Plato and Constitutionalism

Here's an interesting video (HT: Gil Bailie) of Hillsdale College President, Larry Arnn, trying to reclaim America's constitutional heritage in the name of a return to a Platonic conception of the truth. Arnn thinks the mainstream academy's descent into postmodern cultural relativism and deconstruction has meant its abandoning of belief in any absolute truths; and at the same time, at the political level of American society, Arnn sees the camp around Barack Obama at war with the Supreme Court and the American Constitution in an effort to re-write the American Constitution as an "evolving" document, so as to allow for some more "progressive" government, i.e. a yet more centralized authority that will seize and "redistribute" the wealth of American society in the name of some more perfect "equality". My thoughts after the video.


Arnn is no doubt right in attacking the nihilism prevalent in today's academy. But is a return to Platonic conceptions of truth - the kind of truth that is constructed through free debate over the meaning of abstract metaphysical concepts (e.g. the good, the beautiful, the true) - possible after postmodernism has deconstructed such meanings or concepts in order to argue that metaphysical "truths" are merely the projections of social power, of the elitist debate and its will to power?

I think Arnn eventually deconstructs his own argument in his concluding thoughts where he hails the American Constitution - a document that owes as much if not more to the Judeo-Christian revelation as to the Greco-Roman - not so much for some metaphysical or philosophical truth inherent in it - the kind of truth that could be stated as some eternally true principle - but more simply for its recognition of the nature of human (covenantal) freedom and for its setting up of rules by which the various branches of government can interact in order to allow our multi-dimensional human freedom to interact, to discover and rule itself.

Arnn argues in response to a question (at 47.30):

The purpose of a college is not diversity, it's truth.... the words university and diversity don't work together, it's stupid... how do you get to the truth... we believe the Constitution of the US is the greatest instrument of government ever written... progressivism is a terrible and dangerous thing

It's a good polemic, but how could we know it's good (or bad, if you must)? We know it if we've had the considered experience that can make sense of what no amount of abstract spinning of concepts like "unity" and "diversity" to young people alone will allow any youngster to appreciate, the kind of experience that allows us to intuit the fundamental unity from which all human diversity has evolved.

The problem with the postmodern deconstruction of abstract philosophical truths is that the deconstructors must forget what the Platonic philosopher kings must also forget - the originary revelatory experiences by which our intuitions of an ultimate human truth were first grasped. It is true that that originary experience cannot be articulated by any one person as a complete and all-satisfying vision of the truth. The mere fact that he is saying it, and not us, is alone enough, in our eyes, for it to fail the inevitable test of truth, since truth is always tested by the faculties of human resentment (a resentment that stems form the fact that he has a different role in the revelatory event than the rest of us).

But what we should not deny is the shared experience of the event by which we have to choose whether to love or resent the event's leader(s) and what s/he offers us. We may disagree with his/her philsophical account of the event, but we can only do so as we share in some experience of the revelatory event itself. It is a commonplace to point out that the postmodern assertion that there is no truth is itself an assertion of truth. Indeed, we cannot escape from the ultimate truth that human beings cannot but direct themselves towards some conception of the "true" and "good". Even the nihilist cannot be a complete nihilist for he has to defend his nihilism as true. Even the Satanist has to convince himself that the Satanic is a higher truth. Even the Gnostic has to convince himself that he is more "progressive" in the face of inevitable change.

And why is that? Ultimately, no strictly Platonic debate is going to provide a satisfactory answer to today's young people made cynical by any claim on authority. I believe only a (generative) anthropological debate focussed on the nature of our experience of shared events can take us further into understanding why man cannot but attempt to justify himself before some "higher" presence, the presence that centres any shared scene of human consciousness. Yes, we do indeed "construct" our truths, each in his way; but these constructions are not some arbitrary will to power, some conspiracy of the elite or of the mob. They are the unpredictable, uncontrollable outcome of human interaction in specific, very real, events.

And the event cannot be controlled by any powerful will, if it is to be significant to more than the lone fantasist. It is the shared event, its truth in unpredictable shared experience, that is variously represented in never-ending debates over truth and significance. We cannot deny truth because we cannot deny the centrality of the shared event/scene of consciousness, even though the nature of a concrete event is not such as to guarantee the sufficiency of abstract philosophical accounts of the truth. And that, ultimately, is why constitutionalism is something worthy of protection and fertilization: constitutionalism, with its origin in the divine covenant of monotheism, is the means by which we maximize our production and representation of the significant events by which we come, individually and as a whole, to know and to rule ourselves.

There is a truth, a truth much more profound than anyone's will to power, but no single account can exhaust or complete our knowledge of it. The "progressive" might say as much, but in his attacks on the Constitution as a mere tool of elite power he betrays his bad faith, which he hopes to cover up by promising us some new and improved Constitution. He is at heart a conspiracy nut, however "nuanced" his accounting of the conspiracy. Easy for me to say... but how do you know his account of the possibilities of human freedom under some new and improved constitution freed from the present elitist conspiracy is in fact less free than my accounting of covenantal freedom? You will know by your experiences of events, by looking at those who would turn means to the service of "progressive" ends, and by looking at those who say our means are our "ends". You will know by your experience of those who rely largely on scapegoating the present regime in order to assert their own alternative legitimacy, and by looking at those who rely on pointing to their own and everyone's fallibilities as reason for a better division or distribution of authority.

Change is inevitable; but does that give anyone a license to try and control it in the mere name of "democracy", "the people", "we won"? Or does it give license only to a truly constitutional, shared, divided, freedom?

Official Jews and Levantian Jews

I attended the forum last night sponsored by the Canadian Jewish Congress, Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver, and the Temple Sholom: Responding to Antisemitism: Are we too thin-skinned?

There may have been 2-300 people there - I didn't attempt a count - most of whom were Jews and I would guess members of the reform Temple Sholom. Almost everyone had reached middle-age and I was quickly joined by some (judging from accents) German Jewish ladies who put me me in nostalgic mind of my grandparents, people who could never solve the mystery of antisemitism in their day and who consequently didn't know whether to run away or remain identified with the Jewish community.

My feeling was there was an assumed consensus in the temple about the answer to the evening's official question. No, we are not too thin skinned, though the question was rarely directly addressed and there was no questioning of the question itself, which I see as acknowledging a little too openly the mindset of the “anti-Zionists” who accuse neurotic Jews of using their supposed victim status to do nasty things to the Palestinians.

Mark Freiman

First to speak was the CJC's national President, Mark Freiman (the CJC's CEO, Bernie Farber had also been scheduled to attend but, we were told, he is suffering from laryngitis and the doctor wouldn't let him travel).

Freiman began by lauding both the government of Canada for announcing that it will host an international conference on antisemitism and the Parliamentary coalition that has set itself up to study antisemitism. Clearly, Freiman thinks antisemitism is a growing problem. He then offered a little history lesson, pointing to various assumed causes of historical antisemisitm (economic, theological, etc.) reminding us of the day when pseudo-scientific “antisemites” were proud of coining the name and racial theory. But he left the ultimate nature of antisemitism unspoken, as an apparent mystery. Today, he says, no antisemite wants the name, and in polite society everyone wants to appear anti-antisemitic.

Freiman, who generally impresses as having the mind of a highly-disciplined, poker-faced, lawyer then offered one of his few moves to sarcasm, rejecting those who tell us today we only have to (not) worry about kooks and crackpots typing on the internet in their parents' basements.

Let me interject that this was a cheap shot at those who love the (is it originally Mark Steyn's?) “basement Nazi” metaphor. Our argument is that while having a “human rights” speech police is for various reasons a bad or impracticable idea in the age of the internet, there nonetheless really is a growing antisemitism given today's left-Islamist alliance focused, nominally, on hating Israel. We further argue that it is the likes of the CJC who, in encouraging the Canadian state to assume censorship powers, only have the courage or desire (like generals fighting the last war) to focus prosecution on the non-Islamic, i.e. poor white, anachronistically “Nazi”, margins of antisemitism, knowing full well the problems that would ensue if official Jews and official Muslims in Canada went full-tilt in trying to silence alleged Jewish and/or Islamic “hate speech”. This in turn leads to charges that the “official Jews” don't have the courage of their convictions, and by extension to claims that our “justice” on questions of freedom of expression in Canada is becoming dangerously arbitrary, guided by the whims of a political correctness that can always backfire on Jews.

But, as I say, Mr. Freiman speaks like a lawyer dilligently arguing his side of the case, not that Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act was the central issue of the night (though it was clearly closely under the surface of the discussion). One might keep in mind that anti-group defamation law has been a central concern of organized Jews in Canada; groups like the CJC have been leaders in lobbying for such laws, going back to the 1930s. And it appears it is the CJC's intent to focus the recent moves by Canada's government and Parliament, to study antisemitism, on the new forms of left-Islamist, or “anti-Zionist”, antisemitism. But after this study happens, it was not made clear to me if Freiman wants our so-called “human rights” or “administrative” law to be the lead agent in trying to shut up the new antisemitism on the internet and in other public media.

Freiman went on to suggest that anti-Zionists are telling the Parliamentary inquiry on antisemitism that its existence is not necessary. Freiman then suggested that the age-old hatred of Jews is always in search of an alibi. Judeophobia survives like an organism by successfully mutating over time.

Freiman then attempted to explain when criticism of Israel becomes a problem of antsemitism. Briefly, his point was that when this criticism of the state of Israel has as its intent, at least in part, to convey some more general comment about the badness of Jews or Judaism, to convey some lesson on Jewish evil, then “anti-Zionism” is just another example of antisemitism or Judeophobia looking for respectability.

Accordingly, Freiman says the CJC will ask for a “broad and realistic” definition of antisemitism by the Parliamentary committee, one that includes anti-Zionism; and it will seek measures to monitor, assess, and combat antisemitism, but he did not specify. He concluded that this is being done not because we (the CJC) are over-sensitive, but because we are asserting Canadian values of tolerance, decency, and intellectual honesty.
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Robert Daum

The floor was then turned over to Rabbi Robert Daum, the newly-appointed, founding director of the Iona Pacfic: Inter-Religious Centre of the Vancouver School of Theology, at UBC. Rabbi Daum, raised and educated in the USA, contrasted the lawyer Freiman by speaking like a postmodern liberal academic whose principle purpose in taking the stage is somewhat less to assert oneself in conveying a series of tightly logical propositions, than to assert the importance of our giving much consideration to some supposed basis on which all sides can fairly contribute to the debate.

One of Daum's main points was that we have to be sensitive to the difference between intentional and inadvertent antisemitism. Our response to antisemitism must be sensitive to context; we have good reasons to be thin-skinned, given recent historical contexts, but still we must try to get inside the mind or world view of the other.

Speaking about today's “political” antisemitism, evidenced in charges of “Israeli Apartheid”, Daum said we are witnessing a devolution of discussion into a dangerous Manicheanism of simple-minded black and white, good and evil. Daum on the one hand declared he is repulsed by the current focus on boycotts of Israel; but he is also repulsed by Jews who, in heated debate, call other Jews names like “self-hating” or “kapo”. For Daum, such names are a refusal of a Jewish need both to guard jealously the use of language associated with the Nazis and the Shoah, and to understand the genuine motivations of our political opponents and the true complexity of our conflicts. The discourse that reduces all to a battle of heroes and villains is the central problem of our times, for it is only from within such a mindset that one can find the reason to excuse, for example, suicide bombing as simply a “misdemeanor” in a larger “heroic” struggle.

Daum thus, in supposedly rejecting binary thinking, falls into the postmodern trap and performs a yet bigger binary: that which pits the sensitive postmodern discourse theorist – Daum recommends we read the work of Bernard Harrison – against the simplistic Manichean. The message is ultimately Utopian for, in fact, there is no escape from binary thinking but only a perennial challenge to deepen our understanding of its basis in the origin of language. But I'll try not to use this reporting as an excuse to lecture on this central point of Generative Anthropology.

Daum then discussed the recent devolution, at Kelowna, of the United Church of Canada's national congress into a discussion of “Israeli apartheid”. He suggested that a need to respond to this was one of the motivating reasons for the evening's forum. However he then blamed the UCC fiasco only on fringe elements within the church and on rules that allow a single local presbytery to circulate egregiously offensive materials and resolutions.

He then made some comment which I did not entirely catch, about how the circulation of hate speech was a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for the Shoah. He concluded by invoking the need to embrace “teachable moments”: when people within or without our (jewish) community inadvertently shame our community we need to respond not with arched backs but with an eye to building mutually respectful personal relationships.
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Philip Bregman

The moderator for the evening, Temple Sholom's Rabbi Philip Bregman, then took the floor joking that he was less kind that Daum; “if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck...”

Rabbi Bregman then told a story about how he had just taken Barbara Kay's recent column on the rising antisemitism in Canada with him to the local Jewish day school. He said the column provoked from the students their own stories of antisemitism. He suggested this was something quite new in recent memory. Vancouver kids had in recent decades not reported, or only occasionally reported, antisemitic incidents to Bregman. And yet all of a sudden this week he had heard from five students, with more hands raised in the class, who had received antisemitic slurs. Bregman said these insults came from kids from a variety of racial backgrounds. He typified the incidents in terms of a tussle on the hockey rink or basketball court which results in a charge of “dirty Jew”. I thought he was probably re-presenting the actual language used: how many kids in Vancouver today would know to preface Jew with the classical “dirty” and not, say, the f word? One can imagine perhaps only those raised in particularly clean-obsessed religions, or with “old-fashioned”, Jew-as-market-cheat, antisemitism; but Bregman suggested his recent experience is evidence that the new antisemitism is a widespread political agenda “filtering down” now to youth. In any case, the invocation of the “dirty Jew” left me with the impression that something ritualistic was going on, whatever the basis in today's lived reality for the ritual's re-performance tonight.

Robert Matas and Barbara Yaffe

Two Jewish journalists were then invited to the podium to offer their own thoughts, partly in response to the prepared presentations of Freiman and Daum. First off, Robert Matas of the Globe and Mail revealed a deeply conciliatory intent, though as with Daum, I don't think he can escape from binary thinking. He did not deny the recent rise in antisemitism that the Parliamentary committee is discussing, but he also noted official statistics that suggest a decline in specific hate crimes, of which Blacks in Canada are twice as often the target as Jews (on a per capita basis?). He remarked on how the Calgary police, in responding to recent antisemitic graffiti attacks in that city, were notably pro-active in denouncing this vandalism as hate crime. He suggested this reveals a new sensitivity in Canada, one partly attributable to the efforts of the CJC.

He then went on to defend the media against accusations of bias, particularly in regard to reporting on Israel. He suggested there is a great desire among his colleagues to be neutral and accurate and to get the story right, though he had to admit that the number of corrections his paper has had to publish, concerning stories on Israel, suggested there was often incompetence, which is not to be confused with antisemitism; the corrections also reveal a genuine desire to get it right. He was not happy that the media are accused of bias when they do their job, as he understands it, in providing a range of opinions on Israel. He suggested that when Jews shout “antisemitism” at the media, it just sounds to journalists like name calling, and it is thus counter-productive. Many "ethnic" communities have declared war on the media he said, but like Obama declaring war on Fox news, doing so only hurts them in the battle for public opinion. The solution, he suggested, is for people to engage the media which in turn will just hold up the mirror.

I will leave it to readers to judge to what extent such a journalistically orthodox desire to escape the binaries of us and them is self-deceiving.

Next up was Barbara Yaffe of the Vancouver Sun who was the only speaker to confront directly the question posed in the chosen title for the forum. She said we Jews have exactly the right thickness of skin, apparently well-adjusted by experience. She suggested that in her 30-plus years as a reporter she has encountered no community that is as sophisticated in dealing with the media as is the Jewish community.

And yet she said there is no question that Israel is vilified in this world - and so also in the media, a listener might assume - way out of proportion to its size as a country.

Speaking in point form, she said the challenge for the Jewish community is to know where to draw the line with legitimate criticism of the media. What is at stake is freedom of speech, and a Jewish community appearing to attack this freedom in combatting antisemitism could be the target of a serious backlash. We must be very specific where we draw the line, though she did not go into details.
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Questions

There was then a little time for questions from the floor. Questions had to be submitted, handwritten, on pieces of paper the organizers had provided and they were then filtered and handed to the speakers; only a small number of the submitted questions were asked.

Mark Freiman answered two questions, the first dealing with what is legitimate criticism of Israel. Freiman suggested any criticism that entails, as its likely solution, that Israel commit suicide or lose its specifically Jewish identity, needs to be rejected as antisemitic. He then answered the only question on the topic that is probably of most interest to readers of this blog. The questioner said s/he had been convinced by attending the recent Jewish Book Festival (i.e. Ezra Levant's presentation - see my piece here) of the need to do away with Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, and for Canadians to rely only on the criminal code to police hate speech.

Freiman replied by saying the Human Rights Commissions and the criminal code serve two different functions and target two different problems. He argued that the criminal code is designed to punish the evil doer and hence it has the highest evidentiary and procedural standards to insure protection of the innocent. On the other hand, “human rights”, and/or “administrative” law is aimed at the message itself (not the messenger) and is meant to condemn misuses of our public media and means of communications. He said explicitly that the purpose of the HRCs is not to punish but to denounce hateful messages.

Those who have been sent through the HRC kangaroo court mill and fined and suffered court orders that they not speak publicly, forevermore, on certain issues, would no doubt laugh bitterly at such a bald statement of legal theory that paid no respect to actual experience with the inevitably corrupting, i.e. politicized, attempts to apply such a law. But it was not clear if Freiman was offering a comment on the history of the HRCs or on the future direction the CJC will be lobbying for, as if it might one day be possible to have HRCs that don't punish those they target. He acknowledged there are difficulties and problems with the HRCs, but then seemed to discount these by saying there are problems with the courts as well. If we get rid of Section 13, he said, we give up our commitment to combat hateful messages.


I will take this last statement as the moment to offer some concluding observations on the event. It will seem ridiculous to many "free speechers" for someone to suggest that we necessarily give up our commitment to combat (illegitimate?) resentments, or “hate”, if we give up Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act. One can be publicly active in denouncing and marginalizing sundry hatreds, without desiring for there to be an ultimate state arbiter deciding - only G-d knows how this could ever be done apolitically - just whose resentments deserve public denunciation and whose not. But that Freiman said this, to this kind of forum, in all sincerity, and, I suspect, touched a chord in doing so, is something we should maybe consider in the spirit of Rabbi Daum's call to get inside the head of the other.

What those of us who are battling against the existence of Section 13 inevitably confront is the nature of Jewish experience, and some of its established “common sense”, which has something to do with Barbara Yaffe's observation that Jews have the most sophisticated forms of “ethnic” organization in Canada. I am talking, I suspect, about a common sense rooted both in modern Jewish historical experience and in the very founding nature of Judaism itself.

Historically, Jews have of course lived as the other, as the minority within various societies. But this, in my understanding, has not been simply a two-way relationship of majority vs. minority, but a variously triangular relationship in which Jews have often had to contend, and sometimes ally, with either or both the aristocratic and official, or the plebeian or popular elements and resentments in their society.

Now is not the time to attempt any serious historical analysis, but i'll just note that in the experience of Jews in Western Christian nations, there developed from the eighteenth century the opportunity to become enfranchised co-participants in secular national cultures. Jews could now identify not only with Judaism but with a shared secular high culture. While the potential for scapegoating violence and discrimination that the Jews faced often came not simply from either aristocratic/official or from plebeian elements, but from both when it became convenient for the system as a whole to attempt to bond itself against “the Jew”, especially the jew of the marketplace (a bonding in which some secular Jews, or nominal converts to Christianity, like Karl Marx, attempted to participate), Jews could not simply live nonchalantly with a “pox on both your houses”. One had to place bets with one side or another.

Inevitably, as Jews became educated and had access to bureaucratic jobs in Western Europe, they were more likely to associate with aristocratic and official elements within their societies, and perhaps more often with high, and not popular, culture – and they could, indeed, in their often highly educated, and idealized procedural neutrality, be variously useful to those official elements. At the end of the day, it may be that no one is going to save you, as the rise of the Nazis demonstrated; but in the Europe of old, I think Jews did sometimes have a better chance of being saved from antisemitic violence by having a relationship with official society than by attempting, as perhaps did many a Jewish communist, the more difficult challenge of transforming popular culture away from its antisemitic resentments (of course communism had ambitions to also control high and official culture and not just popular culture).

In any case, respect for the law, and not so much for unconsidered popular resentment, is fundamental to Judaism. The point being, historically many Jews have had little reason to put their faith in nothing but a free-wheeling freedom of speech. It was not a realistic, immediately available, option in most places outside North America.

Still, I am one of those of who can't but look at the Nazi experience as proof of anything other than the idea that Jews may only be safe in a society that goes out of its way to maximize individual freedom, even if this means having to keep the state away from policing hate speech, and spending our own individual time and energy to encourage other individuals to take up the task of defending each other's freedom. Accordingly, one wonders how well does the founding logic of the secularizing, state-associating Jew of Europe work in the context of modern North America? I think a study of the Canadian Jewish Congress might allow one to claim that something of the attitudes of middle-class German and perhaps English Jews was transferred to North America in its development of an “official Jewry”.

I observe a speaker like Mark Freiman and genuinely admire his mind but it is nonetheless clearly the mind of a lawyer. If there is a problem, he looks for a legal solution, just as Rabbi Daum looks for an academic solution to the problem of antisemitism. I am not sure, whatever arguments the Ezra Levants of the world put in front of the Freimans that the two are ever really going to connect in a shared common sense, or whether that is necessary. A “Levantian” might try to invoke the idea that the only real solution can come within a maximally free civil society, with unfettered free speech. But, as I am suggesting, this is deeply counter-intuitive to one kind of Jewish experience rooted not just in modern history but perhaps in the very nature of Judaism itself.

To be a Jew is to carry the sign of the people who, depending on whether you favour a religious or an anthropological account, were either the first chosen by God, or the first to discover fully, through their own humanistic genius, the (idea of) the One God. The Jews were thus the first to define, or systematically explore, the idea of there being fundamentally only one kind of (human) Being, however variously represented that Being is by different cultures. Jews took a lead in transforming the polytheist understanding of our humanity. But, the point is, as Eric Gans argues, they could only do this, and remain Jews, by assuming a certain kind of legalistic identity.

What does it mean to remember Moses' revelation on Mt. Sinai of the G-d who does not offer his people a name to be called, but only a paradoxical statement: I am what I am?

If I take on the task of communicating my understanding of the meaning of that revelation to the entirety of humanity, I might well think that it best that I become a Christian for therein lies a means or reason to evangelize the world and not just my fellow Jews. But while Christianity may be a fine and great thing for most people, one that genuinely furthers the Jewish revelation, if I, as a Jew, take that route, do I entirely remember the human nature and meaning of the Mosaic, or indeed any, revelation into our common humanity? Does remembering the nature of this or any story well require there to remain some Jews walking about on this earth?

This is the paradox that every Jew has to face. It may well be – I believe it is – that essential to the meaning of our discovery of the one God, or his equivalent role in a secular anthropology, is the knowledge that someone had to go first in signing a covenant with this God, or someone had to go first in making more systematic what can only be intuitive, unstated, in the polytheist world - the idea that there is ultimately only kind of human Being, and a purely transcendent God who can't be named and invoked at will to change our fate in the worldly world as we seek, in our conflicts, to gain the upper hand over other children of God.

In short, in order to say "we're all the same", someone has to go first, someone has to be different, refusing, unlike everyone previously in human history, to have a special name for G-d.

Jewish chosenness is not a sign of G-d's favouritism; Jews believe, with experience, that they will be both rewarded and punished according to their conduct in keeping the covenant and that their G-d is eveyone's G-d. Rather, chosenness is fundamentally a sign of G-d's willingness to restrain himself, in order to make a deal with humans, and hence to assert the fundamental nature of human freedom to discover a world that need not be understood as infused with unknowable animal spirits.

Humanity will forget something about that which happened at Sinai – someone being chosen to go first - if everyone becomes a Jew or everyone a Christian, or Muslim. Jewish survival is a living reminder of the distinctive nature or burden of firstness, a reminder that is realized or renewed through the various distinctive forms of Jewish identity today. It's not particularly heroic this identity, but generally a simple sign of faith in the given law, as the basis of freedom through learned discipline that the humanly-consistent Creation offers to us. There are thus "official Jews" and their supporters who genuinely believe in the possibility of a "hate speech" law that could be administered in a way that treated all people equally, without politicizing the definition of unacceptable speech, without these laws being one day corrupted and used to promote antisemitism. I think they're wrong, but sincere.

As noted, the keeper of the sign of firstness, a Jew, cannot be an evangelizing knight or a soldier of Allah without ceasing to be a Jew. Since he cannot readily be a dashing hero to the gentile, Jewish identity often takes refuge in respect for the law, a sign of solidarity with both fellow Jews, and humanity. But today a Jew can also remember the lesson laid down at Sinai by furthering the spirit of Exodus and discovery for all humanity by involving oneself in the opportunities the secular world provides for going first in some new kind of human discovery, be this in science, the arts, the law, etc.

In any case, whatever you think of my analysis, one of the claims made a few times at the forum is that we need to attend to the problem of communications as it is so easy for miscommunication of our genuine intent to occur in passionate debates over antisemitism. And it is perhaps true, as I have been suggesting, that there are not a lot of ways for Jews to speak, as Jews, to the rest of humanity without risking a slippery slope on which they might stop being distinctively Jewish and disappear in a common, forgetful, mission to evangelize the world. Thus the Jewish community, while involving itself today in all arenas of civil society, tends, when it looks for a representative Jewish voice or position, to defer to the learned and to the law, to an “official Jew”. Ezra Levant, in contrast, may be good example of someone who is remembering Sinai by extending the meaning of Exodus in our times.

An inclusive perspective may entail realization that neither the Freiman, nor the Levant, can simply do away with the other if we are to sustain Jewish identity. This may be a paradox we cannot solve, which is a happy realization for an irresolvable paradox is one that never dies; but if so, it is a paradox with which we will simply have to fight, hopefully in productive ways, forever.

So perhaps Jewish organizations, by their very nature, are always going to attract lawyers who are going to tend to seek legal solutions to the problems they feel they have to confront. And so there needs to be “Levantian Jews” to question “official Jews”, forever. The happy thing is, every Canadian gets a vote on the issue currently in play. Contact your MP and tell him or her what you think of Section 13 and whether we need government to police antisemitism, and by extension any other form of prejudice some group may hold against you, though of course we could have "hate speech" laws that targeted only antisemitism. I wonder how well that would work.

UPDATE:
Don't miss Jonathan Narvey's pre-forum comments.

What is the covenantal spirit?

Historian Donald Harmon Akenson writes in God's Peoples. Covenant and Land in South Africa, Israel, and Ulster (1992):

Just how difficult it is to escape the influence of the ancient scriptural grid is best illustrated by the development of early Christianity. Although we know much less than we would like to know about the historical Jesus, it is generally (if not quite universally) agreed among biblical critics that the most radical parts of the New Testament, the Beatitudes (Matt. 5:3-12; Luke 6:20-46) are for the most part authentically representative of Jesus' views, if not his exact words. It is impossible to read the Beatitudes without recognizing that Jesus was rejecting the covenant. He was truly revolutionary... [But] The church was unable to follow his example in breaking free of the covenantal grid. So, although on the surface they appeared to reject Judaism, Jesus' successors interpreted the life and teachings of Jesus within the context of that grid. His successors transformed him into a covenantal figure... though claiming to have broken free of the Hebrew covenant, the Christian Church did not. Why? Because the Hebrew conceptual grid was not simply a conviction or a belief, but rather something lying so deep within the mind that it ultimately determined the possibilities of conviction and belief. (41)

Although Akenson is one of Canada's finest historians (he is one of our American imports) I am not yet convinced, only forty pages into his book, that he fully grasps how a covenant may ever be renewed (does his metaphysics offer him a satisfactory understanding of why and how humans are historical beings?). Is Jesus a "revolutionary" figure in the sense of someone who makes a definite and (at least in intention) complete break with the old covenant, or someone who is recovering the necessarily radical moment, those rare moments in history when (re)new covenants are first proposed to a people desperately in need of them (again) because they have fallen away from the old? What are we to do with the passage from the Gospel of Matthew that immediately follows the passage referred to by Akenson? The beatitudes, Jesus' declarations of the blessedness of the meek, hungry, persecuted, etc., in Matthew 5:3-12 are followed in the now canonical text by

13Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.

14Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid.

15Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house.

16Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.

17Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.

18For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.

19Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.

20For I say unto you, That except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven.

BibleGateway.com - Passage Lookup: Matthew 5;

Is that a rejection of the old covenant or a recognition of the spirit in which it must be renewed? Only a way of thinking that is enamored of the need to recover our Judeo-Christian traditions for covenanting in ways appropriate to our own times will provide answers. To this end, I recommend two things: 1) the recent post at the GABlog: Victimary Modernity and Covenantal Modernity and 2)joining in some conversation about how we can renew our commitments to sharing in a nation founded in covenants that requires each of us to act as guarantors of each and every other's individual freedom to share in a collective self-rule. If you can join us some Thursday in Vancouver, we can be found at the Downtown Library, 7-9 pm, in the atrium in front of Blenz Coffee (with blue scarves).

As Adam writes:

The only answer is freedom–to act as free men and women, engaging in free speech, free inquiry, free creation, free association, because covenants can only be generated amongst the free. Maybe the most basic thing to do now is distinguish these modes of freedom from their victimary doppelgangers: speech, inquiry, creation and association mired in “resistance” to the “hypocrisy” of “domination.”

Adam K. in the Covenant Zone - Palinite

After warning us what the Obama administration will do if it is smart about irreversibly transforming America and its Constitutional order, Adam begins to unfold an inverse strategy for those full of (presently fantastic, but eventually possible) visions of how Washington could be turned back to the people. His is a message for the thinking representatives of the vast majority of Americans, those without any power or benefit in the present Washington game, or those who can disavow present interests in the name of a necessary freedom for the future nation, those who can now start producing thought experiments in hopes for making subtle changes in the culture at large, in the quest to erode the liberal fascist order and renew the constitutionalism proper to a self-ruling nation.

But note, this will require a discipline for building (imagined and real) covenants, a great love for, an understanding of, freedom and nation and ordinary people, and not just angry rhetoric obsessed with the evils of the present regime:

I haven’t spoken about the Palin phenomenon, but would like to now, because it is linked to a broader point: the absolute need, if we are to extricate ourselves from what seems to me to be a death spiral (the success of the 9/11 attacks), to demolish the Washington “establishment”: there is almost nothing actually existing in Washington, with the exception of Constitutionally mandated institutions, that I wouldn’t include in this imperative. The CIA should be abolished and replaced by human intelligence gathering groups directly accountable to the President; the State Department should be eviscerated; we should bring back the “spoils system,” so that a new Adminstration can be genuinely responsible for the actions it undertakes–I would like to set the major political parties on the road to extinction, first of all by removing any legal forms which elevate them above any other private association; the same for the big media. And that’s just for starters. All this is in the realm of fantasy (and, perhaps, liberating thought experiments) at this point, of course–I raise the issue here not because I necessarily think Sarah Palin would do any of these things, but because there is no doubt that official Washington and its media praetorian guard saw her as a deadly threat to business as usual. The frame-up of Palin revolved around her unfamiliarity with Washingtonese and media-speak–I would agree that she probably doesn’t know much about some foreign policy issues, but neither did Clinton or Bush before being elected, neither does Obama, and Biden knows a lot more that isn’t true than is. They have no more brains than she does: the difference, to paraphrase the Wizard of Oz’s speech to the strawman at the end of the movie, is that they have been “certified” by the establishment and she hasn’t. The most remarkable and prescient events of the campaign might turn out to be those disastrous interviews: what a careful and sympathetic viewer saw in Palin’s encounters with the “mainstream” media was someone torn between her lack of familiarity with the terms of a very hostile environment, her loyalty to her running mate which led, in turn, to her exaggerated deference to the standardized “official” discourse with which the campaign advisors tried to inculcate her, and her own, rather precise but largely unwelcome convictions and political instincts. Torn to the point of incoherence: when, in that cring-producing moment, Katie Couric asked her which newspapers and magazines she reads, and Palin answered “all of them,” as a writing instructor I saw the terror of the student desperate not to be “wrong” and rummaging through her store of commonplaces for a serviceable answer that won’t draw upon itself the dreaded red ink (”what is this essay about?”–”He is making a point about universal human nature”…)–I imagine that, running through her mind at that moment was something like “Oh my God, they didn’t tell me which newspapers and magazines I read!”

It was very good for us to see it and, I hope, in the long run, for Palin to have experienced it–because it is only those who are untutored in Washington’s ways, but skeptical enough to burst the bubbles of conventional wisdom (and there Palin certainly has some work to do) who can save us at this point. Margins of the political system must be sought where “unregulated” associations and agendas can be formed–there’s no need to ignore the pseudo-center, but no serious political activity at this point can allow itself to be dependent upon it either. My own favorite is a movement organized around constitutional amendments: let’s sit down a formulate the language knocking the media, the judiciary, the universities, and the political parties off of the pedestal they have erected for themselves; let’s see if we can revise the terms of accountability of elected officials for the programs they establish by forcing Congress, not unelected bureaucrats, to set the rules according to which laws will be implemented–I am confident that language in all of these cases, and many more, can be found that would gain the support of the 2/3-3/4 of Americans needed to pass new amendments, and such a campaign would be an unprecedented experience in trans-partisan political self-education. We could then hold politicians accountable to their stand on the amendments. Let’s see if we can be subtle and irreversible ourselves: all ideas conforming to our constitutional order should be welcomed into the discussion.

GABlog » Blog Archive » Subtle and Irreversible

A bioethicist who finds human hierarchy in all the wrong places

Dag and I recently had a conversation touching on the nature of hierarchy. So when I read today in the Ottawa Citizen the following comments from Margaret Somerville on the nature of hierarchy (hat tip: Catfur), I thought it might be useful to say something about this fine example, from Canada's most famous bioethicist, of how contemporary mainstream academic thought tends to locate such basic human questions as the nature of hierarchy.

My goal will be to point out what is ignored by the present mainstream ways of thinking, as it appears to me as a student of Generative Anthropology which is a new way of thinking, developed by Eric Gans, that has yet few followers despite, to be frank, its superiority (as its students attest) as a way of thinking about the human.

Margaret Somerville is addressing the controversial awarding of membership in the Order of Canada to the abortionist, Henry Morgentaler, an award which Somerville herself was denied for being too controversial, given her opposition to same-sex "marriage". Here's what Somerville writes:

We seem to have a great need for hierarchy and recognition, but the practice of awarding civilian honours such as the Order of Canada raises a host of difficult issues

In the wake of the controversy surrounding the awarding of the Order of Canada to Henry Morgentaler, the question arises: Are citizen honours a good idea?

First, however, in the interests of transparency, I want to note I'm in the somewhat unusual position of having been both given such an award and, 17 years later, refused one. It's an open question whether those experiences qualify or disqualify me from weighing in on this issue, but here goes.

We all like to be recognized and the urge to establish hierarchical structures is almost certainly programmed into our genes - it's a survival mechanism, a psychobiological phenomenon that, as the new field of epigenetic research is showing us, may well be activated by certain environmental triggers that physically change the genes involved.

Over the years, I've mused on why most of us react as we do to "famous" people. I keep thinking they're just another person and it doesn't make sense. But, like many others, I've found it "special" to meet such people. We seem to need them to be "famous" and they oblige. Part of the explanation might be that we vicariously experience their fame - we feel some of it rubs off on us. Citizen honours are a mini-fame - most of us notice the person in the elevator or on the plane with the Order of Canada snowflake on their lapel and wonder who they are and what they did to merit it.

We can take the millennia of monarchies, dictatorships and empires, as well as social structures used by other animals (my cats eat their shared meals in their order of hierarchy and become distressed if I intervene to try to change that), as evidence that the basic or default position is hierarchy. That means egalitarianism, for instance, as implemented in democracy, is the exception and has to be worked at if it is to be maintained. Tragically, many examples supporting that fact can be pointed to in our contemporary world.

So do citizen honours interfere with egalitarianism? Is putting letters after one's name obsolete - or even harmful to society as a whole - a relic of the age of monarchy and its various trappings? Is it an example of the "all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others" principle, that is, an unjustified power grab? Does awarding OCs endorse a philosophy that some of us are superior to others of us?
[...]

Margaret Somerville " Questions of merit:

The most important thing to note about Somerville's comments is that that since she concludes "that the basic or default position is hierarchy" she can't seriously explain herself and her own moral intuitions: why does she even think of making her cats' lives more egalitarian? Why is democracy such an exception in human history, as she claims? Why do so many people today care so deeply about equality?

Somerville comes to her assumptions about the "default position of hierarchy" because her cats have a pecking order, and on the fact of monarchies, dictatorships, and empires. But these hierarchical institutions are all the products of agrarian societies, which have only existed for five to ten thousand years, unlike the more ancient and much longer-lived hunter-gatherer societies that are ruled by a collective ritual and myth that no one controls or dominates but that evolves communally in some way.

Somerville wants us to believe that our democratic instincts are something very new in history and hard to sustain. But are we moderns really the discoverers of some idea - equality - so radical and unheard of in human history until recently? Can anyone who notes how deeply felt today are our moral intuitions of some fundamental human equality - how deeply passionate (not only) the left is about such matters - really think this is simply the discovery of some Enlightenment philosophers, a few hundred years ago, or maybe of Christianity, a mere (in the lifetime of the human species) two thousand years ago?

It's oh so tempting for moderns to think that they have discovered something rare and profound in the way of justice, as if the key to a whole new way of being in the world were unveiled by our genius, just recently, thanks to some heroic revolutionary. Notwithstanding that we are continually refining and deepening our understanding of ourselves, I think it's a great delusion to believe in unprecedented discoveries and revolutions.

In the thinking of Generative Anthropology, it is by reflecting on the nature of human language that we come to see how our intuition of equality is one of the most basic qualities of human language itself. And for GA, symbolic language is the defining quality of the human, that which distinguishes us from the animal world.

Whatever our differences in the material world, whatever our differences in social status, language only works when all members of the community share in it. We are not divided by nature into camps of listeners and talkers; everyone who uses language must be potentially both. Language only works when we are all willing to exercise free will and sign off on, or refuse, the shared meanings we accord to arbitrary collections of sounds, gestures, or letters.

Keep in mind , for example, that one of the first thing an infant learns to say to the mother on whom she is almost entirely dependent for survival, is "no"! That is a bold assertion, at such a young age, of both difference and moral equality.

No matter how nasty a tyrant may be, he cannot overcome the thought in those he rules that he IS a nasty tyrant. He must insist on obedience to his intentions and meanings. He must insist, because we could refuse, if only we had the courage. So where does this thought that he is an evil tyrant come from if hierarchy is our "default position"? Why shouldn't we just accept the tyrant as readily and unconsciously as cats accepting their order of dominance and submission?

And one thing any student of history can tell you is that throughout the entire history of hierarchical societies there have been at least some people who have had some sense of injustice at inequality. (I would not say the sense of injustice in the past was ever as strong as it is today in our more egalitarian times but this is a paradox I will leave aside for now.)

Personally, I wouldn't argue that our common sense of injustice is always reasonable. Hierarchy can definitely serve collective purposes: in organizing a society in ways more complex than the equalitarian hunter-gatherer society, a hierarchical society becomes better able to create wealth and to defend itself in warfare. In the modern world, differences in wealth often reflect a return on investment for the risks people have taken in creating opportunities for others, without knowing in advance that they would be rewarded in the marketplace for trying to create wealth and opportunities for others.

But notwithstanding that our sense of injustice at inequality can be irrational, there is no doubting how strongly this sense of injustice can be felt. The powerful intuition that human equality is somehow fundamental to our nature cannot be seriously denied.

Defenders of freedom (which is often in tension with our moral intuition of equality) need to realize this and not attempt to escape the issue with lazy arguments about our cats. We have human language, and hence the intuition that comes with sharing equally in the signs of language, precisely because at some point in our past the animal pecking order was no longer sufficient to keep all our proto-human forebears in line. The alpha "dog" was losing control; the order of the pack was breaking down... a new kind of order, specifically human, had to emerge... or so begins the powerful hypothesis of Generative Anthropology.

Animal hierarchies are notably different from human ones. Animals relate to each other in one-to-one relations of dominance and submission. The alpha dog does not have to get up on his hind quarters and address all the other dogs as a communal whole, convincing them why it would be better if they didn't all gang up and turn on him. Rather, he only needs to address his immediate rivals for alpha status. Images of dogs playing poker with each other are strictly for human consumption. Only human culture is structured as a relationship between a sacred centre and a collective periphery (in poker, the sacred centre is the pot, or the winning hand).

A human king must be in continual conversation with his subjects, lest they do gang up and turn on him. Whatever the attempts to defend monarchy in terms of a theory of the divine right of kings, we are all susceptible to the revelation that the king is just a man who should be brought down to our level. On the other hand, the reason we all are interested in fame and we are usually keen to have some of it "rub off" on us is that we all know that there is something sacred in human affairs that we are all more or less equally interested in. We all want to use celebrities in our conversations with each other. We all want a piece of the sacred action. It is precisely our desire to share in the signs and things that we make sacred that leads us to create more and more social differences, and hence some hierarchies.

We create signs of difference that differentiate one human from another; but we do this so that these signs of difference may circulate widely, that we may all be empowered by their use and transformation. Give Morgentaler the Order of Canada, if you will, but be assured that this will only renew the debate on abortion. Liberal elites can't settle the issue by declaring Morgentaler a national worthy; rather they can only make clearer the sacred stakes in the battle and thus add fuel to the debate, as we in Canada have seen in recent days.


Finally, to attempt to explain human culture by reference to "epigenetic" research is to commit a serious category error. Human culture cannot be measured discreetly in the laboratory. It is the product of history, of a complex evolution by which we have periodically renewed and reworked the first ever memorable scene where a sign of language was shared equally by all involved.

Empirical research into human nature means little on its own. It must be adopted by an overarching theory of the human. The empirical is subject to the theoretical because we are ultimately ruled by our shared language and our freedom to use it in ways complex and paradoxical. Theory is the attempt to understand the shared but contested scenes of language, religion, and culture. And that is why we need ethicists, to theorize what maximizes the human good. And we will always need them, for there will never be a day when science and facts simply rule us.

Somerville cannot understand herself as a fan of democracy and equality because she takes for granted the language with which she makes her claims about the world. She does not make fundamental the question of how it is that she only understands herself and the human world through shared cultural representations that exist, not anywhere in the material world, but only in a transcendent domain.

This is the kind of thing that a modern "scientific" thinker is afraid to discuss. Transcendence?

But seriously, an idea has no material reality; it has no permanent presence in anyone`s brain or in any other material thing (a book, as a material thing, is only a collection of printed symbols). We find the idea, somehow, when our brains, firing neurons in ways we can hardly begin to understand, are able to associate words (by associating sounds or letters, images or gestures, etc.). When our brains are not making these associations, where does the idea reside? Well, it is hard to get our heads around it, but frankly the idea only really exists in some domain above or among us. The existence of this transcendent domain is a mysterious fact of our humanity that only religion, and not yet science, has tried seriously to understand. In other words, religion is a form of anthropology yet superior to anything produced by "scientific" anthropology.

The hierarchy of human culture is somehow built on top of our animal past that was no doubt hierarchical in the way of Somerville`s cats. But there is quite a divide between the world of cats, or any animal pecking order, and the world of kings and peasants. And we can only understand that divide by understanding how humans made it through the use of language and representation. We build on top of our biology by creating differences in language or culture. And every cultural difference begins as a basic distinction between a material thing, like a cat, and a transcendent word, like "cat". Human hierarchy is not simply or largely based on biology, but on the basic difference between things and representations, the difference between the material and the transcendent.

When we use language, we make a difference, but not in the material or biological world. We create difference in the symbolic world of representations. Yet even as we make a difference in this transcendent world, a difference that will allow us to distinguish one human from another as being more or less central to whatever it is we are representing, we all share equally in using language. Thus, difference and equality go hand in hand. They are both defining, or originary, qualities of the human. This is the fundamental paradox of the human that Generative Anthropology begins to explore.

We're happier because we're more in touch with human reality

This post is first of all a reminder that the Covenant Zone bloggers and friends meet every Thursday, 7-9 pm, in the atrium of the central branch of the Vancouver Public Library, in front of Blenz Coffee. Please join us in the discussion of what may become the new Canadian covenant.

For identification, you may see us wearing blue scarves, though with summer coming on, you can't be sure. Sooo... maybe just look for the happy people:

Individuals with conservative ideologies are happier than liberal-leaners, and new research pinpoints the reason: Conservatives rationalize social and economic inequalities.

Now, right off the bat, reading this report on some new "study", one feels one is gaining insight into the liberal world view. I mean, for starters, who would be sure enough to think that they could "pinpoint" the reason for happiness? We all have our ideas about what makes people happy, but pinpointing, through social scientific methods....? Let's read on:

Regardless of marital status, income or church attendance, right-wing individuals reported greater life satisfaction and well-being than left-wingers, the new study found. Conservatives also scored highest on measures of rationalization, which gauge a person's tendency to justify, or explain away, inequalities.

The rationalization measure included statements such as: "It is not really that big a problem if some people have more of a chance in life than others," and "This country would be better off if we worried less about how equal people are."

To justify economic inequalities, a person could support the idea of meritocracy, in which people supposedly move up their economic status in society based on hard work and good performance. In that way, one's social class attainment, whether upper, middle or lower, would be perceived as totally fair and justified.

Now here's another indicator of the liberal world view. Liberals are desperate rationalizers; so they think that if they can find people who can respond to a great and difficult human question, like "inequality", with a rationalization, well then that must be what is making the "rationalizers" happy.

Yet surely, whatever one's propensity to answer a social scientist with a rationalization, it's not the act of rationalizing that makes us happy. I would suggest that it's our ability to have good faith in the social system of which we are a part that makes us happy; and one cannot reduce this faith to its rationalizations. Indeed the attempt to reduce faith (which is always a leap into a mystery) to rationalization is just what makes us unhappy.

If your beliefs don't justify gaps in status, you could be left frustrated and disheartened, according to the researchers, Jaime Napier and John Jost of New York University. They conducted a U.S.-centric survey and a more internationally focused one to arrive at the findings.

"Our research suggests that inequality takes a greater psychological toll on liberals than on conservatives," the researchers write in the June issue of the journal Psychological Science, "apparently because liberals lack ideological rationalizations that would help them frame inequality in a positive (or at least neutral) light."

The results support and further explain a Pew Research Center survey from 2006, in which 47 percent of conservative Republicans in the U.S. described themselves as "very happy," while only 28 percent of liberal Democrats indicated such cheer.

First of all, if this is true, then why - as this blogger asks in questioning the present study - are conservatives much more involved in charitable giving than liberals, even though the latter have more of the wealthiest North Americans among their ranks?

I would suggest that liberals are not unhappy because of their failure to rationalize. They are unhappy because of their propensity to resent what they perceive as an injustice. But what makes us resentful is not something we can take for granted, as undoubtedly unjust. We need to understand our sense of injustice at a more fundamental anthropological level if we want to get at the happiness question.

In my world view, what makes us resentful and unhappy is our sense of alienation from the sacred. The liberal is someone who often takes "equality" as some absolute measure of the sacred; so she cannot but help to feel more or less alienated from all the other forms of the sacred that have evolved in cultural history to allow for social differences (in our proximity to the sacred) around which relationships of reciprocity and freedom can emerge. The conservative is more likely to make human reciprocity and freedom sacred, but these require we take on and respect social differences. It is, essentially, our social differences that create a basis for our exchange with each other. We free ourselves from the more primitive human rituals fixated on equality, in order to have freer and more full lives in exchange with each other. For example, we cannot really enjoy the freedom to eat in restaurants (nor respect the need to employ people and create wealth) if we cannot give the job of serving others some kind of sacred charge (keeping in mind that the sacred always has simultaneously both a positive and negative charge, it both attracts and repels our desire).

The liberal who takes for granted resentment of his or anyone's sense of alienation from the sacred centre, is involved in an inherently delusional state of mind, even when a real injustice is involved. However much the resentment is founded in a real injustice, say inexcusably rough treatment of a waiter in a restaurant, it is the nature of resentment that it moves our minds beyond a reasonable apprehension of the injustice to fixate on the mere fact of difference and or distance from the sacred: one person serves and another eats. Reason teaches us to respect certain social differences, but a liberal can still resent them, merely on the basis of a powerful sense of unholy difference in people's proximity to a sacred centre.

We focus our resentment on the person we "think" (often scapegoating him) is responsible for our alienation from the centre, or sometimes on the thing at the centre of a scene that is being held up as sacred (I resent, for example, people who think SUVs are more cool than bicycles... I resent Jihad-funding SUVs and love bicycles). But at root, it is not so much the person or the thing that is responsible for our resentment, as the mere fact that our consciousness as human beings takes place on scenes that require a sacred centre and hence a human relationship to a centre that can be experienced as unduly close or far away, though ultimately it is really all in the mind, as any Buddhist sage can tell you.

Resentment is inherently delusional because it is founded in our scenic sense of alienation from something, from a lack or absence, and is not founded in concrete rationalizations about the world and the things in it. Those who spend all their time trying to rationalize the world, instead of coming to terms with the need for faith in the scenic ways and means by which humans make and relate to sacred centres, is someone prone to be unhappy, in my experience.

Eric Gans: Transcendence is a Human Fact

The intellectually curious should not miss the latest essay from Eric Gans: Chronicles of Love & Resentment CCCLVI, which takes on the dialogue of the deaf between the currently fashionable camp of atheist polemicists and the defenders of religion.

What neither side has, as Gans never tires of pointing out, is an adequate anthropological account of how our shared human consciousness or transcendence works, or could have first come into being, something that Gans' Generative Anthropology (GA) serves to hypothesize. To those of us familiar with GA, it is clearly a superior way of approaching the question of transcendence, and yet the science vs. religion polemicists keep on fighting, showing little interest in GA's way of minimizing the difference between the two camps. GA is founded on an "originary hypothesis" concerning the minimal conditions for the simultaneous origin of human language, religion, and our transcendent consciousness, and GA's work is to continually refine this hypothesis:

I am currently in the preliminary stages of a project that will address the question raised by the current wave of anti-religion books and the replies they have received from the faithful. Now that I've read a few works in both categories, I am able to provide an update. At this point I will not address the specific points raised in these works. Although eventually I will have to respond to their chief arguments, such as they are, my readings confirm my conviction that no one conceives which I shall call the question of transcendence in anything like the same terms as GA.

As might be expected, although the common assumptions of both sides exclude consideration of the originary hypothesis, the arguments in defense of the transcendental are more congenial to it. As a rule, those who attack religion assume that the universe can be understood as composed entirely of matter and that the human does not put into question this overall materialist ontology. The a priori exclusion of a transcendental realm, which reduces representations to forms of matter associated with other forms, more complex but not ontologically different from the strands of DNA that are "expressed" in bodily traits or functions, makes the construction of a hypothetical originary scene a waste of time. In contrast, for those who defend God or the "spiritual," the originary hypothesis can be understood as a minimal reading of a scene of creation, and even if the defense drifts off into the cosmos, the human battleground remains the essential one. What these defenders do not do, however, is propose a minimal hypothesis of their own. Either they accept in some sense a specific religion's account of creation or, more commonly, they avoid discussing origin altogether, since the "spiritual realm" is simply assumed to exist independently of humanity. Neuroscientist Mario Beauregard and Denyse O'Leary's The Spiritual Brain (HarperSanFrancisco 2007) is the best example I have seen of this kind of argumentation. This book's claims for "spirituality" are not in real contradiction with the principles of GA, but there is no expressed concern for restricting these claims to the domain of anthropology.

Of the atheists' various theories of how religion came into existence, the most serious are founded on evolutionary psychology. If religion is widespread despite its costliness in time and energy (not to speak of its absurdity, criminality, imbecility, etc.), it must somehow be adaptive, so we may assume there exist for its central traits genes, or brain modules, or complexes of "memes"--unless religious activity is merely a "spandrel," an indirect consequence of genuinely adaptive traits, such as our love for stories. As for what might make religion adaptive, perhaps the best guess is that it satisfies our (or our children's) tendency to attribute intention to ostensible agents, whether truly animate or not, including the dead, whose agental status we tend to prolong as their bodies decay. Aside from the pseudo-scientific vocabulary, most of these arguments are not measurably more sophisticated than the 19th-century figure of "primitive man" bowing down to the god of the thunderstorm. In perhaps the most serious of these explorations, Daniel Dennett's insufferably long-winded Breaking the Spell (Viking 2006), the set of possibly useful analogies with which the author begins his investigation includes such things as our excessive fondness for sugar and behavior influenced by parasites. The idea that a complex institution bound up with the whole of human culture can be approached by means of such analogies is a category error of astounding intellectual arrogance. Concerning those works that dispense with both diatribes and evolutionary speculations and limit themselves to philosophical demonstrations of the Impossibility or merely the Improbability of God--the titles of two collections of philosophical essays--they commit a less dramatic version of the same category error by discussing the God-concept independently of its necessarily anthropological context.

Beyond Voltairean religion-bashing that has no bearing on the question of transcendence, the bottom line of the atheistic side's arguments is that what we know about matter and its organization gives no evidence of a creator-designer, that is, a world-creating mind gifted with intentionality. Everything from the big bang to the emergence of life to that of humanity can be reasonably attributed to matter's self-organizing properties, as manifested in particular in the Darwinian evolution of life.

My claim is that this line of argument is simply irrelevant. It fails to address the real question at stake, which should not be posed--by either side--in terms of the existence or non-existence of a "designer." Religion is about the human, and God's existence in realms not inhabited by humanity is of at most allegorical significance. Christianity makes this explicit with John's "In the beginning was the word," rewriting what was already strongly implicit in the Genesis original, where God creates the universe with language. Speculating on what God was or was not doing at the big bang, or whether he created just one universe or a zillion alternative ones (to respect the "anthropic principle") is the contemporary equivalent of counting angels on pinheads. As for the "proofs" of God's impossibility or improbability, it suffices to say that if God exists, he is no doubt capable of arranging things as he likes, including dealing with the logical impossibility of being at once omnipotent and omniscient. To suggest, as some do, that if God really existed, he would almost certainly have made the world differently reflects the cosmological arrogance that scientists display whenever they forget that to present quantum indeterminacy and the decomposition of matter into quarks as the definitive ontology is to declare the end of (scientific) history.
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Our possession of representations is the central feature of what we call our "consciousness." Animals have intentions and make calculations, but they lack a "theory of mind" that allows them to understand and predict not merely the actions but the intentions of other beings. As Richard van Oort has pointed out, based on Michael Tomasello's studies of chimpanzees, even the highest animals, although clearly able to react to the intentions of others (as a prey animal avoids its predators), are unable to attribute intention to their fellows, for example, in teaching/learning a new technique. From this we may conclude that these creatures lack a theory of their own mind and cannot attribute intention to themselves. Humans acquire an intuitive grasp of others' and their own intentionality through the shared use of representations. Unlike the tool-like actions of chimpanzees, speech acts are intrinsically intentional--intentionality is all they are. We are able to guess each other's intentions because they can in principle be formulated in language.

A familiar point against the materialist denial of human specificity is that a robot or computer has no internal mental state. Computers use signs, but they are our signs; to the computer, they are so many bytes--in fact, there is no "to the computer" at all. As Beauregard and others point out, the claim that our mind is nothing but the activity of our brain is an act of faith, not a scientific truth. What the originary hypothesis adds to this debate is to clarify what it is that humans share with respect to the use of representations: their creators' originary and subsequently virtual community. The individual brain does not "contain" the representations it uses; it borrows them from a communal source to which they always remain attached. It is their dependence on the human community that distinguishes the signs of language from the indexical signs employed by our animal forebears. Whereas animals' signaling systems are rooted in individual, genetically inherited behavior patterns that have been refined by evolution to arouse the appropriate reaction in their fellows, requiring at best some postnatal training, humans invent, use, and modify language in a collective setting. Each use of a word or symbol takes place before this virtual community, whose members' mutual recognition as fellow language-users is ultimately dependent on a shared sense of the sacred. The virtual presence of the human community generates the scenic space within which we become conscious of ourselves.

The arguments given above do little more than summarize, with some added refinements, ideas I first put forth on this subject in 1981 in The Origin of Language. I am prepared to continue repeating and refining these same ideas--in dialogue with the handful of free spirits who take them seriously--while I am able to think at all.

So long as the two sides in the public debate agree to disagree about "the existence of God," there will be no progress. It is only when both sides come to accept the fact that--as I think Derrida realized in his last years (see Chronicle 340)--the distance between the faith of the possessor of human language and that of the believer in sacred revelation is vanishingly small, that the understanding of what these two "believers" have in common can become the focus of a way of thinking about the human that will finally be worthy to be called anthropology.

Dad kills daughter over not really "competing" cultures

I had this post, written too quickly, up earlier. I'm not sure I got started on this story with a correct idea. I wanted to take to task the headline writer at the Vancouver Sun, for his or her multiculti posturing. But maybe what I was responding to was less posturing than a reflexive deferral to the words of the supposed authority quoted in the Sun story. I took the post down, but Charles tells me it is worth keeping up. So here it is with a few more edits, if something can still be of interest in my angry response to a horrible murder....

I was responding to this headline in the Sun: “Muslim girls struggle with 'competing' cultures”.
[original post begins now]
You see those scare quotes around “competing”? That’s to imply that kids who grow up with Muslim fathers who might kill them if they “dishonour” their family by refusing to wear the hijab – as has just happened in Toronto to 16-year old Aqsa Parvez, a cold fact the headline shamelessly dances around - kids who want to dress and look like normal kids at their public schools, are not caught in a totally real clash of competing cultures.

But of course they are caught in a cultural competition, a competition that necessarily implies value, and judgment of what is of lesser value. We, as a postmodern liberal society, live in fear of the reality that conflict and value judgment is inherent to the human condition. And so we put simple references to reality in quotation marks.

You see, it is a matter of unquestionable religious faith, for the liberal-Gnostic Canadians who rule opinion in this country, that in this country there is no fundamental clash of cultures, just a lack of good people willing to live by the singular dictates of “multiculturalism,” i.e. the insistence that all people can get along in Canada just as long as they respect each others’ differences and let the multiculti authorities settle all differences from on high. How such pieties apply to Muslim fathers who think they must brutalize daughters who shame the family among pious friends, and to daughters who want to look normal by Canadian standards, no one really explains, and the article to which this headline refers is full of the usual posturing from liberal elites about how hard it is for girls caught between two cultures:

Many Muslim girls in Canada lead something of a double life when it comes to reconciling religious traditions while living in a secular, Western society, says a researcher at Wilfrid Laurier University.

"At home they're the good Muslim kid, they pray and they fast and go to mosque," said Jasmin Zine, a professor of sociology at the Waterloo, Ont., school. "When they go to school they become a different person. They create a persona to fit with the competing cultural demands of home and school."

The fundamental questions behind such sentiments are never raised: e.g. just how, exactly, is killing your daughter for bringing shame on the family a “religious” tradition? It’s only “religious” in the sense of conformity to an all-encompassing ritual code – a “total way of life” - that is centuries apart from the Western idea of religion rooted in the separation of church and state, of private religion and “secular” culture.

The Sun’s article also provides us the opinions of

“Ausma Khan, a human rights lawyer and the editor-in-chief of Muslim Girl Magazine.” “The decision whether to don the hijab is not always difficult for Muslim girls... But, she acknowledges, the hijab has become a flashpoint.

"It can so easily be taken for a signal of difference and otherness and alienation, but it doesn't have to be read like that," she said. Khan, 38, is now based in Los Angeles, but grew up in Canada. "There is definitely an American-Islam or a Canadian-Islam that has imbibed the reality of growing up in a pluralistic society that accommodates difference, that respects difference," she said.

"I think we see that. We see this in the practice of this generation of young women. They are accommodating. Just as they want to put their own view point forward, have their religious freedom and be protected, they are equally willing to recognize and respect the rights of others."

I first became familiar with Muslim Girl magazine a couple of months ago when I saw a fellow bus rider, a Muslim educator at Simon Fraser University - with whom I had previously discussed matters covenantal and “religious” when he first saw me on the bus with Israeli and Canadian flags on my Covenant Zone blog hat - showing an edition of the glossy mag with pride (it looks like the Muslim educators want to provide girls with an alternative to the ilk of Cosmo) to what looked like two SFU women students. One was wearing a hijab and the other, of European ancestry, who clearly knew the educator and respectfully deferred to him, may have been a convert to Islam or to the leftist-Islamic (global intifada) alliance.

Previously, this man had been keen to point out to me the apparent hypocrisy that Westerners think they can separate church and state, when in fact they can’t, or so he alleged – and therefore how can anyone expect the same of Islam? – a question provoked by my comments on Western nationhood being founded in covenants that were once religious, but are now largely secular or constitutional. Canada, and our constitutionally-based freedom, I pointed out, owes a historical debt to the first nation and first covenanters, Israel; and it is to remember this that I have the flags on my hat. I don’t think he appreciated the historical subtlety of my point – he didn’t even know the word “covenant” - that just because everything cultural can be given a genealogy that links it back to some ancestry in religion, it is therefore not hypocrisy to say we have progressed to the point where we choose to differentiate church and state, as Jesus did.

Since Canadians’ sense of nationhood is rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition, therefore we can’t really separate the religious and secular, he seemed to want to argue as I was getting off the bus.

I bring this up because the particular cover of Muslim Girl Magazine that I saw on the bus featured two young and attractive girls, one in hijab, one without, as if to say either is ok, or there’s a debate going on. But that’s the point the Vancouver Sun headliner will (or so it first appeared to me) only recognize in scare quotes. All culture is about conflict, since all signs of culture come into existence to defer humanity’s foundational potential for destructive, intra-specific violence. At least that is the hypothesis, very convincing to me, of Generative Anthropology. So, for example, a hijab was originally "designed" to defer men's violence over women’s sexuality, just as the latest in sexually-charged Western fashion is also a way of deferring conflict over sexuality by making it and its signs mundane. We can’t avoid the realization that there is a conflict, if yet largely non-violent, in our society about which approach (including others) to deferral is better, more valuable, than the other.

This argument from anthropology has all sorts of consequences for how we choose to face, or not, the global intifada that is out to destroy the basis for free constitutional democracies and the global economy that presently feeds over six billion people. Because... there is one sense in which there is not a “clash of civilizations” ongoing, and that is the sense that there is now only one global civilization, one world economy, from which no one and no society can be walled off, and in relation to which all the angry losers and marginal “cultures” in the global intifada are expressing a confict *internal* to the single civilization, and not one between truly independent civilizations.

Because of this, there is no way we can just leave Muslims to their own devices if we have any respect for their lives. There is already a far greater population in the Islamic world than could be fed by Islamic withdrawal from the global economy into some Sharia-bound backwardness. Either we welcome the prospect of a mass die-off (and all the guilt and conflict it would create in the West), or we admit that we are bound to Muslims for the foreseeable future, in which case it would be best if our conflicts were faced and not hidden in scare quotes.

Even those of my friends who clearly see the conflict out there, but who characterize it by claiming that Islam cannot be changed and cannot be negotiated with, are suggesting that we have no choice but to conquer and defeat Islam by force of arms, isolate and starve Islam, or give in to the Jihad. But precisely because they take this line, they have very little to offer by a way of a vision for what might transcend the coming final conflict between us and them. Once we defeat the Muslims in battle, then what?

I wish that they could see that there is value in already anticipating that question in today’s world, and that we need give up nothing by facing it now, if we are confident about the value of Western civilization. By highlighting the question now, maybe we can defer some of the violence they anticipate as inevitable. What if there is another way to conquer “Islam” by forcing it to acknowledge its dependence on the global economy and the covenants guaranteeing the individual freedoms by which this economy operates? In other words, what if we make it our explicit policy that we will only be at war with that part of “Islam” that refuses to play by the rules of the global economy - for example that part which thinks it can come to Canada and still brutalize its women. Only then can we learn what “Muslims” really believe, when they must choose between freedom and death, when the fantasy of a global caliphate, or of a world of second-class women, is truly revealed as an impossibility, if six or ten billion are to be fed?

But then, my friends say, you will not be dealing with Islam” as my friends insist Islam must be, i.e. supremacist and totalitarian, following Koran and Sharia to the letter. That would be fine with me. What if we face up to the reality that a global economy entails, and force Muslims in Canada to do the same? Then we might admit that the editor of Muslim Girl is not simply lying or being un-Islamic when she sees the young Muslim woman as the possible vanguard for a reformation: “Just as they want to put their own view point forward, have their religious freedom and be protected, they are equally willing to recognize and respect the rights of others." If this is true, then “Islam” cannot survive, but maybe something else Islamic can. It’s not for us to decide.

UPDATE: What is a lie is this:

A spokesman for the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-CAN) said he is dubious of opinions that the girl's death resulted from a clash of cultures.

"Teen rebellion is something that exists in all households in Canada and is not unique to any culture or background," CAIR-CAN's Sameer Zuberi said in an interview. "Domestic violence is also not unique to Muslims."

The death of Aqsa "was the result of domestic violence, a problem that cuts across Canadian society and is blind to color or creed," echoed Shahina Siddiqui, president of the Islamic Social Services Association.

Does anyone really think domestic violence just happens? Surely it is always a sign of some underlying conflict. Sure, the nature of that conflict will be different from case to case. But in this case, it seems from all the evidence so far that the underlying conflict in this murder was between Islamic and Western values.

Eric Gans in Vancouver: Public Lectures Not to Miss

Eric Gans

Vancouver is this weekend host to a conference discussing the work (and its ongoing extension) of one of the most important intellectuals of our time - his importance for our increasingly decentralized age partly reflected in the fact that his non-charismatic work is not as well known as certain lesser intellectuals who cling to the public showmanship and sacrificial theatre of old. Eric Gans is a prophet for our age when each of us should aspire to be a little leader in our own little neck of the woods. Gans' work, Generative Anthropology, provides us a deeper understanding of what all humans minimally share, an understanding of how culture or language first emerged, in a memorable event, and is since re-presented or generated through history on scenes, or in events, of shared consciousness.

In a global village where cultural and cognitive differences among individuals and populations remain significant, a firmer grasp of those aspects of human nature or culture that we all share helps provide us intellectual and spiritual tools to meet all comers, face to face, and hopefully to engage them in useful exchange, or, if need be, better to confront our enemies, whatever our neck of the woods.

Now is not the time to try more seriously to summarize the work of Eric Gans (though following the links above will get you started). But if you're in Vancouver and you are interested in real thinking, you'd be a fool not to make time on Saturday to see Eric Gans himself present his discipline of Generative Anthropology to the public, in Room 527 of the Vancouver School of Theology, University of British Columbia, 1:30-3:30. (Directions and link to map here) The lecture is titled "Generative Anthropology: A New Way of Thinking". Another public lecture being given as part of the Generative Anthropology Thinking Event is by another great scholar, Eugene Webb of the University of Washington, on Friday afternoon, 1:30-2:45, also in Room 527 of the Vancouver School of Theology. Prof. Webb will speak on "Stepping Back: Religious Faith and the Differentiation of Consciousness".

Covenant Zone blog is also organizing a chat, Friday evening, with a great student of Generative Anthropology, Adam Katz, whom we have often linked at this blog; anyone interested in attending should send me an email by early Friday morning (truepeers@gmail.com) for details. Sorry for the late notice.