. What is notable is that the Turkish state clearly views religion itself as a problem, a force to be coopted and suppressed, not granted freedom. The Iranian state, meanwhile, clearly views every aspect of the liberal order to be a threat. The achievement of a liberal order in the Islamic world is clearly an important long-term war aim, for a number of reasons. It is imperative, therefore, that we be able to articulate that order in a way that does not make Islam itself, or religion generally, the enemy to be annihilated. We have done this rhetorically, but we have not done this theoretically, and the reason, I think, is that this is an unsettled question in our own minds. For this very reason, it deserves considerably more attention from our political philosophers and our theologians - particularly from conservative ones who, much as they might object to imperial liberalism, leave no doubt that they would prefer to live in Turkey than in Iran.
posted by Noah at 1:04 PM

 
Israel again. Andrewsullivan.com, The Weekly Standard, The National Review, The Wall Street Journal and other denizens of what Pat Buchanan calls Israel's "amen corner" in the U.S. are in "say it ain't so" mode over Bush's and Cheney's recent moves vis-a-vis Israel. But the ultra-hawks at DEBKA don't seem so worried - and I don't think they are just whistling past the graveyard. I hate to get involved in a Kremlinological analysis of my own government's diplomacy - after all, what's been so pleasing about this Administration is its straight talk - but I do think the DEBKA-oids have a point. A synopsis: (1) Cheney has specifically placed the onus on Arafat to implement a cease-fire, and has given him a deadline of a week in which to do so. (2) Tenet's requirements, which Arafat has to achieve, or at least make progress towards, before any talkof resuming the peace process can be entertained, include shutting down terrorist organizations that now include Arafat's own faction. (3) Cheney referred specifically to Israel's right to be a Jewish state within secure borders. This is clarifying in that it has a direct bearing on the so-called right to return. (4) Cheney made it clear that while a 2-state solution is the core of America's vision for solving the Arab-Israeli conflict, such a solution can only be implemented if the Israelis "have confidence that their existence as a Jewish state within secure borders is accepted by all, first and foremost, by Israel’s neighbors in the region.” This effectively turned the tables on the Saudis: they presented their plan for region-wide normalization as a reward for Israel's withdrawal to the '67 borders and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state; Cheney has made it a precondition for a 2-state solution. (5) Cheney declined to meet with Arafat and has suggested, in effect, that the onus is on Arafat to prove whether he is fit to remain the putative head of a future Palestinian state by ending terrorism. All of these points bolster the Israeli position diplomatically and put Arafat on the defensive. What Arafat has been offered is only what America had already given him more than two months ago when they asked Sharon not to attack Arafat personally: one last chance.

It is reasonable to assume, as the DEBKA-oids do, that Arafat cannot abide the conditions that Cheney and Sharon have required for any negotiations beyond those pursuant to a cease-fire. It is also reasonable to assume that Cheney and the Bush Administration know this. So what is going on? I think the Bush Administration must be talking frankly to other Arab countries about a post-Arafat Palestinian government, but they need to lay the groundwork. The Bushies don't think Sharon can win his war militarily. That's a very damning thing, but I also think they are right. Sharon can only win if he is willing to reconquer the territories, kill the terrorists, exile or kill Arafat, and even then he will not have won because the Palestinians are not submitting to Israeli military rule. That means Israel would either have to expel them, or make them citizens, or trade the territory away with one of Israel's neighbors. The first and second are unthinkable and the third cannot be achieved without diplomacy, and American-sponsored diplomacy at that. So Bush is trying to lay the groundwork.

I am very pleased that so many conservative voices have been raised in defense of Israel. I hope those who love Israel in this country are aware of who have been her staunchest defenders. But the fact remains that Israel, while she will not lose this war, is proving daily that she cannot win it. I was reminded recently of something Johnson said during the Vietnam War. He explained that the U.S. was going to convince the North Vietnamese that they could not defeat us by force. That's pretty much what Sharon is saying to Arafat. And the translation is: give us your best shot. We can take it; we can outlast you. It worked for Ali against Foreman. But look what it cost him. Far better to say: we're not trying to convince you of anything. We're trying to kill you before you kill us.
posted by Noah at 5:12 PM

 
OK, links to three articles I read recently that I think are particularly interesting.

From the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars: Is America an Experiment? by Wilfred M. McClay. We hear the expression "American experiment" all the time, but what is meant by it? If America is an experiment, what is the object of the experiment, and what the control? And if we are not talking in these terms, are we really talking about experiment at all, or are we using the word as an excuse for license and disorder? The article is stronger towards the beginning than the end, but very much worth reading and discussing. And any piece of writing that praises William James while damning Richard Rorty is bound to get a smile out of me.

From Commentary Magazine: What Brings a World Into Being? by David Berlinski. Berlinski, a critic of Darwinism (but not a creationist; he's a mathematician and molecular biologist by training), has written extensively on the problem of how information becomes an active principle in contemporary descriptions of reality. In this essay, he elegantly describes the verbal slight-of-hand by which this is assumed without ever being asserted in three very different realms of science: (1) how the information recorded, for example, in language causes a fully ramified reality to be represented in our minds; (2) how the information encoded in DNA causes a fully ramified organism to develop in the womb; (3) how the information encoded in the laws of physics cause (apparently) the entire universe to spontaneously come into being. It was to me a novel and interesting way of looking at a set of problems that I had been aware of for some time. Here's another article by Berlinski, this one from The Weekly Standard, a critical review of the revival of natural theology in the context of the scientific advances of the last 50 years.

From Azure Magazine (terrible name; in Hebrew the name is t'chelet, which is the blue originally used in tzitzit, the ritual fringes, and also and relatedly the blue of the Israeli flag; "azure" may be a good literal translation but figuratively it is a disaster): On the National State, by Yoram Hazony. Hazony has undertaken to defend the nation-state as the foundation of political order, and he contrasts it with the Imperial or Anarchic state. In terms of nomenclature, I think the term "Anarchy" is poorly chosen; a better term would be "Feudal" which more accurately describes the kind of political order that he calls "Anarchy." I think his argument in general is very much worth advancing, and highly topical; its relevance not only to Israel's Oslo war but to the formation of the European Union and the War of September 11 should be obvious. Even those inclined to be critical of nationalism should read the argument; Hazony will recall to their minds that only a few years ago, these same people who now abhor nationalism in favor of global institutions were great champions of the principle of national self-determination against the previous global order dominated by European empires. (Indeed, in an ironic development, the Palestinian war against Israel benefits from both the older approbation and the contemporary abhorrence of nationalism on the left; the Palestinians are making war in the name of national liberation, but Israel is condemned precisely for being a national rather than a multi-cultural state. You can't win.)

Enjoy!
posted by Noah at 11:34 AM

 
Another thought on the subject of Beinart's piece. Is there a difference between Abraham Lincoln and Marcus Aurelius? Between Benjamin Franklin and Aristotle? What I'm getting at is: is there a difference between a deist and a virtuous pagan?

Christians of Bush's stripe are skeptical of the virtuous pagans and the deists they misunderstand. But do liberals of Beinart's stripe understand them any better? The virtuous pagans, after all, have no notion of rights at all, which are rather dear things to liberals. The liberty of the ancients would not look much like liberty to us moderns. Liberty to the ancients meant self-government both individual and collective; it meant personal virtue and responsibility to the group. Our modern idea of freedom of religion is utterly incompatible with this ancient liberty, in the same way that any freedom that divides the community is so incompatible. The compassionate-conservatives may distrust the pagans' virtue, and in this they may be wrong, but they are not wrong to sense that they do not provide a valid alternative foundation for a liberal order.

And what of the deists? While the deists do not exactly have a religion, they stand on the shoulders of religious notions that, in many cases, are precisely what the Bush-style conservatives are promoting as our universal, natural religion. Their belief in conscious design and the intelligibility of the universe would have made sense to the virtuous pagans. Their belief in Providence, less so. Their belief in individualism, even less. While the deists were, in many cases, quite contemptuous of the Bible, it is hard to see historically how you could have deism without Protestantism. Deism for the American Protestants of the 18th century was like Socialism for Jews of the late 19th and early 20th century: it was the perfect religion for people who had thrown off their particular religion. And it could not really replicate itself.

Beinart understands that the founders of our country were not orthodox believers, and that this has something to do with why they were able to bring forth such a miraculous Constitution. This is something important that the compassionate-conservatives are missing. But what Beinart has left out is: how does what the founders believed get passed down, without becoming a religion in its own right?

More on this later.
posted by Noah at 4:25 PM

 
Religion again. Peter Beinart (my favorite liberal) has a piece in the latest issue of The New Republic (which he's done wonders for - have I mentioned he's my favorite liberal?) about the Bush Administration's consistent ecumenism and its equally consistent ignoring of non-believers. It's a very good statement of an argument that Beinart has been developing for some time in that space. In essence, he argues that the Bushies - and religious conservatives generally - so equate faith with morality that they are unable to make the case for coexistence with those without religion, or even for the existence of people without religion.

What's good about this argument as that, well, it's true. The Bushies do ignore non-believers, and on some level they seem to think that non-believers don't even exist. They do tend to equate religion with morality (for this reason, they've had a hard time coming to grips with the role Islam - a religion - plays in our current war; see Franklin Foer's piece from several months ago). And they often seem to suggest that our political tradition is incomprehensible from a non-religious perspective. They suggest, for example, that America believes in freedom of religion because freedom is good for religion, not because we believe in freedom.

But just because Beinart is right about the Bushies doesn't mean that the Bushies are wrong about our political tradition. In fact, we believe in freedom of religion both because we believe in religion and because we believe in freedom. And Beinart does not make as strong a case against this religious reading of the American system of government as he thinks. In part, I think, this is because the Bushies - and moderates among the so-called theocons generally - do not distinguish between two related but distinct religious understandings of our political system.

If we grant that we believe in freedom as a fundamental value, and that this is the foundation of our political tradition, why do we do so? Where does freedom come from? And if we don't need to answer this question, how are we to understand what freedom is? The American political tradition arguably springs from two European wells: a liberal constitutionalism that starts with Locke and a conservative pragmatism (avant la lettre; the term is an anachronism) that is exemplified by Burke and Montesquieu. To vastly oversimplify, in the former freedom comes from the Creator and in the latter freedom comes from tradition; in the former it is deduced from first principles, and in the latter it is observed in the behavior of society.

At first glance, it would seem that Beinart, who wants a non-sectarian defense of freedom, would prefer the latter. But things are not so simple. In many parts of the world, after all, there are no traditions of freedom to be observed. Indeed, commentators like Pat Buchanan or John Debyshire who deny the universality of the Western political tradition do so precisely for this reason. Where Western culture is alien, they predict, Western institutions like republican democracy will fail to take root or, worse, will yield profoundly illiberal results. An articulation of American freedom that is fully open to pagans or non-believers may be closed to those without Western cultural roots.

The compassionate-conservative crowd wants a way to talk to a culturally divided America. It is for this reason, I think, that they have so embraced a kind of mushy neo-Lockean universal religion: under this umbrella, they can articulate what they think is superior about the Western tradition without explicitly saying that it is Western at all. And, more important, they articulate a reason for Western religious communities to remain loyal to the American Constitution, something no longer to be taken for granted now that our culture has become ever more fragmented.

I suspect that in fact Beinart believes in the former, Lockean notion of freedom, grounded in innate rights that accrue to us for being human, but that he would reject Locke's premises; he would like to find a pragmatic, non-religious basis for the notion of fundamental, inalienable rights. Perhaps a convincing statement of such can be made; it has certainly been tried. But I think Beinart is kidding himself if he thinks that such articulations are truly neutral, or even ecumenical. In practice, a fundamental-rights understanding of freedom that is not pragmatic or religious has become a kind of crusading secularism. Believers can happily be loyal to a state that asserts no fundamental values, only contingent ones. They can also plausibly be loyal to a state that bases itself on a set of fundamentals that are compatible with or derivative of the fundamentals of their faith. But where the state makes certain beliefs fundamental to the political order, and these beliefs are incompatible with the fundamentals of a believer's faith, we've got a problem. The Bushies potentially run into this problem because their universal religion may be incompatible with some religions - indeed it may be incompatible with all. But Beinart runs into this problem as well, because his notion of fundamental rights will likely conflict with many believers. This is the essence of the culture war: the conviction by many believers that our government is not neutral between beliefs but has strong, fundamental beliefs, and that these contradict and interfere with the fundamental beliefs that traditionally religious people hold.

It is not a trivial problem, the problem we face. We have good, pragmatic reasons to believe that the American political tradition is the pinnacle of human achievement in politics. Western and non-Western peoples alike have reason to look at America and say: how can we make that work for us? For Christian societies, the great American political compromises - such as our radical religious freedom - are intelligible, even if they may be foreign. It may take work to convince Christians to support a state that is not explicitly Christian, but at least there is ample precedent, and a set of arguments that are native to the Christian world to defend such an arrangement. But for non-Christian societies - particularly for Muslims, but also for Jews - they appear to contradict deep-seated assumptions about how their religion works. Islam actively seeks to colonize the state; a proper government is a Muslim one, and proper law is Islamic law, enforced by the state. Judaism is more equivocal, in that the state itself is viewed with suspicion by much of the tradition, but there is no equivalent in Judaism to the maxim: render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's. We answer, in all things, to a higher authority than the state. It is not an easy thing to domesticate such long-lived traditions to an American-informed system of government. And it is not clear to me whether a doctrine of natural religion or some alternative of Beinart's is a better way to do so. I give the compassionate-conservative crowd credit for tackling the problem, though I am skeptical whether their approach will succeed (and I believe in natural religion, so I'm a pretty sympathetic audience).
posted by Noah at 4:09 PM

 
Another excellent piece on the Yates trial, this one from Chris Caldwell at the Weekly Standard. Digest of Caldwell's argument: the jury effectively nullified the law because they wanted to come to a "guilty but insane" verdict, and such a verdict is not allowed for by Texas law. Caldwell does a fine job of demolishing Yates's feminist defenders, and a good case as well against the traditional insanity plea and for a verdict of guilty but insane. Where he muddles things - only slightly - is in his description of jury nullification. Properly understood, jury nullification happens when a jury refuses to apply the law as written because it is unjust; the jury, instead, makes new law that it views as more just. This notion of the powers of the jury, while far from universally accepted (the legal profession condemns it strongly, and has for decades) has a very long history in Western political thought, and in American practice. But I think Caldwell mischaracterizes this controversial practice. He says that jury nullification is reasoning backwards from a conclusion in a particular case - deciding what outcome you want for a particular defendant and then coming to the necessary verdict. But this is not properly jury nullification; it is transparent injustice. For example, if a jury were to acquit a defendant accused of murdering his ex-wife and a friend of hers who happened to be with her at the time, not because the jury genuinely thought the defendant was innocent of the murder, nor because they sought to nullify the law against murder, but because the jury lacked sympathy for the victim because of her race and had sympathy with the defendant because of his, that would be injustice, a flagrant violation of the jury's sacred trust and an act that deeply compromises the jury system as a whole. (I'm of course making up such a trial, which would be unthinkable in our day in America.) By contrast, if a jury, unsympathetic with laws against possession of marijuana, were to refuse to convict a clearly guilty defendant with no history of lawbreaking in a trial where neither violence nor trafficking in the drug was alleged, that would be an instance of nullification. The jury is not clearly demonstrating bias toward the defendant, but is overturning an unjust law. The action may be illegitimate, but no more obviously so than when judges strike down laws based on legal theories not clearly rooted in the Constitution's text. (The former may be more legitimate, in that the jury is the people itself acting, and therefore the very basis of the political order; or the latter may be more legitimate, in that judges are ultimately, though not directly, responsive to a political process that represents the people as a whole, and is not merely representative of it. This is an argument for another time, however.) And it undermines the jury system only to the extent that we do not trust the jury system to deal justly - in other words, to the extent that we find a particular instance of nullification to be absurd or indefensible, or to the extent that we already find the jury system to be theoretically indefensible. It seems to me that the Texas jury, in refusing to either allow Andrea Yates to go free or to execute her, committed an act of justice. The Texas legislature, if it concurs, should swiftly pass a law amending the criminal code to eliminate the insanity defense and replace it with the option of a verdict: guilty but insane.
posted by Noah at 11:45 AM

 
An excellent follow-up piece by Michelle Cottle in The New Republic about the Yates trial. Here's why I like it: there's plenty of room to debate who else besides Andrea Yates should be tried for their involvement in the deaths of her five children. But there's no real room for debate about her own guilt. And attempts by NOW to excuse her are particularly egregious examples of our victim culture. There may be many guilty parties in this case, but there are exactly five victims and they are all dead.

And the other reason I like it: she clarifies what the proper prophylactic response would be if we wanted to enact one. To whit: restrict the freedom of would-be parents. If you are not satisfied that criminal justice is the big-picture way to prevent crimes like this one, then you either have to restrict people's freedom to have children (crazies get sterilized, or some such) or you have to restrict the general freedom of crazy people (institutionalize them involuntarily, or some such). If you respect people's freedom to procreate (something NOW usually cares a lot about) and their freedom to manage their own health (ditto), then you run the risk that they will fail to live up to the responsibilities of these freedoms and, in an extreme case, even commit murder. Michelle Cottle is sanguine about the prospect of the government forbidding certain people to be parents (in an update of Oliver Wendell Holmes' line, "three generations of imbeciles are enough"). I am much less so. But clearly that's the honest choice: freedom and accountability or government control of human reproduction and/or mental health.
posted by Noah at 10:41 AM

 
The New York Times ran a review this past week of the Conservative Movement's new Chumash (Bible, 1st 5 books), called Etz Chayyim ("Tree of Life"). The essence of the review seems to be that the book is a wonderful advance because it debunks the historicity of the Exodus, etc. The Jerusalem Report has a review of the same book, arguing that it doesn't go far enough on the one hand in accepting mystical interpretations of scripture and on the other hand in denying the divine authorship of the text. Finally, Harpers has a piece this month (not online) on the topic of the historicity of the Bible (or lack thereof), called, "False Testament: Archaeology refutes the Bible's claim to history."

All of this strikes me as both very old hat and a lamentable trend. People have been trashing the historicity of the Bible since Wellhausen. But overwhelmingly the arguments are from silence. It's a simple fact that there is little in the historical record outside of the Bible to corroborate the biblical account of, say, the Exodus. It also just so happens that there is very little evidence that God split the Red Sea for Moses or stopped the rotation of the earth for Joshua. Believing Christians have to deal with the fact that no Roman history records the signs and wonders associated with the life and death of Jesus. And not just signs and wonders: big public actions like the Massacre of the Innocents: no evidence at all outside of the Christian scriptures. Believing Jews have to deal with the fact that the Egyptian court histories make no mention of Israelite slaves, the plagues, or the Exodus. For that matter, the Hebrew Bible makes no mention of the pyramids. And even secularists must reckon with the fact that no ancient source purports to be history in the modern sense (certainly Herodotus didn't) and that our own readings of the past are deeply informed by our notions of how history and culture work - that is to say, by ideological matters. An honest approach to the world of biblical criticism would admit that the bible critics can prove almost nothing. Their own theories are wildly speculative and mutually contradictory. What they share is a conviction that whatever the text says must be inaccurate until corroborated. That is certainly a skeptical stance, but why is it a neutral stance?

I do think it's worthwhile to try to construct a non-apologetic history of the ancient Levant. But you know, there's really no reliable source for such an endeavor. The Hebrew Bible is scripture, the non-Israelite royal chronicles are propaganda, and there's not much else to go on. You can only tease so much history out of archaeology; much of what gets published is wildly speculative. I read an interesting book once called Return to Sodom and Gemorrah. (It's not what you think; the author is a paleontologist and amateur archaeologist, and the book is basically airing his pet theories about the historicity of the Bible.) His particular pet theory is that the historical event that originates the stories of the plagues in Egypt and the parting of the Sea of Reeds (which, by the way, he identifies as the shallows of the Mediterranean) is the explosion of Thera (Santorini). This is the same event that supposedly accounts for the Atlantis myth, explains the destruction of Cretan civilization and, consequently, the origin of the Philistines and the rise of Homeric Greece in the subsequent power vacuum. Sounds as plausible to me as anything else people say about the history of the ancient world.

For myself, with my historian hat on I am persuaded that the Bible is our best account of the history of the biblical period. Specifically, nowhere in the article do I hear a refutation of Hertz's general contention: that the ancient Israelites would not have invested a past for themselves as slaves in a foreign country unless they were such. That's a very persuasive argument. The Torah's account of the wandering in the desert is hard to trace, and the Torah's use of numbers - the recurrent use of the number 40, for instance - suggests that outside of chronicle it means something different than calendar time. So why is the absence of pottery in the desert telling? The Times review says that the accounts of Creation and the Flood are of Mesopotamian origin. The Torah also says that the Israelites are of Mesopotamian origin, from Ur. So, does the similarity between the Torah and Mesopotamian myth confirm or disconfirm the biblical account of Israelite origins?

But let's step a little further back, put on our Jewish hats and take the divine nature of the Torah seriously, and what that implies. This text is written in language - human language, not God's language. Human language reflects human experience. It uses tropes, metaphors, similes, conventions. No text intelligible to humans can avoid these things; that is how language works. These human languages are artifacts of human history. If you write a text in a human language, your language will reflect that history, make use of it in deliberate and in unanticipated ways. So, if ancient Hebrew contained within its tropes and conventions the association of River with the Dragon slain by Marduk, how is it surprising that the Torah will play off that association? When God writes a book, He becomes an author, and He is constrained and empowered by the characteristics of the language in which the book is written. If He wrote the book without such constraint, His book would not have been intelligible to the reader.

All this was well-understood by pre-modern readers. They were so well-aware that the text, and the event of revelation, was embedded in history that they invented myths and interpretations that devalued the singularity of the moment of revelation. Two of note: first, the Rambam (Maimonides) argued that the sacrificial system was a concession to the idolatrous history of the Israelites. By implication, this system would not be restored in its original form in the Messianic age. That's a radical conclusion, rooted in a sophisticated understanding of the text that does not deny its divine origin. A second: there is a rabbinic story about Mount Sinai being suspended over the Israelites as they decided whether to accept the Torah. (The basis for the story is a specific turn of phrase in the biblical account; the children of Israel are said to be camped tachat ha-har ("under the mountain") and the rabbis undertake to explain why the text says "under" rather than "beside" by saying that God suspended the mountain over the Israelites' heads, saying: accept the Torah or I will drop the mountain on you and bury you here.) By means of such a story, which makes the original revelation an imposition rather than the voluntary acceptance of a yoke, the rabbis could devalue that moment in favor of their own interpretive moment. But the myth does not undermine the original text, or deny its divine origin. It simply embeds it in history.

And this, I think, is the real scandal to the Conservative rabbis: that God acts in history. This is what they cannot accept, because it means that God, the Ultimate, somehow breaks through into the mundane. They want God out of history because they see history as a record of crimes; they see that God's world does not do honor to God's purported justice, and their solution is to push God away from the world. Or, in Harold Kushner's version of the solution - and this is also Rabbi Philip Graubart's view in his Jerusalem Report review, at least as I read him - to reduce God to subordination to the world, which is to say, to make Him no longer God. Either way, one has to wonder, sitting in the synagogue: why am I here? If this text is not divine - either because God did not write it or because there is no divinity governing the universe - then why am I reading it here instead of in my study, alongside Plato and Freud?

Conservatives are trapped by their belief that they must at all times be reasonable and scientific, by their desire not to be fundamentalists. But in their desire to be scientific they have forgotten that they are not scientists, and do not have the commitments that a scientist has, while they do have other commitments. Who wants a Torah translation only as good as the latest archaeology? Planned obsolescence is for cars, not scriptures. What does archaeology have to do with the Torah text in the first place? Is the synagogue a history classroom? And how is this a remotely useful response to the fundamentalists who are behind books like the Stone Chumash? For these are the real enemies of traditional interpretation, in that they deny that there is such a thing as interpretation, and understand revelation as a license not to reason rather than the grounds on which to reason.

The Torah is not a biology textbook or a physics textbook, and it is not a history textbook either. It is scripture. Scripture is its own category of text, with its own hermeneutic rules, and if these are not taught to the next generation of readers then that generation will not know them, though they may know a great deal about biology, physics and history. It would be nice if someone who presumes to translate the Torah would remember that.


posted by Noah at 3:17 PM

 
Some thoughts on Andrea Yates as she awaits her sentencing:

I do not mind saying that I am gratified that the jury came a guilty verdict easily in this case. (I also don't mind saying that I hope they do not apply the death penalty; I'm not a huge fan of the death penalty to begin with.) The case has afforded some opportunity to think about the nature and purpose of criminal justice. And, this being a blog, I thought I'd share my own thoughts on the subject.

There are, broadly speaking, four justifications for having a criminal justice system in the first place: (1) to deter criminal activity; (2) to protect the citizenry from specific individuals known to be dangerous; (3) to rehabilitate the criminal; (4) to effect retribution. All but the last could be satisfied in Andrea Yates' case without a guilty verdict. But the last is the only element strictly necessary to justify a criminal-justice system as such.

Andrea Yates could not be deterred. At the time of her crime, she was in a psychotic state. If deterrence is to be our standard, then Andrea Yates could well get off scott-free, and the law should focus on her husband, her physician, and on anyone else who should have acted to prevent her from becoming a murderess.

The citizenry could be protected from Andrea Yates by various means short of incarceration, much less execution. For example, she could be sterilized. This may sound cruel, but imposes a lot less suffering than locking her up for the rest of her life.

Andrea Yates will not be rehabilitated by prison. Arguably, since her condition is caused by pregnancy, she could be rehabilitated simply by sterilization and by psychotherapy. If this is insufficient, she could be institutionalized for a time, or put under some kind of outpatient psychiatric care.

If these were the only things we cared about, then we would not need to proclaim Andrea Yates guilty. Indeed, one would like to think that the necessary authorities would have intervened - even against her will - to impose some sanction before she killed her children, on the basis not of her guilt but of the potential danger she represented.

But these are not the only things we care about. All three of the goals cited - deterrence, direct protection, rehabilitation - are future-looking; they are utilitarian goals. But justice is not just a funny word for doing the most good for the greatest number; it is not fundamentally a utilitarian concept. At the heart of our notion - any notion - of criminal justice is the idea that actions require a response in and of themselves, and not because such a response would directly promote some other good. This is the notion of retribution. And to satisfy this notion, which I believe is at the heart of the idea of criminal justice, we need to know whether Andrea Yates is guilty.

There are two arguments about where the idea of retribution comes from, and both of them are true. On the one hand, it is argued that retribution is a substitute for vengeance. In the absence of a state, people will seek private justice, i.e. they will exact vengeance. If you kill my brother, I will kill you, or your brother, or both of you, to avenge the honor of my dead brother. For me to forgo this option of private vengeance, the state must promise me something superior: just retribution. The state does not promise to exact vengeance for me; indeed it requires me to give up my private sense of honor and accept the state's judgement. But it does promise that it will, in general, impose penalties that satisfy my sense of the gravity of the offense.

On the other hand, it is argued that retribution is the state acting as an agent or substitute for the divinity. When Cain kills Abel, Abel's blood cries out from the earth. The crime itself demands punishment, irrespective of whether there is someone calling for revenge. God underwrites a moral order for all human activity, and God punishes those who deviate from that order. When the state undertakes to punish malefactors, it is either acting in God's name or in imitation of God's authority in underwriting a moral order. In a non-theocratic society such as ours, the emphasis must be on the latter rather than the former.

As I say, both of these ideas of where retribution comes from are true, I believe, both theoretically and historically. And because it is the only basis for criminal justice that is backward-looking, it is one indispensable element in criminal justice. Because a muder - a deliberate, unjustified killing - has been committed, to uphold the moral order Andrea Yates must be tried for murder. And if she is guilty - meaning, if she did it knowingly - then she must be convicted, as she was.

It may be objected that Andrea Yates is not-guilty by reason of insanity. The legal definition of insanity is the inability to tell that one's actions are wrong. This is a peculiar standard, and it is possible that it could never be met. That does not bother me. For our theory of insanity, as a medical matter, is a slippery one. At some point, one can argue, anyone who commits certain crimes suffers from a medical condition. To take an obvious example, sex-offenders are generally acknowledged to be deeply sick. Does that mean they do not deserve to be punished? In his summation of Dan White's defense, his attorney said, apropos of murdering Mayor George Moscone and Councilman Harvey Milk (and I paraphrase, not having the quote handy), people like Dan White just don't do things like that. And that is the danger of the insanity defense: what it amounts to is an excuse to acquit people who, for whatever reason - race, gender, community stature; whatever - we do not want to convict, even though we know they have committed the crime.

Andrea Yates, we are told, was mad at the time she committed her murders. Well, how did she become mad? We are told that she suffers from post-partum psychosis. But we are also told that she had so suffered before, but was nonetheless pressured by her husband into having more children. Granted that he should be faulted for this, granted that her physician should be faulted as well, and either or both of these might legitimately come under legal sanction. But it is false to say that Andrea Yates had no power in her situation, that she had no choice but to have another child, no choice but to let herself go mad, and then no choice but to murder all her children. That she did not see a way out is precisely her fault, for which she will be held guilty, and to excuse her on these grounds is to say that those who suffer and are afraid have no moral agency. And the reason why we are tempted to say this of Andrea Yates is that she is a woman and a mother, and we do not want such a person to be guilty.

Where insanity can legitimately be taken into account is in the sentencing phase. Once guilt is pronounced, some part of justice has been done. Now the question is what is a just punishment. All four of the aspects of criminal justice - deterrence, direct protection, rehabilitation and retribution - must be taken into account. As noted, deterrence should not be a factor in the Yates trial or any trial of the medically insane. The mad cannot be deterred. Direct protection should absolutely be a factor, but as noted this could be satisfied by means other than incarceration. Retribution requires that she be punished severely. But rehabilitation requires that she comprehend her punishment, that it have some bearing on bringing her to repentance. This is another way in which criminal justice supplants both private justice - in primitive societies, an important function of freelance "judges" is to reconcile the parties and so heal the social organism - and imitates divine justice - God's ultimate desire is for reconciliation between Himself and all sinners, by means of repentance.

For this reason, it makes the most sense to talk about sentencing Andrea Yates to a psychiatric prison, at least initially. I have no doubt that, if she is ever cured of her condition, she will then have the lamentable task of repentance to face. Some part of her now takes comfort from the notion that she had no choice but to do what she did. That comfort, should she achieve sanity, will be stripped from her, and she will be naked before the horror that she committed.

As an aside, the argument against executing her is, from my perspective, very simple. First, as a general rule, if the criminal law is an imitation of divine retribution, then capital punishment may be a bridge too far in such imitation. Some punishments should be reserved for the divine. This is an argument against the death penalty in general, one that I have much sympathy for. But more specifically, it is somewhat absurd to impose the death penalty in situations where (a) the guilty party poses no further risk to society, and (b) where the guilty party arguably cannot comprehend the punishment imposed. For part of the reason that those who support the death penalty consider it just is precisely because it tells the guilty just how evil their actions were, and forces them to confront this, and this is only possible if the executed are in their right minds. (Recall, in this context, the convict in Measure for Measure who escapes conviction because he is too wild to contemplate his own demise; the state will not kill him until he has been reconciled to God through the offices of the Church.) The best cases for the death penalty are those where the individual involved poses too great a threat to be allowed to live, even in prison. This is not the case with Andrea Yates.
posted by Noah at 2:11 PM

 
And finally, thinking a little about the future.

There's a good piece in STRATFOR about the Saudi peace initiative. It's a good analysis of the cynical motives behind the initiative, and of why it will fail, as it was intended to do. But what I want to focus on is that STRATFOR, uniquely among commentators on the conflict, understands that coexistence between a sovereign Israel and a sovereign Palestinian state, each within secure borders, is physically impossible. Even a withdrawal to the suicide borders of 1967 would result in two insecure states intertwined with one another. Any realistic proposal to secure Israel's population centers would mean a Palestinian state reduced to a pathetic dependency. Arafat understands this, and for this reason he has always chosen war rather than peace, because peace would mean accepting such a depedency. Palestinian nationalism is incompatible with any result other than the total destruction of the Jewish state. It is physically incompatible, because the minimal requirements of nationalism are a fully sovereign state, able to defend itself and determine its own destiny, and Palestine can never be that without destroying Israel.

For that reason, any serious discussion of an ultimate peace must be on the terms of dependency - specifically, of what state or states will a Palestinian state be a colony. Israel has no desire to rule the Palestinian population centers, and is amply willing to abandon isolated settlements. In the context of a genuine peace, all the tought issues - water rights, Jerusalem, the Jordan Valley, etc. - can be negotiated. But at the end of the day, if the Jewish people is to be fully sovereign in Israel, there can be no fully sovereign Palestinian state. So the only question is: will this state be a dependency of Israel, of Jordan, of Turkey, of America, of the United Nations - who? It would be well for those who are making policy in this area to keep this fact clear in the mind, and it would be even better if the media could understand this. Even with Arafat gone, even with a PA that was not a terrorist entity, even with an Israeli government of the Left and without a strong right-wing constituency, even with Saddam Hussein overthrown, the aspirations of the Palestinian nationalists can be satisfied only by the destruction of Israel. And so those aspirations must be rejected, always, by Israel and by any friends of Israel. And any serious proposal to solve the plight of the Palestinian people must start from this understanding, and not from the premises of Palestinian nationalism.



posted by Noah at 12:27 PM

 
And now, back to the situation.

A quote from a letter to Andrew Sullivan's website:

"Bush did not oppose Israel's assassination policy. He did not oppose missiles fired at terrorists by Israeli helicopters or Israeli incursions to get terrrorists or even keeping Arafat locked in Ramallah. Bush said nothing, for months, about Israel tearing down a TV station or hitting an occasional ambulance or school. I was proud of our president for allowing Israel to act as any nation should when it faces terror on its streets. What Bush has rightly opposed, yesterday and before, was Sharon first saying last week that the Palestinians needed to "be battered" before negotiations could begin . . ."

There's more in the letter that I don't agree with, but this sentiment I quoted here is, I think, basically right. It has been very painful to watch the Bush Administration's recent pressure on Israel, and it has been gratifying to see Israel's perennial friends in the American conservative press voicing criticism of the Administration for it. But I have to admit, I agree with the letter-writer. Sharon has no solution, and he should stop talking as if his policies are intended to achieve a solution. You cannot change anyone's mind by beating them on the head. If Sharon's tactics thwarted terror successfully and put pressure on the Arafat regime, they would perhaps cause Arafat to negotiate a cease-fire, because he would see that his war was not working. (If they did that, of course, then Israel would have little reason to negotiate such a cease-fire, which could only give Arafat room to maneuver for the next round of attacks.) But they have not thwarted terror. Terrorism has only increased, week by week, and for Arafat this is victory. For Arafat and his regime, success is not measured in how well they have served their people but in how many Jews they can kill. If Sharon were to send tanks into every street in the territories, and kill 1000 Palestinians, and if Fatah were able to blow up one of those tanks and set off one bomb in Tel Aviv killing 20 schoolchildren, Arafat would count it a victory. And he would be right, because Israel measures victory not in blows inflicted on the enemy but in lives saved and security preserved in Israel. And this is as it should be.

Sharon is stuck between two unacceptable alternatives. He will not surrender and he will not destroy the PA. So his policy is to cut off the tail of the snake while leaving the head intact. But, like a hydra in reverse, every tail cut off grows two. (Perhaps I should describe the PA as a scorpion not a snake; on a scorpion, the tail is what is deadly.) It is pointless for Sharon to talk in terms of pressuring Arafat to come to the table, and he should certainly not talk in terms of bloodying the Palestinians to make them give up on terror, which is a public-relations disaster and serves no strategic purpose. They are a proud people egged on to war by fanatics and ruled by cynical murderers. They will be absolutely impervious to their own losses. They will respond only to conclusive defeat. If the details of coalition politics - Israel's internal coalition and America's war coalition - prevent Israel from delivering that defeat and destroying Arafat, then there are only two alternatives. First, America must itself or through a proxy (such as Jordan) eliminate the PA and establish the major population centers as wards of an international police force. This would have real costs for Israel in that she would lose her freedom to respond to terror with operations such as have recently been conducted in Ramallah. Or, second, Israel must prepare itself to bleed, indefinitely, while America redraws the larger map of the Middle East in a way that, not incidentally, will be highly beneficial to Israel.

Sharon has clearly opted for the second course. He has said, by his actions, that he would prefer Israeli civilians to continue to die rather than either upset the American war effort or surrender in the face of attacks. He has decided that, in one sense, Arafat is right: we (Jews) are all soldiers, none of us civilians. This is a terrible decision; I would not want to be Sharon or in his cabinet, and have to decide it. But if we endorse this decision, we should not demand tough talk of our leader that weakens our cause and emboldens our enemies (as if they need to be emboldened).
posted by Noah at 11:50 AM

 
First, apologies for not posting since Monday. It's been a busy week. Second, apologies for (a) being a broken record on the subject of the situation in Israel, and (b) not expressing with sufficient anxiety the emotions we all feel. It is not my forte.

On erev Rosh Hodesh Nissan (this past Wednesday), we (all Jews) were asked by the Israeli Chief Rabbis to fast in observance of a Yom Kippur Katan (a minor day of atonement) on account of the situation. It was an extraordinary request. I do not think that such a request has been made since the establishment of the State. The terms of the request called to mind the fast Esther called for her people to observe in advance of her approach to her husband and king, Achashverosh of Persia, to plead for her people's life.

This comparison is in itself extraordinary. Two striking things about the Book of Esther are: the absence of any explicit reference to the Almighty and the utter defenselessness of the people of Israel against the will of the King. I think most of us understand the Book of Esther as a paradigm of Israel's existence in exile, in our helplessness and reliance on a higher power that we cannot even name, and in the almost inscrutible evil of our foremost enemies. Zionism was supposed to change this paradigm for good. How strange, then, that in our day, with Israel a sovereign state with a powerful army, navy and air force, and supported by the greatest power on Earth, we must turn to the Almighty in the same terms that we did in the days of Esther.

I davenned mincha (which I do not ususally do at all, much less in a minyan) this past Wednesday at the Radio City synagogue. It's in an office in the diamond district, a small room already full when I arrived with men studying Talmud. The rabbi had a mellifluous voice, twinkling eyes and a great beard down to his protruding belly - he was almost a caricature of the rabbinic, and he read from the Talmud so quickly that I could not even catch the words, much less make out the meaning. After the Talmud study was over, he read a few words in English from the Chofetz Chayyim on that tzaddik's favorite topic, lashon hara (gossip, or, more generally, sinning with words). The little room filled with more and more men, until we were packed one against the other like a crowded subway car, until we flowed out the door into the antechamber. When the service began I tried to follow along, successfully enough when it corresponded to the regular weekday mincha service or with the more familiar parts of the Yom Kippur liturgy, less so when it drifted into passages that I had never read before. It is interesting how one loses one's hunger when engaged in continuous prayer, even if one is struggling to follow along. The tenor of the prayers is the same as Yom Kippur: we have sinned, and we confess it, and ask for forgiveness in the face of dreadful punishment. It felt strange to voice such sentiments out of their sacred season, and strange to think on this injunction to repent in the face of calamity, as if we could influence the Almighty in this way, as if the Book of Job did not put paid to this idea, as if the six million did not put paid to this idea, as if every cruelty daily visited by man or nature upon innocents did not put paid to this idea. It is a strange injunction, but it is somehow right in a way that is hard to articulate.

A book I read recently which I heartily recommend came to my mind several times that day and since: Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, by Alan Guelzo. It is an intellectual - or, better yet, a spiritual - biography of Lincoln. Lincoln was, strangely, both one of the least and one of the most religious Presidents in American history. In one sense, he seems to have seriously doubted the existence of God, and he was never an orthodox Christian or even a regular member of a church. But he meditated deeply on the workings of Providence, and over the course of the Civil War came to very different conclusions about that Providence than he had held at the war's start. At the outset of the Civil War, President Lincoln felt that "real" war would not come, or if it did it would be brief, because the South was violating the laws of nature (so he thought) by their actions in defense of the slave system, and the North would naturally prevail. But as the war ground on, and victory receded, Lincoln did not despair of the rightness of his cause, but changed his views of Providence. Lincoln came to the following conclusion (I paraphrase his words): that there is a Higher Power that wills this conflict, and wills it to continue. It was after this change in his appreciation of God's ways on earth (and, I think, in part because of it) that Lincoln moved further in the direction (always equivocal) of turning the war's aims against slavery itself, and not only against secession.

That phrase - "there is a Higher Power that wills this conflict, and wills it to continue" - is what had stuck in my mind particularly. We can know that God has a purpose in events, and know the moral contours of the conflict, and yet God may not will a quick victory for the side of right. As our current President said in his magnificent September 20th address (and I paraphrase again), we are in a conflict between good and evil, and God is not indifferent between them. But while we are told that God is a man of war, we can have no confidence with what arms and in which battles He will fight. The KB"H no doubt has His own reasons for putting us through the trials we are currently suffering, and He will not bring them to an end until His purpose has been served. This is not fatalism; it is humility, a recognition that the ways of God are not those of man, and that we should not be too confident that we understand God's purpose. But it is a humility of an exalted kind, for while we may not know God's purpose in events, we know His purpose for us - as human beings and specifically as Jews. And because that is the only purpose we know, it is appropriate in times of extremity to measure ourselves more stringently against that purpose.

Zionism changes nothing about the fundamental Jewish condition; I have said this before and I will repeat it. That is not a defect in Zionism; it is a fact about Judaism. The existence of the IDF changes nothing about our dependence on the Almighty, and it only changes, but does not eliminate, our dependence on the nations of the world. And so it is not strange for the Chief Rabbis of Israel to ask Jews worldwide to call out to the Almighty in a dark hour, as Esther did in what seem very different times.
posted by Noah at 11:16 AM

 
An excellent summary of the case under international law for Israeli retaliation against terrorism and of the case against that terrorism itself. It's a shame this stuff needs to be repeated, but it does.

For those who need a refresher, a few other fine points that need to be refreshed:

First, terrorism itself is being given a bad name by the murderous policies of the PA. Terrorism classically is the use of violence strategically to demoralize a population. It did not specifically mean the murder of civilians and, indeed, some of the classic terrorist groups of world war II and the immediate post-world took pains to focus on "legitimate" targets - i.e. soldiers, police, administration officials of an occupying regime - and to avoid civilian casualties. This was the case, in general, with the French Resistance and with the Irgun, for example. It was even, generally, true of the Basque terrorists under Franco. These forms of terrorism were still illegal, in that they constituted irregular and unauthorized warfare, but they were meaningfully different from the terrorism that has been practiced since the pre-state period by Arab fedayeen. The latter has overwhelmingly focused on the murder of innocent civilians.

The justification that has been offered for this kind of terrorism is the following: Israel, being a mobilized society, has no civilians. Every able-bodied man (except for yeshivah students) is drafted, and every able-bodied woman does some form of national service. Even their infants will grow up to be soldiers. Therefore, all people are legitimate military targets. It is also worth pointing out that the partisans of Osama bin Laden have extended this argument to justify terrorism against any Western state, whether mobilized or not, whether involved in military rule over Muslims or not. Their argument is that, since America is a democracy, all its citizens are effectively responsible for the actions of its leadership, and therefore all are legitimate targets in war.

As should be obvious, the purpose of this line of argument is to set up rules inevitably favorable to terrorists. Because terrorists are not state actors, they do not implicate the state in their actions; and, because they do not implicate the state, they do not implicate the general population. A policy of irregular warfare and murder thus becomes more morally defensible than a policy of honorable war, because the crimes of the former implicate only the individual terrorists while the crimes (or errors) of the latter implicate the entire nation. If we do not want to see the moral destruction of civilization itself, it is therefore absolutely essential to resist this logic. The right way to resist it is to adopt the rule that states are strictly liable for terrorist operations that originate from their soil. Britain would be fully justified in bombing Dublin in response to IRA attacks; Israel fully justified in declaring war on the PA, Lebanon and Syria in response to the attacks of Hamas and Hezbollah; etc. Moreover, since terrorist actions are war crimes, the nation that sponsors or permits terrorist attacks from its soil is subject to the kind of response that the civilized nations reserve for outlaw states like Nazi Germany: the potential for the state to be subject to sustained occupation, the trial and execution of its leaders, and even the elimination of the state's sovereignty.
posted by Noah at 11:18 AM