Smarter Than a Box of Rocks

Among the many downticket races I didn't pay enough attention to was the one for North Carolina's Congressional District 11.  The seat was open because incumbent Mark Meadows had left to become Donald Trump's Chief of Staff, and Trump endorsed Lynda Bennett as the Republican nominee.  But Bennett was trounced in the primary by Madison Cawthorn, a 25-year-old with no political experience, who went on to defeat the Democratic challenger, a middle-aged military veteran who was also new to politics.  Judging by that article, Davis tried to run as a centrist, a good recipe for failure in a longtime Republican stronghold like the 11th District.

Cawthorn got a lot of attention: not only is he very young, he's wheelchair-bound due to an auto accident several years ago; he was homeschooled, dropped (or maybe flunked) out of college, has been accused of sexual aggressiveness, and as CNN delicately described him, "is a motivational speaker and filed to start a real estate investment company last year."  The company seems not to have gotten off the ground, perhaps because of Cawthorn's new political enterprise, and "motivational speaker" means that he witnesses to Jesus at evangelical churches around the state.  He also paid a "bucket list" visit in 2017 to the Eagle's Nest, Hitler's mountain chalet, referring to Hitler in a now-deleted Instagram post as "the Fuhrer" and as "supreme evil."

Now Cawthorn's in Washington for freshman Congressional orientation, and he granted an interview to Jewish Insider, missing few opportunities to put his foot in his mouth.

“It’s actually incredible,” Cawthorn said of orientation. “I’m a lover of history, so it’s incredible to be in a place where we had the vote to decide to have the Emancipation Proclamation, where we decided to go to World War II, where the civil rights battles were fought. I mean, it’s just, I got to spend about 30 minutes all by myself on the House floor yesterday — and just to be frank with you, I was in awe.”

He loves history, so of course he doesn't know that the Emancipation Proclamation was Abraham's executive order, not voted on by Congress.  He also reportedly said that James Madison signed the Declaration of Independence.  One presumable liberal lamented that Cawthorn had been "appointed" to Congress, which indicates that Cawthorn's not the only political illiterate around.  But he does at least know that the presidential election could go to the House of Representatives.  And he's already learning how to triangulate like a born politician: he has "expressed admiration [for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] despite taking issue with her policies.  'I’m looking forward to [talking to her], though, for sure,' he said. 'Disagree with just about everything she believes in, but I think that we need more people of conviction.'"

Cawthorn's clearly not the sharpest pencil in the box, and I wish NC-11 had someone better to represent it in Congress, but neither of his opponents was particularly good; and if we removed all the politically and historically ignorant pols from office, things would be interesting.  I recall, for example, a highly-placed elected official, a Constitutional scholar no less, who declared confidently and falsely that it would be unprecedented for the Supreme Court to overturn a law passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.  Nor have I noticed that liberals and progressives are much more knowledgeable overall about history and politics than conservatives and reactionaries.

What really set people off, though were Cawthorn's remarks about religion.  It's not surprising that a religious nut would seek to bring everyone he could into the body of Christ; in a pluralist society like this one, one simply has to learn to deal with missionaries.  (Not only Christian ones: in the past I've fended off Muslims and Hare Krishna peddlers.)  There's no need to indulge them, just tell them No and send them on their way.  I've noticed that a good many American liberals react to Christian missionaries the way that many heterosexual males react to homosexual passes: they don't seem to realize that they are allowed to turn down an offer, so they freak out.

Cawthorn's takes on Judaism and Islam are familiar to me; I've led a less sheltered life than many liberals.  He told the Insider "he had read through 'just about every single religious work there is,' including the Torah and the Quran."  I take this claim with plenty of salt, though many liberals don't know that the Torah is the first five books of the Christian Bible either.  He made some doubtful claims of having won over a couple of Muslims, and then:

Had he ever tried to convert any Jews to the Christian faith?

“I have,” he said with a laugh. “I have, unsuccessfully. I have switched a lot of, uh, you know, I guess, culturally Jewish people. But being a practicing Jew, like, people who are religious about it, they are very difficult. I’ve had a hard time connecting with them in that way.”

Cawthorn expressed a similar sentiment during a July 2019 sermon at a church in Highlands, North Carolina. “If you have Jewish blood running through your veins today,” he told the crowd, mulling on a chapter from the Gospel of Mark, “this might not mean as much to you, but for someone like me, who’s a gentile, this means a lot.”

This got him some mockery, but also some alarmist high dudgeon for the bit about "Jewish blood running through your veins."  As the philosopher Michael Neumann wrote a few years ago,

But here, immediately, we come up against the venerable shell-game of Jewish identity: “Look! We’re a religion! No! a race! No! a cultural entity! Sorry–a religion!” When we tire of this game, we get suckered into another: “anti-Zionism is antisemitism! ” quickly alternates with: “Don’t confuse Zionism with Judaism! How dare you, you antisemite!”

The notion of blood as a "racial" essence is too widespread, including in Israel, and certainly in the Tanakh and the New Testament, for me to get very worked up about this example.  Racial/ethnic discourse stinks to high heaven almost everywhere it turns up, not just among right-wing Republicans.

I was fascinated, though, by the panicky reactions many people had to the idea of being proselytized.  For  example, the BlueMAGA personality Charlotte Clymer.

I don't know who needs to hear this (@CawthornforNC), but you can be faithful to Christ without invalidating and shaming those of other faith traditions, notably Jewish and Muslim folks. It's profoundly insulting and dehumanizing. It's also NOT what Christ would do.

Invalidating, shaming, insulting and dehumanizing is absolutely what Christ would do.  He spent a lot of time attacking his fellow Jews, he insulted a gentile woman who approached him to heal her sick daughter, and he ordered his followers to go and make disciples of all nations, replacing their "faith traditions" with his teachings and commands.  It's arguable that you can't "be faithful to Christ" without attacking the beliefs of others. 

Or this person:

Many have the best intentions, but trying to convert people to another religion is mean.

Madison Cawthorn does NOT have the best intentions. His attempts are evil.

(Some religions, such as Buddhism, have NO RECRUITING policies, because recruiting is mean).

She's at least as ignorant as Cawthorn, or Clymer.  Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam are all missionary religions.  All three have made converts by persuasion and by force.  When I challenged her, she linked to an article in which the Dalai Lama spoke against attempts to convert, but he represents at most one stream of Buddhism.  He wouldn't exist if Tibetans hadn't been 'recruited' to Buddhism.  She added "Of course, there is a great deal of diversity in a Buddhism, so people enjoy different experiences, depending on the country or culture."  That "diversity" includes missionary activity, but it's clear she knows nothing about the history of Buddhism, let alone other proselytizing religions.

After JI inquired about Cawthorn’s thoughts on the separation of church and state, he said that many people have asked him if he will be able to divorce himself from his faith as a congressman. “That is the basis of all of my experience and everything I’ve learned, everything that I believe in, how I’ve formed all of my worldview,” he said of his religion. “I always think of that question as just so silly.”

“The Lord and the Bible and the value systems I’ve gotten through Judeo-Christian values,” he added, “it affects every single decision I make.”

I don't like this kind of talk either, but it doesn't bother liberals when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Joe Biden expresses similar views.  Nor do they mind it when AOC or other Democrats insult and invalidate the "faith traditions" of reactionary Christians; indeed, they regard it as mandatory and a badge of honor to do so.

Yes, Madison Cawthorn is profoundly ignorant, but not more so than his liberal-religious counterparts.  It would have been better for the country if a Democrat had beaten him, but Moe Davis didn't.  The JI interview is refreshingly free of hysteria; unfortunately, most of the liberal and progressive responses to it are not.  I'm not optimistic about the chances of lessening the polarization that everyone loves to deplore in American political life, and when I see Democrats loving their ragegasms I know that they can't be counted on to do anything about it.

Not a Son of San Francisco

I just read Lillian Faderman's Harvey Milk: His Lives and Death, published in 2018 by Yale's Jewish Lives series.  It's a smooth read, less detailed than Randy Shilts's The Mayor of Castro Street (St. Martin's Press, 1982), but with a longer perspective.  Harvey Milk and George Moscone were assassinated more than forty years ago, and a lot has changed since then.

I only read Shilts' book once, decades ago, and don't remember much about it, so this is a point he may have covered; but as the series name indicates, one of Faderman's concerns is Harvey Milk's Jewishness.  Though he was mostly non-observant, he reveled in his New York Jewishness (see Faderman, page 4) and often drew explicit analogies between being Jewish and being gay.  I also knew how controversial he was as a San Francisco politician, often with good reason as Faderman shows.  But consider what you might call the gay Democratic establishment in San Francisco, notably the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club.  (P.S. For what it's worth, Alice B. Toklas was Jewish herself, as was her wife Gertrude Stein.)  It doesn't make much sense to refer to the Toklas club as the Old Guard, since it was founded in 1971, two years after Stonewall and only a couple of years before Milk began running for public office in San Francisco; but their mentality was clearly Old Guard.

Faderman says a couple of times that "major politicos of the gay establishment continued to regard [Milk] as an interloper with a New York accent and a kind of pushiness that they they also associated with New York" (122).  The members of the San Diego Democratic Club "found him loud, 'New-York-in-your-face,' presumptuous, abrasive - a know-it-all who had the audacity to speak for all gays" (189).  I might be overstepping to detect anti-Semitism in this reaction, if only because some of Milk's enemies, such as David Goodstein, were also Jewish, but it seems that most of them were A-gays who thought it was tolerable to be a Jew as long as you had class.  And I couldn't help thinking, as I read this material, of similar criticisms of Bernie Sanders today.  Despite Sanders's long political career, he's still seen as a presumptuous, abrasive, know-it-all upstart by 'respectable' people.  Just a thought.

Mnyeh, Typical

Jews Sans Frontieres has several good new posts up, dealing with accusations of anti-Semitism against Jeremy Corbyn and his section of the Labour Party.  It happened that I read these a day after a Facebook friend linked to an article warning of newly increased anti-Semitism. These are important and contain valid information and arguments.  But I noticed something that bothered me here.

If you look at the way the Zionist movement is throwing its weight around in the UK ever since Jeremy Corbyn became leader, it's not an edifying spectacle. I mean it must be causing antisemitism given the unjust and unfounded nature of the allegations. 

And here:

Sadly it also has the effect of making ill-informed people subscribe to the old antisemitism because of course Dave [Rich, author of a book accusing the left of anti-Semitism] and others like him, including now a Home Office Select Committee have decided that Jews and Zionists are the same thing.  All very sad and very irresponsible.

I agree that many, probably most people react to the bad behavior of a few people by ascribing it to all members of the group they associate with the bad actors.  So, for example, I captured this specimen a year ago after the Paris attacks, in comments at another blog:

And yet yesterday evening I found myself thinking “what the f*** is wrong with those people”, and I’d be lying if said I meant just the murdering a*******. I should know better. I DO know better. And yet… I don’t know any muslims. It’s so easy to slip into that lazy, wrongheaded thinking, even when you know better. 

Since it's so easy to slip into that lazy, wrongheaded thinking, I think it's important that everybody be vigilant against it, in themselves and others, and challenge it whenever you encounter it.  It's not something that occurs only far away; it happens all around us.

I disagree with JSF and the commenter, though, that this tendency has anything to do with being ill-informed, or knowing any members of the group being demonized.  For one thing, even scholars fall into it: though they are generally very well-informed, they can't or won't apply the knowledge they have.  And contrariwise, anytime someone hears about some bad behavior and asks themselves "What's wrong with those people?", meaning not the specific perpetrators but their country, their religion, their political party, they need to stop and catch themselves.  You don't need to be informed, beyond the knowledge that no group is completely homogeneous.  You don't need to know any Muslims.  The burden of proof, and it's a heavy one, lies on anyone who claims that They are all alike, They are all responsible.  The variety within groups is always enormous.  (Think of the old Jewish proverb Two Jews, three opinions.)

In particular, if someone is angry about what members of the IDF, or settlers in the Occupied Terroritories, or members of ISIS or al-Qaeda have done, and then decides to beat up (or worse) the Jew or Arab or random brown-skinned person in their neighborhood in revenge, the legal penalty should be heavy, but more important, they should be shunned and generally given a hard time by everyone in their neighborhood.  If such a person tries to justify their violence by pointing to crimes committed against the ocean, the penalty should be even stiffer.  If only because such thinking and behavior lessens the safety of everybody in the vicinity, it needs to be nipped in the bud, killed before it spreads.

P.S. I forgot to mention that in a review of Dave Rich's book that JSF quotes approvingly, the reviewer says:

Clearly, insofar as some remarks are antisemitic they need to be confronted. Conspiracy theories, e.g. that Israel founded Isis or that Jews escaped 9/11, should be dismissed out of hand. 

People keep using this word, I do not think it means what they think it means.  Those aren't "conspiracy theories," they're simple falsehoods.  They may be used in conspiracy theories, but that's not quite the same thing.  But the important thing is that Dave Rich and the constituency he's writing for are conspiracy theorists, accusing the British left of deliberately fomenting anti-Semitism in order to bring down Israel.  As I've pointed out before, conspiracy theories are a thoroughly acceptable feature of mainstream political discourse, as long as they name the "right" conspirators.

But do read JSF's new posts.  Though they are about Britain, the same tactics are being used in the US.

Luckily, We're All Enlightened Progressives Here

Someone I know "liked" this image on Facebook today, and I couldn't comment there so I'm reposting it and commenting here. It's not the first time I've seen it. It comes via a page called "The Comical Conservative," and when I've seen it before it's been shared by right-wing white racists who want to believe that they are endangered by Obama, just like the Jews under Hitler. (Never mind that if they were alive in the 30s, they'd probably have been fans of Father Coughlin and other anti-Semites, and would have objected to letting refugees from Nazism into the US.  European Jews didn't accept their fate "blindly"; the only workable option, though, was emigration, and that door was locked on both sides.) I think that's what the meme is meant to say, because the text is confused, perhaps deliberately.

Hitler didn't "get over 6 million people to follow along blindly and not fight back." By the 6 million, the meme-maker presumably means the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust, and they mostly did not follow Hitler.  There were some German Jews who did support Hitler, thinking that they could prove that they were Good Germans.  But they were few.  Before Hitler came to power (if you don't vote, you can't complain!), the Nazis relied on street violence through their thugs to intimidate their opponents, not all of whom were Jews.  After he came to power Hitler passed laws depriving German Jews of their rights as German citizens; these were enforced by more violence, this time official state violence.  Many of the 6 million weren't German -- they were in countries the Germans invaded and controlled. They didn't follow Hitler either.

The racists who share this meme think that German Jews could have resisted successfully if they hadn't been disarmed. (It's a popular racist Israeli fantasy, too.) That's doubtful, since Jews were a tiny minority in Germany: even armed resistance would have been put down brutally, and would have been used to justify Nazi propaganda against Jews as a threat to civilization. By contrast, the white American racists who share this meme are among the overwhelming "racial" majority in the US. They are generally armed, and no laws have been passed that would change that.  African-Americans, who are an oppressed minority in the US, have often resisted, sometimes but not always violently, but the white racists who made this meme don't approve; instead they see their dark compatriots as a threat to them.

The message of the meme, then, is that HitlerObama is leading white Americans, whom he has disarmed, down the primrose path to their/our ultimate elimination. The person who shared the meme from The Comical Conservative remarked, "The even more scary thing is that almost all 'western' nations are on that path, threatening something much much worse than WWII. If we are truly honest, WWIII is already underway."  Evidently he didn't think about its content either.  So why did an anti-racist, politically left person approve this nonsensical piece of racist propaganda? 

From what the friend who liked the meme on Facebook told me, she assumed that "more than 6 million" could not refer to the Jews, presumably because the iconic number for Jews killed in the Holocaust is 6 million, not "more than" 6 million.  I understand this, since it gave me pause when I first saw the meme.  Probably she read it in the light of what she knew of the person who brought the meme to her attention, another progressive.  Someone else, commenting on our exchange, said that he'd seen the same meme invoked against Donald Trump and his racist followers.  I think this confirms that they're misreading it: who would expect Trump's white racist fans to "fight back" against him, any more than one would expect German anti-Semites to "fight back" against Hitler?

I'm also put off by "almost all 'western' nations are on that path."  Why "western," and why in quotes?  Non-western nations don't have a good record either.  The strange thing, for a person as misanthropic as my friend, is that she can look at human history and see Hitler and the Holocaust as aberrations in kind, rather than in degree, let alone affect to be surprised by them.  Anti-semitism was deep-rooted in Germany, as in Europe generally; the mechanization of death began not with Zyklon B but with heavy artillery (remember that the American Civil War was the bloodiest war in history in its day), if not the invention of gunpowder; Nazi race science drew heavily on American eugenics, as well as the extermination of our pre-Columbian peoples -- who were no angels themselves, but the wrongness of mass slaughter is not dependent on the moral purity of the victims.

No doubt I'm overreacting; I don't see that as necessarily invalidating my response.  It's legitimate to be appalled by the eruption of white racism in the US.  Racists have clearly been emboldened by Donald Trump's strutting about; comparisons to Hitler are not entirely out of line.  But simple Us/Them divisions aren't going to help, and we need to think about the propaganda we ourselves appropriate.

Only I Get to Decide Which Criticisms of Me Are Valid

To a great extent I agree with this meme; it makes an important point.  But even as I clicked "Like," I heard once again that snarky voice in the back of my mind saying, "Oh, yeah?"

Rather than try to tell other minorities what they should do, I'll start with the one of which I'm a member.  I don't trust gay people to decide what is homophobic, or what is antigay bigotry.  Many gay people are themselves homophobic; if they can't spot it in themselves, they probably won't be able to spot it reliably in heterosexuals.  And they don't.

There are two phases to the question, it seems to me.  First we need to know what we're talking about when we talk about homophobia.  Merriam Webster's definition is revealing:

irrational fear of, aversion to, or discrimination against homosexuality or homosexuals

I've already discussed the odd conflation of "aversion" and "discrimination."

But I once had a revealing exchange about all this online.  I wrote that if you are uncomfortable seeing two men kissing, but not a man and a woman kissing, that is homophobia.  It didn't seem like a particularly controversial statement to me -- that discomfort is an irrational aversion, no? -- but other gay people disagreed with me vehemently.  Their argument was that if you aren't throwing rocks at a gay person, you aren't homophobic.  It also seemed that they were hesitant to label someone a homophobe merely for wanting to vomit at the sight of two boys kissing, because homophobes are, like, monsters -- demons, even.  That's odd when you consider how much fuss there has been among my people over language like "That's so gay," which doesn't constitute overt violence either.  But then, many gay people have at least claimed to be disgusted by public displays of affection between people of the same sex.  They would commonly try to mask their own homophobia by claiming to be just as disgusted by heterosexual PDAs.  The only disgust at PDAs I've ever observed among my fellow Homo-Americans, however, is disgust in gay men at lesbian PDAs.

I've known a fair number of people who were initially shocked (irrational aversion) or repulsed (ditto) by the idea of homosexuality, or the sight of same-sex couples kissing (or even holding hands), but who got over it -- without therapy.  Their original reactions were born of ignorance and socialization, and these faded away when they got to know gay people, and their repugnance faded.  Even if one wanted to call this homophobia an illness, like most illnesses it can pass without treatment.  Some people, true, cling to their revulsion; that's a lifestyle choice.  It can be judged morally, though a sensible person will also recognize that clinging can become a reflex that isn't turned off easily.

Many, perhaps most gay people regard as homophobic any criticism of born-gay theories of sexual orientation.  Anyone who doubts that homosexuality is innate will be accused of believing that being gay is a "choice" and of siding with the bigots.  This is problematic given the absence of sound scientific evidence for, or a coherent concept underlying for those theories; but as with the medical model in general, the conclusion comes first and the evidence later, if ever.  And the born-gay faith is compatible with considerable internalized homophobia.  (Would anyone choose a lifestyle that caused them to be hated, despised, persecuted ...?)

Having said that, I notice that "Gentiles don't get to decide what is anti-Semitic" is conspicuously absent from the meme.  I suspect that many if not most American Jews would agree that any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic, unless the critic is a Jew, in which case he or she is a self-hating Jew. Should this be allowed to stand?  I know that the acquaintance who posted the meme on Facebook is critical of Israel, as am I, and would dismiss the contention and the accusation.  But this can't stand, on the meme's simplistic terms. 

"Non-patriots don't get to decide what is anti-American" is also absent from the list.  So is "Non-Christians don't get to decide what is anti-Christian," along with "Non-Catholics don't get to decide what is anti-Catholic," and even "Non-fundamentalists don't get to decide what violates religious freedom."  What complicates the problem -- and also indicates the way out of it -- is that not all members of any of these groups agree, about much of anything.  There is a wide range of attitudes to homosexuality and antigay bigotry among gay people, for example; many critics of Israel are Jewish; many critics of the Vatican and the Catholic hierarchy are Catholic; feminists take a wide range of stances; and so on.  It's easy, and all too common, to dismiss the dissenters as willing victims of false consciousness, but that won't work: who gets to decide who has authentic consciousness?

But too much good work on women's issues has been done by men, good work on gay issues has been done by heterosexuals, good work on race has been done by white people, and so on, to limit discussion to the simplistic level of this meme.   Beyond that level, what matters is the quality of the arguments a person makes.  By that standard, much of the discourse of oppression by the oppressed groups doesn't measure up, and it's not news that majorities in such groups are often hostile to the arguments made by the more thoughtful among them/us.  Which doesn't mean that academics and other intellectuals should automatically have the last word either; nor can an outsider dismiss the complaints of the oppressed by pointing to one or two among them who support the oppressor.  You have to acquaint yourself with the range of opinions in any group, and then think about them.  That's a lot harder, but it's what has to be done if anyone's going to learn anything.

The Passion of the Moral Mind

Yo, Is This Racist? suddenly erupted onto my Facebook feed recently,* for the first time in months.

Anonymous asked: I came across this libertarian who said she didn't believe in women's rights but individual rights.  Is it safe to say she's a bigot?

Bigots, always think they’ve found some kind of rhetorical loophole that allows them to ignore the obvious nature of existing inequality, that the reason people who aren’t total pieces of shit support “women’s rights” or “black rights” or whatever, is because those groups of people (and others) have fewer rights than the people who control everything, and that allows them to pretend that people who want more equality in the world are over-reacting, or even that we need “men’s rights” or “white pride” or whatever.

It’s telling, however, that if someone only espouses any rhetoric about equality in support of the PEOPLE WHO ALREADY HAVE FUCKING POWER, they miiiiiiiiight just be complete piece of shit bigots, or, I guess, if you want to be nice, so fucking stupid and clueless that they’ve been fooled by this pathetic argument. Could be either, I guess.

It occurs to me that I haven't mentioned a book I read lately that I found really useful: The Tactical Uses of Passion: An Essay on Power, Reason, and Reality,** by the anthropologist F. G. Bailey.  I hope to read some more of his work, but what I want to bring from The Tactical Use of Passion is Bailey's distinction between what he calls "the moral mind" and "the civic mind":

The moral self excludes, we argued, ideas of right and duty.  But it is evident that such phrases as “not oneself” and “above oneself” make sense only if we measure performance against the rights and duties expected of the person.  In some of these cases displays of emotion (for example, being “beside oneself”) indicate a flaw in the self, an inadequacy.  A person who is beside himself is unable to undertake the responsibilities that normally attach to his status.  Often the judgment means that he is absolved from guilt: “He could not help it.”  Evidently this self, unlike the moral self, is validated by accounting procedures.  It is the “civic” self and it includes an element that is apart from emotions, either dominating them as a control or standing as a rival for the use of available avenues of expression.  In other words, the “civic” self signals that a mind is at work.  Let us look at situations in which this idea of the self controlling emotion (rather than being revealed in displays of emotion) appears [51].

... What reasons could be advanced to justify such an image of the weakness of rationality and the strength of passion?  First the moral self carries its own defenses in that it is rooted in the passions and is therefore immune to rational arguments.  It has a facility for twisting and rendering unintelligible negative messages from outside the relationship: a jamming device, so to speak.  This, too, is a kind of façade: a pretense that the real world can be left to go its own way.  It is also a shield keeping away what Weber calls” the cold skeletal hands of rational orders” and “the banality of everyday routine” [77] ...

I hope it will be fairly clear why Andrew Ti's outburst brought Bailey's discussion to mind.  Bailey doesn't consider the "the moral mind" to be bad; it's one way to organize and prepare for action.  "The civic mind" comes on the job when goals and directions have been decided by "moral" means, and it's time to figure out how to get to the goal.

The thing is, in a narrow technical sense, that Libertarian Lady was correct.  Civil Rights, for example, are rights of the individual, not rights of a group.  But facts should never get in the way of a good ragegasm.

So I take Ti to be exercising his moral mind, waxing passionate for Righteousness.  But my civic mind is at work now, and I'm reminded of some of Sartre's remarks on anti-Semitism and irrationality:

I mentioned awhile back some remarks by anti-Semites, all of them absurd: "I hate Jews because they make servants insubordinate, because a Jewish furrier robbed me, etc."  Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies.  They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge.  But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words.  The anti-Semites have the right to play.  They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors.  They delight in act­ing in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.  If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.  It is not that they are afraid of being convinced.  They fear only to appear ridiculous or to prejudice by their embarrassment their hope of winning over some third person to their side.

I recognize the syndrome Sartre was writing about here, and I think this applies to Ti no less than to the "libertarian" he's discussing.

* To be honest, not all that recently.  I'm trying to clear out some posts from my backlog from the Drafts folder.

** Cornell University Press, 1983.

A State of One's Own

The question arose on Facebook last night whether there's a relationship between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.  I wasn't able to comment on it myself, which was just as well, but this remark fascinated me:

Being anti Zionist is being against Jews having a state in their historic home. Seeing as every other religious group have states in their historic homes, I'd call that anti Semitic[.]

Sometimes the claim is less specific, declaring that Jews have a right to a state of their own (as "every other religious group" allegedly has), without necessarily laying claim to a specific stretch of territory in the Middle East.  But in whatever form, it makes no sense to me.

What, for example, would be "the historic home" of Christianity?  The Jesus cult originated in Judea and Galilee; wouldn't this mean that Christians have a right to a state in their historic home?  Buddhism originated in northern India but, like Christianity, spread around the world.  For that matter, Judaism also spread around the world, though in much smaller numbers because Judaism is not a missionary religion.  Europe is the historic home of a variety of non-Yahwist religions.  So are the Americas.  Which of those religions can and does have a state in some piece of turf?

For that matter, what is the historic home of, say, Methodism?  It originated in England, yet Methodists don't have a state of their own.  Except for Catholics, who have Vatican City, no Christian sect does.  Some countries have official state religions, but I hope no one would claim that Germany, for example, as the historic home of Lutheranism, is entitled to treat all non-Lutherans as second-class citizens.  When racists try to block immigration, they are usually at least as concerned about language and "culture" as they are about religion.  And despite those who want the USA to be a Christian nation, this country has no official religion, but does have an official policy of religious toleration and pluralism.

The argument that Jews have a right to their own state, wherever it's located, seems to agree that a state properly will consist of one "race," one "people," one language, one religion.  It would then follow that discrimination against minority races, peoples, languages, religions is legitimate, and Zionists simply want a state where they can push others around.  Perhaps they are entitled to such a state, but it would also follow that complaints about discrimination, marginalization, even persecution of minorities are invalid.  Anti-semitism in Europe, the Middle East outside of Israel, or anywhere else, is on this Zionist argument perfectly legitimate, as is racism generally: it's merely the natural outcome of a state defined as a "homeland" for religion and ethnicity, and if you're not comfortable where you are, you should go back where you came from, or where your distant ancestors came from.  If there other people living there, you can just kick them out and take back your historic home.

It's true that Judaism is a bit of a holdover from the days when religion was usually associated with place and culture. The Greeks had their gods, the Romans had theirs, the Babylonians and Assyrians and Egyptians had theirs, and Israel had its gods. (It took a long time for Israel to purge all of Yahweh's competitors.)  All of these states had permeable boundaries, however: some of their natives traveled for trade or whatever reason, taking their gods with them, and natives of other nations brought their gods with them when they came to trade.  This was true of Israelite religion too: there was a diaspora even before it was accelerated by various national disasters: the conquest by Babylon, the conquest by Rome. Buddhism, and later Christianity and Islam broke with this model, detaching religion from native land -- and also to a great extent from family.

So India is the "historic home" of Buddhism as well as Hinduism and Jainism; but India also has a large Muslim population.  China is the "historic home" of Confucianism and Taoism, but it also provided fertile soil for Buddhism.  Should these interlopers (and sometimes invaders) be kicked out so that India and China can be the states of their respective religions?  This would mean that all Buddhists in East Asia would either have to relocate to India, abandon their religion for the supposedly native religion where they live, or accept a status of religious aliens there?  This would solve the problem of Tibetan Buddhism, which would simply have to give up any claims to that country.  I don't think many people anywhere would want to follow this logic to its conclusion.  Linking religion to place and ethnicity is one of the defining symptoms of racism, nativism, and religious bigotry.

The Rejection of Shame

I'm still reading Claudia Roth Pierpont's Roth Unbound, advancing chronologically through Philip Roth's career.  For some reason she skipped the long story "On the Air," which appeared in issue 10 of the paperback-magazine New American Review, back in 1970; I know I still have that issue around here somewhere.  It has almost never been reprinted, apparently because Roth himself hates it.  But it fits so neatly into that period, which includes several intentionally provocative works, from Portnoy to the Nixon satire Our Gang. And incidentally, one of the more amazing bits in Roth Unbound is a page-and-a-half excerpt from Nixon's White House Tapes, most of which I read before I realized that it was not a quotation from Our Gang but the real thing:

NIXON: Roth is of course a Jew
HALDEMAN: Oh yes ... He's brilliant in a sick way [73].

Anyway, I'm now reading Pierpont's discussion of Roth's middle period, initiated by The Ghost Writer in 1979.  This is the novel where the protagonist, Nathan Zuckerman, meets a young woman who might or might not be Anne Frank, if Frank had survived Bergen-Belsen and immigrated to the US.  Roth was interested in her status as a sort of Jewish saint, had been wondering for years about her appeal.  As Pierpont explains it:

For all the tears that have been shed for Anne Frank, has her book really taught anybody anything?

The question may seem naive.  But Nathan, in the voice of his imaginary Anne, comes to an answer about the lessons of the book that accords, perhaps unsurprisingly, with Roth's defense of his stories years earlier.  The Diary has touched so many people -- and here Roth says "aloud" the most hazardous thing he felt he had to say -- because there was nothing notably Jewish about this mostly secular, Dickens-reading, European family who just happened to be Jews.  "A harmless Chankukah song" once a year, a few Hebrew words, a few candles, a few presents; there was hardly more to it than that.  They were in no way foreign, strange, or embarrassing -- and look what happened to them.  They were entirely charming, in fact, especially, of course, Anne.  And look what happened to her.  What did it take to provoke what happened?  "It took nothing -- that was the horror.  And that was the truth.  And that was the power of her book."  As Roth had once replied to the rabbis, it is impossible to control anti-Semitism through exemplary behavior, accomplishments, or charm.  Because anti-Semitism originates not in the Jew but in the anti-Semites.  Repression, pretension, "putting on a good face": all useless.  Anne's diary offered a double lesson, really.  For Gentiles, a lesson in common humanity, the nightmare made real because of how familiar Anne and her family seemed.  And for Jews, the fact that this familiarity had not done a thing to save them [118].

The stories Roth had to defend years earlier were in his first book, Goodbye Columbus, which had outraged many Jewish readers and spokesmen for (as they thought) airing Jewish dirty laundry where the Gentiles could see it.  At least once he was asked, "Mr. Roth, would you write the same stories you've written if you were living in Nazi Germany?" (14).  Roth was not living in Nazi Germany, of course.  His take on Anne Frank was in part an answer to that very stupid question.  For one thing, German Jews were among the most assimilated in Europe; all their efforts to minimize their differences made them no less vulnerable.  Hasidim who stood out were demonized in ways that often sound familiar from antigay propaganda now, but assimilated Jews were demonized as a Fifth Column, a secret menace pretending to be normal while burrowing away at the foundations of Western Civilization.  As Pierpont puts it, anti-Semitism (or any kind of bigotry, really) originates not in the Jew but in the anti-Semite.  I've argued before that trying to appease bigots by conforming to predominant gender norms is just as futile, for the same reason: flamboyant "stereotypical" queers will outrage many people, but others will be just as outraged by non-stereotypical queers who pretend to be normal.  This doesn't mean that all gay people or Jews should strive to be visible, only that it's useless to rationalize conformity as a remedy for bigotry.

Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a fine piece yesterday that (among other things) addressed the same point for African-Americans.

When W.E.B. Du Bois, in 1897, claimed that the "first and greatest" step toward addressing "the Negro Problem," lay in correcting the "immorality, crime and laziness among the Negroes themselves" he was wrong. No amount of morality could have prevented the overthrow of Wilmington by white supremacists—the only coup in American history—a year later. When Booker T. Washington urged blacks to use "every iota of influence that we possess" to "get rid of the criminal and loafing element of our people," he was wrong. When Marcus Garvey claimed that "the greatest stumbling block in the way of progress in the race has invariably come from within the race itself," he was dead wrong. When Malcolm X claimed that "the white man is too intelligent to let someone else come and gain control of the economy of his community,” and asserted that black people "will let anybody come in and take control of the economy of your community," he was wrong. He knew the game was rigged. He did not know how much.

In his book The Condemnation of Blackness, the historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad notes that a few years after Du Bois made his proclamations he was shocked to find himself cited by unreformed white supremacists.

Besides, many of the black people who were lynched in Du Bois' day were in fact responsible, disciplined, and successful: that was why the mobs targeted them.  (Again, like Jews -- stereotyped as rich -- and gay men -- ditto.)

That isn't to deny, of course, that many black people are irresponsible -- Coates addresses that elsewhere in the piece -- or that many gay people are.  But so are many white people, and many straights.  Whites may complain about low-class white trash, but they don't see the misconduct of other whites as invalidating their own privilege, and they certainly don't expect to be judged by it.  The same goes for straights versus gays, or Gentiles versus Jews, or Christians versus Muslims, or men versus women ... any such division, really.

In another book I read recently, What Is English and Why Should We Care? (Oxford, 2013), Tim Machan says that colonialists preferred that "natives" speak broken English, which could be despised as a symptom of laziness and/or inferior intellect, rather than fluent standard English, which caused the rulers anxiety on numerous levels.  This double bind persists, I think, in whites' contempt for poor blacks (or other Others -- it also applied to European immigrants a hundred years ago) combined with hatred of those who succeed in whites' domains.  This accounts for the racist hatred of Barack Obama, as can be seen in the memes which depict him as an African witch doctor or other "primitive" caricature.  But it can also be seen in white liberal middle-class caricatures of inbred rednecks and ignorant fundamentalists.  The Other is a mirror in which we try very hard not to see ourselves.