Augean Stables

Ronald Dworkin, no mean thinker, has an extraordinarily muddled piece on Danoongate in the New York Review of Books.

The British and most of the American press have been right, on balance, not to republish the Danish cartoons that millions of furious Muslims protested against in violent and terrible destruction around the world. Reprinting would very likely have meant—and could still mean—more people killed and more property destroyed.

So we take Muslim violence as a “fact”, like nature, and work around it? One of the things that comes out in the study of cultures of “self-help justice” (feud and vendetta) is that the ground rules demand that retaliation be predictable, regardless of whether the initial damage was done intentionally or not. Any leeway means moving from “realism” to “constructivism” in modern poli sci terms, and then things get messy. Andy Bostom, in a recent lecture on the Armenian genocide as Jihad, explained that the very effort of the Armenians to relieve themselves of their dhimmi status provoked the genocidal rage of the Muslims. The point reminded me of the argument that Christopher Boehm makes in his work on Montenegran tribal feuds. As part of an explanation for the remorseless hostility of every other alpha male to the emergence of a leader, he comments that it makes evolutionary sense as a survival mechanism in that, were any serious leader to arise, the Turks would have exterminated them. Predictability of murderous violence: one of the lynch pins of dhimmi behavior.

It would have caused many British and American Muslims great pain because they would have been told by other Muslims that the publication was intended to show contempt for their religion, and though that perception would in most cases have been inaccurate and unjustified, the pain would nevertheless have been genuine.

This comment strikes me as the quintessence of what’s wrong with the way we think about these issues. British and American (and presumably other European) Muslims will be made to feel bad by other Muslims when they tell them that they’ve been diss’d. Why on earth should people not be expected to feel pain? What kind of infantilization is going on here? Why should we protect them from such “pain,” rather than expect them to reply intelligently to their Muslim brethren, and tell them that their infantile behavior in rioting over these pictures is embarrassing Muslims the world over. Or, better yet, tell them that they’ve been worked into a fever pitch by dishonest Muslims who faked really disgusting pictures of the Prophet to provoke them. Of course, that would be treating the Muslims in Europe as responsible members of the society.

True, readers and viewers who have been following the story might well have wanted to judge the cartoons’ impact, humor, and offensiveness for themselves, and the press might therefore have felt some responsibility to provide that opportunity. But the public does not have a right to read or see whatever it wants no matter what the cost, and the cartoons are in any case widely available on the Internet.

This is amazing. Part of what makes the cartoon scandal such a scandal is how mild the cartoons. One cannot possibly understand just how grotesque the reaction (and the need on the part of the really vicious Imams who stirred the toxic brew four months later to fake really disgusting cartoons) until you’ve seen how mild, respectful, even intimidated most of them are. The very notion that the MSM need not show us these cartoons — or better yet, go to the internet to get them — illustrates what kind of bankruptcy now reigns supreme in the world of our MSM.

Sometimes the press’s self-censorship means the loss of significant information, argument, literature, or art, but not in this case. Not publishing may seem to give a victory to the fanatics and authorities who instigated the violent protests against them and therefore incite them to similar tactics in the future.

Okayyyy…. but is there a “but” coming?

But there is strong evidence that the wave of rioting and destruction—suddenly, four months after the cartoons were first published —was orchestrated by Muslim leaders in Denmark and in the Middle East for larger political reasons. If that analysis is correct, then keeping the issue boiling by fresh republications would actually serve the interests of those responsible and reward their strategies of encouraging violence.

What? The evidence that it was concocted is a reason not to make it a deal of it? I’m at a complete loss here. I would have thought that confronting it was all the more important since the whole row was set off by people intent on intimidating the West. Prof. Dworkin seems to mistake the effects for the goal. He thinks that the Imams wanted to stir up violence and more violence, and anything we do that increases the violence plays into their hands. But what’s far more likely is that the violence is a means to the end of intimidating us. And that is precisely what Dworkin recommends we do: back down.

What’s so bizarre about the article is that Dworkin then goes on to argue on principle that no one should be free from ridicule, especially if they wish to benefit by the rules of the civil society game. But he does so, stumbling every time he deals with Muslims, into a moral relativism that shows a staggering lack of understanding. Take, for example, his handling of the Muslim accusation of “double standard” over the Holocaust:

Muslims who are outraged by the Danish cartoons note that in several European countries it is a crime publicly to deny, as the president of Iran has denied, that the Holocaust ever took place. They say that Western concern for free speech is therefore only self-serving hypocrisy, and they have a point. But of course the remedy is not to make the compromise of democratic legitimacy even greater than it already is but to work toward a new understanding of the European Convention on Human Rights that would strike down the Holocaust-denial law and similar laws across Europe for what they are: violations of the freedom of speech that that convention demands.

The idea that ridiculing the “Religion of Peace” for being mindlessly violent is somehow on a par with Holocaust denial is a moral capitulation of monumental proportions. It is actually a form of Muslim apologetic that fails to make the most basic case for moral thinking.

But in the end, somehow, Dworkin pulls the rabbit out of the hat:

If we want to forbid the police from profiling people who look or dress like Muslims for special searches, for example, we cannot also forbid people from opposing that policy by claiming, in cartoons or otherwise, that Islam is committed to terrorism, however misguided we think that opinion is. Certainly we should criticize the judgment and taste of such people. But religion must observe the principles of democracy, not the other way around. No religion can be permitted to legislate for everyone about what can or cannot be drawn any more than it can legislate about what may or may not be eaten. No one’s religious convictions can be thought to trump the freedom that makes democracy possible.

I didn’t see that coming. I guess the article is a good example of Muslim exceptionalism.

[This is the continuation of my long multi-part post on the “Open Source/PJ” media launch at Solomonia last November. I have divided them up differently this time and made slight changes.]

Fashion Advice for the Ugly: I’d Rather be in my Pajamas Part 5

NB: This was written, the day after the launch, before the recent (and welcome) change back to PJMedia.

With What They Have Going for Them, What Were They Thinking?

Okay it’s easy to make fun of the MSM, what about OSM?

As Roger Simon put it, “What a day of juitjisui — we invite them [MSM], give them a place, and they illustrate what we’ve been saying along.”

Is this interpretation a brave face on a miscalculation? Or triumph of the Art of War?

Inviting the MSM seems more like a positioning move than a trick to get themselves to reveal what idiotarians they are. This was, a number of people sagely explained to me, “reaching out to the MSM” by giving them a place in the process whereby PJ Media sheds its maverick garb and attempts to establish itself as a portal from the blogosphere to the MSM.

Okay… but who is inviting whom? The MSMers clearly don’t get what’s going on; and hopefully the people driving OSM won’t forget what’s going on.

‘Don’t forget who gave you your prominence,” I said to one of the suited young Turks in OSM at the cocktail party, “don’t forget it is independent thinkers who form your most precious audience and took these blogger stars from obscurity to celebrity.”

“No one is forgetting that,” he replied. (Was that a defensive response? Working hypothesis…)

“Well the opening round, with all the MSM people showing us how little they understood, rather than featuring the bloggers and exploring the future, wasn’t very promising.” I said, choosing the role of gadfly rather than pressing the flesh and looking for a way in with this gatekeeper of OSM.

“We put a lot of effort into this event,” he replied (firming up the working hypothesis).

“That doesn’t mean you necessarily made the right choices.”

“Youíre freaking me out here,” he said, leaving me. (Maybe one shouldn’t criticize people on their launch day.)

I guess I can’t count on a call from him to join in planning new projects.

Fortunately, Charles, in a similar conversation during the same cocktail party, was far less thin-skinned.

Pedro on the other hand spent most of the time talking to the two other Europeans (”united against Eurabia?”) at the party: Paul Berger Englishman in New York (who, after discussing Israel and Palestine for almost an hour, said to Pedro “you’ve exhausted me!”) and Pieter Dorsman from PeakTalk (who, like Pedro, will probably apply for “political refugee status” in the US).

Late night conversation around a fire with Pedro, Glenn Reynolds, Mary Madigan, and Judith Weiss. Very smart, informed, opinionated people, unencumbered by the PCP baggage that normally chokes conversation. These are people who would not, as the French and Europeans do, choose slow strangulation rather than risk the embarrassment of saying something that might be considered inappropriate… something someone else could label racist.

It occurred to me, as I heard a number of people mention that they used to be on the left (Charles, Roger, Neo), that the blogosphere represents an interesting refuge from the increasingly self-ghettoized “left” that has, both in academia and in the MSM, isolated anyone who brings up politically incorrect attitudes. This process, of long standing, took a sharp turn to the insane with the outbreak of the second Intifada in 2000, and showed its full and astonishing lack of understanding, with the response of many on the left to 9-11 — “it’s all our fault; we’re the real terrorists; and if only we could change, they wouldn’t hate us so.” The more idiotarian they get, the less they can tolerate serious criticism, the more isolated they must become, driving out anyone who has the nerve to suggest theyíre getting it wrong.

As a result, they shun, as Jill Hunter, in a variant on Neo’s experience, put it in the title of her self-published book, How I read the Quran and Lost all my Friends. So you get a left that is literally incapable of reality testing, so intent is it on avoiding any criticism. Some of the people thus shunned, end up on the right, neo-cons and beyond. But some of us refuse to be driven out of the left (if by left one means progressive thinking about freedom, decency and fairness), by people who have hijacked it (again) for loopy utopian projects laced with a not so secret admiration for vicious aggressors. As the conference continued it occurred to me, now I know where at least some of us go — the blogosphere.

Academics have a habit of doing retrospective conferences and collected essays at round-numbers dates (e.g., Essays in honor of … at his 60th birthday, or the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth).

I view the emergence of the blogosphere as a parallel phenomenon to the emergence of the “city of letters” that came out of the print world and, gathering a new and largely anonymous audience of letter writers, did an end run around the MSM of the day (universities and manuscript culture). And as far as I can make out, in the next four or so years, we’ll be coming up to the tenth anniversary of the blogosphere.

Anticipating a long period for the blogosphere of growth and maturing (hopefully not rotting before ripeness), this early period will be (probably already is getting) forgotten.

At this point, are there any early histories of the blogosphere? Are there any candidates for when it (as opposed to blogs) first could be dated?

The range of material — from testimonials, memoirs, statistical studies, analyses of its scope (I am particularly interested in the politico-journalistic blogosphere), of its relationship to the MSM, of its phases of growth — seems fairly limitless. Also seems like a multiple-person/group project.

Anyone interested in such a project please let me know.

[This is the continuation of the essay on Anti-semitism which will appear in its entirety (eventually), here.]

The perspective developed above offers a wide-ranging analysis of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Here we have a virtual morality play of the conflict between civic and prime-divider values. On the one hand, the Zionist (i.e., modernized) Jews, who come to the area with the most developed sense of civil commitments, quite unlike the imperialist Europeans (British, French, German). Many came with radical social values of egalitarianism and justice for the in-group, and non-coercive attitudes for the outgroup. On the other, the Arab Muslims, inheritors of a long tradition of prime-divider politics, with wealthy and arbitrary elites dominating impoverished commoners, to whom they threw the bone of dhimmi inferiors, religious minorities legally impotent before the law, against whom they could always direct their frustration and rage.

On the one hand, we have a society in which the discourse of civil society has advanced so far in practice, that they launched the most successful experiments in radical communist egalitarianism in recorded history (kibbutzim). On the other, we have a prime divider society where the elite violently defend their right to distribute wealth as they see fit. On the one hand, a culture committed to values of impartial justice, free press, and vigorous self-criticism, on the other, a classic case of the Anthropologists’ “shame culture,” an honor society that held sacred the right of a man to shed the blood of another for the sake of his own honor. On the one hand, a culture in which a rigorous epistemology of skepticism and demand for honesty informs both the journalistic and academic standards; on the other, one in which lying, especially to outsiders, is an art.

Normally the results of such a culture clash, played out on the home turf of the prime-divider societies, and not accompanied by the massive use of military force, dooms the experiment in civil society. Only with great difficulty do civic (modern) cultures successfully resist the hostility of prime-divider societies, who try to destroy the civic experiments in their midst — as Walter Map put it, “if we let them in they will drive us out.” Characteristically, even predictably such pressures drive the leadership in these revolutionary experiments in egalitarianism to adopt techniques of totalitarian control in order to survive. The French, in a pattern we would see repeat with variants all over the world for the next two centuries, started in 1789 with a revolutionary enthusiasm for egalitarianism (liberté, égalité, fraternité) only to swing wildly towards a paranoid terror that maintained its purity by shedding the blood of anyone – even its own – who criticized the leadership. Under pressure the political pattern of revolutionary movements seems quite consistent: the older patterns of prime-divider culture resurface with a vengeance – the violent reaction to criticism, the remorseless grip on the mechanisms of power, the projection of blame onto enemies, real and designated. Prime divider values triumph, and the revolutionary movement subsides and the political culture returns to a different but recognizable prime divider – the restored monarchies, the “Third Republic.”

The common accusation against Israel – that it is not “really” a democracy, but rather an apartheid state – gets the story precisely wrong. Under conditions of enormous security and self-confidence, it took America centuries to stop committing genocide against natives, and grant African-Americans full civil rights. Under the conditions of radical insecurity and immense pressures of attack, no democracy has survived, even in terms of the rights of the “in” group, much less those of a hostile minority. Except Israel. The apartheid is about two different cultures with radically different atmospheric pressures — a prime divider society with a heavy, debilitating atmosphere that favors honor-sensitive alpha males, and a civil, open society in which women and beta males can also carry public weight. The more hostile the former, the more the latter must insulate itself from the atmospheric pressures of hostile prime divider societies. (The current “barrier” is actually a form of space-suit. — added RL)

Indeed, were people to have an historical perspective, the endurance and continuously expanding world of Israeli democracy over the last half-century – the free press, the academic revisionism, the multiple parties, the almost complete lack of assassination (except, tragically but exceptionally, Rabin), even the presence of Arab members of parliament (who continuously push the very limits of the system) – represents an anomaly almost as exceptional in the history of politics as the survival of Jewish communities under the crushing pressures of diaspora for millennia represents in the history of culture.

(more…)

[This is the continuation of the essay on Anti-semitism which will appear in its entirety (eventually), here.]

Modernity as Conspiracy to Enslave

Theories about a conspiracy of illuminati who secretly sought to take over and rule the world go back to the 18th century, and initially focus on the secret society of the Masons. To some extent they may well be right. To judge from Mozart’s The Magic Flute (1791), written at the height of enthusiasm about the French Revolution, the Masons constituted a secret society dedicated to getting rid the authoritarian elites and their monarchical systems that ruled Europe at the time.

“He is a prince!” gushes one character about Tamino. “He is more than a prince, he’s a man (Mensch),” corrects the Mason. Just as Rip Van Winkle noticed when he awakened after the American Revolution and found that the caps (commoners) no longer showed deference to the hats (gentlemen), the Masons sought a world in which deference was gone, a world where the prime divider had ceded to world of equality in which all men “can walk upright.”

The key issue, of course, concerned the purpose of this overthrow. For the elites who felt threatened, the secret work of the Masons could only signify the work of men who, like themselves, sought to dominate others. Thus the purpose of a vision of world “liberation” on the part of the Masons could only mean the intention of world “domination” to the prime divider elites. Thus they heard such “noble-sounding” sentiments as merely the trap, the weapon whereby these people planned to disarm their opposition. Only an imbecile would possibly believe in such ideas as “Liberty, equality, fraternity.”

Thus the intelligent elites who were taking over were using these notions to gull the foolish and greedy masses. These duped mobs who overthrew their aristocracies for promises of freedom and prosperity had a nasty surprise awaiting them. After losing their only real, if iron-fisted, protector, they would be at the mercy of forces over which they had no control, especially those of the technologically enhanced market place. When these new manipulators had achieved their goal – constitutional democracies everywhere, they would then engineer a global crisis that would then permit them to enslave the entire world. At its simplest, these conspiracies represented a political argument made explicit by Plato and Thucydides: the painful order of prime divider society is better than chaos and enslavement of democracy.

(more…)

[This is the continuation of my long multi-part post on the “Open Source/PJ” media launch at Solomonia last November. I have divided them up differently this time and made slight changes.]

Who’s in Which Century/Millennium?

At first I didn’t quite get it. Everyone I talked to who blogged was uniformly interesting, no matter how much we might not agree on some matters. Independent thinkers all, combining nicely two difficult traits — assertiveness and modesty. What a delight. It really was a convention of the people who, at the emperorís parade, would have been unashamed to ask the embarrassing questions. And as I contrasted the quality of conversation in the halls with the panel discussions, I realized that I was walking through liminal terrain, between the two-dimensional, colorblind paradigms of the 20th century, and the emerging stereoscopic color-rich vision that begins to emerge from the blogs.

Want to know whatís going on in France? Check out Belmont Club, Brussels Journal, or Jihad Watch. They leave MSM coverage in the dust. Red pill or blue pill? How do you want to reality test? Read them both, all, by all means. What’s really happening? We won’t know until later, in the meantime, without the blogs, we would have very little idea that there’s more to this than what the MSM report.

A discussion later that evening on about one of the more colorful of the bloggers having been “on the bus” with Ken Kesey, reminded me of a story Tom Wolfe tells in Electric Koolaid Acid Test about when Kesey first took acid as part of hospital experiments conducted in the 1950s, shortly after its discovery. Some were given the drug, some a placebo. Within a short while, it was obvious who got the acid and who got the placebo.

Similarly, within a short while in any given conversation, it was clear who was in the 21st century, and who in the 20th. How stimulating to talk with OSM bloggers. How familiar the holding actions and resistances of those who, weighed down with the baggage of political correctness, still have a reflexive confidence in the MSM.

All this became clear in a random conversation with a photographer who came to see one of his friends attending the launch. We were at the bar later that evening, talking about the MSM and the blogosphere, and I remarked that the difference in coverage of the French Intifada was stark, with the blogosphere on it from night one, and the MSM waiting till the end of week 1 before mentioning it in the back pages.

“Not true,” he insisted. “The pictures were up at a newswire services the first day.”

“Maybe, I don’t know,” I replied, “but what you say makes it worse. The media had these pictures from the start, and didn’t use them or mention the story for days?”

“Look, the MSM have to make decisions about whatís important to their readerships’ lives, so if they didn’t cover it for a couple of days, that makes perfect sense. It just wasn’t that important.”

“First of all, it was five days, not two. Secondly, that very attitude is part of the problem. The blogosphere understood immediately how significant these riots were, partly because they have been paying attention to the RoP and Eurabia whereas the MSM have been systematically ignoring these issues. And so, when the MSM finally wake up to the riots they didn’t deign to be worthy of attention until day five, on day six they already know what they’re about, explaining to us that it has nothing to do with Islam, but it’s “really all about poverty and discrimination.” (As if the two are mutually exclusive.. as if eliminating Islam from the picture will make things clearer…)

I spare the reader the blow-by-blow, although if you want the other guy’s version (with me as a gung-ho supporter of OSM, and demonizer of the MSM), it’s here, with me as “Boston Guy.” My suspicion that I was speaking with a PCPer is there confirmed.

“It sounded like classic rioting with all the classic reasons for rioting. It was horrible but wasn’t directly affecting my life, as I was working very hard to get a guy elected governor of New Jersey. People riot for a reason, things burn and then change comes for better or worse.” Probably worse, as long as people continue to think in terms of “classical” rather than religious terms. Of course that would mean overcoming cognitive egocentrism.

Finally, when he had repeated his comment about, “so what if they didn’t cover it for the first two days, it wasn’t important…,” Pedro stepped into the conversation and quietly asked, “Do you blog?”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

[It turns out he has his own blog, with occasional postings and no mechanism for comments.]

“Let me tell you about a French expression,” I cut in with what was surely an excessively triumphalist and dismissive tone that lacked the modesty I normally praise, c’est très deuxième millénaire,” that’s very second millennium, or, to be a bit more immediate, you have a very 20th century attitude. You might want to get up to speed in the 21st century.” [I shudder as I reread this — not very nice of me.]

“You don’t know anything about me, and I find that presumptuous and insulting,” he said with considerable justification as he grabbed his stuff and left, apparently thinking that I thought of the NYT and the MSM as part of an “evil conspiracy.”

I’d prefer “persistently incompetent MSM.” I guess we all hear what we want to hear. I’m actually quite critical of thinking conspiratorially or projecting it onto people who do not explicitly embrace it. But I had been abrasive and probably deserved it.

There’s a wonderful passage in C.S.Lewis’ The Great Divorce, his answer to Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, where he describes how people first respond to heaven. They are overwhelmed by the intensity, they are unprepared for it, they are fragile, the very grass cuts their thin skins, they need time to adjust. Of course that takes the ability to acknowledge that there’s something to adjust to.

Next: What Were They Thinking?

This is the continuation of my long multi-part post on the “Open Source/PJ” media launch at Solomonia last November. I have divided them up differently this time and made slight changes.

Keynote: Preaching to the Great Unwashed

But the best was for after lunch. Glenn Reynolds (a.k.a InstaPundit) introduced keynote Judith Miller. Why Judith Miller? Why not Glenn Reynolds (whose book “An Army of Davids : How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths” with a scheduled date release of March 2006 is already a best-seller at Amazon)? Like Elizabeth Hayt in the first panel, she admits she doesn’t blog, she only really found out about them when she was in prison and didn’t have internet access, and actually, she admitted later in the discussion as she entertained the suggestion that she really should blog, she finds the prospect quite “terrifying.”

Why is she here? Because she’s the Martha Stewart of journalism? The current MSM celebrity? Because various key legislation swirls around her case? Okay. Whatever. I guess I just happen to have other concerns. But wait, what’s that she’s saying?

“Let me tell you the five commandments of journalism.”

Huh?!? What does she think she’s doing?

Apparently she views herself as the representative of serious mainstream journalism who has come to give some elementary ethics and advice to these junior journalist bloggers so that they too could aspire to the heights of mainstream excellence.

Is this dramatic misreading of the audience due to “lack of curiosity” as Austin would put it dryly, or the result of such intense cocooning that she doesn’t know to whom she speaks? (Are these two sides of the same coin?) Is this a whiff of that characteristic arrogance that has given us so much MSM misbehavior, including the Olympian disdain that prompted Dan Rather to talk about those “those guys sitting around at 2:00 AM in their pajamas”? Oh wait, she’s also NYT, or was.

It could only get surreal from this point on. Her first three commandments were elementary, known to anyone in the room, perhaps useful to recall, but hardly keynote timber. But then the whopper: “Fourth commandment: If you are wrong, acknowledge it prominently, and follow up with further stories.”

Silence. My jaw dropped. Even she squirmed, distancing herself sotto voce from the NYT editorial policy on this. This woman wrote for a paper with a scandalous record of “correcting itself,” with some of the worst misreporting on its record, including the Holocaust on the back pages just to name one of the more staggering… Nor does it have any institutional memory of such catastrophic failures, as it careens into a similar lack of understanding and a systematic downplaying of another round of genocidal ferocity aimed at Jews.

One of the main causes of the blogosphere’s success comes precisely from the brick wall that descends from the MSM any time serious corrections are in order. The case we work on at Second Draft, that of the “martyr” Muhammed al Durah is one that had spectacularly destructive initial impact and never got “followed up” on even as plentiful evidence emerged that the media had gotten it wrong emerged… with few exceptions that really went nowhere, for five years now. Embarrassingly wrong. Anyone who has read Renata Adler on the combination of superciliousness and arrogance that characterizes the NYT attitude towards self correction had to laugh at this lesson in MSM ethics. Or cry.

After all, what characterizes the blogosphere — and may explain Miller’s terrified attitude towards it — is that if you have a thin skin, you’re doomed (well, not so Juan Cole — added). Don’t expect polite coddling, don’t expect to escape correction — immediate correction — if you mess up. Bloggers are accustomed to a level of give-and-take which the MSM has systematically insulated themselves from — with tragic consequences. (Could we say that blogging is on one level the record of letters to the editor that the MSM refused to publish?)

Next, Part IV: Who’s in What Century/Millennium?

[This is the continuation of the essay on Anti-semitism which will appear in its entirety (eventually), here.]

With the advent of constitutional democracies, with the American and French revolutions, we find a significant shift in the attitude towards Jews. Rather than the built-in hostility of prime divider societies, we find two major mutations in the gentile attitude. On the one hand, secular (post-) Christian Westerners felt, reasonably, that if all people were to be free and no Church should run the state apparatus, then they should include the Jews in the new dispensation. Thus modern constitutional states, as a matter of principle emancipated the Jews from the legal and social inferiority to which Christian Europe had relegated them. Jews could now join in the open, meritocratic competition for professional and economic advancement.

On the other hand, specifically in those Christian millennial circles most closely allied with democratic thinking, we find a peculiar innovation in the apocalyptic scenario. Whereas medieval Christianity had viewed any Jewish messianic activity as the “work of the Antichrist,” a strain of Protestantism viewed the return of the Jews to Israel as a necessary and positive step in the preparation for Jesus’ return. Although this scenario still involved the ultimate conversion of the Jews to Christianity, it delayed it significantly, and interjected a lengthy period of mutual cooperation and respect between Jews and Christians before that day of reckoning. These two philo-Judaic attitudes (secular and millennial) overlapped for a considerable period of time, during the lengthy (and still on-going) process of the Jews’ return to Israel before Jesus’ return. And in that space, I will argue in future work, democracy — tolerant, positive-sum, iisonomic — was born.

By the calculations of the secular democrats, the emancipation of the Jews should have led to their rapid assimilation and ultimate disappearance. In a sense this constituted a secular version of Luther’s atttitude towards the Jews – of course they rejected the previous nonsense: we too see its follies. Jews therefore had understandably rejected the superstitions of our predecessors (for Luther, Catholicism, for the Enlightenment, Christianity), but now they would become citizens and leave behind their own superstitions. Civic commitments to the rule and protections of the law prevented the disappointment that many “modern” gentiles felt in the persistence of Judaism, but hostility nonetheless flourished. Ironically, one of the few things that the enlightened thinkers of 18th and 19th centuries did not reject from Christianity was that religion’s attitude towards the Jews (Voltaire, Gibbon, Fichte).

Far more serious than this “polite” Antisemitism, however, the modern age gave birth to a still more virulent version that resulted from a development that surprised everyone, gentile and Jew. When the gentiles emancipated the Jews, they thought they were doing a favor to a shriveled population fossilized in their ancient superstitions. At best they expected them to gratefully vanish into the powerful currents of the modern age. What they did not realize (and I suspect the rabbis of the time did not realize either), was that the Western constitutional states had just adopted rules of the game (equality before the law, including intellectual meritocracy) that Jews had been playing by for over three millennia. It turns out that, despite the democrats’ initial sense that these rules are self-evident, these rules of civil society are extremely difficult rules, whose implications continue to unfold in an ever-changing scene over the course of centuries. The Jews therefore had an enormous advantage once the surrounding culture adopted them.

As a result one of the greatest unanticipated consequences of modernity, was the immense, astonishing success of Jews. Far from being swallowed up in the process, Jews rose to great prominence in all walks of life – the professions (especially law and medicine), academia, finance, commerce, journalism. Indeed, any profession that called for opening oneself to stiff criticism (academia, science, law, journalism) was a site of predilection for Jews, trained in a “culture of Machloket” [dispute] and the “love of rebuke” [resignation under chastisement] (Ethics of the Fathers, chapter 6:6).

Nor was this “mere” stiff competition. Jews not only played the game well, they changed the rules. Marx, Freud and Einstein literally changed the way that we think about the world and ourselves. Nor did this only happen at the level of the elites. Poor Jews, Eastern Europeans fleeing the pogroms to Western Europe and the US, became a particularly active laboring group with a distinct predilection for socialist and communist thought. Finally, perhaps at the conjunction of the elites and the commoners, “modern” Jews showed a particular interest and talent in the rapidly emerging world of the “public sphere” – the world of newspapers, pamphlets, journals; later, radio, film, television. Jewish prominence in all aspects of this central new dimension of modern life created a sense among some gentiles that the defining elements of their culture had been taken over by the Jews.

This exceptional success alarmed many. Above all, it deeply disturbed those members of an older aristocratic elite who found themselves frustratingly handicapped by the modern egalitarian rule-set, and further hemmed in by their increasing transparency under the public gaze of journalists. It also alarmed those below the prime divider, whose “medieval” identities had, in significant part been formed around their sense of superiority to the even more lowly — Jews, women, lepers, vagabonds.

To crabs in the basket, the sight of Jews getting out from underneath them created emotional turmoil. Just as the Christians and Muslims legislated that no one could build a higher house of worship than their own, they needed to make sure that they had a population inferior to them, a bone to gnaw on in their misery. And they did not like losing the Jews whom they ritually humiliated and occasionally battered just to reassure themselves that they were not the bottom of the barrel.

When we move from the crab basket to above the prime divider and the new elite we find people who discovered that, by the new rules, they were in a disturbing and unexpected competition with these newcomers. Some chose to continue to play by the tolerant rules, despite their confusion about the Jews, their talents, their intentions, their loyalties. These elites, including the Jews they tolerate, have come – very slowly – to dominate most Western academic circles, constituting one of the most vital and creative elements of modern culture, and drawing in their wake even those who would rather not play by modern rules in the academy. Here again we find the biblical formula illustrated: those who bless you (Western academy) will be blessed; those who curse you (Nazi, Soviet, Arab universities) will be cursed.

But the story is never-ending. Just as the triumph of civil society seems both assured and spectacular (industrial and communications revolutions), we begin to find the reemergence of recessive forms of anti-semitism that had dominated in the medieval world. Now they have mutated under the conditions of modernity and the pressures of civil society. In academic circles of “semi-modernized” (ultimately anti-modern) intellectuals, for example we find a scientific language of racism aimed at putting the Jews back below the prime divider. These people followed modern (”civc”) rule sets only because they were the established game. They had more profound commitments to the prime-divider values of incumbency and honor at others’ expense. They resented competition, especially from foreigners whom they did not understand, who hated the humiliation of losing control. (Sartre makes this point in Antisemite and Jew.)

Whereas in medieval culture, the authoritarians who played by the rules of the dominating imperative controlled political and public voice and legislated against Jews to assure their humiliation, in modern culture these people found themselves increasingly under pressure, either marginalized, or under growing scrutiny while they watched the Jews grow steadily in influence. And of course the printing press (both in books and newspapers) proved one of the most sensitive areas where this new configuration of conflict played itself out. The older authoritarians found the greatest threat to them in the arena precisely which attracted Jews with great commitment to the civic values of free speech, the transparency and criticism of elites and the de-mystification of power, the education and exposure of the larger public to a wide range of opinions and information. For these authoritarians who watched their power wane precisely as that of the Jews waxed, only one answer made sense: Conspiracy… conspiracy not to create democracy but, in classic projective style, to enslave mankind.

Next: Modernity as a Conspiracy to Enslave Mankind: The Protocols Reveal True “Jewish” Goals

[This is the continuation of the essay on Anti-semitism which will appear in its entirety (eventually), here.]

Optimists think that civil society should put an end to Antisemitism, whereas the pessimists think that Antisemitism is a permanent element of human nature (even Jews are susceptible). The perspective suggested here suggests that both are misconceived.

Antisemitic sentiment, in this view, derives from those authoritarians who benefit most from the prime divider, both the elites and their agents of domination among the commoners. Jews, with their iconoclastic intellects, their developed moral discourse, their educated and assertive (chutzpadik) commoners and responsive and responsible elites, offer a counter-example to the aristocratic insistence that prime dividers are necessary for social order.

As long as the Jewish communities in a larger diaspora culture remain relatively separate and interact only to a limited degree, they do not present a serious threat. But, especially in cultures that at least nominally prize biblical values of social justice (Islam and Christianity), easy and positive-sum intercourse between Jews and lay commoners tends to create conditions favorable to the flourishing of civil society: contracts and credit (which necessitate mutual trust), economic initiatives, religious and moral discussions, rule of law and equity. Here the presence of the Jews as a kind of social leaven creates a threat to many with a stake in the prime divider.

These two elements of Jewish-gentile interaction have operated in a kind of dialectic, especially notable in Latin Christian society, which runs roughly as follows. We begin with a period of extended Jewish-gentile interaction based on a Christian “philo-Judaism” during which the forces of civil society flourished, and economic, legal, and cultural transformations favored initiatives from below. Elites might initially favor, even encourage such interactions because they proved so fruitful and hence enriching for them as well as for the commoners involved. But over time, the kinds of transformations such interactions wrought began to threaten the grip of elites, began to subtly but recognizably alter the socio-economic landscape, creating new and potentially aggressive forces to reckon with.

Thus the continued influence of Jews on an increasing assertive and articulate Christian commoner population triggered the emergence of hostility specifically among those – elites and commoners – who stood most to lose from the new rule-set and the way it undermined the interests of the prime divider. For these people, the constantly changing social and economic landscape created deep anxiety, fear of change, fear of being left behind by change. Denunciations of greed and economic exploitation aimed attacks at those who profited most from new market relations, and attacks on the Jews served as a scapegoat aimed at undermining the new “modern” forces at work in the culture. And at some moment, the gathering forces of this hostility manage to seize upon a widespread social malaise to explode in violence against the designated scapegoat. Soon thereafter, coercion and violence attack the other forces of civil society within the culture – religious dissent and autonomous commoners.

In the history of Jewish-Christian relations, the full cycle of this dialectic remains largely hidden from view, especially the initial period of cooperation since it takes place largely at the level of commoners where little gets recorded in the surviving documentation. Violence, however, pogroms, expulsions, inquisitorial attacks, blood libels and their consequences, leaves a more visible documentary trace. Looking back at this documentation, historians tend to see an almost unbroken string of anti-Jewish outbreaks, a lachrymose narrative of hatred and violence. But my own work on the 11th and 12th century, and subsequent inquiries into later periods like the Renaissance and the Reformation suggest that when we see a violent outbreak of anti-Jewish sentiments, we should look to the previous period of evidence of more philo-Judaic attitudes and the kinds of socio-economic changes that such positive Jewish-Christian interactions encourage.

Thus, in the period just before the explosion of crusading violence in 1096, we find a century of extensive Jewish-Christian interaction, the emergence of autonomous, self-regulating urban communities based on remarkably egalitarian law codes (communes), and the rapid spread of agricultural, commercial, and productive capacities within the European economy. When, in 1084, the bishop of Speyer, following the example of the archbishop of Mainz , granted the community of Jews in his town the right to rule themselves according to their own laws. At the dawn of European economic growth, the Jews were prized players. And when the violence came, it often came not from those who had interacted with the Jews, but those who had “lost ground” as a result of the economic growth such interactions had fostered.

This is the continuation of my long multi-part post on the “Open Source/PJ” media launch at Solomonia last November. I have divided them up differently this time and made slight changes.

First Panel: Whimper of Joke?

I didn’t check the program, trusting that it would be stellar. We finally sit down, at our tables with outlets and wireless, and then have Roger and Charles tell us about OSM. Good stuff. I’m following on my computer — what a great way to take notes at a conference, look up anything I want while the speaker speaks. And then the first panel. Lifestyles.

Lifestyles? I look up from my computer and watch in astonishment and growing horror as a bevy of smart beauties take their seats, introduced by a witty moderator, each one a specialist in that great lifestyle arena — fashion. And behind, occasionally adding a comment in a disembodied voice, the great Manolo, whose Dadaesque blog on shoes and other fashion accessories I quickly visited.

“Wait a minute,” I thought, “the last time I looked in my computer, France was still burning (smoldering the MSM would insist), and we’re listening to what?”

I look at Pedro with astonishment. He smiles at me and raises his eyebrows. Then the panel begins with Elizabeth Hayt, fashion columnist for the NYT and author of I’m No Saint : A Nasty Little Memoir of Love and Leaving (2005) and when asked the very deep question “what do you think the blogosphere means for fashion?” replied with refreshing if somewhat disconcerting candor: “I’m not sure why youíve asked me here, I don’t blog, I don’t even think blogging is useful, it’s for rich people with too much time on their hands.”

I blinked. Excuse me? Wait a minute, whatís going on here. Isnít this woman making a fine career in fashion, that field for people with too little money and too little time on their hands? Did I go to the wrong place. Is this the People Magazine blog launch?

Pedro leaned over and said in a conspiratorial whisper, “It must be a joke.”

I looked around to see who got it. The faces were wonderful. Some staring in disbelief, some smiling, some annoyed, the people with computers started to work… Sol had a poker face with the traces of a bemused smile on the edges of his lips, no way to tell what he’s thinking; Tom Bowler pulled his glasses down and a blank stare descended over his face. One of our tablemates leaned forward and whispered in Pedro’s ear: “I think theyíre waiting for Larry Kudlow.”

The situation became particularly surreal when the nice looking blonde girl on the panel, began talking about the make-up styles of celebrities: “I trash them every Saturday.” Stunned silence. Some people started moving uncomfortably in their seats, others looked bemused and, others like Pedro, were slowly becoming aware that the joke was on us. I felt like the Roman soldiers in Life of Brian trying desperately not to laugh as Pontius Pilate talks about his fwend Biggus Dickus and his wife Incontinentia Buttox. I wondered how many people out in cyberspace were dropping out in astonished dismay.

As Austin Bay put it later, in an interesting conversation with me, neo-neocon and Pedro, Elizabeth Hayt “was quite admirable in her lack of curiosity.”

What? New York Times? Uninterested in the world around it? How can you say that?

Second Panel: Which Century are We in?

The second panel was good, although much of the discussion revolved around the kind of sports thinking that Charles had deplored in his opening comments. It does not help to think in terms of liberal, conservative, right, left, the two teams that you try to “balance” in order to be “fair” or “objective.” And yet the panel had been stacked to give us those 20th century notions center stage, especially with David Corn and John Podhoretz (author of Bush Country : How George W. Bush Became the First Great Leader of the 21st Century—While Driving Liberals Insane) who started going at each other before we even heard from Claudia Rosett.

Much reworking of the old debates about objectivity and facts vs. opinion and partisanship, about the difference between gumshoeing (what the best of the MSM claims to do — gathering facts) and thumbsucking (what the worst of the blogosphere thrives on — ruminating narcissism). Richard Fernandez of Belmont Club illustrated the sterling quality of the best bloggers, ferociously smart, modest of demeanor, thinking about the question he’s been asked, speaking in paragraphs.

He explored what it is that makes information as accurate as we can shape it, how we pursue theories (I’d prefer to call them “working hypotheses” — like, is the first panel an intentional joke?) and see how they firm up over time as we take in more data (after five minutes, apparently not), how we need to think about what would have to be true in order for what we (or someone else) think has happened to also be true (someone thought this would be a great way to show OSM’s broad spectrum of interests, and managed to convince the board). Listening to Fernandez was in some ways like revisiting the very exploration of thinking about reason and reality-testing in the 16th and 17th centuries, that made the West an open society, the place where both modern academia and modern science were born after the advent of printing.

The discussion ended with an observation on the difference in our idea of whatís going on in Iraq that we get from bloggers there and from the MSM here, prompting Podhoretz to make the classic “right-wing” argument that we really won the Tet offensive, and that the MSM (thank you uncle Walt), took it away by presenting it as a catastrophe, an observation that Austin Bay affirmed later that afternoon. But to bring this argument up to speed, John took it a step further, proffered the interesting analogous argument that, had there been bloggers in Vietnam, we would have won the war. Interesting, perhaps going too far. Worth a thought, an exploration.

“Oh yeah,” responds Corn in classic “left-wing” style, “well what about Latin America?!?”

“Oh yeah,” says Podhoretz, “well what about Irving Stone!”

And with a crescendo into the puerile arguments that have produced our current state of self-ghettoization, the panel came to an end with a promise to look further into these matters. (I hope OSM follows up on this one.)

At lunch we talked about the morning sessions, and I remarked about how it would be nice to know the statistics about who was following the webcast, and be able to trace what I suspected — looking at the members of the audience “drop out” — was a precipitous drop-off as the first panel went on. “It was webcast?” one of our table companions gasped, blushing bright red.

Ouch.

Among the many profound and perceptive remarks that Alain Finkielkraut made in two lectures at BU, one on “Laïcité” [secularism], one on the Plight of the Jews — hopefully soon to be podcast — one remark came, en passant in answer to a question about the Ha-Aretz affair. Referring to the journalist from Ha-Aretz, an Israeli paper notorious for its aggressive credulity for any accusation against Israel and for its hostility to what it considers any form of “right-wing” Zionism, he remarked that the journalist was acting neither as an impartial journalist nor a friend; but that he had ambushed Finkielkraut with this interview.

This prompted an aside on so-called “self-hating Jews.”

“They are not self-hating,” he said pausing, “they love themselves. It’s other Jews they hate.

They hate other Jews for embarrassing them, for making their idea of what Judaism is (should be) — the quintessence of liberal love for humanity and creation — look bad. “Surely you can’t justify Sharon! Sharoooon!”

One of Finkielkraut’s points was precisely that “the other side of the coin of anti-Zionism was a self-loathing of the French, as anti-French as anti-Zionist. [I’d start thinking of a cube, because we now have at least three major components: anti-Zionist, anti-American, anti-French/British/German… , a “Western derangement disorder cube.”]

Apply the insight from Jewish “self-hate” to this problem of the left, and we can see what makes the Left so vulnerable to American Derangement Syndrome, ADS. When they view