The Price of Living One’s Philosophy

Cover Illustration by Caroline Church for
Confessions of a Young Philosopher by Abigail L. Rosenthal (forthcoming).

At our Torah Study class this week, we took up the concluding portion of the Book of Exodus. Mostly it deals with instructions for constructing the Mishkan (Tent of Meeting). That’s the portable temple housing the famous box (the Ark of the Covenant) that holds the ten commandments graven on their two stone tablets. The specifications for the Mishkan are so detailed and literal that I wondered how on earth our rabbi could find anything to say about them that could be interesting!

Nothing daunted, Rabbi Sigal Brier plunged in, with her candid and creative question: what cherished possession do we each bring to the pathway we feel called to make our own? Thus she found a contemporary analogy for the task faced by each Israelite, who was asked to contribute a personal gift to the building and ornamenting of the Tent of Meeting.

Our group quickly caught the idea. Their examples – such as that of the musician who taught inner city kids to play the piano and even try to learn to read a score, or the mother whose daughter had Attention Deficit Disorder but overcame it in the days before ADD had been identified as a disability – were heartfelt and interesting. I held back from participating, thinking that work in my field lacked the concreteness of their analogies. After all, I thought, what you bring to philosophy wasn’t like bringing bejeweled bracelets to the Mishkan. But then I thought, maybe it is. Here’s how I described my contribution.

When I first entered the field of philosophy, the very sounds of the words philosophers used seemed to me so beautiful! I heard them the way my musician co-religionist friend hears music. I couldn’t write the equivalent of the musical score for any single note on the instrument of philosophy, but even so I loved to listen.

In time, the terms took on significance. But I could still recall how vague and uncertain my early grasp had been. So I made it a principle not to write anything for publication that I hadn’t myself experienced in one way or another.

If an engineer designs a bridge and it falls down, you know it. Nobody is fooled. But if a philosopher builds a bridge-of-words, going from nowhere to nowhere, and the verbal tour de force draws recognition and respect from other philosophers, the unsoundness will be far less obvious. 

There was another aspect of my own situation when I entered the field. I wasn’t the first person to get here! In any field, you have to know what’s been done up to the present time, before you can figure out what needs your contribution now. Almost all the philosophers whose work had intellectual credibility and cultural impact had been men. My life experience overlapped theirs in many ways, but it also differed – as a woman’s life differs from a man’s.

Well, you might say, didn’t feminism – that exciting new slant on the life of the mind – make room for this very difference? Why should the his and hers contrasts continue to present any philosophic challenge? Well, for one thing, unlike many feminists, I personally had not found that being-a-woman was a mere social construct. Pregnant out of wedlock is not a social construct. Men don’t lactate.  

Come on girls, get real!

Nor did my own experience confirm the claims, being made by some feminists I knew, that the presence of women in the field would necessarily add the qualities of nurture and compassion to philosophy’s ancient practices.

At that time I lived in Manhattan, where I had the chance to attend gatherings of the feminists who were then coming to be well-known. Those early events were typically held at the Park Avenue penthouse apartments provided by hegemonic, patriarchal husbands who were not at home to greet afternoon guests because they were sweating it out on Wall Street!  

One husband I heard about was an exception. He was stuck at home because he was dying of cancer. His wife was home too, writing a book about her experience as a woman whose husband was dying of cancer. If the phone rang during her writing hours, he would pick up the receiver and explain to callers that his wife was busy working on her book and would get back to them later.

No, the question of what philosophic difference my experience as a woman might make did not get handled by claiming that women were innately compassionate. Nor that femininity was merely, border-to-border, a social construct. So the difference it might make to any work I did would turn out a nuanced one. No one-size-fits-all answer would deal with it adequately.

I came to reconfigure the question in the following way: would I find it possible and desirable to live inside a world corresponding to views I defend? Philosophy is an inherently costly discipline. We are honor bound not to affirm what we can’t sincerely believe. Or live out.

As I write, the streets of Paris are piling up with garbage. The French garbage workers – unwilling to accept the government’s plan to stave off budget ruin by deferring their retirement age for another year or two – have gone on strike. As a New Yorker, I feel for the municipality. You didn’t mess with our sanitation workers. They too had the City by the throat.

That said, I hope I may be permitted to wonder what the Parisian postmoderns – who take reality itself to be a “text” – will do as the rats move toward Paris, perhaps – hearing with their good rodent ears – that the pickings are good in that beautiful city where fashionable opinions are formed.

Are the rats also a text?

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Loving Thyself

Primavera (Spring) by Sandro Botticelli ca. 1470

Sometimes the chief happenings of one’s life occur in the form of inward shifts. That’s been true of me lately.

Late Saturday night, we returned from five days of neuropathy treatments in California. In the evenings, we dined with some fine people. But the main event that was personal was invisible to anyone but me.

When I first read Jerry’s God: An Autobiography, as told to a philosopher, I was particularly struck by the assertion that Jesus could love without the usual filters, cautions and inhibitors. Why? Because, given the Biblical injunction to love thy neighbor as thyself, he was able first to love himself unreservedly. Here I am talking about Jesus of Nazareth, “the carpenter’s son whom we know” – not the Christ of theology.

Huh! I thought. That’s interesting.

I wonder how you do that.

Nota bene: I am not talking here about “self-esteem.” My friend the late Shirley Kennedy, an award-winning barrel racer, once told me that some of the hardest events had been eliminated from recent rodeos lest inability to perform in them lower the self-esteem of potential competitors. 

Needless to say, if my “self-esteem” hung on a competition rigged so that I couldn’t lose, it would be a tiny thing indeed.

In fact, I really didn’t know what it meant to be a Lover-of-Oneself and whether it designated a class with no members.  

I did know what it was like to have one’s feelings of self-worth bruised or eroded. And I knew what it felt like to fight for one’s footing in the world. Or to resist challenges to one’s integrity. In my field of philosophy, I knew how one went about exploring a view of reality that seemed incompatible with one’s own previously-held view – even at the risk of discovering that one had been mistaken. I also knew what it meant to make a choice that seemed to be the right one – and stick to it through every discouraging setback and hurdle until one had either confirmed it in every feasible way or else found by experience that one’s earlier view or choice was unsustainable.

You might call me a dialectically serious person. It’s been my intention to say what I meant and mean what I said. But to “love myself”? I did that, so far as I knew, only in the sense that, in my own life, I refused to settle for Plan B prematurely – until and unless I was quite sure that all the other available options were worse. But that was not about loving myself. It was more like a question of sincerity. If what you really want is a husband, don’t get a cat. Don’t be a phony. Your cat will see through you.

So the features of my sole self that I could approve had to do with loving truth. Not necessarily with loving the self-of-Abigail. Or so it seemed to me.

Meanwhile, I kept the thought about Jesus’s capacity for unfiltered love in brackets, filing it (so to speak) under “for eventual consideration,” and didn’t trouble my little head about it further.

Until this past week in California. The treatments were particularly exhausting this time. At his Loma Linda Hospital-affiliated clinic, Mark Bussell has found an approach that allows him to take more precise measurements as well as locate sites of inflammation more accurately. As a result, my body got more of an overhaul than usual and I was too tired to do anything much in the afternoons but doze and let whatever images appeared just float down the river of consciousness.

That’s when the inner shift came about. I was too tired to do anything but dream and muse. Here’s what came into my mind:

Suppose, experimentally,

I tried aiming the best love I can –

on me – Abigail.

If I did that, what would happen? Of course, Abigail doesn’t live in a vacuum. She lives with a pretty full complement of memories. Including painful ones. So I tried to love the-Abigail-I-am in the presence of some particularly trying, infuriating, or depressing occurrences. The kind that you replay to get right this time at last, but can’t get right even when replayed the hundredth time with nobody butting in to stop you.

Here’s such a sample memory that I just tried out for the first time now, while writing this. It’s an incident from years past and I don’t think anyone who was at that dinner will be reading this, so I can call it up for general viewing.  

I was visiting a southern woman friend in New Orleans over Thanksgiving. My friend had cooked a traditional festive dinner and, besides me, had invited three other guests. These included a local couple – a woman friend and her husband. The other was a then boyfriend of my hostess, Jewish as it happened, who was given to referring to his Jewishness in demeaning and vulgar epithets. No doubt the boyfriend thought that, by “saying it first,” he would self-protectively get ahead of slings and arrows coming from other people.  

His strategy was flawed in many ways. Rather than prevent bigotry, it stoked it. (“If even he says it, surely it must be true,” goes the reaction.) Additionally, it made him utterly unable to defend a co-religionist, at whom the same epithets could now be flung with social impunity – even had he been minded to defend her.

As I turned toward this desecrator-of-the-Name to express some personal disavowal of his style of being Jewish, the other woman guest said to me, “There are no [plural anti-semitic epithet] in your family?”

I stared at her, silenced by the following silencers: (1) not wanting to spoil the Thanksgiving festival so carefully prepared by my hostess; (2) not wanting to quarrel with the woman friend of my woman friend; (3) feeling a guest’s duty of politeness; (4) not wanting to attack – and thereby prompt a display of – my friend’s execrable choice in boyfriends. 

Obviously, the scene has stayed with me through the years: exhibit A in the evidence for my ineptitude at the social art of gracefully, wittily, holding-one’s-own.

Now what does it look like if I add a powerful inflow of self-love to Abigail at the Dinner Party in New Orleans? I need only turn to the woman guest, since she had addressed me personally, to say, in the mildest, smiling tones, but with finality, 

“I’m sorry, but you may not speak to me that way.”

Now I ask you, isn’t that amazing?

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Book Matters

“Young Girl Reading”
Seymour Joseph Guy, 1877

The Fifth Act: America’s End in Afghanistan

By Elliot Ackerman

In case you’ve put the whole awful subject out of your mind by now, this book, by a battle-hardened marine, is a reminder that our (the USA’s) exit from Afghanistan was not a thing of beauty.

Ackerman’s attempts – together with other combat veterans with whom he served and assorted free-lancers – to rescue their Afghan helpers, are the main story. It’s presented interleafed with personal post-combat scenes and his own reflections on the high-level policy decisions that precipitated the hasty, ill-planned, American withdrawal. 

It’s very well written. The author’s lean, unembellished style put me in mind of the Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S Grant, Commander General of the Union Armies during our Civil War and later 18th President of the United States. There may be something about the direct experience of war that cuts the fat off the prose.

Here are samples: 

“Never before had America engaged in a protracted conflict with an all-volunteer military that was funded through deficit spending.”

“Medevacs are called in with three priority levels. The highest is urgent, which is for ‘loss of life or limb.’ The next is priority, ‘patient’s condition is stable but requires care.’ The last is routine, ‘personnel’s condition is not expected to worsen significantly.’

“The dead are routine.”

One imagines that wars are won on the battlefield, but they are partly fought on the plane of public opinion, where the last shots are often fired by the opinion-shapers. The author takes note of other sites (South Korea, and Niger, to name two) where our troops hold the peace (really, the cease-fire), taking sporadic casualties equal to those we suffered in Afghanistan – without any public clamor for withdrawal.  

It’s said, before you start a revolution, make sure you have a means of escape. By the same token it should be said, before you engage your country in a war, have a means to keep the public on your side!

“In Afghanistan,” Ackerman notes, “there is a saying, ‘The Americans have the watches but the Taliban have the time.’”

The most gripping part of this story is still the author’s efforts, with his military teammates, to save Afghan allies who were now, with their families, in mortal danger from the Taliban. Each report is given as it unfolds on the ground. The reports are hair-raising.  Successes depend on lucky chances, unswerving persistence and steadfast loyalty.  

What motivates these people working to repair some of the wounds left by our exit from Afghanistan? So far as I can tell, it’s actually a high sense of personal honor. For that reason, this is an elevating read.

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I Never Got A Cat

Renée, my mother’s French friend, with her cat Nora, also French.

Cats are greatly to be respected. For that reason, I never wanted to treat a cat as Abbie’s Plan B, to have and to hold just in case she didn’t obtain what she really wanted – Abbie’s Plan A – whatever that turned out to be.

So what was it that I really wanted? It seems a question to which Sigmund Freud would have very much liked to know the answer. Freud is quoted on “the great question” – to which, in all his years of research, he had not yet found the answer: 

Was will das Weib?

What does Woman want? It’s an intriguing question, but I’d rather not rush to a one-size-fits-all answer. Anyway, not before I look at a question that occurred to me recently:

What do women fear?

About men’s fears, Freud had already hit upon the answer. That would be castration (if you’ll excuse the expression). Let’s not go all the way into his “Oedipus complex,” the hypothesis that he named after Oedipus Rex, the play that Sophocles wrote in fifth-century Athens. I don’t know if men do or do not share the rather intricate fear that Freud assumed they all have. Whatever one thinks about Freud’s theory, it would surely be sensible for any man to be decently concerned for the protection of an external organ that figures significantly in a major human desire. Among the many items about which a reasonable man would feel proprietary, Freud’s favorite would be found somewhere on the list.

Likewise, there is something that all women would be reasonable in fearing, but I’ve never seen it on any list.

It’s not spinsterhood! That’s less awful than it used to be, and believe me I didn’t marry at the age when the other girls did so I know how it used to be.  

We come back to our question: what do women fear – qua woman? Ah, glad you asked! It’s an attack on their womanhood; I mean an attack that targets them as women. There are physical dangers too obvious to list here. But I am thinking particularly of social drummings-out of the sort that can become irreparable.

Think of Monica Lewinsky. A girl who, whatever her weaknesses, found herself publicly outed after a – shall we say compromising? – interaction with then President Bill Clinton. Her very name became a joke.  

Think of Juanita Broaddrick, who claimed – credibly in my eyes as I watched her interview on NBC with Lisa Myers – that she had suffered a brutal rape at the hands of then Arkansas Attorney General Bill Clinton, in the years before he came to Washington. Broaddrick had not sought any such TV spotlight. When, at a later point, I had occasion to speak with her by phone, she told me that, in the words of her son, she had not so much “come out of the closet” as been outed! The ensuing public notoriety led to a divorce. She had been a quiet, respectable woman. An ordinary woman. Where do you go, after being “outed”?

I could multiply examples. Others come to mind. But let me defer to a certain nineteenth-century Danish philosopher, justly renowned for his sensitivity to the nuances of the inner life. In celebrating the role of the wife in the ethical life of man, the philosopher waxes eloquent on the subject of the “beautiful tresses” of such a woman. Those tresses would of course be neatly bound up in a chignon behind her neck as she would go lightly about her womanly – subordinate yet indispensable – household tasks. I’ll let Soren Kierkegaard take up the story of the ethical woman:

“Behold, there she stands in all her imperfection, a lowlier being than man; if you have the courage, clip the rich tresses, sheer asunder these heavy chains—and let her run like a crazy woman, like a criminal, a horror to men.”

What women fear is precisely what Kierkegaard levels: an attack on themselves as women. You may say that men have similar fears and I don’t doubt that. Yet often enough, the disabled or dishonored man remains a candidate for someone’s sympathy – even the consolations of a good woman.

What about the disabled and dishonored woman? Well, few pronouncements on the human situation will hold universally or unqualifiedly. But I would maintain that, in this respect, the scales are not evenly weighted. Can I prove that? Of course not. But if you want to understand the coping strategies – the demarche in the world – of actual women, you might bear it in mind and see if it doesn’t illuminate

what women fear.

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The Divine Name

Moses Before the Burning Thornbush
Gebhard Fugel ca. 1920.

I’ve been reading Martin Buber’s book Moses, with the result that the encounter Moses has with God at the burning bush – the one that burns but is not consumed – comes frequently to my mind.

I don’t know if any of us would want to be in Moses’s sandals (which he’s told to take off) right then and there – but anyway he has enough presence of mind to ask God, “By what Name should I tell my enslaved people to call You?”  

And God answers. It’s Yod Hey Waw Hey –

YHWH –

the tetragrammaton, and it’s not to be pronounced lightly. Since a proper name can be interpreted to signify a defining characteristic, the question has often been asked, 

What was the meaning of God’s Name?

Some theologians have interpreted the Name to mean, “I Am That I Am” or “I Will Be What I Will Be.” One can regard that as speculative soaring to the highest level – or as vacuous redundancy. Those who regard it in the former way, speak of Necessary Being – the Being on which all contingent beings depend. But it’s kinda hard to picture, unless one could at the same time imagine an alternative – say Nothingness or Nonbeing.

Any imagined alternative to Being, such as Nothingness, runs the risk of having some kind of being or reality as well. In sum, if God’s defining Name is just to Be the Being-that-Is – it’s not very filled out. Seems a bit thin. Maybe that’s why they call God “ineffable.”

In fact, the opening verses of Genesis don’t describe creation as a process of the Creator’s drawing-things-into-being out of Nothingness. Rather, the acquisition of definite characteristics is contrasted with a prior state where it’s all real enough, but it’s chaos – 

tohu va bohu –

void and unformed.

That’s much easier to picture. I go through what feels like chaos as I put myself together every morning. Or when I recover from a shock. Or try to control panic. Or pull my socks up and consult my to-do list. Tohu va bohu meets Abigail every day and we certainly hope that, by day’s end, she’ll be at least one step ahead of the beast.  

For some people it’s easier than for others, but our daily struggle against tohu va bohu is one key reason to stay truthful during our waking hours. Untruth comports memory-suppression, followed by construction of artefacts to layer over whatever-really-happened … At some point, further down the road, people may decide to join up with their enemies just to stave off the chaos that threatens to return from underfoot or overhead.  

So, if the Name is not to be invoked in contrast to Nothingness – but rather in tension with chaos – how should the tetragrammaton be translated? Here is what Buber and his co-translator Rosenzweig proposed:

I will be there,

howsoever I will be there.

To me, this interpretation seems quite loaded with meaning. To the speaking God who meets Moses in the fire, it gives two defining characteristics. First, God is providential, will stand by, will intervene, will not leave you stranded. Second, God is unpredictable. That trait is signified by the “howsoever,” and it’s just as identifying as the first trait.

But don’t the two traits contradict each other? God will helpfully intervene but you’ll never know when? God will helpfully be present but you’ll never know where?

Well, let’s set up a thought experiment where God is present predictably and is helpful whenever needed. Doesn’t that sound more like magic? A God capable of creating the universe – who nevertheless comes and goes at our beck and call? Goodness! You wouldn’t even want a husband you could manipulate like that – much less a God!  

So ends our thought experiment. Prayer doesn’t work like magic and, oddly enough, we don’t want it to really

That said, in what sense is God providential? If we can’t know whether God will be there, why does the Name tell us that God will be there?

There are theologians who assure us that our hope and faith counts with God, even when it’s going to be disappointed. We get more credit if we can sustain it even through all the refuting instances.  

But for what are we getting credit in the cases where hope is dashed? For actually believing, or for continuing to assume the posture of a believer? 

I raised the question – about the times when Providence doesn’t come through for us – in Saturday’s Bible Study class. The study Leader responded that, in his own life experience, even the most disappointing instances could be seen – in retrospect – as having worked out for the best.

Well I wasn’t there to argue, but the thought passed rapidly through my mind: yeah, how ‘bout if someone is being marched at gunpoint into a gas chamber? How does that work out for the best?

At this point, the truly faithful come up to the bar to testify about the next world. The next world is reported to be very nice. Be even nicer, I should think, if you didn’t have to step into it through a gas chamber. 

God gives us one assurance: the world we must walk through will be real. And, in the real world, as the Israeli mother said when – after the whole country prayed for her kidnapped son and, a week later, he was found murdered –

“God doesn’t work for us.”

She was not saying that faith in God is useless. She was reminding the nation that we are not God’s employers. Nor are we God’s magicians. 

Why then keep faith? Without intelligent hope, chaos would reign. Without hard reality, hope and faith would be vaporous. We come back to the burning bush and God’s enigmatic answer:

I will be there;

howsoever I will be there.

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The Covenant on the Timeline

From the “Exodus Series Paintings” by Maria Lago.

In the Book of Exodus, we read that God offered a covenant to the people of Israel. God acted from the top of Mount Sinai and the mountain shook and smoke went up from it and there was thunder and lightning. And the people standing at the base of the mountain agreed to do it and hear it.  

But did anything like that happen in real time?

A lot of sophisticated people would call that entire narrative “metaphorical.” That is, not literally true, but explaining one thing (perhaps an emotional experience) by comparing it to another (the Creator of the universe shaking a mountain and issuing ten basic rules for life in community in partnership with that Creator). Wow! The emotional experience that turned out best “explained” in such terms must have been a doozy!

Anyway, here are some examples of actions in real time that weren’t metaphoric. Let’s go back to an area of the Middle East called Palestine. Since about 1918, it had been under a British Mandate, the Brits having taken it over from the Ottoman Turks who, before World War I, had governed it for the previous three hundred years. Under the terms of the Mandate, the plan was eventually to allow a Jewish “homeland” to set itself up in that region.

By 1945, the Nazis had lost the Second World War, which meant that the furnaces at Auschwitz, Dachau, Treblinka, Bergen Belsen etc., into which they’d shoveled six million Jews, were shut down. All the same, looking ahead, long-term Jewish existence would be untenable without a state and the means for its defense. If such a state were to declare its sovereign independence (as it would in fact do in 1948), it could expect an attack from the surrounding armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iraq.  

That being the situation in prospect, the Mandate authorities forbade the Jews to purchase or manufacture arms!  

Yosef Avidar, my mother’s first cousin by marriage, had been a senior commander in the underground army of pre-state Israel, the Haganah. He was tasked with getting weapons. “I found that worst of all was the lack of bullets,” he recalled. His unit had already learned to manufacture 600 Sten sub-machine guns. “If we would produce enough bullets, we could increase Sten production.” But where could they situate an underground bullet-manufacturing facility?

Well, underground – and that’s not a metaphor! “If you wish to do something in secrecy, do it under the enemy’s nose,” Avidar commented. “This is the one place they will never think to search.” The facility they dug, very near a major British army base, was about the size of a tennis court and twenty-five feet deep. Its above-ground secret entrances were located in the bakery and laundry rooms of a newly-populated kibbutz. The noise of the washing machines, which also served the laundry needs of British military personnel, masked the ear-splitting noise of the bullet-making machinery down below ground.

The facility produced over two million bullets – crucial to winning Israel’s War of Independence. Doing all this, they were making their plans and describing their actions in Hebrew – the Biblical language that hadn’t been in that kind of ordinary, nonritual use for over two thousand years.

Here’s another non-metaphoric action. An Israeli cousin-by-marriage of mine had a father in the Haganah. One time her father took a drive, his wife and children with him in the car, all dressed suitably for a country outing. Under a blanket behind the back seat of the car, a cache of arms was hidden. 

“What’s under the blanket?” asked a British officer, when they were stopped at a checkpoint.  

“Arms!” joked my cousin’s father jovially. Not wanting to miss the joke, the officer joined in the good-natured laughter, waving them all through.

My first cousin Nomi was employed by the British Army during World War II. Noticing that she was young and pretty, one of the officers volunteered to give her a cost-free, after-hours introduction to marksmanship. Obligingly, she went along to his lesson at the shooting range, where she would take aim and carefully miss – pretending that she did not already know very well how to aim, fire and hit the target.

Jews carry the burden of historical memory. Did the Mount Sinai covenant actually happen – on the same timeline that we still walk? Or are Jews ”remembering” something that never did happen, deluded by what psychiatrists call a “screen memory”? How can we know? How do we fit that event (or that nonevent) into the timeline of our own lives?

In trying to sort this question out, I have only two clues. The first is the extraordinary degree of ever-mounting negative attention given to the State of Israel. It’s not the genocidal dictatorship of China. It’s not the brutal theocracy of Iran. It’s not Putin’s Russia taking its army across a border into a neighboring country. It’s not repressive Cuba. Why do the fashionable people care so much? Could it be because modern Israel reminds them – with its Hebrew language and passionately assumed continuity with the Biblical predecessor – that maybe the covenant event actually happened in ancient history and, conceivably, was never abrogated? 

The other clue comes from my personal experience. I have more than once found that I could predict the onset of anti-semitism – sometimes in close friends – when something occurs on the timeline of their own lives that they can’t absorb, face or properly deal with. For example, in a small town in Maine I had a friend who’d been a German war bride, and immigrated to this country with a husband who’d turned out to be a brute. After her divorce, she’d courageously and inventively made a living, running a shop in town and then a small café, while she raised her two children alone. Then at a certain point, her fortunes took a downward turn. Her daughter’s travel agency couldn’t compete with equivalent online services. Other projects ran into similar roadblocks. She began to chain smoke and talk pessimistically about the delusiveness of the American dream. Then one day I noticed Protocols of the Elders of Zion on her coffee table.  

“Why are you reading that book?” I asked her. “That was Hitler’s bedtime reading!” Argument was useless. The death camps never existed. They were hostels for Jews who happened to come down with tuberculosis. However, the Jews really were a toxic conspiracy. And so on.

It happens when there’s a perceived break in the timeline connecting their past to their future. Then, by a strange kind of alchemy, the missing piece of time gets delusively restored as the claim that “the Jews” have absconded with it. The Jews usurped it – took away something to which the Jews had no rightful claim. It’s projection all right, but projection of a very specific kind. It has to do with time – and with history.

The memory of Jewish history is borne, as an ineluctable burden and potential blessing, by the Jews themselves. But it is also borne – either as God’s pilot project of covenant or as the missing segment in the anti-semite’s timeline – by those who are not born into the passion of Jewish history.

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What Do Women Want?

Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci ca. 1503,
Digitally restored and color balanced by: 1ax15fastcar, 2019  

At the beginning of the American feminist movement, a distinguished philosophical journal, The Monist, brought out an entire issue on the subject. It included my contribution, “Feminism Without Contradictions.” There I pointed out some of the dangerous rocks, shoals and whirlpools that the good ship “American-Feminism” could run into as it navigated the unknown waters ahead. I warned that foresight would be crucial because “[p]eople may get tired of compensating women for what, after all, they are.”

Despite all those cautionary notes, there was one whirlpool I did not foresee: that people would get tired of compensating women for what [feminists claimed that] they are not. Feminists have stressed that there is nothing essentially womanly about being a woman, or feminine about being female, because such classifications are mere social constructs. If womanliness has been dismissed as a myth or fiction, then hard-won safeguards and barriers that protected women’s unique vulnerabilities could drop away, leaving them defenseless.  

The warnings — that “Feminism Without Contradictions” never thought to issue — would apply equally to sports competitions, locker rooms, bathing facilities and bathrooms, but no need to picture prurient details. You get the general idea.

Reflections like these may occasion curiosity about what life was like for women in their pre-feminist days. All in all, were the sexes in better balance back then? Well, let me call up a few vignettes from deep storage.

There was the well-known woman writer from the South, comfortably taken care of by a man devoted to her, who told me that her mother had passed down to her this fragment of Quaint Life Wisdom:

men are the enemy.

She repeated it twice, in oracular tones, as if to make sure I’d get it memorized.

Another time, I was on a southbound Greyhound bus with a seatmate I did not know who confided her romantic story to me.  

 “I thought he was all mine, he was my little boy! But it turned out he was everybody’s little boy! You know, that’s embarrassing?”

Southern girls had a more definite sense of the unfavorable power dynamic. But perhaps you are thinking that men weren’t always or necessarily “the enemy”? Wasn’t there a time before feminism when men sincerely, if naively, idealized women? Put them on a pedestal perhaps?

In New York, where I lived, Sigmund Freud reigned. People followed their shrinks to Long Island in August so as not to lose a therapeutic day. If you hoped to have an inner life, Freud had got there first and mapped it for you. 

For men, it was relatively straightforward. They had only to recognize their castration fears, suppress their incestuous passion for their mothers, thereby freeing themselves for the climb up the ladder of civilized accomplishment accompanied by the moderate discontents that are the price of sublimation.

For women, however, no such separate peace was negotiable. Women came into the world with a primal defect; they lacked what made the boys so special.  

(Reader, I had no brothers so, at the age in question, would not have known what Freud was talking about. Nude statues of men that I saw at the museum had leaves at the fork in the road between the legs. I probably thought men’s torsos terminated in foliage.)  

Anyway, in Freud’s view, women were doomed to envy the possessors of the mysterious male organ and yearn to dispossess men of it. So men were well advised to regard women as natural castrators! Also to see through women’s aspirations if those went beyond bedroom and nursery. Women’s nonbiologic aims should be viewed as compensations for the male appendage women were doomed never to possess for themselves.

How ‘bout them apples? Whatever you do — or don’t do — you lose! You’re certainly not idealized. You’re both feared and “seen through”! Meanwhile, you had to keep the seams of your nylon stockings straight, wear heels even on the coldest winter days, keep your pointy bra pointed in the right direction and take care never to win an argument with a man.

Riding a unicycle on a tightrope was easier than being an acceptable woman in pre-feminist America.

My own unconscious strategy was probably to model my sense of the womanly future on my mother and her European women friends. Also, the era included a kind of Sorority of the Similarly Stigmatized, which had its own conspiratorial compassion inbuilt.

What effect did feminism have on that sisterhood? Ladies, it’s a long, long story. Probably worth telling, though.

Are women all profoundly liberated now? Well no, not profoundly. Not only have we seen the recent rollback of hard-won rights and privileges, with regard to women’s shelters, sports, locker rooms, bathrooms, prisons – protective privacies of all kinds. But so far, we have not seen any credible replacement for the “social construct” model of sexual difference and identity that has proved notably powerless to prevent that rollback.

Certainly some things are better now. Women can wear slacks. There are more female gynecologists. We aren’t caricatured for seeking to acquire proficiency in fields where our talents lead us.

But … there is an erotic core at the center of human life. It’s not Freudian. Freud knew next to nothing about it. Nevertheless, this is a world of desire. As women, we must learn to ask ourselves afresh, what do we want?

What, ideally —

and in the imagined best case —

do we women want?

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Book Matters

“Young Girl Reading”
Seymour Joseph Guy, 1877

Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America

By John McWhorter

Sometimes I imagine the following scene: I am seated at a sidewalk café in D.C., having dinner with a friend. Suddenly a troop of Wokesters show up. They command me to repeat their slogan-of-the-hour. Although I don’t disagree with their mantra, I feel that anything I say under coercion can’t be said sincerely – even if I would say it unhesitatingly in other circumstances.

What would I do at that sidewalk café? It’s my view that saying something insincerely in such a context corrupts both the speaker and the coercer. (Be it noted, sincerity has its limits. Of course I wouldn’t say, “I hate your new hairdo.” If you want the unvarnished truth about cosmetic matters, don’t come to me.)  

So why does this imagined scene on a Washington sidewalk seem to me high stakes? Isn’t repeating the mantra-of-the-hour a trivial matter, even if you’re doing it under implied threat? Not something worth spoiling a café dinner over? Well, I don’t always choose the times, the places or the situations of my life. Yet, intuitively, I know:

this one’s not trivial.

It was with that imaginary scene in mind that I sent for McWhorter’s book. Who is McWhorter? The jacket flap tells that he’s a Columbia University professor of “linguistics, American Studies and music history,” has published multiply in prestigious newspapers and magazines, and is the author of “over twenty books.” I’ve seen him before, in discussions on C-Span. Incidentally, he’s black.

He sets the scene for his book by naming three people, a food writer for the NY Times, a Dean of Nursing at a Massachusetts university, and a data processor, each of whom was fired for making some obviously inoffensive remark that was arbitrarily and publicly deemed to be offensive.

I know people who would never themselves participate in a Twitter mob but nevertheless reflexively suppose that victims like these three must have done something to deserve their downfall. Such people have one thing in common: they’ve never had their social faces ripped off.

To show the “heads I win/tails you lose” character of the accusers’ methods, McWhorter lays out ten Wokist antinomies side by side. Here’s one pair from his lineup: “You must strive eternally to understand the experiences of black people.” However, “you can never understand what it is to be black, and if you think you do you’re a racist.” 

Parenthetical remark from me: one reason I deeply enjoyed teaching philosophy was my conviction that, by extending the reasoning powers of students and showing their applicability in real situations, past and present, I was enlarging the power and the freedom of my students. So when I see someone working to subvert the intellectual self-trust of students, rebranding it as “acting white,” and encouraging unreason in its place, I feel outraged on behalf of the young people being seduced or pressured in such a way as to lose free access to their own natural powers.

According to McWhorter, Critical Race Theory makes those very moves. He cites Richard Delgado, a legal scholar and CRT advocate, who advises foregrounding “centuries-long mistreatment” over objective truth, and Regina Austin, also a legal scholar, who’s come out for “lawbreaker culture” that can, she claims, “add a bit of toughness, resilience, bluntness and defiance to contemporary black political discourse …”

Really? There came a point in my own development as a young adult when I decided not to send other people on trips I wasn’t taking.

McWhorter exhibits white people’s Wokery as the strategy of admitting one’s inherited racial privilege along with the guilt of that. By thus embracing one’s moral abjectness, one is in a paradoxically good position to pull moral rank on anybody not self-identified by those code words. On the whole, as I gather, the Woke protect each other, so it is always a good idea to confess your power, privilege and the racism underlying it — to confess it prophylactically, as it were.

In this crude display of pretend identification with the powerless and pretend dissociation from the powerful, I discern an embedded confusion about the nature of power. But not to worry. Plato can help us clear it up in the twinkling of an eye! In the dialogue whose English title is The Republic, Socrates is discussing the nature of political justice when a fellow Athenian named Thrasymachus bursts in, shouting that he knows all about justice. “Justice,” he says, has no ideal meaning. It’s the cover word for what’s really operative: the interest of whoever has more power. It falls to Socrates to point out that the powerful man can be mistaken about where his interest lies. Once Thrasymachus admits that, it isn’t hard to point out a genuine difference between functional power (say, the power to compose a song) and brute power (say, the power to outshout the singer). This ancient distinction, between brute and functional power, the Wokesters seem to have forgotten.

McWhorter offers three policy suggestions, each designed to enhance functional power: 

(1) phonics, to replace the less effective “whole word” approach to teaching children to read. If the child can read, all kinds of worlds, methods and avenues open up; 

(2) legalization of all drugs. If illegal drug dealing – a ruinously easy way to make a dollar – is closed down, young people will be motivated to acquire lawful ways to support themselves; 

(3) vocational schools to teach practical, marketable skills from which a decent living can be made and a successful life built.

I have only one objection to the brave and thoughtful analysis provided by McWhorter. He insists on imputing to Wokery the character of a “religion.” He even puts that word in his subtitle. “I do not mean that these people’s ideology is ‘like’ a religion. … I mean that it actually is a religion.” By repeatedly making that identification, he cuts his book off from a large class of potential readers, including those who may have reasons for faith as sound as his (never-stated) reasons for skepticism. He takes for granted that reasonable people are and must be religious skeptics. That’s not so. 

There’s one other reason for my objection. The concept of “religion” fails to identify his book’s target precisely. The behavior of people who exact confessions as the price of admission to their group, mete out endless and pitiless punishment to the excluded nonmembers, and discount all and every reasonable objection to their doctrines and methods, is not typical of any religion I’ve encountered in my own life. There is, however, one form of group organization that does meet all these criteria: the cult.

Wokery is a cult.

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Our Twenty-Fourth Anniversary

Abbie and Jerry
Wedding Day, January 20th, 1999

As of last Friday, Jerry and I have been married for twenty-four years.  By the time we met, neither of us expected to meet our true love – Mr. and Ms. Right – much less meet the way we did.

I’d even made use of (what stood in my mind for) a traditional marriage broker, putting a petitionary note in a crevice of the Western Wall, the outer retaining wall that was all the Romans left standing of the Second Temple when they destroyed it in Jerusalem in 70 CE.

“Did you pray at The Wall?” my Israeli cousins asked me in their ironically commonsensical tones.

“Of course!” I replied staunchly. “Do you think I’m going to pay the price of a round-trip El Al ticket and not pray at The Wall?”  

My note had been quite simple and straightforward. It said, 

I’d like to meet and marry the right man for me.

A few years later, to my surprise, the man who at the time seemed to me right accepted a job offer from the Sydney University’s Department of Traditional and Modern Philosophy. While our union lasted, we had what was probably the longest commuting and epistolary marriage in the profession. During the intervals when I could get to Sydney, we’d join his amusing and cultivated colleagues for lunch at the Staff Club. At the time, I was researching A Good Look at Evil, and they helped steer me to relevant philosophical work from their side of the field. So, as an unexpected side-benefit of an otherwise inharmonious marriage, my book gained a wider scope and readership than it would otherwise have enjoyed. 

Does the God who makes marriages also make divorces? Who can say? In any event, I hadn’t yet given up on the Western Wall. The next time I visited my Israeli cousins, the note that I put in a crevice petitioned for nothing more permanent than the right Romantic Other.

Did that note work any better? Eventually, circumstances led me circuitously to Paris and a reunion with my first Romantic Other. And it was pretty awful. By then, being out of ideas, I decided not to bother God again.

The following fall, the administration of Brooklyn College notified the faculty that it was about to revise our award-winning liberal arts curriculum, replacing it with course offerings that would revolve around … the Borough of Brooklyn! You know, the Philosophy of Brooklyn, Scientific Methods of Brooklyn, Social Sciences of Brooklyn, you get the idea. There was only one other faculty member, a distinguished woman in the History Department, who was prepared to fight it. Margaret King telephoned me and we agreed to meet for lunch at the Graduate Center.  

“Incidentally,” I asked her, after we’d mapped some initial strategic steps, “do you pray?”

“Daily,” she replied promptly.

“Me too. Good. Because that’s about all we have going for us.”

Neither of us seriously imagined winning. My own feeling was that, when my time came, I couldn’t die in peace knowing I’d done nothing to stop this preposterous nonsense.  

Such a battle would of course mean giving up whatever was left of my personal life. I wouldn’t have time to meet my teaching obligations, fight this fight, and also see friends, stop in at a museum or café – even take a walk!

By February, we had got to the point where a faculty vote could be taken on “Brooklyn Connections.” With secret ballots. These were essential since the administration had many ways of making its anger felt if it knew you’d voted against its wishes. The faculty vote went about fifty/fifty. Certainly not a college-wide endorsement. The college president told Margaret and me that he planned to forge ahead with Brooklyn Connections.

We started calling around to see who or what could help save the college’s liberal arts curriculum. One of the organizations dedicated to championing excellence in higher education was located in Washington D.C. It had been founded by a philosopher named Jerry L. Martin. As things turned out, Dr. Martin was about the only one we called who was sympathetic and actually willing to try to help us! By the time – against all odds – that we actually won the fight, Jerry and I had been on the phone almost daily for the remainder of spring term.   

Our conversations, focused on a shared but impersonal objective, gave leeway for a highly personal interest to unfold without my noticing it in time to protect myself. From what might I have sought protection? From a feeling – a REALITY – bigger than my own definite sense of who I had been up to that point. 

How exactly does God make marriages? Did the Creator put this bad idea into the mind of the college president just to set the stage for our true love?

I really don’t know.

You’ll have to ask the theologians.

I just live here.

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Voegelinian Vagaries

“Daniel in the Lion’s Den,” 1907-1918. Henry Ossawa Tanner

In last week’s column, I mentioned that Eric Voegelin is a political philosopher whom I approach – in advance and in principle – with a high degree of respect. Unlike most contemporary thinkers about life at the political level, he is not afraid to find Providential footprints even there. This despite his enormous erudition, relentless productivity and finely honed mind.

Voegelin credits Biblical Israel with a breakthrough insight: that “history” is a plane on which human players like you and me can meet the Providential Player. So it was with a lot of hopeful interest that I started reading Vol. I, Israel and Revelation, the first of the five volumes of his Order and History

Before I go on, I might explain my own sense of how to live on the plane of history. The approach I favor has two aspects. First, respect for chronology, for a life that keeps track of the “before” and “after.” If you have to give testimony under oath, as I’ve done, you’ll be asked, who said or did what first, and what was the response after that.

We live and learn, it is said — but not always and not necessarily. I keep a journal, which records events and acts, along with the question of what I made of them. And I try to keep track of the views I’ve held earlier as well as the later changes, sometimes dramatic and sudden, often subtle and almost imperceptible. This is living in time.

History — the more encompassing category — comes into my life when I too hold views that are held commonly in the culture I live in. The culture encounters challenges, it changes in response, or does not, and I change with it, or do not.

So history is bigger than personal life, but personal life is a piece of history. Each of us is a player in the human story.

Where does divine Providence come into the story? Well, in many ways and many times, but I’ll just replay one incident from my own life.

Some years ago, I was giving a talk at the Center for Process Studies at Claremont University in California. It drew from my book, A Good Look at Evil, specifically the chapter called “Spoiling One’s Story: The Case of Hannah Arendt.” At the Q & A, a dapper gentleman, older than the grad students, seated in the front row, raised his hand. When called on, he began to voice a view, (not pertaining to my paper) that the Jews brought the Holocaust upon themselves in a series of ways that he proceeded to list!

Meanwhile Jerry, also seated in the front row but over to the side, was wondering (as he told me later) what on earth Abigail would say.

As it happens, I had a certain pertinent background. In the course of researching A Good Look at Evil, I’d read a whole lot of Nazi materials: trial testimony, memoirs, minutes of meetings with the Fuhrer. So, without necessarily wanting to be, I’ve become something of an expert on Nazi rhetoric. I knew what I was hearing. No more than Jerry had I the slightest idea “what Abigail would say.” So I looked upward to see or hear Guidance.  It was unexpected, not very academic, but unmistakable:

Don’t interact.

Just denounce.

That’s all.

So I responded, “I denounce you from the floor to the ceiling! I will not enter a discussion on any of these points. These are not ‘facts.’ They are Nazi canards!” He tried to quibble but I refused to pretend that this was an issue to be debated. And we went back to ordinary Q & A.

Is this an exemplary case of divine Providence coming into the plotline of somebody’s life? What worked in my case might not work in a similar case if circumstances were even slightly different. The only thing exemplary about it is that I prayed for guidance and followed the guidance I got. Normally, if there’s time, I don’t just pray for direct guidance. I get human advice too.

To recap: my sense of how to live in history involves keeping track of the before and after of one’s experience and being wholesomely (but not exclusively) open to prayer guidance.

Given these terms, how do I see Voegelin’s account of Biblical life in history? I’ve not finished Vol. I and my view of what he’s doing keeps changing from chapter to chapter, at times from page to page. At certain junctures, I think he completely – disastrously! — misunderstands what he’s reading. At other points, he seems to regather the main inspired threads and put it all rightly together.

For an example of his misreading, take his overview of Deuteronomy. Because it puts the Exodus story into the mouth of Moses, rather than telling it from the vantage point of an omniscient narrator (presumably God), Voegelin says, the “word of God had become the Book of the Torah, written by a Moses who had become a Pharaonic mummy” (p. 365). From this purported downward step, Voegelin traces further decline moments: the canonization of scripture (which he deems “an obstacle to its free unfolding” and — get this — “a sacred incubus”) that will “prevent further reforms,” later produce the “formidable ‘conflicts between science and religion,'” and, still later, “various Gnostic creed movements, as for instance in the [Auguste] Comptean creation of a Torah for the religion de l’humanite, or the formation of a Marxist Torah in the communist movement” (p. 367). Hey, give me a break!

These accusations, bearing a not-so-faint anti-semitic tinge, is what Voegelin manages to get out of Deuteronomy? What he fails to get is one lesson clear to me from my journal keeping. The past keeps changing as it is reintegrated into the present. It’s not the previous events that change. But their focus, meaning or aim gets reconceived. This is what it means to live in history! Despite Voegelin, it’s not a perversion or embalming; it’s the work of keeping the past relevant and alive. It’s how you live and learn!

That said, this is far from the whole story of Voegelin’s wrestlings with the Biblical text. He can pass suddenly from agenda-driven Source Criticism (where anything can symbolize syncretism, Canaanite or other) to inspired respect for the narrative unfolding on the page. Here’s his description of Moses when given his commission at the burning bush: “The command could be rejected only by a man who could never hear it; the man who can hear cannot reject, because he has ontologically entered the will of God, as the will of God has entered him” (p. 407). Quite so: inspiration in action.

What’s going on here? I really don’t know. What I suspect is an unresolved collision between — on the one hand, a culturally inherited, supersessionist assumption that the covenantal torch has been passed to Christian successors, self-anointed as the Only True Israel — and on the other hand, an acknowledgment that the gift of living with God in real time and actual situations is, and continues to be, the gift of the Jews.

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