I don’t know a single person, from the heretics to the messianists and all the in-betweens, who think that the Judaic State is functional today. People with different degrees of attachments or detachments, the geeks absorbed in the Talmudic abstractions, the utopian dreamers living in the projected past, the rebels and the swindlers, no one can stare at the present without averting his or her eyes.
How would one define a contemporary post-Judaism or post-Orthodoxy? The two most significant ideologies of the last centuries – Marxism and Freudism represent a post-Judaic eruption, except they don’t brand themselves as Judaism anymore. Similarly Christianity and Islam are the plagiarized branches of Judaism, even after they severed their ties with the trunk. The Jewish history itself is replete with what I call the source code hacks, indeed Chassidism itself was a post-orthodox eruption, so was Kabbalah, etc. Is the evolution possible today?
Speaking about the future is futile; you never know when a “black swan” will glide in unexpectedly. We are constructed to see the world in a rear view mirror. Sometimes we can master the heroism to glimpse the present, but never the future.
Contemporaneously I observe two main groups of people in various stages of the Judaic rejection. First are the tiny minority who managed to escape relatively unscathed. You can literally count them on one hand. The second group is the vast majority. I call it nominally the Chulent Brigade, these are the people who reject or more likely were rejected by the religious communities. They feel that the secular world doesn’t understand them, the religious world doesn’t accept them, so they live in the in-between, the intergalactic void. A friend compared them to the Eastern European dissidents – “the commies are evil but the West doesn’t get us”.
Psychologically people who were subjected to the various flavors of orthodox indoctrination can be compared to the victims of a sexual abuse. The survivors of the abuse are forever torn between the hate towards the abusers and the longing, even love. This very confusion is the lethal and unrelenting legacy of a sexual abuse, and blasphemously speaking, the confusion of is the staple of a ideological or religious indoctrination. I just don’t meet many people who can break from this.
In America this predicament is only worse. There is the unprecedented chasm with the secular society. And then there is the cruelty of the mass produced indoctrination. What was traditionally, by and large, a private religious instruction, turned into the factory-like school system, where an ego and dissent are crushed by the debilitating group-think. The proud graduates are measured, rewarded and awarded a Stockholm syndrome degree. Is a post-abuse, a post-Stockholm syndrome possible for a post-human? Not even God can ask that much from a mere mortal.
Illustrations by Hugh MacLeod
Timothy Sandefur links to the video about Stephen Wiltshire, the autistic savant memorizing Rome. I have seen and linked to this video years back but Timothy makes an interesting point:
“The one thing I would challenge is the term “beautiful mind.” Wiltshire’s ability is breathtaking, to be sure, but the capacity to forget, and to not be fixated by tedious detail, is crucial to the function of a normal human mind.”
So really, we all have the latent capacity to remember as good as that of Stephen Wiltshire, but we also have the more important capacity to forget, to sort and prioritize information. This is different from what Tyler Cowen calls in his book “autistic cognitive strengths”. Tyler means “channeling”, concentrating on a certain area, or more precisely tuning out of multiple channels.
I am not sure what Timothy refers to with a “normal human mind”, but for whatever reason we evolved to forget. So if forgetfulness makes us “normal” shouldn’t the ideal education teach us how to forget instead of how to remember?
The Seven Liberal Arts are the Trivium (you start by learning these):
And the Quadrivium (your “graduate disciplines”)
- geometry
- arithmetic
- music
- astronomy
During the Renaissance Leon Battista Alberti, Leonardo da Vinci, and Giorgio Vasari argued for the inclusion of architecture, painting and sculpture. Let me guess who are the muses in the Sandro Botticelli’s fresco (the one with the glasses sitting on top is the shadchan, she doesn’t count).
Sandro Botticelli, A Young Man Being Introduced to the Seven Liberal Arts c. 1484. Fresco transferred to canvas, Musée du Louvre, Paris
Starting from the upper left:
- Grammar with the parchment,
- Astronomy with the crab,
- Rhetoric is trying to say something.
The three we see from the back, starting from the lower left:
- Music with the tambourine,
- Either Arithmetic or Logic (no signs of the “trade”),
- Geometry with the angle,
- The muse standing next to the young man is also either Arithmetic or Logic. I say he probably picked the Logic. The young man needs to go back to school for picking the “logic”…
Sandro Botticelli is published with permission from the Web Gallery of Art
Giovannino de'Grassi, Gothic letters from a model book Illumination. Parchment, Biblioteca Civica, Bergamo. 1390
I will give you a one sentence solution on how to improve education on a personal and national level. In fact if implemented by a country I guarantee that this country will be propelled into the economic leadership virtually instantaneously. The invention of the alphabet set the stage for current civilization. More specifically Judaic civilization runs on Hebrew, the Roman Empire on Latin, Islam on Arabic, philosophy on Greek, etc. Reformation set the stage for the vernacular, the printing press, literature, journalism, theater, industrialization and modern world as we know it. These are all codes, programming languages civilizations use. In the world defined by the Internet people communicate via a programming code. At the moment, similarly to the dawn of the original language based civilizations, only geeky priests can read and write and often they rip the financial benefit. Any nation that takes seriously the programming literacy and introduces computer science into schools is the clear contender for leadership. Douglas Rushkoff writes about this – It’s not too late for humanity to survive the digital:
“Computers and networks finally offer us the ability to write. And we do write with them. But the underlying capability of the computer era is actually programming—which almost none of us really knows how to do. We simply use the programs that have been made for us, and enter our blog text in the appropriate box on the screen. We teach kids how to use software to write, but not how to write software. This means they have access to the capabilities given to them by others, but not the power to determine the value-creating capabilities of the technology for themselves.
Like those failed media renaissances before this one, we remain one step behind the capability actually being offered us. Only an elite—sometimes a new elite, but an elite nonetheless—gain the ability to fully exploit the new medium on offer. The rest learn to be satisfied with gaining the ability offered by the last new medium. The people hear while the rabbis read; the people read while those with access to the printing press write; we write, while our techno-elite program. As a result, a majority of people remain one dimensional leap of awareness and capability behind those who manage to monopolize access to the real power of any media age.”
If computer is at the center of our civilization than being able to write in computer speak is the basis of literacy. The choice is pretty stark, slavery to the new priesthood or freedom. And I know the American sentiment. The only way to earn the freedom in the new world is to master the written language. Towards this immediate goal teaching of computer science in schools is the most important priority for education. The old argument that all those “machines” are just the chariots for content is undermined by the reality that the costs of content gravitates to zero, while the price of platforms that run the content scales exponentially. Yet there is a concern that this skill is outsourceable. Indeed there are scribes who could be compared to the copier monks during the manuscript era. Yet the original texts and supervision of the scribes is still very much by the new priesthood, capable or reading and writing the canonical codex.
Image published with permission from the Web Gallery of Art
Nassim Taleb – Fooled by Rationalism; Lecturing Birds How to Fly:
“The greatest problem in knowledge is the “lecturing birds how to fly” effect. Let us call it the error of rationalism. In Fat Tony’s language, it would be what makes us the suckers of all suckers. Consider two types of knowledge. The first type is not exactly “knowledge”; its ambiguous character prevents us from calling it exactly knowledge. It a way of doing thing that we cannot really express in clear language, but that we do nevertheless, and do well. The second type is more like what we call “knowledge”; it is what you acquire in school, can get grades for, can codify, what can be explainable, academizable, rationalizable, formalizable, theoretizable, codifiable, Sovietizable, bureaucratizable, Harvardifiable, provable, etc.
To make things simple, just look at the second type of knowledge as something so stripped of ambiguity that an autistic person (a high functioning autistic person, that is) can easily understand it.
The error of rationalism is, simply, overestimating the role and necessity of the second type, the academic knowledge, in human affairs. It is a severe error because not only much of our knowledge is not explainable, academizable, rationalizable, formalizable, theoretizable, codifiable, Sovietizable, bureaucratizable, Harvardifiable, etc., but, further, that such knowledge plays such a minor life that it is not even funny.
We are very likely to believe that skills and ideas that we actually acquired by doing, or that came naturally to us (as we already knew by our innate biological instinct) came from books, ideas, and reasoning. We get blinded by it; there may even be something in our brains that makes us suckers for the point…”
As footnote to Nassim, I have a minor variance. What Nassim calls knowledge I call the field of play. It is the mental gymnastics, the eternal geek game. It really makes the difference, it is the science, the art, dance, even sports. And it’s in the “flying birds” category because for people who are consumed and obsessed by it, it comes as natural as a step. The problem is the entire super-culture that feeds off it. This reminds me the sports stats industry, especially in America. Athletes play games but stats are meticulously preserved and give the fodder for endless commentary, forever talking about the flying birds instead of flying. But Nassim is right that this knowledge super-structure is pretty stupid.
One of the biggest flaws in this universe is that fortune and misfortune are cumulative. There are steps to success and visa versus. Say you are born to fortune, go to the right school, mix with the right people, it all adds up. Chris Dixon writes about getting a job in venture capital – “VCs I know only recruit from Wharton, Harvard, Stanford.” So there is a pyramid that you climb step by step and missteps are fatal. For sure there are aberrations. The exceptions are few but people like to yap about them. People endlessly repeat stories about a person who came from nowhere, this gives them hope. People also love to talk about someone who had it all and lost it all, this give them pleasure. Even the statistical anomaly of success is mostly removed during the economic collapse, it remains just the exceptions to the rule and the rules still rule.
As promised there is a photographic update on this, Professor Cox’ retirement. ►►►read more
Sir Edwin Landseer, R.A. Head of a cow, ca.1810-12
The Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard University has the traditional grazing rights for his cows at Harvard Yard. The current holder of the chair, Harvey Cox is exercising his right and bringing a cow named “Faith” to graze in Harvard Yard this coming Thursday. Boston Globe – Bovine to visit Harvard Yard. I will be sure to check this out.
Image licensed courtesy of Picture Library of the Royal Academy of Arts
Did you ever wonder how children survive the abuse of religious and ideological indoctrination? Slate – Why Jaycee Dugard Bonded With Her Kidnappers:
“The House of Desolation is well-known because the boy was Rudyard Kipling, who, in his autobiography, answered the questions that are always asked about abused children during the first shock of discovery: Why didn’t they tell anyone? Why did they cooperate? Those questions are being asked now about Jaycee Lee Dugard, who was, police say, held for 18 years by the couple who kidnapped her at age 11. Why didn’t she tell anyone? How is it possible that Dugard not only raised the two daughters she had by her alleged kidnapper with him and his wife, but also worked in his printing business?
To Kipling, this sort of question reflected a lack of understanding of children, and childhood: “Children tell little more than animals,” he wrote,”for what comes to them they accept as eternally established.”
One of those universals, no surprise, is routine and constancy—the small, unchanging certainties that make even the weirdest domestic life feel eternally established. Child-rearers everywhere struggle to make the kids’ world a place where the family rules always hold. And parents everywhere connect their lessons to strong emotions. Americans tend to praise good behavior more than Chinese parents, who are more likely to instill shame over lapses, Quinn writes, but the strategy is the same: Make the child remember what is important by connecting the lesson to an intense feeling, whether induced by fear or the desire to please.
***
The control that authorities say Garrido had over his victims was not that of a brainwashing monster— it was that of a parent. “I’m so proud of my girls. They don’t know any curse words,” Garrido told Ally Jacobs, the Berkeley police officer whose suspicions about the children cracked the case. “We raised them right. They don’t know anything bad about the world.” Garrido’s approach to child-rearing even included the typical parent’s decision to let the children attend neighbors’ birthday parties. That methods of raising children are deeply alike even as ideologies vary is, of course, the reason people don’t agree where to draw the line between a religious household and a crazy-cult one.
***
As a number of psychiatrists and therapists have said, part of the work ahead for the three victims, Dugard and her two children, will consist in reconciling their new, free lives with their old one. Removed from the circumstances that made them act as they did, they may have trouble forgiving, or even understanding, their former selves. But a look at memoirs by children raised in cults suggests their prospects aren’t all bleak.”
Of course bounding with kidnappers is not unique for children and has been shown during numerous prolonged hostage situations.
Royal Academy Diploma Work given by Sir Frank Brangwyn, The Market Stall, 1919
Hugh MacLeod tweeted yesterday: “Three things worth doing in life: Breeding, loving and learning. Everything else is filler…” I will take this aphorism for a spin.
- Breeding – Offspring and fertility. A woman’s life long obsession with being attractive, the confidence of being able to arouse a man. A man’s sense of self worth depending on his ability to meet the challenge.
- Loving – the intoxication and the yearning. The “loving” is never complete if unrequited. “Speed” Levitch said it must be reciprocal. Love is about being loved, about validation of what you are. Loving includes being respected, the accolades and appreciation. If you love a man or a god and they don’t love you back, you can’t put a check mark here.
- Learning – Trying to understand your place in the universe, an opportunity to satisfy the natural thirst, an opening to quench the curiosity. The desire to travel and see the world. By no means is this a textual manipulation.
I have never met a person who had all three in the bag. If you imagine the world as a puzzle and the goal of the game to line up all three, the jackpot is theoretical. The vast majority of people manage only one of the three life essentials. There are a small number of the lucky bastards who lined up two of those. But the fascinating human condition is that even if a single goal is at bay out of the three, humans are in a state of constant agony, like a chronic plain, the realization that a defining component of life is missing. They constantly think about it and if you are a friend you have the privilege of always hearing about it. Perhaps the wisdom is the recognition of the bargain, and if you managed to score two of the three, acceptance of your luck. Just like at the end of his remarkable speech Alain de Botton says that “every vision of success has to admit what it is loosing out on”.
When people say “money is not important” they mean it isn’t amongst the three essential goals of life but no one ever argued that money indeed can facilitate all three. Or on a more nuanced level the traditional “bazaar” is treated in the Middle Eastern cultures as an elaborate ruse to cover up the transactions in the intangibles, the ritual of pretending to trade in physical objects. Pay respect to haggling, a breeding dance with love and knowledge.
P.S. I was thinking where creativity fits into the scheme. I have to say that creativity is a part of learning. People dance, paint, write code, do scientific research, play ball, all in order to think. These are the rosary beads of learning. As McLuhan said an artist confronts “present as his material because it is the area of challenge to the whole sensory life.” This is the process of learning and occasionally there is a byproduct, a breakthrough of discovery.
Image licensed courtesy of Picture Library of the Royal Academy of Arts
Raphael, The School of Athens, Stanza della Segnatura, Palazzi Pontifici, Vatican
Few moths back Seth Godin wrote a seminal post – Intentionally building communities (More hallway!):
“These tribes of people are arguably a more valuable creation than the fish that were caught or the physics that were learned, right? And yet, most of the time we don’t see the obvious opportunity–if you intentionally create the connections, you’ll get more of them, and better ones too. If the hallway conversations at a convention are worth more than the sessions, why not have more and better hallways?”
We are in the midst of the radical changes in both education and the correlating changes in the architectural building planning. Let’s say there are classrooms and hallways in a college. Most people are making decisions to go to a college based on the classrooms criteria, i.e. professors, libraries, reputation, major, etc. But equally important is the hallways consideration. Does a college have the right mix of students where one can build a life long network? Is there a quality “hanging out” space on campus? This seems so obvious since most of the jobs people get are not based on the reputation of their professors (except the small number of academic jobs) but based on the people they know. This is triply important today when the essential knowledge, including world class lectures are free online. The hallways consideration becomes the key consideration. Does a college have the right blend of people with similar or even dissimilar backgrounds where one can build the deep connections? Is the community around campus has a broad selection of the virtual hallways, i.e. opportunities to meet people. When selecting a college think of it as a mixer. Forget about the life long pursuits; think about the life long friends. Jobs and professions change with the accelerated speed, good friends stay with you forever. Long live the hallway!
Shmuley Boteach’s Seven Challenges of Chabad’s Future published on his blog:
- Shore up its educational institutions.
- Make moral educational and personal introspection an integral part of a Lubavitch upbringing.
- Establish tribunals that allow Shluchim to air grievances in a fair and impartial setting.
- Fix the Shidduch system.
- Teach Chabad Rabbis and Shluchim that public oratory is not just a regurgitation of a Sicha.
- Make Chabad a meritocracy and not an aristocracy.
- Address the growing number of Chabad youth who are abandoning the community.
Read more on Shmuley’s blog.
The Seven Challenges to Shmuley:
- Surely these are not just challenges to Chabad specifically. These are the challenges to the Jewish cultural legacy in general and the orthodoxy in particular. Even the point about the tribunals, although unique to Shluchim, could be spun as a complaint about the impotent, corrupt and protectionist religious courts in all denominations.
- Virtually all of the suggestions have been experimented by the so called Modern Orthodoxy. Chabad already is considered modern, at least by the rest of the Chassidim. The fact the “the army” of Shlucim live amongst secular Jews and their children are influenced by the culture will only accelerate this process.
- If you want to criticize a culture, please start by shoving that elephant under the carpet. Namely that all of this is the result of mismanagement and the relegation of the communal responsibilities at best or even deliberate negligence on the part of the Rebbe himself. You can no longer honestly get away by blaming the lieutenants, even if there is a letter from the Rebbe to prove any given point on any given day. Yet no reform is possible till the movement will assume a sober posture about the role of the Rebbe in the current malaise. The best one can say is that he was disheartened by the state of affairs and hoped for a messianic cataclysm. But perhaps the worst is true; he was definitely aware and complacent about the incompetent mismanagement of the institutions. When the movement will be honest about the Rebbe it will no longer be a movement, a catch 22 here.
- The “regurgitating of sichos” is the most grotesque detriment, no argument there. But there is the deeper problem that underlines this phenomenon. The derivative, the closed source propriety code needs to be broken. The regurgitation is an expression of the pervasive derivative thinking that dimmed the Jewish discourse for thousands of years, not unique to Chabad.
- The appeal to Chabad as a centralized entity is misguided. The power is never given it has to be taken. Stop the appeal to the larger entity, the entire corporate paradigm is so the last fascist century. Speaking about the “ego management”. Who calls himself the “America’s Rabbi”? Right, the America’s Rabbi has as much to say about what I eat for lunch as the Word Jewish Congress. Is the detox from the centralized thinking one of the challenges?
- Why give the impression that Chabad is all about Shluchim, this is a shortsighted concern. You want depth, don’t talk about breadth.
- Finally the challenge of addressing “the growing number of Chabad youth who are abandoning the community” is as productive as the talk about the urgent closing of the Mexican border.
