On the New Intolerance: Hate and War: The Only Things We Got Today

by David Shasha

Warning sign, warning sign

C’mon baby, c’mon baby.

Talking Heads, “Warning Sign”

The classical Sephardic tradition, as encapsulated in its Maimonidean formulation, established the primacy of the Golden Mean as the essence of Judaism.  In the words of the master:

The straight path – this is the median value that is found in each and every thought from the inventory of human thoughts; and it is the thought which is furthest from the two extremes, of equal distance and not near either extreme.  Therefore, the first Sages commanded that human beings must consider their thoughts constantly, and guide them to the median path, in order to become unified in body. (Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot De’ot 1:4)

From as far back as we can determine, Maimonides was attacked by those rabbis who saw in his rationalist moderation a threat to their peculiar understanding of religion.  Anathemas commonly hurled at both laypeople and rabbis in the Ashkenazi community were written against the great Maimonides and served to eviscerate his religious moderation and his strides to incorporating science and philosophy into the Jewish tradition.

I begin with the story of Maimonides because I continue to feel the sting and the harshness of the hate produced by extreme forms of thinking.  In a world where fewer and fewer people can find common ground, the Maimonidean Option seems more and more needed – yet more and more out of our reach.

We have been bombarded in recent months by a number of books that attack God and traditional religion from loose cannons like Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins – to name only the most prominent.  In these mean-spirited attacks on the values of Monotheism, there may be found two interwoven strands of ideology: The “new” Atheists have become apoplectic over the emergence of a malignant strain of religious fundamentalism that has sought to tear to shreds the values of humanism and scientific advancement that has been the legacy of the Western Enlightenment.  With the triumph of Christian fundamentalists since the time of Ronald Reagan, rationalists see their world under attack.  So they have reconfigured their pedagogy and posited Secular Humanism as a form of religion in itself.

Secular Humanism, like Religious Fundamentalism, has its own “orthodox” tenets that must be “believed.”  The new Atheists attack religion in its most primitive and basest formulations.  If one is to believe Christopher Hitchens or Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Muslims are all a bunch of rock-throwing lunatics who believe in the literal truth of every passage in the Qur’an.  So too in the case of Jews and Christians, all of whom are pigeonholed along the lines of the most retrograde of the faith.

Such a move empowers and strengthens the hold of the fundamentalists.  It establishes that religion is not an evolutionary process which seeks to parse and interpret ancient texts, but which serves only to affirm the most literal pronouncements of the ancient books.  So we have a dialogue of the deaf where religious extremists – the most Orthodox of the Orthodox – are lined up in a steel-cage battle between themselves and the Atheists.

I was struck by the virulence of this useless but now commonplace battle while reading the new book by our friend James Kugel, How to Read the Bible.  Having been a devoted reader of Kugel’s many important books on Scriptural interpretation over the course of the years, I was shocked to find the polarizing voice of the Biblical agnostic ringing out through the pages of the new book.

In many ways the position that is argued in How to Read the Bible is not one that is unfamiliar to those who are conversant with modern study of the Bible.  And indeed, the basic argument of Bible scholars is one that should be addressed by those who consider themselves observant Jews.  I have argued in my own writings on the Hebrew Bible that believing Jews must – per Maimonides – not ignore the evidence of those who investigate things, but are compelled to accept the empirical findings of science.  Maimonides was always quite emphatic on this particular point.  And it was over this matter that an almost complete segment of the Jewish world – the Ashkenazim – sought to hurl the most vicious attacks at Maimonides.

In the Ashkenazi world there was the enchanted circle of Divine infallibility that served as the sole foundation of Jewish life.  Anyone who deviated from such an understanding would find themselves severed from the body politic of the Jewish community.  In addition, the constant bickering and infighting between various Ashkenazi rabbinical authorities had, over the centuries, served to create incompatible sects within the community – the most pronounced being the Hasidic schism which carried over into the battles waged – then and now – among the various Hasidic groups themselves.

Ironically, modern Bible scholarship, begun in the German Protestant world which sought to defy centuries-old traditions coming from Catholic Rome, found a place among the so-called “enlightened” Jewish intellectuals, the Maskilim, who began to sharpen the divisions that continue to gnaw at the Jewish community.

Bible scholars see the later accretions of rabbinical interpretation as falsifications of the historical document.  In fact, the use of the term “document” in the singular has been contested by the scholars who not only emphasize the disparate nature of the various Biblical books, but contest the very homogeneity of the individual books themselves.  Kugel’s book affirms the integrity of the traditional Bible of the Sages, but, paradoxically and inexplicably, also affirms the Documentary Hypothesis of the scholars and at book’s-end calls the thing a draw: each side is right which leaves us without any common ground between them.  Bible scholars have their point of view and traditionalists theirs’ and never the twains shall meet. 

Obviously, such a position, if correct, would serve to undo a great deal of the work done by those religious believers who have argued that members of their community should respect and learn from the work of the scholars.  Many in the religious community who counsel patience and moderation have suffered – often miserably – in order to uphold the values of critical rationalism and by the end of How to Read the Bible find that their work has been in vain.  Coming from a believing Jew, as Kugel is, the whole thing is quite hard to understand.

But from the standpoint of the current acrimony in our polluted discourse, the whole thing does, sadly, make a great deal of sense.

Staying within the Jewish context, we can see the vulnerabilities inherent in the Maimonidean system.  An epistemology that is based on compromise and adaptation to pluralistic ideas and ways of being is of course always more vulnerable than an authoritarian system such as fundamentalist Orthodoxy which brooks no compromise.  To add to this basic dilemma of the religious pluralist, the Religious Humanist, is the centrality of ethical piety that informs all aspects of the Homo Religiosus.  The fundamentalist, as Hitchens correctly argues in his televised debate with Dinesh D’Souza, is apt to justify any and all forms of behavior in the name of God.  Piety is merely a pretense to mask a virulent form of ultra-violent behavior that serves to express the Divine mandate.  The religious fundamentalist – which for the new Atheists is every religious person – sees his own parochial tradition as determinative and whose singular understanding must be applied universally.  This of course goes back to the confusion of ancient Jewish categories by the early Christians who determined that Jewish particularism would have to be fused into a new universal amalgam even though the particular terms of the Christian revelation were not at all a universal phenomenon.

Hitchens and his modern cohorts must argue out of the basest forms of religious understanding and avoid Maimonides.  Tellingly, such thinkers consistently reference the philosopher Spinoza, an authoritarian figure whose philosophy brooks no compromise, and ignore the pluralistic philosophy of Giambattista Vico who has been the model of religious pluralism and tolerance.

At the very core of this debate which has spilled over into our politics and social arrangements, is an intransigence which does not permit adaptation and a mutual exchange of ideas in a respectful and civilized manner.  The balkanization of thought into mutually exclusive and warring cantons is tragically reinforced by those who call themselves scholars.  And even though the learning that a man like Richard Dawkins has in science or that James Kugel has in Biblical studies, or that Christopher Hitchens has in history and culture, may well be substantial, the trend today is to polarize and remove from us the possibility of mutual dialogue and exchange.

A comforting figure who writes on religion such as Karen Armstrong is universally dismissed by those whose views lean toward the new balkanization.  Those who seek to question the dogmas of the new learning are rejected as “irrational” or as “unscientific.”  Most tellingly, today we have bastions of political correctness such as the New York Times demanding that we “believe” in evolution, as if Darwin was a catechism and not a scientist.

And it is on the point of Evolution that much of this discussion tends to hinge.  Having run roughshod over Stephen Jay Gould’s authoritative pronouncements on the compatibility of the differing truth claims of science and religion – an attempt to permit religious believers to function within a scientific environment and not be dismissed as Dawkins arrogantly does – the new Atheists require a litmus test over Evolution that turns it from a science into a new form of religion.  Such demands refuse the legitimacy of those who abide Monotheism, just as the Bible scholars demand fidelity to their theoretical composite defining Biblical authorship.

The aims of science as a valuable process of discovery can be seen quite easily see in what now seems a quaint artifact like the Hollywood film “The Story of Louis Pasteur” where Paul Muni plays the great Parisian humanist – a man who was demonized and hounded in his own time – as a humble craftsman who checked and rechecked his work and would not pronounce success until success occurred.

Today, because of the emergence of a politicized religious fundamentalism, some scientists and their followers have demanded the inviolability of both method and result even when those things are not empirically proven. 

Much is debated about the origins of the universe.  Scientists have built upon Darwin’s own agnosticism on this question – his book never asserts anything about the origins of the universe in a scientific manner – and determined their ideas on the “Big Bang” that is a dogma now used as an inversion of the literalist account of Genesis 1.  This does not take into account the massive scientific discussion over the process that the Big Bang entails and the inconclusive nature of its own origins.  So too have the vast bulk of Bible-believers seen the Genesis account as allegorical and not literal.

But we are left with a deeply troubling battle between secular and religious fundamentalists which has served to corrode our discourse in profoundly disturbing ways.

In our current debased culture the individual is not seen as part of the larger human family, but as a member of a parochial sect that sees itself as the sole holder of the truth – with a capital T.  There is nothing that will dislodge the true “believer” – whether or not he is a Bible-belt Baptist who ascribes to Jesus the sole role of salvation – eliminating those who are to be “Left Behind” in the coming apocalyptic cataclysm of the so-called “Rapture” – or whether he may be a Richard Dawkins-thumping Atheist who demonizes every person who believes in God no matter what their social understanding of humanity.

And where does this lead us in a larger sense?

Well, it is now not uncommon to find universities the site of death-battles where groups line up to enforce their own speech codes.  Boycotts and threats are commonplace.  Speakers on all sides of an issue can find themselves either disinvited from speaking publicly, or shouted down when they do get a chance to speak.

Alan Dershowitz has made it his life’s work to make sure that Norman Finkelstein is not heard on any college campus anywhere in the world.  Abe Foxman has orchestrated a campaign against the scholars John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt who claim that there is a danger in having too much power accrue to lobby groups such as AIPAC and the ADL.  Noam Chomsky indoctrinates his millions of young followers in the belief that the evil American empire must be set in check and that those who speak in its name be rejected as “fascist”; meaning that Progressive campus groups are free to engage in the most vicious hate speech and vitriolic actions against those they disagree with.  David Horowitz – a former Trostkite Leftist – marches through US campuses with a merry band of hateful fanatics such as Ann Coulter and Daniel Pipes in tow – preaching a violently anti-Islamic message which in turn leads groups like CAIR to shout them down. 

On and on, ad infinitum. 

It’s all one big circus of freaks – Left, Right and whatever.

Living inside a Jewish community that is now almost completely overtaken by the traditional Ashkenazi point of view has allowed me to see things in a number of unique ways: Having intimately studied the schisms of the Sephardi-Ashkenazi split over humanism and religion – united in the Maimonidean tradition, irreconcilable according to the Ashkenazi authorities who rejected Maimonidean Religious Humanism – I have understood all too well the role played by PILPUL, exegetical casuistry, that has created – as has been expertly argued by the work of Jose Faur in his many studies on the subject – a foundational form of situational morality in the Ashkenazi Judaism.  As Christopher Hitchens has correctly argued – as we mentioned earlier – the nature of the PILPUL-type discourse is to justify the actions of the believer as licit under any circumstances.  Underlying Ashkenazi PILPUL is a strain of religious ANTI-HUMANISM that valorizes the mystical beliefs of the religious person at the expense of a pluralistic discourse that can allow for differing beliefs to peacefully coexist.

Now, as Faur correctly argues, the Ashkenazim lived in a Christian environment that was quite dogmatic when it came to dissent.  Europe, then as now, believed in its own hegemonic superiority and rejected anything not European.  Paradoxical or not, Ashkenazi Jews adopted this intolerant mindset as its own; even as such a mentality served as the mechanism which persecuted those same Jews.

Today we may see the Neo-Conservative Jews and their promotion of a science of genetics and DNA extolling the superiority of Jews (here Jews mean “Ashkenazi” Jews and not Sephardi, as the racist Charles Murray has insisted on the pages of Commentary magazine) over others.  Linking this to the social determinism of Darwinism as a religion we can see that ideas that were discredited in the wake of the Nazis have resurfaced to create a new Aryanism and a new understanding of eugenics.  Sadly, we have seen that Ashkenazi Zionists such as Dr. Chaim Sheba and many others espoused these patently racist views.  But today it is not a matter of one person or another, what we have is an institutionalization of these ideas that serve as marks of identity and as determinative factors that create the Other.

When we valorize one way of thinking or one group identity over another, we have destroyed our ability to live in a civilized way with each other.  When each group sees itself – and only itself – as being the sole possessor of the Truth, we lose the possibility of pluralism, of what Jonathan Sacks has called the “dignity of difference.”  The dignity of difference is the assertion, contra the new fundamentalism(s) – not limited to religious people, but to secularists as well, that we live within our differences; in spite of our own ideas we are required to be members of the larger human family.

And so where is this larger human family today?

There are those who wish homosexuals to be dead as a literal reading of the Bible states.  And then there are those who wish those who wish homosexuals dead to be dead themselves.  Just think of the list of today’s most contentious issues: abortion, immigration, taxes, and the rest.  We can multiply this exponentially as we know all too well the ways in which our culture has become polarized.

It is not enough to disagree with someone today; we must utterly remove them and their views from the discourse.

And in the end those of us who continue – against the mainstream – to espouse the values of pluralism and tolerance face a delicate paradox that our detractors always love to rub in our face: how can a devoted follower of peaceful discussion fight the hate?  When faced with the agents of intolerance, how does a person who believes in the inviolability of tolerance stay strong and committed to free speech?

While Osama bin Laden demonizes the West and while the West demonizes Osama bin Laden, how do those of us who continue to believe in the power of the rational form of discourse continue to function – especially as we now have such intolerant paragons of the “rational” as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens?

In the not-too-distant past, this was a question that was not nearly as complicated as it is now.  While the fight against Hitler was not conducted with the clarity that some may have wanted, there was no question that it be fought.  The legacy of this freedom has not been as clear as the defeat of the Nazis.  Today we have new forms of moral corruption that serve to separate human beings from one another and to demonize whole civilizations.  Political mechanisms are instituted by groups on all sides of the spectrum that delegitimize speech and discourse.  We are told by “experts” and “scholars” that only they know the truth and that we cannot either question or contest what they have to say.  Rather than seeking to adapt and absorb ideas and behaviors from the larger reservoir of human understanding, we have now sought to balkanize each culture and cordon it off from others.

Looking back at my earlier discussion of Ashkenazi Judaism and its place in a Christian Europe which sought both Crusade and Inquisition – elements that were adapted by the Ashkenazim in their shtetls ­– we forgot to mention the polyglot civilization of the Levant, of the Middle East, which provided the very model of Religious Humanism and pluralism that Europe denied.

What I have called “The Levantine Option” is the core of Maimonidean thinking where human beings are taught that they may have their own particular culture, but that we all live in one world, in one universe that we are entrusted to shepherd.  What we have today is a screaming world full of malignant antagonisms where human beings demand their own supremacy at the expense of tolerating the Other.

When reading a book or listening to a lecture, we must determine whether the author or speaker is seeking to tear humanity apart or whether that person seeks to bring us together.  Learning from the internal Jewish failures of the Maimonideans who were decimated by their opponents, we must be ever vigilant to protect the fragile entente of the human community.  If we attack those who would divide us, it should be understood that we fight on behalf of the dignity of difference.  It is all too easy to permit those who have contempt for humanity and for civilization to use our own reasonableness and our pacifistic natures to give them the opportunity to destroy the equilibrium that we strive to uphold.

If we cower in the face of the polarizers, we give them the chance to continue to set us in warring cantons, living as paranoiacs behind walls and fences of fear brought on by arrogance.  If we cannot question, if we cannot investigate, then we have forfeited all our science and all our rational understanding.  Conversely, the role of history and tradition in our lives is equally valuable and sacred. 

To those who wish to speak in the name of science, we must assert that we cannot rationally tear asunder all that has come before us.  We cannot throw our sacred texts into the garbage and pretend that we can live by them even though they are just a bunch of made-up fairy tales.  Such texts have continued to accrue meaning through the ages even as they point us back to our origins. 

And to those who wish to assert the literal truth of each and every passage of those texts, we must present the great insights of the scientists and the academicians who have done so much to help us better know where we come from and to clarify our origins.

In this context we cannot tear asunder the scientific from the traditional.  They are both a part of who we are and it would be futile to deny that who we are has been generated by what the past has given us, but which we must constantly examine for its coherence and complexity.  To those who wish to live only by tradition or only by the tenets of a de-contextualized science, we must stand up and assert the values – as Vico so sagely taught – of Religious Humanism and the freedom of diversity in speech and in opinion.

This is in essence what has been propounded in the multi-ethnic haven of the United States and in its own sacred scripture the Constitution.  It is to this sense of pluralism that we must return if we are to withstand the challenges of what the universe has to offer us.  Continuing to reject the validity of the multiple and to prevent free speech and free thought will corrode our civilization beyond repair.